Order of Good Cheer

by Bill Gaston

  Lucien wonders at these “disagreements.” It was simple madness, surely. Though it’s possible that in a simple place the madness is made more complex. Not a tree on the island. Constant wind. No desire of being there in the first place. No woman, no child. Driftwood to make one’s tangled dwelling. Only beef and pork to eat, as well as, said Champlain, clam. No boat to row out for fish. Fresh water was no problem because it rained two-thirds of the year. One no doubt caught it in barrels, but Lucien pictures a lonely soul — it is himself — standing with mouth open, catching windblown drops, nothing better to do. Did they form enemy camps? Did they take each other as wives? Did any ask a friend to cut his throat as a favour?

  On Sable Island remain the pigs and horses, now gone feral. There have since been two wrecks blown onto its beach — again Basque fishermen — and the hogs have come to good use. So a way station of sorts it did turn out to be.

  They keep asking Champlain to speak of calamity. Of the very worst he has seen in life. As one tale stops, they smile nervously and shake their heads, then ask for another. Or they remind him of one they already know, for many stories were made famous during the crossing. Lucien knows why the men ask, and he knows why the mapmaker does not mind telling. It is so they will feel lucky and safe tonight in this world where luck and safety might not last. Tonight, their legs are steady on land. They will go to sleep knowing they have three cannon and thirty-odd muskets, and that the savages hereabouts are jollier than those to the west. They have sweet water to drink and a new, deep cesspit downwind. They have casks of wine and of biscuit and of salt meat. Certain leafy crops have grown well and taste as they should. They have many songs, and two new ones have been composed and learned and enough men are harmonious to drown out those who aren’t. They have a Cross outside the gate and soon, they have been told, a larger Cross will stand atop the north mountain. Their lives all continue and indeed Sieur Poutrincourt is having a birthday. In a year or two his wife and children will live in the compound, and perhaps some other noble families too. Most of all, the men know a ship is coming in the next summer. It will take, back to France, whoever wants to go. Or, perhaps, whoever remains alive. It is November now, and the men desperately do not speak of this ship. Those who do are told to shut up.

  Lucien knows why Champlain will not speak of one calamity, though he has been asked by indirection. He will not speak of last winter, or of the Island of St-Croix, at all. There, men just like them built a settlement just like this. Mistakes were made, and they are now famous mistakes. The island had no water of its own, and men had to row to the mainland, about a mile, to refill the casks, and winter storms sometimes prevented this. As well, there was no shelter from the winter wind, nor was there handy wood to build wind-walls. These mistakes led to a new search, and that search led Champlain here. He is one of only three men amongst this present company who spent last year on St-Croix. Everyone knows that of those seventy-nine men exactly one beyond half — forty souls — died of the winter scurve. And now, standing out here, leaning like an oaf against the storeroom wall, the nobleman has been asked gently and respectfully to describe it, but the mapmaker declines. The men no doubt think he is still too saddened to bring the details to mind.

  Lucien has noted the navigator’s star winking at him between trees as it cleared the north mountain. He knows why Champlain is refusing to tell the story of St-Croix. It is because, despite this being a warmer spot, and despite there being fresh water at their door, there is no reason why St-Croix won’t happen here, this winter. Why should it not? These men sharing this pipe and this wine pray to the same God the forty men of St-Croix did. The scurve is said to be the ugliest dying possible, its one saving grace being that, near the end, the dying do not care . . . but Lucien will entertain it no more tonight. Instead he shakes his empty cup at Bonneville, distracting the wine-monger from yet another attack on the noble mapmaker Samuel Champlain.

  SAMUEL HAS TONIGHT become drunk on common wine and, having guzzled like a lout only moments ago, he grows drunker still from it. Sitting in his chambers, trying to put thoughts to his journal, his pen wobbles and is impatient to end each present word. He has enjoyed the evening nonetheless.

  He edges open his sliding shutter, but not too much, as the night cold streams in to sit under the table and embrace his legs. His fire is stoked, his face and hands are warm enough, but he sees that come winter he will not be opening that window at all. Apparently, sitting in stores, there is a glass for his window. Of the nobles, only his and Lescarbot’s glass remains uninstalled, Lescarbot having trumpeted to the whole encampment his selfless desire that “more needful things that ensure our common survival” take place before the fixing of his trifling window. Samuel knows it will seem mean of him to complain just yet, but he will, for he so loves to gaze out, even at night, because of the rising stars — and because there! across the bay, even now, is a light. It flickers once, then sinks, then dies. A savage fire, no doubt, but what is its story? Was it doused for some reason? Is it a fishing party, encamped by the Eel?

  A storm builds between him and Lescarbot. The other man must know it too, for he’s lately kept his distance. While in the same room he gives Samuel his shoulder and rarely his eyes. Today, hard upon Samuel wishing the Sieur Poutrincourt a good birthday and offering him escargots for later and then simply shaking his hand, Lescarbot launched his own birthday speech and shook the heavens with his oversugared words. And then came all seven bombastic — and traitorous! — cannon. The first shot put Samuel deep into a cave of disgust and he did not care to see the man again this night. So he did not.

