Order of Good Cheer

by Bill Gaston

  Laura appeared to reach her peak and finish. And then it was funny, a little: maybe twenty seconds before Andy finished too, someone downstairs stopped the music. In those last moments the new silence was haunting, as if his labours were watched and appraised not just by patient Laura but by something surrounding him, something larger even than his attic and his house.

  ANDY NEVER WOULD find out whose idea the moose dance was. Likely Gloria Tait. But it also could have been Leonard, because he always promoted such things, or it could even have been little Alex. It could have been anybody.

  Andy was in from the beach with the others and had just descended from his bedroom where he’d put on dry pants. Drew was up there now looking for some too; Leonard hadn’t bothered, waving off Andy’s offer with, “You’re way too skinny for me.” Instead, Leonard turned on the oven and stood in his boxer shorts by its open door, and there he quietly sipped a beer.

  Andy wandered, prospecting for a cozy spot to sit while waiting for people to leave, because he was ready for that. He moved from kitchen to couch to dark corner, but found no vacant chair appealing. He realized that what repelled him was the candlelight itself. Its effect had shifted from churchy to ghoulish, from sombre to gloomy. For one thing, it lit faces from below, a non-stop flashlight held under the chin of everyone. Andy had to resist going to the light switch. The flickering chiaroscuro made everyone eerily not themselves. Andy walked past his mother, for instance, and she sent him a little wave that unsettled him, the light and dark on her face a kind of duplicity she somehow seemed aware of, and she was having him on, perhaps truly witchy, her little wave maybe a curse. John Lennon’s soft “So this is Christmas . . .” couldn’t be trusted in this flickering light either. And now he remembered with a downward lurch in the gut that he had invited red-haired Dan Boyd to this party tonight, he’d left that message, and Boyd might walk in, any second. Andy didn’t want him here. Dan Boyd’s smile, lit by this wavering candlelight, could mean any number of things, and most were bad.

  Andy found himself staring at his front door, pleading that no more people come through it. But then he knew it was all him, he was only tired and stupid. Plus he knew that Boyd wouldn’t be showing up tonight; sometimes you could simply trust that your enemies would stay your enemies. But as he turned on his heel to go sit down beside his mother after all, his new mood made him reconsider l’Habitation, and spending an entire winter in light like this. Long greasy black hair, heavily moustachioed faces, ill lit, from below. The stink of whale oil and tallow smoke, the walls and ceiling heavy with soot. Faces bobbed and wavered, not to be trusted in such light; you could be cursed by both Catholics and Indians many times a night and not know it and —

  From the group at the couch rang a new eagerness of voices, outshouting Lennon, about a “moose dance.” A moose dance was about to begin in the backyard, around the firepit. It was Gloria Tait being consulted, from the looks of things, and she had risen off the couch wearing a palpable pride. Her head was back, her face stern and commanding, and she stood two inches taller. She said something to those around her, and little Alex shouted, “Wounded-moose dance! Wounded-moose dance!” An odd smile lifted one side of Gloria Tait’s face as she approached the glass doors to the yard, and Andy didn’t know if a traditional dance was forthcoming or if she’d made a little joke. She wore braids and seemed girlish and unpredictable for them, and she didn’t seem drunk, though you never knew. May E did make a joke out of it, proclaiming, “Wounded-moose-with-no-nose dance,” and when no one laughed she said it again, and a few people did.

  People climbed back into the same coats. The old ladies came out this time, because Gloria Tait was leading. Everyone came out. It was the end of the party and everyone knew it. Some carried another refill of brandy. Pauline lugged her own full bottle of expensive French wine that she and Drew had brought. Some clomped in wet boots over his living-room wall-to-wall. Leonard wore a parka but below the waist only his boxer shorts, and he was bringing out the rest of the nose to cremate and explained to his niece that this needed to be done. Rachel Hedley and Magda were blatantly holding hands. Drew put on and turned up that sassy Pogues Christmas song Andy could never remember the name of, and after he’d gone out through the double doors, Andy’s mother went back in and turned it down.

