Order of Good Cheer

by Bill Gaston

  Anyway, you were brave to stay. I didn’t always think that way. But you didn’t follow everyone out. I remember it felt exciting and dangerous to leave. But back then it also felt dangerous — more dangerous — to stay.

  Where had he ever been besides here? Hawaii with Drew when they turned twenty-one. Trips to Calgary and Edmonton, and that one-week fiasco at UBC. If Laura asked, Where else? he might or he might not tell her about the time, about five years after she’d left town, when he flew down to see her perform in Vancouver, where her small Toronto company was touring. He remembered telling himself that the purpose of the trip was mainly to see the new museum and a Canucks game, and hike the Grouse Grind, all of which he did. But really there was only one purpose. He bought the most expensive ticket but when in the smallish hall he found himself too close to the stage he took an empty seat at the back. She’d probably be blinded by the lights but he couldn’t risk it. The program said she’d choreographed four of the eight pieces; she would appear in five of them. After sitting an unbearable time, reading every word in the program, the lights began to fall and he squirmed in his seat and, amazingly, despite himself, giggled, and then there she was, Laura Schultz, hardly herself in the glare and colours and exaggerated poses. In one piece she wore a bowler hat and a sort of tux with tails, and there was lots of kneeling, shuffling, and rolling on the floor. Her hair was butch and her hips noticeably wider —good God, yes, she’d had a baby. Who was now three and a half years old, a girl. But, though he had no right, her body, the way she moved it, still thrilled him somewhere deep. Watching her five pieces, awash with memories of that arm, those fingers, that barely parted mouth betraying rapid breathing, his nether zone was wildly abuzz. The way she thrust that cane while also holding it back, coy in a way that was impossible to see unless you knew her. As he knew how she smelled, right now. And missed that smell as much as he missed anything else about her. Watching her, the performance far, far too quickly at its end, he felt like laughing and crying both — whatever the word might be that splits those two right down the middle, or adds them both up.

  Comedy

  septembre 1606

  SAMUEL SETS OFF to seek a patch of land for next year’s garden plot, a clearing both deep with earth and well favoured by the sun. He deems it an unlikely find. He knows his search is in part fuelled by jealousy over Marc Lescarbot’s plot, adjudged the best in the settlement. He also still hunts annedda, whose needles may prove thicker than he remembered them to be. He thinks now that he only saw them dried. In any case all are reasons to walk. Lately, he finds men’s voices grating. Even their laughter, for it sounds like dogs’ harsh agreement over some foul thing.

  He prefers this rocky beach, walking the tide line, a rush of waves in his left ear and the calls of hidden birds in his right.

  He will walk this shore some distance before plunging up into the forest to nearby treeless knolls — they will let him get his head high and so perhaps see a place his fellows have missed. This wind has mood and blows his hair off his collar. He is happy to be walking near water, which he can feel in his chest as a challenge, even this small turbulence of the bay, its grey toss almost a prideful dare. He feels a pang of loss for the Northern Sea itself, lying just outside that channel, and declares to himself that it is the ocean he loves the most. Its attitude is unlike more southern waters, their azure and feminine ease. The North Atlantic is heartless and wants to seduce no one. It does not care, and shocks all naive appetite for the sea. It is, simply, dangerous, and as such the test of a man. It sends men such as Marc Lescarbot to their cabins to compose fantastical verse.

  Samuel decides to turn back because the wooden shoes Lucien the carpenter fashioned for him are raising a second blister — the first already grew to its anger’s peak and burst. (The other nobles reject these shoes as common, but perhaps they refer to this common pain!) But in the mud they are so superior to leather. He will present his shoes to the carpenter and ask him to go in again with his chisel and make more space for that smallest toe. He must also think to ask Lucien if he can train one or two men in the simpler art of coffins. He desires to alarm no one, but it is a truth: if the coffin-makers die, any further dead will be sent to ground unprotected.

  Walking, limping, he wishes for a canoe, despite these waves. The savages, even women and children, use them ceaselessly, eschewing walking for reasons that have become obvious. He wonders if the carpenter knows how to build a small boat, perhaps a coracle, some light craft very unlike the heavy woodenness of their own dories. Something a lone man could oar or pole, something he could carry on his back — something identical in all ways to the brilliant savage canoe!

