They drive past miles and miles of yellow cattail grass growing wild on the side of the road, while the Yamaska River flows alongside them in perfect sync with the speed of Gabriel’s motorcycle. It’s the beginning of summer and Maggie appreciates all of it with fresh eyes today, this scenery she can sometimes take for granted—the barns with their rusted corrugated tin roofs, the silos and the cows, the endless cornfields glinting gold in the sunshine. Everything with Gabriel seems shinier, more worthy of her attention. Every smell is more fragrant, every color more intense. She loves this boy, whose solid torso she holds on to for safety; she loves this endless road and the wind whipping her hair into her face. In front of her lie miles and miles of possibility.
Gabriel is so much more than her father’s narrow-minded caricature of French Canadians. He’ll never understand the depth and complexity of Gabriel’s heart, his loyalty. He fiercely loves Maggie, his sisters, his little niece. He would do anything for them. The other day, he beat up a guy who told Angèle she looked like an ape. And his eyes fill with tears whenever he talks about how Clémentine raised him, about their poverty and the mistreatment of the Québécois in their own province.
It hasn’t been easy for them to be a couple. Gabriel’s friends dislike Maggie. With her tartan kilts and penny loafers and her English Protestant father, she’s the symbol of all the injustices and indignities they’ve ever suffered. In their world, there are two distinct sides and no one can ever fall in between or cross over to the other side. French and English. Catholics and Protestants. Maggie, with her mixed blood and incompatible religions, will never be one of them.
Gabriel points to the sign for Sainte-Angèle-de-Monnoir and turns off. When he brings the bike to a stop along the side of the river, he turns to Maggie and says, “My mother was born here.”
“You must miss them.”
“I guess so,” he responds, tensing. He rarely talks about his parents. Every once in a while he mentions how young his father was when he died, usually in reference to his own mortality, but never more than that. Everything Maggie knows about Gabriel’s father is from town gossip.
He gets off the bike and helps Maggie off. She hands him his knapsack and he pulls out a blanket and a bottle of wine in a brown paper bag. They sit cross-legged on the blanket. He pours them each a paper cup of wine.
“What do you want to do when you grow up?” she asks him, realizing they’ve never talked about it before. “What do you want to be?”
He looks at her blankly. “Be? I don’t know. I’d run our farm if Clémentine wasn’t such a pain in the ass. I’ll probably wind up a foreman at Canadair.”
Maggie smiles, covering her disappointment.
“I know I don’t want to die with nothing,” he adds. “My father died with nothing. And he left us with nothing.”
“You could be anything,” she encourages. “You’re smart enough.”
Gabriel shrugs. “I love working the field,” he admits. “But Clémentine is in charge and she’s too bossy. She treats me like a kid.”
“Maybe you could have your own farm,” Maggie suggests.
He doesn’t answer.
“Whatever you decide, you’ll be successful,” she tells him, wrapping her arms around his neck.
They make love. Afterwards, they lie lazily under the sun for a long time, ignoring the ants crawling all over their legs.
“I pulled out,” he mentions. “So you don’t have to worry.”
She looks at him and smiles, relieved. “I’m so happy here with you,” she says.
“Mm. Me too.”
When the sun finally begins to drop and the sky fades to pink, they head back to Dunham, silent and content. Gabriel pulls over at the gas station outside of town. “There’s a rattling noise,” he explains. “I’m going to leave the bike here to get it checked out.”
As they approach the corner of Principale and Bruce Streets, walking hand-in-hand, Maggie notices a gang of kids from Cowansville High milling around in front of the Small Bros. building. Now that school is out, they mostly hang out in the street, waiting for something to happen.
Maggie spots Audrey in the middle of the pack and her heart sinks. They haven’t been close since Maggie started dating Gabriel. Audrey has a whole new clique of friends now and a new boyfriend from Cowansville High, though she’s held on to her old attitude of entitlement. As Maggie and Gabriel pass, Audrey’s boyfriend, a stocky redhead, says loud enough for Gabriel to hear, “Well, if it isn’t Maggie Hughes slumming with her Pepsi beau.”
“Oh, Barney, be quiet,” Audrey scolds, mock angry. “Ignore him, Mags.”
Maggie looks nervously at Gabriel.
“What did you call me?” Gabriel says, taking a step toward Barney.
“I’m sorry, I don’t speak Pepsi,” Barney says, puffing up his chest. His friends join in, egging him on. Peasoup, Pepsi.
Gabriel’s eyes get that dangerous steely look and his hands ball into fists. Maggie steps back. Before Barney even has a thought of self-defense, Gabriel’s right fist cracks into his jaw. Barney stumbles back, shocked. The Cowansville High boys encircle Gabriel and start throwing punches at him. Audrey and Maggie scream helplessly. Gabriel, dangerously outnumbered, is getting pummeled. He crouches down to deflect the barrage of blows, and then someone yells, “The peasoup’s got a knife!”
