River City

by John Farrow

  A hush encircled the tables where they were speaking and the others were listening. Houde was gazing upon her with such solemn attention that he appeared as though he might cry. “Roger,” he said, “was a great man. We will miss him always. A round on the house!” he cried out, his first initiative to buy a drink. “We shall drink to Roger!”

  Drink they did, to Roger. Carole was thinking as she sipped her beer, Are you here? Roger’s killer, are you here? Because if you’re here, I’ll find you out, then I’ll hang your balls from the top of the Sun Life Building for the pigeons to peck on.

  She had sat across from many tough men in her day, bosses and steely-eyed foremen. She had stared them down and forced them to negotiate through the sheer will of her resolve. She knew what it meant to play your hand too soon. Observing her daughter on the ex-mayor’s knee, she knew that she had gained the confidence of an inner circle. She could hardly wait to tell Armand Touton of her good fortune, yet she did wait, staying on at the party, having dinner with a bunch of men after the mayor had left and they had pizzas delivered. After being driven home by Roméro, she waited until Anik was tucked in and had fallen asleep before she made the call. She dialled the number for the captain of the Night Patrol.

  First he chastised her, warning her to never call him from her home again. Then he praised her, and told her that she was a brave woman, that Roger would be proud. Although she knew that that was true, she also knew that Roger would never have allowed any of this to happen. But he was gone now, things had changed, and the work she was doing had to be done. She had to find his killer.

  “In the future, when I take my daughter with me,” she told Touton, “that’s an extra two bucks an hour.”

  Touton consented, wondering if he now held the record for the youngest informant in the history of the force. He would never find that out, of course, as no one kept that kind of information on file.

  CHAPTER 12

  1684 ~ 1714

  AND SO THE VOYAGE TO END HIS LONG SUFFERING COMMENCED.

  Earlier journeys had begun with equally keen prospects, for on diverse occasions Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Médard Chouart des Groseilliers had embarked upon grand quests to right their fortunes and defeat the improbable fates that ailed them. From the moment he’d laid claim to his manhood, the determination had been borne in Des Gros to locate the Northwest Passage—not the one fools sought to China, rather, the one to the Rupert and Nelson rivers, inside the Great Salt Bay where Cree gathered fur by the canoe-full. So rampant and consistent had been their misfortune that he finally quit, way back in 1682, and Radisson, always the honourable friend, agreed to relinquish the gambit also. Des Gros built a log cabin for himself near Trois-Rivières. Purchased a rooster and a dozen hens. Yet, even in that comparatively peaceful glen, adversity found him. A fox nabbed a few of the hens, and the fearful rooster ran off. On four consecutive mornings, he sat listening on his stoop to the cock crow, awakening the dawn with its lecherous screech from a woodland refuge before a fox got him as well, or mere hunger despoiled him.

  “No more for us, that’s what we swore,” Radisson was recounting to a cabin boy, the first person in a while to take an interest in his tales. Shy in the beginning, the lad was drawn to the legendary figure. Now that the ship moved upon the waters and the days passed, grey and rainy, the waves rhythmic, the winds steady on the starboard quarter, the lad wanted to know the truth behind the fables he’d heard in London and Southampton, tales related to Radisson and Des Gros. He believed every word that fell from the lips of this weathered, scarred man, his visage craggy and punitive under a rampage of overgrown beard and hair. He had been discovering that the truth eclipsed even the legends recited in their daring and raw adventure, and wished that he could live such a life as had this man, this Radisson.

  The Happy Return plodded on, old timbers creaking, sails full and by.

  “A sadder day,” Radisson reflected. Along the leeward rail they sat amidships, the frothy sea skimming past them, their feet comfortably wedged against the bulwarks to keep them safely onboard. “Aye,” he said, for he was speaking English to the lad somewhat as an Englishman might, although he blended the diction of soldiers and sailors and the language of various provinces. He further vexed his speech with accents both French and Iroquois. “The guv’ner hauled Des Gros to prison off, that wretched hour, stealing our furs after what we had done for him and his lot! Saved Ville-Marie! Saved New France! What we received in return was a merci beaucoup—and prison time. Our furs stolen out of our canoes. A wonder he left us our canoes, that man, that guv’ner!”