  Samuel turns up the bank and inland to risk a shorter route back through the woods. As he rounds a thicket he comes upon a savage squatting to defecate. It is one of Membertou’s sons, the taller, unbalanced one. He had thought himself well hidden but he is startled and quickly glances up, sees Samuel. He glares and begins to mumble some incantation — aheysoos aheysoos aheysoos — all the while continuing his chore. Samuel turns away to allow the man his privacy and decency, but first sees how, despite his change in direction and despite the man knowing him, the savage draws a blade from his skins. And keeps it at the ready, resting armed fist on thigh. Samuel understands this, for the natural weakness of a man at toilet is such that it fires the urge to privacy.

  Many strides and trees away, Samuel casts a look back and into the shadows at his sides. It strikes him now that aheysoos was a savage rendition of the Saviour’s name! While this curiosity causes him to blink, he blinks twice more at the understanding that this man used the Holy Name as a kind of vocal talisman, a charm to ward off an enemy, in this case a Christian! And friend! But this is the unhinged son of Membertou, the one whose name is hard to say and harder to retain, and he is referred to as the crazy one, the son of split mind, to whom Lescarbot ascribes the poetic “of cliff-edge temperament.”

  As he hurries on his new route, recalling the brief scent of the savage’s scat, Samuel has a sudden and lunatic notion of food. He shakes his head and laughs aloud. He is recalling, surely, the story Membertou himself told about the shameful practice of dogs when they put nose to ass of any other they meet, as it seems they must. Some days ago, seeing two dogs behave thus, the sagamore told Samuel that they were seeking news of what food they’d recently eaten, and, if the food smelled good (that is, when it entered the first hole, at the other end), the next task was to ascertain where the food had been got, by tracing the other’s tracks to the source.

  Samuel walks and refuses to be a dog. The savages have many such stories and perhaps some are true. Of more import is an oddity: only that morning did this son of Membertou obtain this same blade in trade with them, for two good skins. That he should be so ready, the same day, to use it, and against the very people he gained it from — is almost a picture of comedy.

  THIS NEXT EVENING he is warmed by the good Lucien, who not only took time from his many labours to fix the wooden boots (Samuel still cannot wear them: to cut away any one part only makes another part rub) but also built Samuel a throne, on the shore. Samuel supposes it is because he has not tried to hide himself as he stands on the shore in a pose, most likely, of “gazing wistfully” upon the empty water. In any case, just around the point away from everyone’s eyes Lucien has built him a chair on which to sit and gaze as wistfully as he might wish. It is but a fat spruce stump with a back support left on. It is not overly comfortable and likely took the skilful Lucien not much time with a sharp saw, but Samuel loves it and it is his. Mostly, it was unasked for, and a gift from a busy man.

  Samuel has heard that the men already have christened it Champlain’s Chair of Dreams, but he trusts it is not all for mock.

  Even if it is, even if he must become a figure of ridicule, he knows it vital not to turn inward and hide. He has seen it often, both on ship and in the closeness of a landlocked winter, how a man feeling wounded will make an island of himself — this
is the way to bitter humour, and worse. And it can cause others to form up as an enemy gang against the afflicted, adding to the torment, which, as a serpent eats its tail, pushes the man-island farther into a deeper, more unreachable sea.

  How we judge one another! It is not unlike a beast stalking, assessing, and devouring prey.

  Samuel knows that on this voyage his first error in misjudging human qualities occurred with Marc Lescarbot. He learned in all manner of books — and Samuel a mapmaker modestly well-read in science — the assumption was that they would love each other as magnets, sharing their wisdom long into the night! Not so. The lawyer finds him foolish, and Samuel in turn finds his arrogance more foolish still. (Perhaps it is their shared learning that provides them with such competing ammunition!) But curse the googoo. In this event Lescarbot is right. Samuel’s too public belief in the savages’ monumental beast was only foolish, and this he can now admit. He sees his error was to boast about it in Paris when, clearly, no beast can exist whose roarings make all, even the forest trees, frozen and incapable of motion; no beast can exist that is big as an island and carries human beings in its pocket on which to dine later. But since Samuel has admitted to his foolishness and reneged in his belief, so Lescarbot should cease his mockery, especially amongst the common men. Samuel so loathes to hear the lawyer’s hissed Googoo! C’est arrivé! and then the men joining his mock trembling. Lescarbot himself has wrong beliefs aplenty, though he will stay blind to these even on the day Saint Peter himself points them out.

