Chapter 9: Père André

The priest came on a Saturday. He arrived the way he always arrived — on foot, in his black coat, the collar visible beneath the scarf, his walk deliberate and slightly uneven, the left hip giving him trouble as it had given him trouble for ten years, the arthritis a companion he had not chosen and could not dismiss, and he came up the road from the church, which was four hundred metres south of the bakery, and the distance was not much but it was enough in December to redden his face and slow his breathing and deposit a fine layer of snow on his shoulders, the flakes catching in the wool of his coat and melting slowly, and when he knocked at the back door of the bakery and Marguerite opened it he looked like a man who had been walking not four hundred metres but forty years, which he had, forty years in this parish, forty years of Saturdays and Sundays and every other day, the parish consuming him the way the oven consumed wood, steadily and completely, the fire of his vocation burning at a rate that had seemed sustainable at thirty and that at seventy felt like an extravagance, a young man's rate, and the fuel was running low.

"Marguerite."

"Mon père."

He entered. The bakery was warm — Saturday was a baking day and the oven was still radiating heat from the morning's fire, the soapstone releasing its stored energy in slow waves that you could feel on your face from two metres away — and the warmth of the bakery hit him the way it always hit visitors from outside, like a physical thing, a wall, a membrane between the cold world and this warm one, and he stood just inside the door and let the heat soak in and looked around with the particular attention of a man who had been visiting this room for forty years and who noticed everything, the way a priest notices everything, not because he is paid to but because noticing is the vocation within the vocation, the daily practice of attention that is the foundation of pastoral care.

"Tu fais du pain le samedi maintenant."

"Oui. Mardi, mercredi, samedi. Six pains par jour."

"Dix-huit par semaine."

"Oui."

He sat on the stool by the woodstove without being invited, the familiarity of four decades granting him permissions that a stranger would not have had, and Marguerite brought him coffee and bread — this she did, this hospitality she extended, because Père André was not Claude Bergeron, was not a man who wanted to buy the building, was a man who wanted to sit in the building, which was different, which was the difference between a buyer and a visitor, between consumption and communion — and she cut a thick slice from the morning's bake and set it before him on a plate and he looked at it the way he looked at the host during Mass, with an attention that was not analytical but reverential, the attention of a man who believed that bread was more than bread, that the ordinary was the vessel of the extraordinary, that the divine resided in the daily, and this belief, which Marguerite did not share or did not think she shared, was visible in his face as he lifted the bread and examined the crust and the crumb and then tore a piece and ate it.

He chewed slowly. He closed his eyes. He opened them.

"C'est différent," he said.

"Oui."

"Plus ouvert. La mie. Plus de trous."

"J'ai augmenté l'hydratation."

He nodded as though he understood, which he might have — he had been eating bread from this bakery for forty years, his palate calibrated by thousands of loaves, his tongue perhaps the most experienced instrument in the parish after Thérèse's own — or which he might not have, the technical detail irrelevant to his experience of the bread, which was not technical but sensory, sacramental almost, the bread received and consumed and understood in the body rather than in the mind.

"C'est bon," he said.

"Merci."

"Non, Marguerite. C'est bon. Pas correct. Pas acceptable. Bon."

She heard the emphasis. She heard the distinction. The bread was not merely adequate. It was good. This was the second time someone had pronounced this judgment — her mother first, the slurred Bon in the hospital room, and now the priest, the man who had found Thérèse on the floor of the sacristy, who had held her head while they waited for the ambulance, who had prayed over her while the right side of her body went still, this man, this witness, this keeper of the parish who was himself being kept alive by the parish, the mutual maintenance, the reciprocal feeding, the priest feeding the parish with sacraments and the parish feeding the priest with purpose — and his bon carried weight, carried authority, carried the endorsement of forty years of Saturdays in this room.

They sat in silence for a time. Père André ate the bread slowly, methodically, the way he did everything, the deliberation not sluggishness but respect, the same respect he showed to the liturgy, the same measured pace. The woodstove ticked. The oven radiated. The afternoon light came through the south-facing windows and fell on the maple bench and on the stone walls and on the cooling loaves and on the old man eating bread, and the light was the pale gold of December, thin and low, the sun barely clearing the treeline before beginning its descent, the day a brief interruption in the long dark, a rumour of warmth.

