Order of Good Cheer

by Bill Gaston

  “Of course. And?”

  “Drowning. Though, again, not so much now, sitting here. But, death. In general.”

  “If God had wanted us not to fear death, He would not have made this fear so natural in us. And what else?”

  “The savages, at first. But now, not at all.”

  “I concur. And?”

  “And men. Who have nothing at all to do.”

  “The men?”

  “Yes.”

  “Surely you don’t feel unsafe at their hand?”

  “I also include myself in the collective noun.”

  Lucien smiles so as to show his seriousness is tainted by irony — wit’s slinking cousin — but Samuel can see his point. Who isn’t a bit afraid of oneself in the wide basin of unfilled time, with no known tide coming to fill it? It makes men do . . . what? He, for instance, has been driven by his own unfilled time to question random men this day, naively expecting not just truth but some measure of friendship.

  But Samuel is not sure friendship is possible even with the likes of Lucien, even if they were both to desire it. Doffing the cloak of one’s class is always uncomfortable, a nakedness, even if neither one fully believes in the cloak from the outset. Harder still to engage in such nakedness when in full view of other men. And Lucien’s ways are unknown to Samuel in any case. It seems he has his own adventures, indeed his own colony, in his cranium. Off by himself, or thinking himself unobserved, Lucien frequently whistles, yet they are airs not of jollity but more like sadness, and also very strange, a music not common to the rest of them. Its melody leapfrogs out of time and takes up an oblique new measure, and sometimes suspends itself in no sound at all, where the silence is itself part of the lyric and poses a question or a mystery — and then the whistle begins again as if to give silence its singing answer.

  “Lucien. Would you like to leave here if you could?”

  The carpenter looks startled by this, perhaps wondering for a moment if it is indeed possible. His eyes glance this way and that, as if to review a calculation of that which is good in New France against that which is not.

  And of that which is newly and secretly good. Lucien’s reply, “Sir, if someone could leave with me,” is humble yet a boast as well, and it is more answer than Samuel wants. The carpenter’s open-faced honesty is not so much impudent as it is reckless in its trust, which Samuel knows is his own fault, for offering such friendship. In any case, it makes the rumours true. And Lucien takes another bold step toward a common intimacy by asking Samuel now if he, too, would not return home if given the chance.

  “No, but I would like to be at sea,” says Samuel. “Or up a new river.” He thinks a moment, and then voices a favourite notion. “It is with their canoes, not our ships, that we will get to see China.”

  Samuel notes Lucien shaking his head at the wonder of this. But then sees that the carpenter is merely disagreeing.

  “No?”

  “Not ‘we,’ that’s certain. Perhaps you. Never me.”

  “Well, likely not me either. I meant France, of course.”

  “Of course.” Lucien appears to remember something and then begins to laugh quietly to himself.

  “What?”

  “It might be me after all, since I’m the only one who’s learned to paddle.” Lucien is beaming at him, staring him openly in the eye. “I got well wet the first time, but since then I’ve got rather good. I didn’t come last in a race.”

  Samuel forces his own smile down. “You must take more care.”

  “I’ll ask for another lesson, yes.” The carpenter smiles with irony again.

  “I believe you know I am not discussing canoes. You must take more care.”

  Lucien studies Samuel’s face the briefest moment before dipping his head in a simple bow. “Thank you, sir. I will.”

  Samuel takes this as cue to turn and walk away. Indeed he felt it was an act of friendship as much as his station to make such a demand of Lucien. The man was near foolhardy. Though Samuel would have much rather stood longer and spoken of paddling and its art. Indeed he would love to paddle a canoe and then own one. In Hochelaga he’d been in a canoe, sitting in its centre while a brave at either end paddled him about like a little king.

  LUCIEN RETURNS TO their hidden meadow every day, just in case. Eight and nine and ten days pass and he tries to resign himself to the truth that she had spelled out weeks, not days, on her fingers.

  But now, on this the twenty-first day, Ndene steps out of the trees. She is neither laughing nor smiling, and Lucien is at first wary of this until he sees that she has been waiting for him too and that her face is severe with missing him.

  Their clothes are more and thicker but they come off as quickly, and though there are no bugs there is the broader bite of the cold. In the corner of the meadow where wind has forced a bed of oak leaves into a nook, they lay her cape, and they draw his coat over them both.