  But one can correct one’s wrong-headed judgements, it seems. This very morning, in fact, Samuel marvelled at how one’s perceptions of one’s fellows can be in error. Dédé with his swimming beetles! Today he saw anew the hirsute and beastly man. Samuel can still picture Dédé shrieking gleefully as a girl.

  It was at the elbow of the brook, widened and rocked in by Poutrincourt’s boy for a trout pond, where Samuel had the pleasure of finding Dédé in a hefty squat, glad as a child, pointing out this beetle and that. These beetles were of a kind unknown at home, with jet-black cloak and outsized paddling arms shaped as a leatherback turtle’s is. They dashed about playfully, chasing who knows what. These beetles Samuel had seen other times, but Dédé was delighted in their discovery, calling all who would come. His honking sounded somewhat like a stag at rut, and from appearances his cheeks were blush with wine, but when Samuel joined him he was all a child, and he would point and chirp and on occasion try to grasp one. Crouched near, Samuel knew him as his typically odorous self, and part of the mapmaker wanted to take and send him into the pond for a bath with his beetles. But then, surprising Samuel (and reminding him that there really is no place for mockery or judgement here in their enclosed and intimate world), the ox-headed Dédé said an intelligent thing. He said: “Monsieur Champlain, look! On their backs you can see the sun, and twice! And they are black like lacquer is black!” He went back to his chirping and Samuel could see he was fairly drunk as he then commenced growling as he caught and burst one between thumb and finger. But in any case it was good to be in the presence of happiness and be reminded that God gives his gleam even to the eyes of the stupid. Samuel knows Dédé’s fellows watch him and stay clear, judging him fragile in his moods, if not broken from his moorings, but as of this morning Samuel decides to think nothing of the kind.

  THOUGH, TOO SOON, Samuel has another glimpse of Membertou’s keel-less son. One of the rough carpenters, the man Simon, ate of a mushroom some days ago and only today returns to productive work. According to Simon, who speaks in fearful whispers still, said fruit was given to him in a jest of sorts, the savage Ponchonech (for that is the imbalanced one’s name) plucking it from the ground under some pines and offering it playfully, and his younger brother Androch joining in, calling Simon a woman if he didn’t eat it, though apparently neither of the two savages dared bite it themselves. Champlain suspects it was their man’s sense of French honour that made him take the dare, he does not know. But the apothecary d’Amboisee could do nothing to counteract the weird vegetable’s strength, trying sirop de rhubarbe and jalop and several other infusions besides. Simon’s dwelling mates tell of him speaking loudly the first night, describing a very great contentment, and he was heard to mention an angel, though of course it was a devil, because as Samuel later witnessed for himself, he was disturbed to the quick and could not sleep and through all his thoughts ran — in Simon’s own phrase — small devils. As well, he was full of devilish prophecy for this place, for Port-Royal, so Samuel is glad it cannot be true. Though Simon’s ramblings did haunt some of the men, even come morning. Ponchonech and Androch have been chastised, and Membertou bade them both bring to the compound a fresh beaver’s tail. Androch’s tail was dead maybe a week and already beginning to foul, and Bonneville risked their friendship with the savages by shouting at them and burying it out back before they had yet walked from sight.

  LUCIEN RESTS HIS HEAD. Though he lies still it feels that his limbs are at work even now, drawing the plane, and measuring, and he knows sleep is not close. Wood shavings will be curling up, unsatisfactorily and without pause, in his dreams.

  He tries to imagine he is still on ship and all of this snoring is wind. Beside him, Simon was snoring in exhaustion, but now he has stopped. Two others over by the wall opposite are still eager and full-lung’d. He imagines them to be fantastical imbecilic beasts of limited vocabulary, sharing a monotonous story. Oddly, he has never heard the real beast, Dédé, snore. The big man stays quiet in sleep. It is more than queer imagining him biding his time till morning.

  Lucien’s pillow is only half full of feathers, for though sea-birds abound he has had no time. How is it the other men find time? True, they do not take walks of such duration. They trout, or kill birds and gather feathers. A master carpenter’s prerogative, Lucien scouts for advantageous wood — though now when he does so it is little more than pretence, for the first time he climbed the promontory he could tell by the uniformity of leaf colour that there would be few surprises. Endless fir with small stands of oak, and scatters of birch, from which he might one day play at constructing a savage canoe. In truth he would love to stumble upon the rusty rock of an iron mine. He has heard there are rewards for Sieur Poutrincourt if copper or iron mines are among the fruits of this exploration, and that Poutrincourt might then reward the finder himself.