  Yet still he grips his stylus too firmly, due to Lescarbot. The man had the giddiness of soul to dare tempt fate. In a toast that went on and on, the lawyer added, while glancing and grinning into his brandy cup, that they had with them “in this November liquor, the sovereign prophylactic against the ravages of scurve.” How the man makes light of a terror he has never felt chew his own bones nor seen put a fellow in his grave. His accompanying smile is like a syrup spooned daintily yet mistakenly into beer. What Samuel hates most is Lescarbot’s poet’s way of joking: in October, anything he drank was “this October liquor,” and in September, the same. This brand of wit of his is like a flower that has no meaning and lacks any good smell.

  The regular men are a mixed sort, of course, but all are agreeable enough fellows. The cook Bonneville is a scamp who tried to get him drunk, and he won that game, though he thought it secret. The pilot Champdoré, with his pretentious royal-pink lobster pipe, has no friends because he is always on guard — against what, who can say. The brute Dédé smells so and has little of God in him, but Samuel would gladly stand behind his buttocks in a fight. Young Lucien, the fine carpenter (he is an able one too; Poutrincourt runs his hand over the joinery of his new staircase railing as though it were a woman’s arm), is a quiet wit, and too shy to befriend, but it is said he not only can read but does. The handsome Pijou will meet no one’s eye, but he is amongst the wittiest of men. Samuel would love to hear what sport he makes of the nobles, including himself, when no nobles are there! And the farmer Claude Medoc, no one hears a word from him, and his eyes are as forlorn as a puppy’s, and Samuel is thinking he should not have come. He has a young wife, and he came aboard on the misbegotten notion that here he will make his fortune! Did no one tell him that all bartered skins hereabouts belong to Monsieur de Monts, to one man? That Claude Medoc would be thrown freshly into gaol if he went ashore at St-Malo holding a single ragged fur to give his lovely young wife? That not even Samuel Champlain can give a knife and receive a skin unless the good Monsieur says that he can? (Samuel recalls that the last time their deluded King allowed the merchants to come and trade here, de Monts bade Samuel erase several strategic tidal rocks on his popular map so that said merchants might flounder and die upon them. Samuel was more than a little glad when they did not.)

  Samuel sees he has begun to draw a beaver, beginning with its hind legs. It stands at th
e paper’s bottom, and now holds up with forepaws his square body of sentences, as though his words were a map. He adds a cross-stitch pattern to the tail, and begins to shade the fur, as if it were indeed a proper beaver, and this a proper map. Why not?

  Like dry rags, the men soaked up his tales and wanted more. Samuel almost startles at the notion that he might be of more comfortable mind around these regular men than his own kind, and it isn’t just because these lesser men honour him. Indeed he had become aware of this tonight even while speaking. With these men he didn’t care that his southern accent showed, or that he has not read the book another noble has, or says he has. With these men he doesn’t care who knows that he has but a modest fortune and is at some lord’s mercy when undertaking a voyage.

  Tonight these men wanted tales of horror from him and he gave them what they wanted. Except St-Croix. He does not believe in dreams’ portent as some do, but he does note the manner in which a strong dream will shadow one’s waking day. How could he tell them he had just dreamed of that place? Not St-Croix exactly, because these men he drank with tonight were themselves in the dream. The dream had begun with the St-Croix men, who then became the men here, as it is with the currents and eddies of dreams. In it, Dédé’s scurve came on in an instant. He was one minute laughing, then the next his mouth was full of putrefying flesh and his voice thickly muffled and he choked and then spat out his inner cheeks. But still he laughed, neither scurve nor death of any concern to the man he is, and of course the scurve went away in him, as if he’d chased it out with scorn. But not so the other men. Lucien had no teeth and, discovering this in the looking glass, he ran off into the night snow. Samuel himself discovered sores on his legs but then on closer scrutiny they were nit bites. And then Poutrincourt’s own children, beautiful twin girls, were there mewling and dying this foulest of deaths, all the while dutifully placing their bloody fallen teeth into an ornament box, as all chaste girls will keep things, whispering over them as over a dowry, and at this juncture Samuel was shocked awake and it was morning, and in the way of dreams he was disturbed long into the day, tendrils of it clutching and befouling his moods — until he became drunk. And he did not care to speak of such events this evening. Not that he believes in dreams.

  Yet he fears for these men. In truth he feels himself wanting to draw apart from them, not wanting to love them as he might soon do, for there are some he loved that lie underground on St-Croix. He has heard that in times of war the wiser soldier finds no friends.

  He knows he will not die himself, though he does not know how he knows this. Perhaps all men know it, even those who then die surprised! But on last year’s black island, not one noble died. And he still believes he knows why, and feels in his deepest sense that it has to do with what is eaten, but even more with what is not eaten, though Lescarbot thinks him a fool in this too. (Let him cure this year’s dying with some February liquor!) And as proof Lescarbot reminds him that their priest there died too; and when Samuel answers that the priest died because he wanted to, Lescarbot looks at him, wonders if he’s blasphemed, and keeps any more words to himself. He was not on St-Croix. How could he know? And how could he know that here in these tight quarters, surrounded by this vast closeness of trees, it is best to leave one’s logic back in France?

