Order of Good Cheer Read online

  THE ORDER OF GOOD CHEER

  The Order of Good Cheer

  a novel by

  Bill Gaston

  Copyright © 2008 Bill Gaston

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

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  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Gaston, Bill

  The order of good cheer / Bill Gaston.

  ISBN 978-0-88784-200-9

  1. Champlain, Samuel de, 1567–1635 — Fiction. I. Title.

  PS8563.A76076 2008 C813’.54 C2007-907357-3

  Jacket design: Ingrid Paulson

  Text design and typesetting: Ingrid Paulson

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program

  the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of

  Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

  Printed and bound in Canada

  To my grandchildren

  Can we agree, the past is not dead but

  the present is its surprising and complex flower?

  — Felix d’Amboisee

  Fowl

  juin 1606

  SAMUEL SITS AT TABLE, alone, eyeing the roasted fowl without hunger, when he hears the sentry’s yelp.

  Bonneville has but moments ago brought and deposited the meat platter angrily, perhaps because he knows he needs must deliver it again, reheated, once Poutrincourt and the others return. All day they’ve been off in the longboat seeking what salt marsh might be diked and drained. A wind has risen to fight their return, and Samuel hopes this is the sole reason they are late.

  He nudges a bird breast with a knuckle. The flesh does not give. Perhaps it wasn’t anger on the cook’s face — perhaps Bonneville is shamed by his own fare. Samuel eyes the platter of five duck. That is, he tries to think of it as duck. The thin black bill suggests less a mallard than a kind of gull. His tongue knows it too, a taste more of salt reeds than of flesh. He can smell nutmeg rising from the pooled yellow fat, and also garlic, but no cook’s magic helps. And one must wonder why the heads have been left on: these birds are not game, nor this the after-hunt, one’s trophies displayed on the platter. These birds can be netted and broken to death by children, and are barely food. Smelling them, Samuel almost yearns — almost — for the salt beef and biscuit they chewed every day of the crossing, the mere memory of which makes the floor pitch and move with swell. The common men eat from those barrels still.

  He pinches up a bird by the beak, lets it drop, stiff-necked. He takes his knife and taps a black bill. It glistens well; and its shape is not unlike the curled thrust of a talon, the kind that adorns necklaces worn by the great sagamores to the west. He must remember to snap off these bills and collect them in a pouch, for a necklace of his own, a bit of craft he might fill some hours with, to complete and save and take back to France next summer and give to . . . whom?

  Pretending appetite, Samuel hoists a dripping creature whole and takes a bite of skin. Bonneville won’t want him eating this cold, when it tastes all the worse.

  THE SENTRY’S NEXT YELL has Poutrincourt’s servant boy — who is one of the several fellows in this colony who can be smelled before he is heard — standing pungently at his side to tell him a lone savage is at the gate.

  “Is he old?”

  “Sir, I do not know that.”

  “Please, quick, find if he is old.”

  He walks rather than runs. Samuel wonders if the boy’s risked impudence is due to Samuel’s being the lone noble who hasn’t a servant — even the priest has one. The boy would have run if Poutrincourt were here, and though Samuel will say nothing of it he guesses that before winter is out this boy will be flogged. Samuel also finds the whelp’s red waist sash somehow impudent. Nor does he care for the up-tilt of the boy’s nose, which allows a constant view into his nostrils — though Samuel knows one should strive to love whichever of God’s designs a man is born with.

  He has heard only that the sagamore is impossibly old, and that one of his names is Membertou. Membertou is the reason Samuel stayed behind today, and yesterday, and the week previous, the sagamore having sent word that he would soon come. Samuel hopes that Membertou is who it is, if only to get this waiting over.

  He finds the Mi’qmah tongue twisted and mystical and often senseless, but of all the nobles he is most able at it and so his duty is to stay and make contact with the sagamore. Indeed, Poutrincourt made formal request that he do this, possibly suspecting Samuel’s regret. For though Samuel knows their words he is less at ease with their ways — their false smiles, the bluster and sometimes interminably long speeches about vainglorious and unlikely deeds. Samuel is a mapmaker. He is a mapmaker who quite needs the sea and who on land is made edgy at the thought of anyone else in the longboat without him, face into the breeze, discovering even so much as the next league of mud and clams. They should have left behind the lawyer. Lescarbot could trick out the sagamore’s trust with his winks and soft pinches to the elbow.

  The odorous boy barely pokes his head in the door to tell him, “The savage is old. No weapon. Not very large, but tall.”

  So it is Membertou, and it is the day Samuel has both wished for and not, this meeting of France with New France. Poutrincourt has expressed some worry about their welcome by these savages who have for the most part presented themselves as a scatter of ghosts off in the trees: first several men, peering out, then more emboldened, standing in postures with weapons in view, and later the women, and then also children, who laughed and sometimes bent to aim their bums.

  Samuel finishes chewing and rises. He plucks a serviette to wipe his lips and beard of bird grease — though some savages would veritably enshine themselves with it, with grease of any kind, in these parts preferring, apparently, bear fat. He wonders why Membertou is alone. Up the great Canada River Samuel met more than one sagamore and none of them ever appeared without entourage, braves to fetch things and to yell at, not so unlike the King’s own military.