"J'ai entendu parler de Bergeron," he said.

Marguerite was not surprised. Kamouraska was a village of six hundred people and in a village of six hundred people there were no secrets, only delays — information arrived everywhere eventually, the way water arrived everywhere eventually, finding its way through cracks and around obstacles and under doors, and the news that a developer from the city wanted to buy Le Four had found its way through the parish the way all news found its way, from kitchen to kitchen, from the dépanneur to the post office, Marie-Claire Pelletier's hair salon being the likely vector, the information attaching itself to the afternoon appointments and spreading from there.

"Oui."

"Il veut acheter."

"Oui."

"Et tu hésites."

It was not a question. It was a reading, an interpretation, the priest doing what priests did, which was to read the human text, to look at the person in front of him and discern what was written between the lines, the unspoken, the suppressed, the thing that lay beneath the thing that was said, and Marguerite felt exposed by it, felt the accuracy of it, the way she sometimes felt the accuracy of a thermometer reading that confirmed what her hand had suspected — the oven too hot, the dough too cold, the truth numeric and inescapable.

"Oui. J'hésite."

"Pourquoi?"

She did not answer immediately. The question was simple but the answer was not. The answer was layered, stratified, the reasons stacked on top of each other like the layers of brick in the oven wall, each one supporting the one above, the structure stable but complex, and she did not know which layer to begin with, which reason to offer first, because offering the top layer — the money, the practical considerations — felt dishonest, and offering the bottom layer — the love, the identity, the thing she could not name — felt too exposed, too raw, like opening the oven before the crust had set, the bread collapsing, the structure ruined by premature exposure.

"La boulangerie, c'est — " she started, and stopped. "C'est tout. C'est ma mère. C'est ma grand-mère. C'est la femme dans la photo. C'est le levain. C'est le four. C'est — "

"C'est toi."

She looked at him. He was looking at the bread on his plate, the last piece, and his expression was the expression of a man who has watched a garden grow for forty years and who knows every plant in it, every season, every drought, every frost, and who can tell by the colour of a single leaf whether the roots are healthy.

"Oui," she said. "C'est moi."

"Et Bergeron. Qu'est-ce qu'il offre?"

She told him the number. He received it the way Jean-François had received it — without visible reaction, the number absorbed, processed, its implications considered. Priests and carpenters had this in common: they worked with immaterial things — joints and joists, souls and sacraments — and the immaterial had taught them a patience with material that material people did not possess.

"C'est beaucoup d'argent," he said.

"Oui."

"Mais l'argent n'est pas la question."

"Non."

"La question, c'est: est-ce que tu veux être boulangère?"

The question landed in the room like a loaf landing on a cooling rack — with weight, with finality, with the authority of a thing that has been through the fire. Not can you be a baker — he had tasted the bread, he knew the answer to that. Not should you be a baker — that was a question for accountants and advisors and people who measured lives in terms of outcomes. Do you want to be a baker? The question of desire. The question of vocation. The question that preceded all other questions and that could not be answered by logic or analysis or the careful weighing of pros and cons but only by the body, by the hands, by the part of a person that knew what it knew without knowing how it knew it, the same part that told a priest he was called to priesthood and a carpenter he was called to wood and a baker she was called to bread.

She did not answer. She could not answer. Not yet. The question was too large for the room, too large for the afternoon, too large for the December light that was already fading, the sun gone behind the treeline, the shadows filling the bakery the way cold filled it when the fire went out, and the question would not be answered today, would sit in her the way the levain sat in the dough, working, transforming, the answer developing slowly in the dark.

Père André finished his bread. He brushed the crumbs from his coat. He stood.

"Ta mère," he said. "Elle priait toujours avant d'allumer le four. Le savais-tu?"

She did not know this. In twenty-three years of working beside her mother she had never seen Thérèse pray before lighting the oven. She had seen her speak to the oven — the murmured words that Marguerite had assumed were practical, directional, the way a rider speaks to a horse — but she had not known that the speaking was prayer.

"Non."

