VISIT

IN THE TEMPERATE LATITUDES OF North America, the countryside is at its greenest in the days leading up to the summer solstice. The fields are green. The woods are green. The understory is strewn with green. The light is green. The mountains are green. The lakes are green with the reflection of all this greenery.

It was on this infinite green palette that, leaving the preparations leading up to the Saint-Jean-Baptist Day celebrations, one, two, three, four police cars showed up in the village of Milan, in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. In the unmarked car at the front of this convoy, Detective Sergeant Miles “Machine Gun” Martinek rode armed with his inseparable Thompson. He had come from Montreal especially to lead the detachment of Quebec Provincial Police stationed in Lac-Mégantic.

The cars braked, raising clouds of dust; the officers jumped out, ready to charge; Martinek advanced with long, purposeful strides, his machine gun at his hip pointed majestically skyward like a thermonuclear warhead. Two days before the national celebrations, he approached the small farmhouse as though it were a ruined castle filled with fanatical warriors ready to die for their cause.

Inside, Jean-Paul Lafleur and his brother René, Lancelot, and Lou Ballester had no intention of dying for their cause, at least not then. They ran for shelter and disappeared into the attic. Richard Godefroid, with Marie-France and Momo Corbo — a communist taxi driver — welcomed the visitors at the front door. Lancelot’s wife, Sylvie, was a few paces behind them, a child hiding behind her skirts.

“You’ve come to celebrate Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day with us, have you? Well, come on in: we’ve got lots of beer and plenty of people who know how to sing.”

“Get out of my way, or I’ll rip off your arm and beat you with the bloody end . . .”

The police pretended to be ferocious, but they were merely paying a courtesy visit. They appeared to swallow whole the fake names furnished to them by those in the kitchen and refrained from pushing their enquiries further. When they went upstairs and came within a hair’s breadth of Lancelot, crouched in the attic and officially on the run, they went back down without breaking anything. Then they took up their tough talk again.

“You know why we’re here?” one of them said. “Because your little friends in Saint-Colomban got themselves busted. And Martinek always finds a way to make people talk who don’t want to talk . . .”

“We’ll be back,” Martinek predicted in a sinister tone.

Before leaving, the officers decided to look around the barn and the buildings.

“You should cut the grass,” one of them called without looking back at the house. With his right foot, he kicked the head off a wild daisy.

That’s when Gode, from his vantage point on the porch, saw Brutal, the goat, lying in wait at the edge of the ditch. He checked to see that Corbeau had seen it, too. The latter slowly raised a finger to his lips, which wasn’t necessary since both men understood each other perfectly. Gode turned back to look toward the grassy ditch. Behind the goat, he now saw clots of dried mud flying in the air, kicked up by the virile caress of a split hoof.

The goat’s rage sent up clumps of grass from the edge of the ditch, and then he charged, head down. The next instant, Sergeant Martinek dropped his machine gun and took off with his legs around his neck. From the porch, Gode and Corbeau saw him cross in front of the house, running, running, like Francis Macomber in the Hemingway story being chased by the lion. Behind him came the stinking goat, hot on his heels. A car door slammed and there came a loud BOING! that must have been heard all the way to the top of Mégantic Mountain. Brutal charged the cars twice more before making a dignified retreat. That winter, Lionel Arcan, the man who owned the body shop in Lac-Mégantic, had his trip to Florida paid for by the Quebec Provincial Police.