  The air of the courtyard is fresh as he strides through. The westerly has some scowl to it, and scalloped cloud says rain comes tomorrow. Samuel sees that Bonneville has wedged open the door to his hot kitchen and, inside, the cook stands on tiptoes to peer out his vent, toward the gate. One door along, the smithy’s clanging and rending has likewise stopped. Samuel wonders if Membertou is truly over one hundred and, if so, how well he walks.

  At the barred double gate, Poutrincourt’s boy leaps laughing away from the Judas hole and stands aside. Samuel hesitates and, feeling watched by the boy, says, inexplicably, “Oui.” He clears his throat and stoops to peer through the hole. No one stands without. There, empty, lies the field of fresh black stumps running down to the beach and the c
hoppy waters of the bay. To either side, more stumps, and then the dark forest. But there at the beach he spies the thin grubby beak of a canoe, aground where the longboat normally rests. But no old sagamore, no Membertou.

  Now, an inch from his bare eyeball rises some dirty, greasy hair. No topknot, no part or braids — it is hair made by the wind and also, so it appears, by sleep. Now a forehead, though not that of an old man. Now eyebrows, grey and fine and glistening with grease, two narrow pelts trod upon by snails.

  Still in his prank, the savage continues rising to the hole slowly, delaying the show of his eyes.

  Now the eyes do come, and both they and the skin around them are deeply those of an old man. Hardened in duty, Samuel will hold Membertou’s gaze, setting himself the task not to look away first. For today his own eyes are his King’s eyes, and those there are the eyes of New France. They have risen full centre in the Judas hole and they widen in surprise at seeing Samuel’s. Now Samuel sees the smile in them and understands that the surprise was actually feigned, was mirroring his own expression. Membertou’s eyes hold this humour but Samuel sees something more behind, a strong quality he cannot put a word to. If wisdom and curiosity could become one gleam, it would be that.

  In a tongue Samuel must tilt his head to know, the sagamore Membertou lisps softly, “I smell duck.”

  juillet 1606

  CHAMPLAIN REACHES THE promontory huffing hardly at all compared to before. He has grown his land muscles again, from these weeks walking it.

  Daily he has climbed to this spot for reasons other than healthful exercise. Up here there blows a harder and finer wind than that down in the compound, one that barely ruffles hair. This higher wind carves in between two mountains, in through the gut that serves as entrance to their port, and this wind smells of that true wilderness — the sea. Samuel never tires of this smell, which makes straight for his innards and draws him. But the loveless spirit of sea wind also humbles him and makes him glad to be up here for a second reason: to see his present safety, below. For l’Habitation is born. The mapmaker makes an artist’s square of his hands and there, through it, captured entire, is his world:

  A sheltered harbour of such size that it may one day hold a hundred of France’s ships. Three rivers flow into it, and they are named the Eel, the Antoine, and the Mill. Much of the shore is shallows of mud bottom, which keeps many birds, some of which are good enough at table. Some spans of mud are dense with clam, which the men hesitate to eat, for it makes dysentery unless taken with fresh bread. From the north wind they are shielded by this shelf of mountain at Samuel’s back. Everywhere lie pockets of a soil that is black and deep. Their forest boasts seven species of tree, one of which presents an unknown nut. Trout hide in all three rivers, and salmon might come late summer, sculling shoulder to shoulder in so thick a school that, says Bonneville, their future children already run across their backs. Membertou promises to show them how to catch a fish long as a canoe. A copper mine lies undug, twenty miles north, in a steeply cliffed bay. The region lacks vines.

  Samuel narrows his square: surrounded by forest, a field of stumps fills several acres. In patches faintly greener than brown, small gardens have sprouted. It is late season, but the rooted crops might store under snow.

  Narrowing his view farther, he frames what they’ve built: a sturdy outer wall of well-pointed logs near twice as tall as a man and not possibly broken by wind, beast, or savage. They have a sturdy but welcoming gate, closed to the evils of the night. Inside it, the dwellings are done, save that they wait on the carpenters’ slower art to cut in windows and properly hang doors. Bringing last year’s planks across Fundy Bay from the damned ruin of St-Croix saved time, though some men bear superstitions about the wood itself, not wanting death’s taint in their dwelling, in particular not wanting a bed frame that cradled a corpse. They have been assured by surgeon, apothecary, and priest that the scurve that carried off last year’s men is not a pestilence that itself lives in wood. (While surgeon, apothecary, and priest all deem the scurve “a failure of the spirit,” it is interesting to watch them disagree on exactly what that means, for no one’s truth is remotely alike.) But they have cookhouse, storehouse (with eight-foot-deep cellar this time, so naught will freeze), smithy, a nobles’ house, a manor (nearly done) and a common house for the men. An inner courtyard, its freedom from stumps their most hard-won labour yet, dug, burnt, and tackled, with ship’s rope, for they lack oxen. In the very centre sits their lovely well, a deep hole into earth’s clean belly, the blessed wound ensheltered with peaked and shingled roof. There, the handmill (so large is its stone and so taxing the job of turning it, any man who labours there is typically suffering punishment). They own three barrels of salt beef and six of biscuit, and twenty cask of wine, three of which are superior. Two barrels of grain, one cask of salt. The sagamore Membertou boasts that within months all will have moose for the asking, for the snow will come and deepen and they will chase the hobbled moose at their leisure. And, as if God kindly noted their weariness of codfish, the first river herring have arrived up the brook west of their clearing, and though bony they are excellent stabbed through with willow skewer, mouth to tail, and touched to the embers.

