River City

by John Farrow

  They watched dolphins prance in the bow wave. The air was much cooler now, as they had journeyed north, where light lingered almost to midnight.

  “I love my wife, lad. It’s a tribulation, love is, between a man and a woman when she is of a merchant class, and English, and the man is French and a coureur de bois. Our two countries have been warring as long as I’ve been alive, and I would guess they’ll still be on the battlefield after my death. To make matters worse, I’m a rough man, a man who has lived among the Iroquois and was considered their equal by them, so to the merchants of London I’m half-Indian myself. Not exactly the choice that a leader of the mercantile class intends for his daughter.”

  “That’s something I can imagine,” the cabin boy acknowledged. Wild Radisson in the home of an English lady—he had to smile just thinking about it. And yet, the woodsman had married the girl, and despite distance and dangers and war between their countries, they had persevered as man and wife.

  “You can imagine a part of it, I don’t doubt, but never the whole. To this day, my wife lives under the influence of her father more than under mine. Whenever I invite her to France, or to North America, she declines. She remains at home, awaiting the day my adventuring concludes. Awaiting the day, I should say, when I, like Des Gros, will satisfy myself raising chickens.”

  “Is that why you sail under an English flag again?” the young sailor inquired.

  Radisson watched a dolphin skim below the surface, then break into the air a moment. “One, I suppose,” he agreed. “After five years in the navy, I was yearning for grander adventures again. I counted my life a failure, and I wanted to be at my wife’s side awhile. I begged her—I begged her, lad, although I’m ashamed to admit it—to come to France with me, to be my proper wife. This was in ‘81. Yet she declined, which surely broke my heart. Live or die, I didn’t much care, so I beseeched the king one more time. ‘Don’t send me to Quebec,’ I told him, ‘where I’m despised.’ In Quebec, I knew, I’d only be asked to shoot Indians, in the hope that an Indian would shoot me. This time, the king undertook the project himself. Frustrated, he was, with Frontenac. I sent for Groseilliers, who was frustrated himself with the growth of his corn, and together, we took two ships into the Great Salt Bay, and did we not take it back from the English, lad? We did! And seized a Boston ship for good measure!”

  “A Boston ship!”

  “Loaded with furs, it was! Fully laden, we sailed our three ships back to France. We’d done our duty. We had reclaimed the Great Salt Bay for France and had paid for the cost of the expedition many times over with the bounty of our furs.”

  “And now you’re going back,” the boy mentioned, “to reclaim the bay for England. Why? Is that love also?”

  Without speaking, Radisson continued his stroll around the deck. Halfway round, he seized the lad by the arm and drew him close for a whisper. “When we got back to France with our cargo and our ships, but more importantly with the news of our conquest, that we had reclaimed the north of the continent for France, Groseilliers and me—we were rebuffed.”

  “No,” the boy decried. “Again?”

  “Again! We were not paid properly for our furs, for it was decided that we were indebted to France for leading the English to the bay years before, therefore we had to forfeit our proper portion. That was the year, 1682, that was the time, just two years ago, when me and Groseilliers decided, once and for all, to quit.”

  They continued their walk, reaching the gangway to the cabin below.

  “This time, do you think,” the boy yearned to know, “will your fortune be made?” He was less certain now of their intended success, for had not Radisson repeatedly come to the bay? Each time, despite victories, despite acquiring prizes of great value, had he not been, as he said, rebuffed?

  “This time I shall seize the bay for England, for this is what my true love wishes me to do. Her father, also. Her father will see to it, if I do this thing, that I will be—at long last—compensated properly. Groseilliers could not be talked into accompanying me this time. He’s a defeated man. I’m not. I took the bay for France in the year of our Lord sixteen hundred and eighty-two, and I shall take it back for England again, in this year of our Lord sixteen hundred and eighty-four. Then I shall retire to an estate in England and live out my days with my true love. As God is my witness.”

  The cabin boy nodded. “That sounds nice,” he said. He clambered below. He now felt less confident that a good end to their excursion would come to pass. Why should he trust Radisson to succeed and prosper, which in turn would allow all aboard to prosper, when in truth the adventurer had never known success?

  After Radisson had claimed the northern fur trade for France—in 1682, two years before he returned to proclaim the same trade for the English—during that time when the men of Ville-Marie would have again doffed their caps to him had he walked by, while keeping their daughters concealed from his eyes, a beautiful young socialite of fine character and high intelligence remained alone in her room as her mother, under the same roof, gradually passed on. She would not emerge from her chamber to be with her ailing parent, whom she loved, to either gaze upon her or utter a final word. Only when her mother had died did the young woman step from her quarters to visit the corpse. She held the dead woman’s hand, kissed her cooling lips, helped prepare the body for burial, then returned to the solitude of her room.

  She did not attend the funeral.