  “I’d be so pissed!” the lad decried.

  “I was so pissed!” Radisson concurred. “In more ways than one, and stayed that way—pissed!—for months. I would’ve stayed pissed longer, but money ran dry. Ah, lad, that was a sadder day.”

  “What did you do after that?” The lad knew well that Radisson had never stayed put for long.

  The coureur de bois sucked his pipe, savouring the smoke that helped to carry his mind back in time. “I waited for Des Gros to conclude his time in the stockade. When he got out, we hauled down to Boston. We talked to merchants, and Groseilliers, aye, he repeated one point, always whispering so when he spoke it, the Boston men had to cock an ear. He’d whisper that he had never told the French of our discovery. In his heart, he believed that the Boston men should be the ones to take advantage of the knowledge only we knew, if they’d but loan us a ship.”

  “Did they?”

  “The Boston men did, yes. They loaned us a ship, and it was our intention to sail north, to find the entrance to what we called the Great Salt Bay. We had been there, from the south, by canoe. A hard paddle, lad, dangerous when we turned back. Iroquois marauding the rapids and anywhere we might portage. One time, we’d set out with a hundred canoes, but forty turned back, giving up—for the diligence required, lad, the courage, I would say, could not be found in the marrow of every man, in French or Huron or Cree. Now, we thought, what if we could fill the hold of a ship with the furs of a thousand canoes? That’s what we told the Boston men. Their ears tipped down, their greedy eyes preening up, and they loaned us a ship.”

  “And you went there, didn’t you?” the boy asked, his hair tousled by the wind, his shyness gone, enveloped by the spirit of the tale. “Where we’re bound to? The Great Salt Bay?”

  “Not that year,” Radisson recalled, bobbing his head. “Ice turned us back. Ice as tall as mountains, as broad as Ireland, but sailing just as ships do upon the sea, pushed by the wind and tide. We could sail around those mountains, we thought in our zeal, and so we did, only to come upon ice that locked the sea for as far as any man could see. We had to turn back that year. We were defeated then.”

  “That’s too bad.” In his mind’s eye, the boy witnessed ice cast upon endless horizons, heaving, yawing, as a flow of lava upon the earth, mauling vessels.

  “Defeated,” Radisson assured the youth, “but never fully disheartened. We knew—Groseilliers, now there’s a man, he knew for a certainty, he had the idea fixed in his head as definitely as the North Star lies fixed in the heavens, he knew that we might yet find a way through the ice. But we could tell, upon our return, that the Boston men were displeased with us, they were dispirited.” Radisson puffed upon his pipe, reflecting. He shrugged. “So we sailed, me and Des Gros, for England. That would be in 1665. Four years after that, we sailed from England, with two ships, for the Great Salt Sea.”

  The wind whistled in the rigging, indicating a gale’s approach, half a day on.

  “This time you made it?” the boy assumed.

  “Des Gros made it aboard his ship, the Nonsuch, with that good Captain Henry Hudson. I did not. My vessel floundered. The Eaglet, she was called. A brave craft, but myself and all aboard were lucky to survive. We had to head back, so damaged we were. But the Nonsuch, stout and true like this fair lass, weathered the storms and made the journey, and when she returned to England’s shore, I saw her from a dista
nce. I held my spyglass upon the horizon every morning and each afternoon for an hour at a time. I spied the Nonsuch, lad, weighed down by beaver pelts to the brim! The hold packed tight to the brim!”

  “You must have made a fortune!”