The English boys suddenly retreat and disperse, leaving Gabriel standing alone on the street, holding up his dead father’s pocket knife.
“What’s going on here?”
Maggie turns to see her father getting out of his car. He marches angrily toward them. “What is going on here?”
“This degenerate pulled a knife!” Barney cries.
Maggie’s father looks from Barney to Maggie in confusion.
“They ganged up on him—” she explains.
“He punched me in the jaw,” Barney moans, rubbing his chin. “All my friends did was help me out. Then he pulled that knife.”
Maggie’s father turns to Gabriel, who hasn’t uttered a single word in his own defense, nor seems inclined to. He makes no attempt to conceal the knife either.
“Get in the car, Maggie,” says her father.
She looks over at Gabriel. He doesn’t meet her gaze.
“Go,” her father orders. Then, turning to Barney, he says calmly, “Son, I’m on your side, but you should know better than to taunt someone like him.”
With that, he drags Maggie to the Packard and gives her a push into the front seat. She’s so ashamed—of her father’s bigotry, of Gabriel for pulling the knife, of herself for doing nothing—she can’t even bring herself to look at Gabriel.
As she drives off with her father, though, she watches him standing there in the street, stone-faced, with the knife still clenched in his hand. His nose is bleeding, his lip swollen, his white T-shirt torn to shreds. He stays there for as long as she can see him in the rearview mirror.
Later that night, after everyone has gone to bed, Maggie hovers outside her father’s sanctuary. She watches the cigar smoke curl up from under the door and knocks tentatively.
“Come in,” he says.
She’s always loved this room. It’s such a man’s world, the very essence of her father. There are radio parts on the table and homemade radios—some finished, others mid-dissection—all over the floor. There’s a stack of empty House of Lords cigar boxes on the shelf he built, alongside all his books—Handbook for Gardeners, Operating a Garden Center, Native Trees of Canada, Dale Carnegie’s How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.
“What do you think of Petunia Colour Parade for the cover of next season’s catalogue?” he asks her.
“I like it.”
“Remember last year’s?” he says, handing her the ’48 catalogue.
She opens it and leafs through the pages.
COSMOS MANDARIN First new all double cosmos. The large bright orange flowers have as many as 40 to 50 petals, making them really double, but even more impressive is the foliage.
Sixty-four pages of single-spaced typeface. She holds it with the kind of reverence one might reserve for a precious work of art, admiring Peter’s hand-drawn diagrams of wooden pot labels, bamboo cane stakes, plant ties, and hose nozzles. “Next year I’m looking into using real photographs,” her father says. “Wouldn’t that be sophisticated?”
“Very,” Maggie says, pulling down one of the tattered books from his shelf. “‘Sow seed generously,’” she reads aloud. “‘One for the rook, one for the crow, one to die, and one to grow.’ I remember you used to read that to me.”
She runs her finger along the spine of A Field Guide for Wildflowers.
“You can do better than a French Canadian,” he says.
“You didn’t.”
“It’s different,” he says, putting the catalogue back on the shelf. “Your mother’s not the one who had to earn the living.” Smoke from his panatela fills the room. “Besides, I’ve acknowledged my mistake. You can learn from it.”
She remembers: You can’t change them.
“Why did you marry her?” she asks him.
He looks at her wearily and sighs, offering a single, defeated word by way of explanation. “Lust,” he says. “She’s always had a strange power over me. Still does.”
As soon as he says it, Maggie understands the way Gabriel makes her feel. It’s the reason her parents can sometimes hate each other and still want to dance together and have sex. Now it has a name. Lust.
“You’re forbidden to see him, Maggie. Do you hear me?”
“Those English boys started it today.”
“He’s a hoodlum. He’s not our kind and you deserve better. This is not how I raised you.”
Her head buzzes at his hypocrisy. She wants to scream, And what about Clémentine? But she holds back, too terrified to crack the fragile wall of silence and denial they tacitly erected that day. It is the only way their relationship can be sustained.
“I’m not cattle,” she says. “Why can’t you let me be happy?”
“I of all people know you can’t be happy with him.”
“He’s not Maman.”
“Isn’t he, though?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Please don’t cross me on this, Margueret.”
“You can’t tell me who to love,” she says, daring to defy him for the first time in her life. “I can love whoever I want.”
He smiles thinly, his lips disappearing, and she has the fleeting thought that the two things she wants most in the world—Gabriel’s love and her father’s approval—cannot coexist, and that one will eventually have to be sacrificed for the other.