  Soon they are made perfectly warm in their lovemaking. When they finish, and rest, and begin to cool, they have only to begin again and it is like pulling a weightless quilt over them.

  Even when they have paused in their lovemaking they don’t try to talk. It is Ndene who seems assured that there is no need to. Her manner of resting, of staring off over his shoulder, suggests that whatever thoughts or words they could arrive at are of no matter at all. How could one better this? And so Lucien relaxes into this posture as well. He doesn’t try to think, or to speak, or to meet her eye. To do so, seeking some kind of reassurance, would be to doubt their growing bond and by questioning hurt it. Her manner tells him that, at least for now, lovemaking is all they need do. And how can he not agree? As her loveliest body, her perfect shape, takes his in, it is only obvious that both of them have been made for this, for this most of all; that in their perfect wrestling they do none other than unwrap God’s gift and witness its sacred brilliance, and in doing so carry out God’s will. That God had them snorting and yelling like beasts could be seen either as comedy or tragedy, should one care to ponder this, and Lucien does not.

  IN TIME HE SLEEPS, but when Ndene shakes his arm he sees the light is unchanged, so he hasn’t dozed long. They rise to dress. Partway into pulling on clothes, Ndene stays him with a hand, insisting that she help him. She rolls on his second legging, helps him pull on breeches. Lucien smiles with warmth when he sees her secretly fondling and turning the clothes, checking the build of each garment, picking at a hem, perhaps with the goal of someday making such clothing herself. Finally, she stops, turns, and demands that he pluck all the broken leaves from her hair.

  It is obvious that Ndene is thinner. Perhaps from all the distance walked. Perhaps they didn’t find the food they were seeking, if that was the nature of their journey, as apparently it most often is. When birds nest in a certain bay, or fish gather at a stream mouth, there her people will gather too, bringing with them or building on the spot the simple but ingenious machines to harvest the creatures and then prepare them for eating. He has seen her family cook a seal in a hollowed-out stump, the bowl of which was filled with water and the stump below set on fire, causing the water and the beast both to boil.

  She has lost any softness or roundness of belly, and she is almost without breasts, and when Lucien shows her this with his hand, she does the same at his waist. He has lost his small belt of fat too, and hadn’t noticed.

  Lucien has practised and saved up some sentences for her. Dressed, hair free of leaf, they sit back down, leaning against each other for shared warmth. He tells her, in what he hopes sounds like Mi’qmah, that he has a sister, Babette, a brother, Albert, and that he lives with his mother, father, and paternal grandmother. He lives in the seaside city of St-Malo, famous for its building of ships. He tells her that, to make his living, he fashions things out of wood. Ndene doesn’t seem to understand this last part, and it begins to occur to Lucien that this might be because, in her world, all men do identical things. So Lucien tries as best he can to explain that d’Amboisee, the apothecary
treats the men with herbs and potions, Bonneville cooks their meals, the soldiers protect them all with their guns, and Lucien builds them all a place to live. Ndene regards him a moment, understanding, and then points to her chest, stabbing it again and again, while with great humour explaining to Lucien that she, Ndene, catches fish, cleans the fish, cooks the fish, digs onions, makes clothing, salves men’s wounds, builds houses, finds the bark to build the houses, snares a rabbit, cooks the rabbit, mends the — and Lucien has to put his wrist into her open mouth, whereupon Ndene keeps talking, muffled and comic, knowing, a clown.

  SAMUEL HAS SUFFERED the kind of day that, though bright with sun and cloudless, still appeared dark to him. Of course it is but his inner humour that so tints the heavens. Not helping is his suspicion — no, it is less a suspicion than a truth, even if the men don’t know it — that the disease is upon them. He has seen the vague limp, and the dull glower, taking over a half-dozen of the men. So, it’s here — but when was its arrival ever in doubt? There’s no surprise in it at all.

  As he often does at such a time, he gathers his pens and ink about him, unfurls a precious fresh sheet of better parchment, and sets to work.

  Yet, hunching over the page for minutes, and minutes more, nothing comes. He has also pulled out various sketches he has yet to commit to ink — the midsection of the River of Saint-Jean, the coastline some leagues below St-Croix, as well as ideas for adorning the finished maps, such as Indian maize, a beaver, a sturgeon — but he does naught but stare at these unmoved. And remains melancholic.