  Though he would rather find the den of a bear. Or see, up a tree — far up a tree, too far up to jump on him — a lion. Membertou has told them a kind of lion lives in these woods, though Monsieur Champlain has never seen or heard of it.

  Well — Lucien decides, knowing in his chest — no one should be held to account for the way one fills one’s time. Every style is but a solution to the demands of this place. For instance, Lucien has watched Bonneville try and try to entertain himself. As cook, Bonneville’s day is more regimented, and in some sense more valued, than any other man’s, and as such he is not allowed to lend even a finger to any brute work even should he want to. They could not bear their cook injured, dirty, or even tired. They go so far as to deny him exercise, for though they aren’t aware of it they prefer their cook plump, perhaps because it instills confidence that he evidently finds his own creations irresistible. So Lucien has seen Bonneville on his off-hours looking rather angry and at sea. To escape the biting flies, the cook set up a bench of driftwood on a sunny outcrop that caught some breeze, but as a result badly burned his face and his lips. Then he pulled out his shoulder finding white stones with which to line the Sieur’s trout pond, so that was the end of that. But it’s clear the man needs to make more work for himself. Lucien shakes his head on his thin pillow. With such impatient industry, Port-Royal will be an entire village soon.

  It is this industry, this mind-filling work, that keeps them all from being afraid, leaving no room for it. Lucien can stand apart and regard the hurry in their chopping and rasping and banging and barking and see too clearly that, to a man, fear is their fuel. None utters the word scurv
e. Sometimes a word is louder, and grows deafening, the longer it is not spoken.

  Speaking of biting flies, this morning Lucien heard — and with no reason to believe it is not true — that the Mi’qmah hereabouts are not so gentle as all have been boasting. For it seems they have a famous way of torturing an enemy, one made worse through being enacted under the guise of benevolence. That is, by letting a man go free. Before doing so they relieve him — a captured Iroquois, one assumes — of the burden of all of his clothes and skins and then point the direction of his village many leagues distant and release him into the care of the woods. Apparently in any season but winter, such a man will not survive the blackflies, mosquitoes, horseflies, stag flies, chiggers, and ticks for more than two days, and it is further said that if the man does not find a pond to jump into within an hour he most certainly will be made mad, being capable by then of naught but running into tree trunks and snorting infantile noises out his nose as he tries to flee. And of course in winter the cold bites you whole.

  Lucien laughs cruelly. He has far too much head for sleep tonight. Beside him, poor Simon sucks breath like a baby, seeking the health he lost over two days and nights doing battle with the purgatorial mushroom.

  No, the Mi’qmah have their own especial world, one the French know only a corner of. Tonight, it had been one of Lucien’s nights to join the nobles’ table, and he had come late because of some smooth-planing he needed to finish before rain came. The sagamore Membertou was a guest at table, and the nobles looked well into their cups. Remarkably — and Lucien merely listened, and his opinion was not sought in any case — they were considering Membertou’s proposal that some Etchemin warriors, from the south, be captured and kept here as slaves and used to grind the grain for their bread! There sat Fougeray de Vitre sombrely nodding, with Monsieur Lescarbot brow-knit, and Sieur Poutrincourt himself thinking this through. Their bread was famously adored by the savages, and lately some of them had taken turns at the hand mill — a job often used as punishment, so tedious is it — their reward being half the bread that results from the labour. But apparently their love knows earthly limits, because here was the sagamore proposing that the French with their many muskets join them in a raid south, where, seeing the French at their side, the Etchemins will be easily defeated, with slaves for the hand mill taken, and women too, if the French wish them. (Monsieur Champlain’s doubtful translation of the sagamore’s words left it unclear whether Membertou was boasting humorously that he already had too many women around him.) In any case, the nobles sat, perhaps envisioning all that bread and all those women, until Monsieur Champlain interrupted his own translation — for the sagamore loves to make long speeches —to tell them simply, “The keeping of slaves would not go well for us,” which appeared to embarrass the rest of them, or at least bring them to their better senses. And the lawyer Lescarbot then made a joke, proclaiming slavery to be a hobby more favoured by the English. And then the Sieur bit himself on the inner cheek and shouted. Not a minute passed before he bit himself again where it had swelled, as it sometimes will, and now he both shouted and stood.