"Chaque matin. Pas longtemps. Juste un moment. Elle mettait la main sur la pierre et elle fermait les yeux et elle priait."

A hand on the stone. Eyes closed. A prayer. Her mother, who went to Mass every Sunday and who sang in the choir and who arranged flowers in the sacristy and who had collapsed on the floor of the sacristy while doing this work that she did for the church and for God and for reasons that Marguerite had never asked about because asking about faith was like asking about breathing — you did not ask, because asking implied that the thing might not be happening, and Thérèse's faith was so constant and so quiet that asking about it would have been an intrusion, a violation of the privacy that faith required, the same privacy that the starter required, the dark, the covered crock, the unseen work of transformation.

"Pourquoi tu me dis ça?" Marguerite asked.

"Parce que tu as besoin de savoir que cette boulangerie n'est pas seulement un bâtiment. C'est un lieu de prière. Et un lieu de prière ne se vend pas."

A place of prayer. She would have rejected this language yesterday. She would have said that the bakery was a place of work, a place of bread, a place of flour and water and fire and the daily repetition that produced sustenance — and these things were sacred in their own way, in the way that all necessary things were sacred, but they were not prayer, they were not divine, they were human and material and bound by the laws of chemistry and physics and economics. But Père André had planted something, and the something was growing, and the something was this: that her mother had stood where Marguerite stood, at the mouth of the oven, and had placed her hand on the stone and had closed her eyes and had spoken to something that was not the oven and not the bread and not the starter but was all of them and more, the something that animated the something, the leaven in the leaven, the life in the living thing.

She walked him to the door. He stepped out into the cold, the December air hitting him, the snow on his shoulders from the walk over having melted in the warmth of the bakery and now beginning to freeze, small crystals forming on the wool of his coat, and he turned back and looked at her and his face was old and tired and kind, the face of a man who had spent forty years listening to people's troubles and who had learned that the best thing he could do was not to solve them but to witness them, to stand in the presence of another person's difficulty and say I see you, I hear you, you are not alone, and he did this now, without words, with his face, and then he turned and walked back toward the church, the black coat receding into the grey afternoon, the limp more pronounced now, the cold stiffening the bad hip, and Marguerite watched him go and closed the door.

She went to the oven. She placed her hand on the stone surround, the granite that Alphonse Deschênes had cut and fitted a hundred and thirty years ago. The stone was warm — the oven still releasing its heat — and the warmth entered her palm and moved up her arm and she closed her eyes.

She did not pray. She did not know how. Or she knew how but the knowing was intellectual, learned in childhood, the rote prayers of catechism that she had memorized and recited and then forgotten, the words gone, the habit gone, the faith — if it had ever been faith and not merely obedience — gone. She stood with her hand on the stone and her eyes closed and she felt the warmth and listened to the building and smelled the bread and the ashes and the starter, and she stood there for a long time, not praying, not speaking, not thinking, just standing, just feeling, just being in the place where her mother had prayed and her grandmother had worked and the woman in the photograph had stood and Alphonse had built, and the place held her the way the crock held the culture, not tightly but completely, and she opened her eyes and removed her hand and the warmth lingered on her palm.

She went to the shelf. She lifted the cloth from the crock. The starter was there, active, alive, bubbling faintly, the surface domed, the smell of green apple and yeast, the culture doing what it did, what it had done every day for seventy years, what it would do tomorrow and the day after and the day after that, the metabolism continuing, the life continuing, the daily miracle of flour and water becoming something more than flour and water, becoming leaven, becoming bread, becoming the thing that sustained and that was sustained, the thing that was both the gift and the need.

She covered the crock. She left the bakery. She walked home through the December dark and the snow that was falling again, always falling, the village white and quiet and cold, the river invisible, the church lit from within, the windows glowing yellow in the dark, and she thought about prayer and bread and the hand on the stone and the question the priest had asked — Est-ce que tu veux être boulangère? — and the answer was in her somewhere, she could feel it, the way she could feel the dough's readiness through her hands, the answer forming in the dark of her, developing, rising, but not yet ready to be spoken, not yet shaped, not yet scored and baked and set before the world.

Soon. But not yet.