  So he turns from his possible art and ponders this mood in hopes of manoeuvring out of it, as sometimes works, casting words as soundings to keep his heart off the reef. The first coil of logic he tosses to himself is simply to announce that reefs are always here, are in everyone’s own sea, and are a part of all voyaging. Yet how is it then that some intelligent men always forget these reefs and always founder, surprised? Why, too, do some of the dullest have such apparent talent for mirth? Having run aground, any glowering genius would be a fool not to want some of that skill. Even the witless Dédé laughs more than most, roaring broadly when a fellow trips and pitches into the mud, or smiling like a lover when he happens to witness the flexing of his own hammy arm in lifting a water bucket over the high lip of the well. Or, give Lescarbot one tankard of good wine and he is at carnival: he sits taller, and life could not be better for this roi de flan. Another, the carpenter Lucien, who likewise seems prone to melancholy, returns from his walks unsmiling but eyes full of soft light, content, it seems.

  How can it be that, when hit with the first cold drops of rain from a surprise cloudburst, some men curse, and some laugh? For some, one cold drop of rain might deliver the final insult, the tipping burden, and send a man to take his own life. For others, a cold drop of rain might cause them to shout for more, as if it has shocked cool their hot captivity and relieved them of a load.

  He picks up a pen and dips it, to try again. Indelible ink can be his fresh rain. It can be no cause for gloom, this committing the unknown world to parchment. No burden, that he be certain enough of his marks to apply indelible ink to these empty wastes. He can, with a full heart, give new, human truth to God’s landforms and to His sea, making them usable to all the men yet to come to these places.

  So he adds lines of shading to the southern shore of the River of Saint-Jean. Some trees, to show where timber can be taken.

  He feels a swelling gladness in his chest. And he will confess here, to the sad silence of his candle, that as he makes these marks that show the very growth west of New France, and of their King’s lands, he thinks neither of men yet to come nor even of New France. As he moves his ink, hearing the scratch as he wounds the fresh sheet with black blood, he is thinking only of himself. This — he says to his heart — is where we have been. He thinks of himself as we, though not as one who is royal. He refers to his hands, and his vision, and his body, and his memories. All of it feels like we.

  Perhaps because he lacks family. In any case, he draws, from the sketch, the westward push up the River of Saint-Jean. He is careful to show any fatal rocks, and shades them well and with respect. He adds some smaller rocks in their likely yet hidden locations, though he isn’t as certain they are there.

  4 decembre 1606

  STILL STEADY ON his course of getting to know these men, whether or not any wants to be known, he contemplates each in turn. Tired of the guilt he feels at learning, yet again, that here is another fellow whose qualities he does not like, he wonders, Whose fault? But he doubts that fault is the issue. Like a divorce of magnets flipped, dislike seems more a force of nature.

  He also tries to find no fault in himself when he understands something more. Since he himself is lately bored, melancholic, and even verging on despair, it stands to reason that the other men are as well. Indeed, he can see it in them. And yet shouldn’t this understanding make him feel for them, forgive them, love them? It does not.

  In any case, the men. For instance the apothecary d’Amboisee. Though of Samuel’s own age and soft-spoken, d’Amboisee is an irritant largely because of his superstitions, which have gotten worse. Perhaps superstition is not the word for his affliction, which is definable only through description: upon entering a room he will eye every corner of it with pronounced wariness. He will eventually make a judgement of some sort and then go and stand or sit in only one area. Sometimes this makes him crowd absurdly with other bodies already located there, and other times this makes him sit altogether alone. But where he places himself has nothing to do with people, and all to do with what the rest of them cannot see. He neither apologizes nor explains, but from what Samuel has gathered, the apothecary’s irritating sensitivity is attuned to such things as the time of day, the moon’s arc, the humour, and sometimes even the birthdate of those who have been in the room and those who have yet to arrive, et cetera. He owns a suspicious and irritating vision. Perhaps it is the laudanum cordial Samuel knows the man takes in some quantity; but more likely it is the man himself.

