A Very Bold Leap (20 page)

Heavy footsteps suddenly sounded in the corridor, and there was a knock on the door. Before Brother Miguel could even call out, a man with a huge nose, wearing blue work clothes, entered the room and sat down smiling beside Charles. He nodded good-naturedly to his two companions without a single word to excuse his lateness.

“Was there a problem, José?” the pastor asked him amiably.

“No,” replied the electrician, adding nothing more. He went on smiling.

Brother Miguel sighed. “Allow me to introduce Charles Thibodeau, your new workmate. He’s quite eager to train with you. Charles, this is José Coïmbro.”

“Hello,” said the electrician, giving Charles an astonishingly energetic handshake.

“Charles is ready to start tomorrow. Is that right, Charles?”

“Uh … well… what I mean is … er, not really. I haven’t told my boss about this yet…”

“I need him right away,” broke in Coïmbro. “I absolutely have to finish putting in those new plugs before tonight’s meeting, otherwise we’ll have the same old problems again.”

Charles stood up. “AU right, let’s get going. But I can’t promise anything for tomorrow.”

Charles worked until midnight, despite the meeting that took place around him. All that time José Coïmbro barely spoke a word to him other than for
strictly technical reasons, and even then said no more than was absolutely necessary. But he made up for his lack of loquacity by constantly smiling. Never before had Charles seen anyone smile so much as José Coïmbro.

“So, you’re leaving us,” murmured Fernand in a strained voice.

And, overcome by distress, he sat down on the edge of the counter while Lucie, her lips compressed by her emotions, pressed her hands to her heart.

It had been a quiet morning, and now the silent hardware store seemed suddenly sad and solemn.

“There’s no need to take it so hard. I just need a change, that’s all… And this new job will give me a chance to travel a bit around Quebec… I’ve wanted to do that for so long…”

“Well, I can see how my little shop here wouldn’t hold any interest for a young explorer like yourself,” Fernand said sarcastically. “When are you leaving?”

“It’s up to you, Fernand. I don’t want to leave you shorthanded.”

The hardware-store owner shrugged resignedly. “Ha! Shorthanded,” he said. “I know about shorthanded. I’m getting to be an expert in short-handed…. We’ll manage without you, don’t worry…. In fact, the way things are going these days, it might be the best thing for both of us.”

Lucie placed both hands on Charles’s shoulders and looked into his eyes.

“What is this Church you’re going to? Tell me. Are you sure they’re good people? You hear so many terrible stories about religious sects … Is there a chance they’re going to try to brainwash you, Charles?”

“No way, no way,” Charles said, laughing. “Don’t worry, I’m only going to work there — and maybe find a bit of adventure.”

“Are they at least paying you well?” asked Fernand.

“Oh, yes,” said Charles simply. He thought that being more specific would embarrass Fernand.

“Well, since your mind is set on going, you might as well go now. Good luck, my boy.”

And leaning over the counter, he began unwrapping a parcel.

“But who’s going to look after Boff when you start traipsing around the province all the time,” Lucie asked suddenly, wiping the corner of her eye.

“You are,” Charles replied lightly, with the impertinence of someone who knows he can count on unconditional love. “He can stay with you. Céline and Henri can take him for walks. They love doing that.”

At the mention of Céline, Lucie winced, and a question trembled on her lips. But she decided it was one she had better keep to herself.

C
harles absorbed the rudiments of his new occupation with remarkable ease. His years of working with Blonblon in the repair shop had developed his resourcefulness, and after only a few days, José Coïmbro was singing Charles’s praises in a way that made the young man’s ears burn with pleasure, even if those praises did come from a man who seemed to him to be more bizarre every day.

They had finished their work at the church on avenue de Lorimier and were wiring a miserable little church on Brossard, not far from boulevard Taschereau. Because he was in the electrician’s good books, he had every evening off, and naturally spent them with Céline, who was slowly recovering from the anxiety she’d felt when Charles had changed jobs. He thought it best not to tell her that, in a few months, when the work they had to do in the Montreal region was completed, they would be moving their operations to Quebec City, perhaps even down into the Gaspésie.

It was, however, under quite different circumstances that Charles’s dream of travelling was soon to become reality.