  STEADIER OF PEN, Samuel sets to his journal, the one he will see published, marking the day’s weather, and moon, and the tide’s neap and ebb, and notes Poutrincourt’s birthday, but he is tired. His gut strains at its buttons and holds its swell. So none will hear him, he goes outside the gate to purge himself and at once feels better for it, though on his return and once seated again, he believes he needs must creep back out to do so again. He has been told by more than one master drinker that purging so, plus much water taken before sleep, becalms the next day’s angry head — so this time he will fall to his knees at the stream. Thirst has always felt to him more honest than prayer. Perhaps he is too scientific a man, or perhaps he has never learned how.

  ON THE SEVENTH DAY, Lucien returns to their spot. The very chill and silence of the place — a toy meadow lying soft between a rock outcrop and three stout oaks — is so complete that he knows in his body, somehow, that she will not come today.

  The ground is damp so he sits on a fallen tree. Its angle of repose and the spikes of its many broken branches make it hard to find a patient seat. Again and again he closes his Horace and stands and tries another place on the tree. In the end, he climbs and sits up on the rock outcrop, which also gives him a better perch from which to penetrate, with unceasing gaze, every direction of the forest. Ars Poetica he keeps closed on his lap. He had wanted to show her letters, words. It would make her understand him better perhaps, though it also carried the danger of showing her their impossible distance, and driving her away. He is wary of his desire to impress her. There is something troubling in how confident she is with him. She is not in awe of the French, or of him. Though neither is Membertou, who is possibly her uncle. None of them seem to be. Though they love — love — their bread, and would indeed trade meat for it in equal size.

  It begins to rain and, looking up, Lucien thinks the clouds are swift enough to pass in time, so he will stay. Tucking Horace into his middle, he doubles up over it. He wants the three books he owns to last, and this bound paper held tight to his stomach feels like the most mortal thing about him.

  A HARSH AND ODD wind blows from north-northwest, bringing with it a thin bitter smell from the hills that lie unseen there. It is hard even to lift one’s eyes to it. The dark season has settled in hard, leaving no more hope for warmth on the face, save that gained by leaning at a fire. Samuel hates and cannot shake an image, though it was many weeks ago, of salmon-trout drifting, soft and dead, back down the stream from out of the impenetrable forest, as if they were poisoned there. In the garden’s deepest soil only the most stubborn root vegetables survive, withering to protect themselves against the cold. He is familiar with the tone of this November month, its unease, its blooming restlessness. With the coming of snows the men find abundant time on their hands, time to fill with whatever entices, however limply. For most, unoccupied time feels more like burden than bounty.

  For Samuel, he seduces himself these days with conversation, not with his fellows but with the regular men. This particularly foul and blowing Sunday, after midday meal he decides to forgo the brandy and leaves the nobles’ table to circulate amongst the men as they are in the business of dispersing. The question he pleasantly puts to them, each in turn, is, “Please, tell me: why did you make this voyage?”

  What he finds oddest as they make their responses is that so many of them seem incapable of telling the truth. That is, of turning their gaze within and questioning themselves truly. There are few answers in the direction of “I wanted to escape my dull and brutish life for one of adventure” or “I am third in the line of heirs and have no chance of fortune at home — the one hundred fifty livres I gain here is some slim chance.” From more men than he can count comes such an answer as, “To help colonize New France.” Or “To aid in spreading the realm of God, and our King, and our country.” In short, parroting the King’s own mandate, perhaps in hope of finding favour with a noble. Or, more likely, in fear of speaking otherwise in case a noble might find fault.

  Even when Samuel presses, and pleads, “Vraiment?” he more often than not gets a “C’est vrai. To aid in spreading the realm of etc.” And as they repeat themselves he receives now a look that admits to the lying. In fact, he sees in this look a fundamental right demanded by the common man: that he be allowed the freedom, in saying the expected thing, to lie to the nobleman. They consider it their right, and an allowable insolence.

  Only the carpenter Lucien is willing — blandly willing, but willing — to converse more freely with him on this subject. In all, over the past weeks Lucien has grown less shy. This noon Samuel has him pinned as he remains at the common table, cleaning bark and such from his supply of tobacco, which Lucien has in suspicio
us abundance these days.

  Samuel considers Lucien an odd man in that he doesn’t fit his lot in life; that is, though he has rightly taken his family’s trade, and does a fair job of it, he is not large of frame or thick in hand and seems more suited to the arts of the better-born, those of music or poetry or painting. Even his skin is clean, and fair, and his beard of a finer sort, such that his cheeks are almost bare. Samuel himself has seen Lucien reading, and Poutrincourt suggested that the subject of his book is sometimes poetry. In any event, to Samuel’s query about his reasons for coming here Lucien speaks chiefly of “having naught but one choice” but also of “wanting to test myself, against fear.” Not looking up from his leaf, Lucien picks through it like a squirrel.

  “Of what?” Samuel ventures, noting the whimsy playing on Lucien’s face.

  “Of the sea, and its weather. But not so much now. Being on land.”