  Radisson considered this, then shrugged, then shook his head. “Fortunes are not so easily earned. That is the one thing I will draw from my life, if nothing else. This journey, now, this journey will make my fortune. That is guaranteed! Back then, we were compensated, that is true. I will not judge it unfair. We had incurred the expense of two ships, with only one returned home filled with furs. Add on the king’s commission. The price of furs that year was paltry—I don’t know why. I would say I suffered a greater disappointment than our poor reward, to hear the name of Henry Hudson attached now to the Great Salt Bay, rather than the name Groseilliers! It had been his dream and purpose, his vision, and he got there with Hudson, but Hudson would never have arrived without Médard!” He shrugged again and smacked his lips regretfully. “That’s how it goes sometimes. Glory lands in the laps of others. All in all, we added enough to our wallets to know that a second journey from England would be worth the while. On that second voyage, my ship succeeded as well, and we sailed much deeper into the bay, all the way to the mouth of the Nelson River! That was the year that the Hudson’s Bay Company was formed, once we had made it through the Northwest Passage inside the bay, and there we conducted the first grand transaction for furs in the life of the company.”

  “Blimey!” the boy complained. Bells had sounded.

  Radisson smiled. “Your watch begins,” he noted. “We shall pick up the story again when time allows.”

  Radisson lingered on the deck awhile, breathing the cool salt air, savouring the last of his pipe. When done, he knocked out the ashes and cleaned the bowl with care and ceremony, then deposited the pipe, still warm, in his pocket, fastened the button and returned below. The air was not so foul as it would be by journey’s end, neither was it sweet-smelling, but damp and close, rife with human sweat. Radisson took to his hammock, located in the hold among the soldiers and sailors aboard, although he had been given the privilege of a segregated corner against a centre bulkhead, where the motion of the ship was least and the hatches that received air close by. He lay upon his back, his body swaying to the vessel’s gentle yaw as his thoughts fell to a lull.

  The boy had done this to him, provoked this bittersweet remembering.

  At times, he felt as though he had never possessed his own life. He was not even positive that he had been born in Paris, although he said so when asked, as his first memories had formed there. He had arrived in Trois-Rivières from Paris, the equivalent, he thought now, of sailing upon the Happy Return from England and landing on the moon. As a youngster, he had been abducted by the Iroquois and treated as one of their own, learning their language perfectly, their customs, their woodland savvy and arts of war. He was one of them, and yet a separate part of him had remained French. He had continued to dream in that language. He could not share his red brothers’ bloodthirstiness for his own people. So he’d fled.

  He had left the Iroquois at Schenectady and run all the way to Trois-Rivières through the woods afoot. Yet Mohawk warriors pursued him. At Trois-Rivières they captured him again before he’d placed a foot inside his father’s front door. This time, they did not treat him well, and never again as one of their own. They ripped at his skin, burned hot coals into his armpits, his chest and his arse. They smashed his fingers and broke his toes. They rubbed his testicles with poison ivy, and in the days ahead laughed in the glee of his anguish. They made him their slave. What was he then? He was not a Frenchman anymore, at least not one who could raise a pig and harvest cabbages and take communion on a Sunday and, within the hour, shoot marauding Iroquois off his back porch. He was more Iroquois than Frenchman, but the Iroquois did not agree. They made him haul the heavy loads and shackled him to a birch at night. They fed him old corn and ferns while they gnawed upon the thighs of tender deer. They never let him eat the berries they made him pick as the women did. He fled again, a more difficult task this time, yet he was wiser, knowing better than to suffer a third capture.

  So he had knocked around, and visited Nieuw Amsterdam, the place the English were calling New York, and he had become a hero among the Jesuits that same summer, rescuing them from attack and destruction by leading an evacuation from danger. He had joined his brother-in-law and a lowly priest, Father Charles Albanel, on a voyage around the Great Lakes deep into the Huron, Cree and Saulteur territories. Yet, was he an explorer, like La Salle, Marquette or Joliet? Apparently not, for the king of France had grown more interested in the explorations that went west and south than those that travelled north. The north frightened the king—that land of snow and ice and darkness for months of the year. Talk of the north sounded like the coldest and darkest hell to him—not even the fiery furnace of his imagination, but worse, a place where there was no life, no movement, no colour. A place where he would freeze and die should ever he visit. So the explorers who went west and south, down the Mississippi to Louisiana, or out onto the plains to the Salt Lake, these were the true explorers in the king’s eye. Radisson and Groseilliers, who dared go north to expand the land of the furs, to wander where even the Iroquois feared to paddle, and who worked for the French one year and the English the next, could not be considered explorers in a true sense.