  On the way up from the beach Andy had thrown the remaining wood onto the bonfire and now it was high, and when smacked with a gust it added its roar to the wind’s. Because of the surrounding trees, and house, the yard was a bowl that caught the wind and swirled it, and the fire’s orange arms flailed out in supplication, or sudden punches, and the fire seemed conscious of its own melodrama.

  Gloria Tait said nothing, no instructions, she simply began to dance, moving at a slower-than-walking pace in a wide circle well out from the fire but close enough to feel some of its blowing heat. As a dancer she was deceptive and odd. She merely walked, but with no movement in the hips, no sway, just a sliding forward, the rock ’n’ roll duckwalk, all in the knees and thighs, head cruising steady as a hunting cat’s, eyes forward. Even from behind you could tell that Gloria Tait wasn’t blinking. A moose would be the last animal you’d guess.

  Then, every five steps, Gloria Tait dipped at the knees, collapsing and then catching herself after a fall of two or three inches.

  And that was it. People fell into line in the circle and followed, walking smoothly, without blinking, and they dipped in rhythm with Gloria Tait. The moose dance. The wounded-moose dance. Wounded-moose-with-no-nose dance. Andy enjoyed it, it was mindless and easy. Around and around they would go, where they’d stop, nobody knew. Between each gust and the fire’s answering roar, you could hear some faint Pogues.

  He’d just about completed one slow circuit when he noticed people laughing, a few nervous titters, a few guffaws. He watched Gloria Tait again and saw why. He counted five, six, seven steps, and she dipped. Some people had dipped at five, and now they quickly dipped again, too late. Gloria stepped two more steps, and dipped. Andy could see that some dancers were frustrated, turning to complain over a shoulder to a friend that that woman couldn’t count. Others found it funny, thinking Gloria Tait a comic. But whatever the idea, people settled in, if randomness can be settled into, dipping whenever they wanted to, which Andy was pretty certain was Gloria Tait’s intention from the start. Her wounded moose was a random moose.

  But here they all were. It was heartwarming for Andy to see, in his dark yard, following in the circle, the bulky form of old Rita — wise-cracking, cancerous, game for anything, using her cane to keep steady, having a finer time than anyone in her condition could have. Instead of a dip from the knees, she performed it quite gracefully with a bob of her head. Behind her, Leonard’s niece didn’t dip at all but merely walked, obediently putting up with adults, likely trying to stay on the good side of Uncle Leonard, who walked, dipping proudly in his boxer shorts, behind her. Then came Andy’s mother, who dipped not randomly but every third step, making it a waltz, and he knew her smile would be fixed and tolerant, and perhaps she wanted Gloria Tait to watch and learn from her. Then came Rachel Hedley, who was drunk and getting in some shoulder rolls and hip-hop moves, dancing to music of her own. On her heels was Magda, who looked all-knowing and who stepped, if anything, like a patient sorceress. Behind her bounced young Chris, and it was amazing he had stayed, because when the dance began Andy heard him say to his buddy James, in a dead voice beyond ironic, “This is the entertainment.” Chris walked in a chain of odd intention made up of James, who had his hands on Amelia’s shoulders, and Amelia, who had her hands on Chris’s, each of them looking too alert. Maybe they’d got Amelia to eat some mushrooms. Then followed May E, happily dipping, apparently content to be included in what she took to be a typical New Year’s night. May E, always trying to be funny, probably lonely, maybe about the same as him, and Andy wondered what it would be like to have her as a girlfriend, Chinese, her childhood as unknowable to him as art to an ape — Now little Alex zoomed p
ast at a furious speed around the outside of their circle, enjoying his bigger, faster one, sometimes dipping so deep he slapped his palms on the ground, sometimes kicking and throwing punches at the air, a perfect little kid with a steep future.

  Finally Andy felt guilty for spying on people.

  But here right in front of him was Drew, his best friend, hooded like a monk, not sober under his cowl, beaten back because he had tried to leave his life but couldn’t, but now maybe his son loved him, and he plodded on, dipping with the dance only because he knew Andy wanted him to, because after all, above all, he was a friend. Andy didn’t know if Drew knew his back was being watched, but now in that clairvoyance of theirs, which never really stopped, Drew brought his flared hands up and stuck thumbs to his head to give himself moose antlers. With no pause he slowly pivoted one down, so the antler dangled and pointed to the ground and swung limply. It was from a cartoon they’d once watched somewhere, some time, and the little miracle was not only that Drew knew Andy would remember but also — it was a wounded moose.