One day, when they were working in Verdun installing some backup lighting in one of the sect’s “biblical encounter” rooms that had been tacked on to one of those modern churches that look more like office or apartment buildings than places of worship, a young woman came up to them carrying a tray with cups, a coffee pot, and a plate of muffins. She introduced herself as the wife of the local pastor, Brother Roch, and said that her husband
hoped they would excuse him for not coming to greet them himself, but he had such a cold that he had been confined to his bed.

Charles spent some time chatting with her. She was open, very pretty, and — God be thanked — did not lard her conversation with quotations from the Bible. On the contrary, she seemed to be a healthy, normal woman, endowed with much common sense and even a sense of humour. José Coïmbro listened to them talking as he worked, and from time to time indicated his agreement by nodding his head. After a few minutes, the woman continued on her way.

“That’s my kind of woman, that one,” said the electrician when she’d gone.

“Yeah,” said Charles. “She’s got what it takes, all right. Except that her husband and the Holy Ghost are the only ones who can lay a finger on her.”

Coïmbro gave him a scandalized look, but went on with his work without saying anything.

“Do you have a girl, José?” Charles asked him after a few minutes.

“No,” Coïmbro replied brusquely, then added, “Never have had one, neither.”

“Don’t you miss it?”

Coïmbro wrinkled his brow and thought about it for a moment, then turned to Charles with a grin. “When God thinks it’s time for me to meet someone, then I’ll meet someone.”

“But what if God forgets to set you up, what’ll you do then?”

“Enough of your yammering. God doesn’t forget things.”

An hour later the pastor’s wife came back with another tray. The two men thanked her profusely, and Charles complimented her on the muffins, saying they all looked so good he didn’t know which one he should take.

“Oh, that makes me feel good,” she said, laughing. “You both are working so hard, I thought you could use the calories.”

She came back two or three more times in the course of the day, always bringing baked goods and coffee. Coïmbro became more and more taken with her, and even ventured to speak a few words when she appeared. He gobbled muffins and drank coffee after coffee, to Charles’s great amusement, since earlier the electrician had called coffee the devil’s own brew, declaring it to be an insidious poison that was one of the chief causes of violence in the world.

By five o’clock, Coïmbro had become so jittery and hyper that he was trying to do ten things at once and was unable to finish any of them. He dropped his pliers and his screwdrivers, misplaced wires, spun around frantically looking for a tool that had been in his hand all along, then stopped in mid-task, a troubled look on his face, having forgotten what it was he was doing. Taking pity on him, Charles suggested they take a break so he could pull himself together. They went into an adjoining room, and the electrician sat down, stretched his legs out in front of him, crossed his hands behind his head, and tried to take a few deep breaths. But he continued to be wracked by bouts of nervous twitching.

“I think I drank too much coffee,” he said, sounding miserable.

Very seriously, Charles nodded in agreement. “Poor José,” he said. “Why on earth did you drink so much of the stuff, since you clearly don’t like it?”

“I did it to please her,” Coïmbro said. “I’m not even sure she noticed! That’s me all over, that is, always trying to do the right thing. And look where it gets me!”

Maybe it was a side effect of too much caffeine, but the electrician launched into an account of his life. He’d been born in Saint-Henri, one of the suburbs of Montreal, to a set of parents who were so perennially unhappy that they managed to pass their unhappiness down to their children. He and his five brothers had been abandoned when they were very young, and had been handed from one foster home or orphanage to another. One of them had even ended up living in an old-age home run by the Grey Nuns!

“But it was a great experience,” Coïmbro assured Charles, with his flashing smile, which now seemed vaguely pathological. “I had some very good times. Oh yeah, it was hard once in a while, but that just made me stronger. When you come right down to it, I was pretty lucky.”

“You hardly knew your parents, then, is that right?”

“No, they took off when I was four. But I remember them well. I didn’t hear from my mother again until a week before she died, when I was fourteen. She left a note on the kitchen table saying how sorry she was that she’d abandoned us, and asking our forgiveness. I thought that was pretty funny.”

He went on with his story. He’d always lived on his own, but he’d got along fairly well, considering. Charles could sense loneliness wrapping itself around the man like a warm coat, not too heavy, not too loose, not too colourful, but
a bit too thin when the wind chill factor went up. Coïmbro dragged it with him wherever he went. He didn’t even know he was doing it. It made him sad sometimes, it sapped his energy, but most of the time he found it comforting. The Church of the Holy Apostles was like the family he’d never had, without actually being a family, since he hardly ever spoke to anyone in it.