  Which was one reason why he sailed upon an English ship again.

  Who was he, then? French? English? Iroquois? A woodsman? A Londoner? A sailor? A coureur de bois? A soldier? A naval officer? He had been all these things, and still his fortune had alluded him. Nor could he indicate who Pierre-Esprit Radisson might possibly become. Perhaps he was finding himself in the boy’s eyes, believing that he was the very man the youth espied. The adventurer. The misfit. The wild, reckless and courageous man of dreams.

  The myth.

  “On that second voyage, lad, I had the good sense to take along Cartier’s dagger.”

  “Then it’s true,” the youth confirmed. They were sailing under the stars, a half-moon five degrees above the horizon, setting. Spindrift lifted off the caps of waves and blew across the sea. White spumes in the moonlight flew up from the bow wave, necessitating that Radisson, along with his new young friend, move farther aft from their favoured spot. “It exists.”

  “The dagger exists, lad. That’s true.”

  “Do you have it with you, on this voyage?”

  Radisson knew what the boy’s next question would be: Can I see it? He smiled. “On this voyage, no. For I have given it to the safekeeping of my true love. She holds it in ransom for my safe return.”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  “Have you also heard of the knife’s great powers? I have married into the family that formed the Hudson’s Bay Company, and is it not the greatest company on the face of the earth today? There’s your proof. I took it with me on that voyage to the bay, and that’s when we formed the company. I gave it to my love as a wedding gift, and my marriage and the company’s fortunes have only prospered since.”

  The lad craned his neck, studying the stars. He had a sextant in his kit, a gift from a sailing uncle. Developing a facility with celestial navigation formed an aspect of his education on this, his first distant voyage. Radisson looked up also. He adored these times upon the ocean the most: at night, the seas whipped up, the skies still clear, the firmament so bright and salutary that no distinction seemed to exist between air and water.

  “There’s an aspect to the knife that’s not been considered. For at one time it had fallen into the hands of the Kirke brothers, when they raided Quebec, before they bequeathed it to their king. Now it remains in the care of my true love, who is a Kirke herself, and it is another generation of Kirkes that has formed ‘The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England, Trading into Hudson’s Bay.’ Now, for short, we call it the Hudson’s Bay Company. Don’t you see? The fate of the family appears blended t
o the northern part of North America, despite the fact that that part is considered French. English merchants don’t countenance my people, except for me and Des Gros. So their fate is also married to the Cartier Dagger. Interesting, isn’t it, the fates the stars decree?”

  The boy considered this tale, yet it only whetted his thirst for another. “After that?” he asked.

  “After that, me and Des Gros made our voyages, year after year, to the land of the Great Salt Bay—Hudson’s Bay, they are calling it now—and the years were good to us. We prospered from our furs. Prices were paltry, commissions paid to the king’s court too great, but we prospered. I have no lasting complaint.”

  “Then what happened?” the insatiable boy inquired.

  Radisson continued to gaze high, to the stars, as though he might find the answer there. “This brings us to 1674, does it not?” he asked the boy. “What turn of fortune would cause us, deep in Hudson’s Bay, to come across a Frenchman there, a man we knew from the old days, a Jesuit, an Assiniboine captive, one Charles Albanel? What bend of starlight, lad, could cause a meeting with an old friend to occur in that far-flung place?”

  He paused, as though his own question had so snagged his attention that further progress to his tales might be delayed that night. The boy did not press him, and yawned, and watched as the man took up his pipe and filled the bowl, tamping the tobacco down with his thumb, curving his hands over the match to light his pipe in the wind. For sure, the man was a mariner who could light his bowl with a single match in gusty conditions yet think nothing of the skill. The boy observed the ritual, awaiting the day when he might enjoy his own smoke this way.

  “Charles Albanel,” Radisson repeated, as though summoning a spirit from the deep of the night as the moon behind a cloud bled orange, “a prisoner, a slave, prevailed upon Médard and me to return to the love of France, to work in the service of the king of France again.”