River City by John Farrow

been nice talking to you. Don’t swing that thing at me again, all right? We’re moving back.”
    “I’ll crack your head open if you don’t! If I find out you’re a reporter, I’ll smash your nose!”
    “If you like, I’ll point out the reporters to you,” Father François offered, which won a chuckle from his new friend.
    “You’d better move back, too, Officer,” Trudeau cautioned him. “We’re in the middle of the next charge. Give up the bench—it’s not worth bleeding over.”
    “You’re communists!”
    “Not quite. He is. I’m merely an intellectual Jesuit Buddhist, with liberal underpinnings and a humanitarian bent. A little hedonism on the side.”
    “You’re homosexuals!”
    “I’m a priest! Watch what you say.”
    “I’m also a lawyer,” Trudeau admitted, “but maybe I shouldn’t tempt you. I’m also a ladies’ man. But, like I said, maybe I shouldn’t tempt you.”
    “Sorry, Father, but get out of here or I’ll forget that you’re a priest. I’ll bust your head! I’ll bust the lawyer’s head in half.”
    “Officer,” Trudeau persisted, “look around you—you’re isolated. Get the hell out of here yourself.”
    The officer did look around this time and realized that he was alone. The mob had spotted him, and the next charge met in the middle of the square around the bench he’d coveted, the officer flailing wildly at communists and homosexuals and unionists and intellectuals and reporters and lawyers and probably teachers and parents and superior officers and even hockey players who failed to score on crucial breakaways while other cops raced to his rescue and Trudeau and his new friend stepped back as the two forces clashed.
    “This changes everything!” Father François yelled in Trudeau’s ear above the din. They were not alone in having a conversation, as behind each joust men on both sides argued and tried to figure out what was happening, or what should happen next, although their discussion was singular.
    “We can agree on that,” Trudeau said.
    “It’s the beginning of the revolution.”
    “Actually, it’s the beginning of the riot. The riot is part of an ongoing social upheaval. To call it a revolution is to hijack the agenda for your own purposes. You should be ashamed of yourself, a priest.”
    “I’m a Dominican. We promote new ideas, unlike Jesuit stick-in-the-muds.”
    “We promote a more rigorous examination, Father.”
    “So in the end you can clear your conscience for doing nothing.”
    “Am I holding you back, Father? Do you want to throw a rotten egg?”
    “The poor don’t have eggs to waste on policemen!”
    “Pardon me?”
    They were being jostled from behind and had to duck to the side against a building to avoid being pushed into the path of horses.
    “Not even rotten ones. The poor don’t have eggs,” Father François repeated.
    “Spare me the rhetoric, Father. Who do you think you’re talking to?”
    “A rich young Jesuit from Outremont.”
    “And you, a cozy priest.”
    “You pulled your punch there, Pierre. You meant to say fat.”
    “I meant to say what I said, Father.”
    “Don’t call me cozy. I’m here, aren’t I? On the front lines.”
    “The front lines are fifty feet away.”
    “Close enough. I don’t have the heart for battle.”
    “You’re a pacifist?”
    “No, I just have a weak heart.”
    The two men laughed then, and the fight in front of them dispersed in a torrent of snowballs from the young boys in the rear.
    Amid imposing Doric columns, visitors are guided up broad stairs into the Sun Life Building. Scaled-down columns are repeated seventeen floors higher, the overall effect one of solidity and long-term prosperity, as if success can be measured as eternal. True to form, the Sun Life Assurance Company has enjoyed a long and eventful history in the province, its influence at times approximating that of the Church. The first institution Armand Touton had chosen to defend upon deducing that there