For a long time, he said, he’d lived the life of a maggot, working here and there when he had to in order to eat, but never having the slightest idea of why he had been placed on this earth. His chaotic childhood hadn’t allowed him to form any solid convictions about anything.

Then, one day, God tested him, and afterwards opened His arms to him. He’d been doing some repair work on the old Loew’s Cinema building on Sainte-Catherine, and an electric cable had fallen on him and electrocuted him. He spent two weeks in a coma, and when he woke up, he heard the voice of God calling him to a better life, a life that was
uplifting
, and
meaningful
. During his stay in hospital, he had begun looking into the differences between the various religions, and he’d had a long conversation with Brother Miguel that decided everything. He was on the right path. All he had to do was stay on it, even if it proved to be rocky and steep.

“You’ll find it, too,” he said to Charles, tapping him on the shoulder and smiling. Charles noticed that the corner of the electrician’s mouth was twitching.

“Maybe. But in the meantime, how about we install the rest of those junction boxes?”

They went back to work. Coïmbro, however, was still so jumpy that Charles soon burst out laughing and sent him out to get a breath of fresh air, assuring him that he would have no trouble finishing the installation himself. The electrician came back after an hour and a half, having missed a round of coffee and muffins but a bit more relaxed, and inspected his apprentice’s work.

“Good, good! All tickety-boo!” he said admiringly. “Couldn’t have done it better myself! You’re going to make a real champion, you heard it here first, folks.”

The next day, when Charles turned up at Brother Miguel’s office to collect his pay, he could tell from the warm reception the pastor gave him that José Coïmbro had been in singing his praises. From certain remarks directed his way by other church members over the next few days, he received the distinct
impression that he was held in high esteem by all, and that everyone was praying for his conversion to the faith.

Which was soon to have unforeseen consequences for him.

The Church of the Holy Apostles of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ was run by a President who lived, curiously enough, in Waterloo, a small village in the Eastern Townships blessed with an excellent Chinese restaurant; exactly how he ran the organization was a matter shrouded in some mystery, since He was never seen, and the few times Charles heard anyone speak of Him, it was only with the vaguest of allusions — highly respectful, but also highly obscure.

That being said, the organization seemed to run smoothly and efficiently, with the different responsibilities of each of its managers delineated with a great deal of care and precision. There were, at the bottom of the managerial ladder, the pastors, whose role was similar to that of curates. Next came the evangelists, a kind of itinerant preacher. Then there were the teachers, the professors of “theology” who instructed the pastors in various Bible colleges; a rank above them were the prospectors, who were former teachers who scrutinized and analyzed the biblical record to extract from it the maximum teachings (a prospector could spend months on three verses!). And then there were the pioneers, the shock troops, who travelled from one region to another trying to open new churches.

These functions weren’t always completely carved in stone. Under the right circumstances, pioneers could become evangelists. The pastor was always a kind of evangelist, since he delivered weekly sermons to the faithful in his church, and also like a teacher, since he could find himself spending part of his time in a Bible school.

A single church could have a number of pastors, each of whom carried out their ministry under the direction of a principal pastor. Three months before Charles’s arrival at the church on avenue de Lorimier, Brother Miguel had lost two assistant pastors under circumstances that changed depending on who was recounting them. But since their departure, Brother Miguel had found himself alone and fairly overworked, which meant he hadn’t had the time he’d wanted to take charge of Charles’s spiritual state. Besides, Charles
worked outside most of the time. Sometimes, however, as though in passing, he would invite Charles to one of the “prayer meetings,” or to a “witness evening,” which took place each week in the church. At other times it was the librarian, she of the almost immaterial hands, who took time to inform herself of Charles’s spiritual well-being, although she was always careful to change the subject as soon as she sensed the slightest boredom or irritation on the part of her interlocutor.

Charles was therefore able to reply to the innuendos of Steve and Céline, and also to those, less caustic, of Blonblon and Isabel, by insisting that the Church of the Holy Apostles was not trying to convert him in any way, shape, or form, but, on the contrary, was leaving him entirely free to hold and even to express his own religious convictions.