  Perhaps Samuel’s problem — as Lescarbot gladly points out to him — is his attempt to leap the walls that naturally keep the classes of men apart. The lawyer could well be right. For Samuel’s search for affinity within the common class has for the most part served him up irritants of a ruder kind. When the foul Dédé belches and then slaps the nearest surface, seeing him as a simple carnivore does help Samuel refrain from judgement, but this understanding does nothing to cushion Samuel against the sharp sense of the man, and the actual smell of him; much as, though one might understand a fowl-house not properly slopped out, one does not want to stand within it and breathe deeply. Thus, understanding is not love, though Samuel has heard in some philosophies that it is.

  He finds it worth noting in this regard that not many savages irritate him. Perhaps this is because he does not understand them and, so far, can find them mostly fascinating. Even the savages far to the west: they commit such horrors upon one another, true, but their tortures don’t concern him and their thievery is for the most part ingenious. That time he found his best knife under the woman’s foot — how did she get it there?

  And some of them, especially the Mi’qmah here, can be delightful. So openly loving are they when they trust.

  Membertou, last night at table, referred humorously to his age. Samuel believes that’s what he did. At one point, he playfully grabbed for Poutrincourt’s boy as he walked past with the wine jug, which Membertou wrestled away from him, mostly in merriment. Membertou was bare-armed as always, and, wine jug now in hand and poised to pour it around, he stopped to regard the crepey underskin of his own arm as it jiggled, noticing his aged flesh, it seemed, for the first time. Perhaps he was self-conscious, for he looked up at the nobles seated with him and he on purpose jiggled the flesh anew. With his other hand he pointed to this offending wrinkled skin, laughed, and said, “I have arrived in this body too early!”

  Samuel believes that is what he said. His Mi’
qmah language improves. He has begun giving informal lessons to Lucien, who requested it of him, which deepens the trust between them. Indeed, Samuel believes the carpenter would have told his reasons if he had been so forward as to ask. So they both remain safe for leaving it unspoken. In all, they have had several sessions during chance meetings outside the walls. Samuel has taught him words on the subject of weather, and seasons, and animals, as well as some nautical terms. Last meeting, Lucien tilted his head as will a pup to learn that the Mi’qmah sun, nakuset, and moon, tepkuset, are to the savages to the west one word alone, gizos. He then claimed he could not decide if, in having but one word for these two heavenly bodies, the western savages were stupid or strangely wise. Sometimes he asks Samuel words he does not know, or knows only in the western tongue, and sometimes Lucien will offer up his own Mi’qmah word unknown to Samuel, almost as in friendly trade. The first time, Lucien somewhat boastfully and with eye aglint counted to five — newt, tapu, sist, new, nan — and it wasn’t till he was done that Samuel understood it wasn’t he who had instructed him in this. But generally they are words of little use: words for the items of clothing Lucien himself wears, words for domestic utensils, and some for the minor plants, and for certain spirits that govern the savages’ lives. They also have the word googoo, and it is also a monster, but hereabouts it is not thought unfriendly. Last meeting, Lucien taught him tongue, kilnu, and belly button, kili, and Adam’s apple, joqlem.

  TONIGHT, PERHAPS AS a purgative, and to work off too much wine, Samuel writes as if in his journal, but this time at length, holding back nothing. He uses the back of a sketch he no longer has use for, and thinks he shall burn it after, and this gives his pen a quickness and freedom:

  15 décembre 1606 (to burn)

  Regarding us and our neighbouring savages, and our taking of food: if our way is up, theirs is down, if ours right, theirs left — so many and so large are the differences. Note but one: they eat as if no tomorrow is coming, verily stuffing themselves until the joint of moose (for instance) is clean bone. Even that bone they’ll crack in the fire and suck for dessert. And then —pardon my fancy — sleep now attacks and sucks them, all greasy-faced and overcome with meat as they faint like dogs and fall snoring onto their own arms. We, on the other hand, nibble and fuss at our biscuit and salt beef, ease the swallowing with some wine. Note another: they eat their meat unadorned. And indeed it is often naught but meat in their meal — they eat a beaver, or a stag, or a fish, naught else, not even salt! We, as if covering God’s offering, salt it, clove it, mace it, pepper sage thyme sugar it, or soak it in vinegar until vinegar is what it is. Excuse another fancy, but a rakish poet might suggest that while we dance with and court our food overlong, they marry theirs directly. One might also add that the savage palate never lets a lack of fire get in the way of their more hasty love either. I propose that raw flesh is less charming to them only because it remains flexed and is less submissive to their chewing and their swallowing.