  Drew having forgiven his party, Andy went back to mindless walking, dipping. The music was harder to hear over the rising wind, which now blew intentionally into the maw of the firepit, brightening it in pulses and launching sparks that flew in brief curves before dying. When he passed leeward of the fire he could smell charred shellfish, and an earthy spice of what must be burning nose.

  He wondered how long they should keep the dance going. At first in its silent solemnity it had felt somehow important on a New Year’s night, even apocalyptic in such a wind, but this had passed. It was hard to tell who was invisibly grumbling and hanging on, and who was amused, and who might actually be in the spirit of things. Whatever that spirit might be. To each his own spirit. He glanced up again. Most looked, if anything, quietly happy, all part of this single possible animal, a herky-jerky snake mouthing its tail. In any case no one was shooting him looks, he sensed no mutiny, everyone was here, dipping around the fire, because he had asked them to be. He caught a small guffaw coming up; then his swelling heart in his throat; he loved these people.

  This could let him stay here. This could let him stay here.

  He hopped and spun comically high in the air and landed walking backwards, and here walked Pauline. She waved at him but looked mostly tired, her wine bottle bouncing off her thigh. Behind her came skittery Doris, who would do this all night if she thought she was supposed to, and then finally there she was, there was Laura, striding and dipping beautifully, just look at her move. The word dance applied and it hadn’t before. Andy could see that she was doing nothing extra, just that all of her was in on it and all of her was smooth. She was doing it for him though her mother had died. She was doing it though she’d leave on Wednesday and neither of them knew if he would ever visit.

  Andy hopped back around and caught himself in a stagger. He didn’t want to stagger. He smiled slyly in the dark. They were out here walking off their good French wine. They were outside l’Habitation’s buggy wooden walls, dancing a wounded routine in the snow, the wide dark unknown their —

  He laughed at a sudden daydream image that came unbidden and flowered out of control. It was another Order of Good Cheer night, not four hundred years in the past but four hundred years in the future. Exactly four hundred years from tonight. But tonight was the new solstice, because Earth’s axis has shifted a bit, due to something heating up, or because more of the planet’s surface is water again. Somewhere — it’s in the exact centre of the continent, it’s in North Dakota, on the shore of a vast inland sea, it’s eerily dark, though not yet night, and a ceremony is unfolding around a man, his name Lu. Lu’s hands are bound behind him. Good Cheer Night is the new Christmas, and the whole remaining world is its Order. It’s a world where food is grey buttery meat grown in vats, and delivered in beaten plastic pails, themselves centuries old. Wild food is almost unknown now, it is so achingly rare it has become demonically sacred, and bound Lu kneels, waiting while a hushed crowd of unseen thousands watches from all sides from the seats of a dark amphitheatre he can’t see. He kneels teetering on the lip of a twenty-foot steel bowl. And now, with the sound of rusty grating and groaning, out of a steel wall (everything is steel, not stainless but Soviet steel, oxidized in shades of gun and black) grinds a ten-foot steel phallus, at the tip of which is a single, gleaming wild berry tiny and bright as a chipmunk’s eye. The phallus head stops over the centre of the bowl, the inflexible yoni bowl, and after several seconds of the amphitheatre’s held breath, the crimson berry drops from the tip, into the bowl, lands with an unheard tick, and Lu is at that moment shoved in too. He slides down on his side, then quickly finds his knees. He knows he is a sacrifice but he’s eager, he wants that berry more than his own life and he scrambles in the dim light and snorts and huffs and noses it around and finally tongues and lips it up and with no room for thought eats this wild bright living taste that he’s never ever — And then he is killed. And, after being cooked, he’s eaten too, because, well, he contains the sacred berry.

  Smiling at himself, at his talent for dreams, Andy woke to the backyard wind’s next assault, a howler that blew the flame horizontal. The fire’s roar grew momentarily louder than the wind’s, and then came an even stronger gust, and the wind won. Some hats flew, hitting the house or off into the trees, gone, and Andy was fairly certain he would lose some land to waves, even as they danced. But no one left the circle yet. They seemed to know what a south wind was, how it was lunatic, and why it was this warm, and what it could and couldn’t do. They seemed brave beyond their drunkenness, because even if they didn’t know the future in its details, in its entirety they did.