  The men’s mood is good.

  Owning the tallest roof, Poutrincourt’s manor begins to look fine. Planks for the floor were sawn here, of oak. It will be near as fine a house as a gentleman’s country retreat in France, though smaller. In the meantime the Sieur stays next door in the nobles’ house, which, though it too will have a glass window, is made of logs and rarely will a day reach its end without a beetle or spider landing excited on one’s shoulder. Poutrincourt speaks fondly — eyes shining — of the year his wife will dwell in the manor with him, and the nobles are gladdened by this dream that, with God’s giving hand, indeed might come to pass. Poutrincourt has asked Lescarbot to compose a descriptive journal to carry back next summer to read to Madame Poutrincourt, so to convince her of Port-Royal’s healthful beauty. (Judging from the number of pages Lescarbot composes in a night, Samuel suspects the lawyer has aims for audiences larger than one friend’s wife.)

  And, there: the gentle Poutrincourt has had a path of one mile cleared to a future flower garden and trimmed woods, a place of contemplation and healthful walking. He has also had a smooth-milled cross of some ten feet erected just outside the gate so that, when a man puts his eye to the Judas hole, it commands his vision. A cross of greater size he has ordered placed atop the North Mountain, behind where Samuel stands, but twice again as high. Cutting a path there will take many working days to fulfill, not to mention the milling and transport of such a cross — and some men have grumbled (not to noble ears, of course, but one can see it in their eyes), eager to begin work on their own gardens and fish traps, always in fear for their own survival. But in the end they trust in the wisdom and benefaction of Sieur Poutrincourt, and of God.

  There is a small chapel, but also giving comfort are three small cannon fierce enough to hole any longboat trying to land.

  Samuel is breathing hard and, discovering himself near tears, he thrusts his hands’ frame at it, at l’Habitation, three times, and declares with certainty that New France is born. He decides he will compose a proper portrait of it in map’s ink as soon as he descends this hill and rejoins his brothers.

  Who are one at the top: Sieur Poutrincourt, of good heart, who lacks a fortune but has been given this land by de Monts, and loves it so.

  Who are eight in the middle: nobles of several kind, of birth primarily, in whose number Samuel Champlain takes a modest place. They serve God and King, and otherwise take their own counsel.

  Who are thirty-six at the bottom — including cook, surgeon, gunsmith, apothecary, carpenters, soldiers, workers — men of diverse talent and good fellows all, even the several who came from gaol, their ill deeds minor enough. Some came seeking adventure, some escaping adventures past. All will earn their one hundred and fifty livres, which is thrice that for the same year’s labou
r at home.

  Who are one off to the side: Fr. Vermoulu, priest, sees that their souls stay clean and offers a food and a wine most necessary for their survival, both earthly and eternal.

  Though perhaps the scurve will not visit this time.

  PENETRATING THIS FOREST of mediocre trees, forearms up against endless chafing branches, the carpenter Lucien realizes how much he misses roads. Here, there is no unhindered walking except in the compound, or the path to the cesspool, or a tilted gambol along the sloped and rocky beach at low tide. Beyond that, one chooses either the deadly sea or the thick forest. At home, even if he never went another place, there were roads to allow escape, if only for the mind. Possibility is itself a freedom. Here he has the morbid sense that this lack of roads plugs his daily dreamings. And at home, when one did walk a road, one could do so without thinking. Here, to walk the forest lost in even a moment’s thought is to have one’s face pierced, fall off a cliff, or find oneself hugging a nest of wasps.

  Though it was hours ago now, if he sucks into the depths of his teeth he can still get some faint molasses onto his tongue. The event was lunatic, truly. The brute Dédé and he had been given the labour of cleansing Monsieur Lescarbot’s beloved window glass when it was lifted from its molasses. Lucien doesn’t know why he, a master carpenter, was paired up with a common worker for this task — perhaps it was to match his brains to Dédé’s brawn for the sake of care. Though Lucien was happy enough for it. A week earlier he’d watched with plenty of other men as that first pane of glass emerged from the safety of its molasses barrel after months of storage in it; they all saw the main thickness of brown syrup get scraped back into the barrel with sharp wooden spatulas; they watched as the first light won its way through and transparency was reborn. It was a kind of magic. Then two men were assigned the task of walking it tenderly down to the shore to wash it to its original perfection before the glass was installed into Sieur Poutrincourt’s frame. Many savages arrived for this, and some looked stricken or insulted as Poutrincourt himself appeared from within, behind his fresh glass, then rapped upon it and waved. Though two older women laughed to each other, and then one shouted something.