  What Andy Winslow knew of tomorrow was, he would sleep well, he would go in and start two weeks of afternoon shift at the grain terminal, and he would read.

  One thing he wanted to read about, though he dreaded it, was an aspect of marine biology having to do with fish (now he remembered the word might be diadromous, he’d look up diadromous fish), specifically any fish that lived in both salt and fresh water. Because, the thing was, tonight while releasing the sturgeon, with everybody chanting drunkenly and feeling good about having saved a noble creature, its tail waving languorously to them as it pushed itself into deeper murk to disappear — well, Andy had felt horrible. He’d remembered that salmon, coming in from the sea to spawn and entering the brackish river mouths of their childhood, needed a period of adjustment to get their tissues used to the fresh water. If you dropped a young one into salt, or a salty adult into fresh, they died as if by poison. Was it the same for that sturgeon? It’d been caught one hundred miles up the Skeena River. Watching the fish swim off, Andy couldn’t help imagining its next moments, which might be its last, the old guy writhing in toxic freedom.

  New World

  1 mars 1607

  WHILE STILL COLD, the days grow resplendently longer. Samuel finds himself standing quietly on the boards of the palisade, watching the world beyond their brief walls. His bare hand cups the arched black metal of a cannon, warmed by a sun that is barely into its strength. It is odd that metal, that a cannon, is the only warmed thing.

  He watches for one in particular, but knows he will not see him.

  The Order has proved beneficial, but that is enough of it. All have gained good humour and strength, and now they needs must spend it in the labours to come, with spring not far off. All the men are eager to break from winter’s damming confines. Samuel knows that all of them dream (though no one dares mention it, fearful of bad luck) of little more than seeing the ship, whose arrival in weeks can now be counted on two hands.

  Those who o’ercame grave disease, such is their joy that it brings joy to the rest. Samuel tries not to take a special, private gladness from it, for this would be a pride unwarranted. Though he may have calculated properly, it is God after all who made him a scientist.

  In any case he has noticed, especially this year, that after surviving such illness a man becomes changed. The passio
n of one who is once more made alive is such that normalcy is now plenty. Simple light of day. The taste of modest broth. Rainfall. Even the itch of a chigger’s bite Samuel has seen draw forth gladness and laughter! The man made newly well knows no lack, is desirous of nothing more than this. A homely world clung to and nursed upon, perhaps he lives in hidden fear that some new thing may turn foul and once again bring Hell through the door. But in any case they appear happy, and more thankful than babes.

  All save Lucien, whose anger deepened, and who is now gone.

  The more the carpenter grew in health, the more he scowled. He became short-tempered even with his friends, and of course with Samuel. Lucien could never be at ease with the knowledge that he was twice imprisoned, and that both crimes — who won’t admit? — were less than crimes. To be riven by such as Dédé and then to be punished for it is to be riven once more.

  Another thing: as soon as Lucien found his legs, the slight joy at walking again was at the same time dashed by his not being allowed to take himself beyond the stinking walls of the sick quarters, now otherwise empty.

  His plea to Samuel was less plea than command. It was the simple, Let me go.

  Samuel did. They all did. Samuel believes that even Poutrincourt, while unaware of the details, knows the heart of the deception, his show of ignorance an easily won means of saving face, all the while satisfying the just demands of what is, after all, his good heart. In any event it was a sad pleasure for Samuel to conspire with Lucien’s friends and get him out under dark of night, with as many things as he could carry while still weak. But he had not many things: a book, three of his father’s tools. And in the morning came their grave announcement of his dying in the middle of the night, and the marking of his interment in the snow, and the funeral rites, which Poutrincourt himself conducted, as usual. (Try as Samuel might, he could not read if the Sieur’s dour visage was the face of guilt at having helped kill a man, or that of lying, saying God’s words over a feigned corpse.) When the thaw arrives and they undertake the true burial of six bodies, and one is found absent, they will blame wolves, and that will be that. Perhaps they will construct a proper head-marker for Lucien, perhaps they will not bother.