  Her mother had been one of the King’s Girls, and had married well enough to have prospered in the New World. At a time when the colony, reckless with bachelors, remained underpopulated, the king opposed the notion of depopulating France of its able, tax-bearing men who were also suitable, beyond the value of their professions, as soldiers. So he devised a compromise: he’d send women instead. New France would grow through its natural fecundity. In agreeing to the plan, the intendant of New France negotiated to receive only young women of sound character, physical stamina and admirable beauty. He expressly insisted that every girl “be entirely free from any natural blemish or anything personally repulsive,” so that the seed of the wild men of the New World might know provident, auspicious wombs in which to create a new nation.

  The first group to arrive had been chosen from among the orphaned girls of Paris, as this helped alleviate the significant cost of their care to the king’s purse. While lovely, they proved too sickly for the regimen of farm life. Country girls from around Rouen were selected next, and they adapted to the conditions best. Over a span of eight years, a thousand young women, often less than sixteen years of age, made the voyage to New France, into the arms of grinning, excited young men.

  The mother of Jeanne Le Ber had been among the first of these, one of the Paris orphans, and had fared well as the wife of an increasingly wealthy fur baron. Yet her constitution had never proven strong. She managed to deliver only two children, and after considerable sickliness, she died. She lived long enough to know that the daughter she’d nurtured to young womanhood, who would not visit her as she lay dying, was singular in her devotions.

  As a child, Jeanne Le Ber committed one flagrantly sinful act each year. In April, from the age of five onwards, she would slip away from her home, in disobedience of her parents’ wishes, and make her way a few blocks to the old market square. The voyageurs were gathering there, the coureurs de bois, fur traders bound for Indian lands. Before embarking, the men would be left alone to drink, to laugh themselves silly and to brawl. Oh, how they loved to brawl! Tucked away behind a sleigh or concealed behind horses’ hooves, the little girl could catch as many as a dozen fights at a time. Men slammed their fists into one another’s heads and butted their heads into one another’s bellies. As their faces were smashed, they’d grunt and bleed and kick and snarl like beasts, and the wee girl would watch them topple, one by one, and collapse upon the snowy pavement and lie still, defeated, unconscious or just dazed, while the victor roared and scanned his peers for the next foolhardy challenger.

&nb
sp; After an hour or two of such excitement, or upon being spotted, little Jeanne would scamper home, terrified and thrilled, bursting with an incomprehensible joy.

  Yet these excursions were kept secret from her mother, and were not among the attributes that would distinguish her as a child who had been touched by her devotions, either in the minds of her parents, or in the hearts and understanding of the people of Ville-Marie on the island of Montreal.

  Having witnessed the brawls, she would sneak away to visit her godmother at the Hôtel-Dieu, the woman after whom she’d been named, Jeanne Mance. The child had already demonstrated a keen interest in the mysteries of the divine, and her comments, at age five, at six, and through her growing years, were original and smart. As a young woman being prepared for marriage, she’d attend the social parties of her set, yet depart early to pay strict adherence to her habits of prayer, for although she was civil and bright and socially adept, she was withdrawing from the world, step by step, moment by moment.

  Ribbons were ripped from the gift of a cushion, the adornment offensive to her eyes. She wept when required to wear an ornate robe in a Biblical play, ashamed that her body would ever know such accoutrement. She desired to be locked up, fully segregated from the world, and upon the death of her best friend, a nun, she renounced all attachment to the world.

  Uncertain what to do with her, an abbé suggested a limited seclusion for a fixed term of five years, to be served inside her own room within her own home. The room was made especially bare, to please her, with every accoutrement or artifact removed, all colour, save for the greyness of her blankets, taken away. Eagerly, Jeanne entered her confinement, declining to emerge either for the death of her mother or to tend to the monstrous injuries her brother suffered in a battle with the Iroquois. For him, as well, she stepped from her room only after his death to help prepare the body for viewing, before she quickly withdrew.

  As a recluse, she was similar to ascetics in various times and places, yet with a few distinguishing characteristics. She managed her own economic affairs, as her father had seen to her initial temporal needs and, if she was not to marry, allowed her access to her dowry. She had investments and charitable contributions to supervise. She wore a hairshirt and inflicted the scourge upon herself, yet she maintained a maid and happily ate meat. Naturally, she was chaste, yet in weaker moments, thoughts did wander to the infinite wilderness and the rapacious coureurs de bois, and she wondered about Radisson, for she had heard countless tales of his exploits at her father’s table. She felt drawn to the legend, even while her fur-baron father had railed against him, perhaps because he was simply the most notorious of the wild men and brawlers and therefore representative of them all, yet also because he was seeking his fortune, while she had renounced hers. While she sought her destiny in the austerity of a cell, he was off plunging into the austere wilderness of the north. She and Radisson were so diametrically opposed, she had imagined—they had never met, although she had seen him in a spring brawl—that they were inextricably linked.

  She dreamed of Radisson and she prayed to God, and following her initial five-year experiment, Jeanne Le Ber chose to make her vows perpetual, continuing to live alone in her room in her father’s house.

  That she could well imagine the universe outside her door, that she acutely envisioned the wilderness and pictured the rowdy men who roamed freely there, gave her confinement its definition, its prerequisite bitterness. In this way, she persevered inside her room.

  Jeanne Le Ber had only begun to inhabit her ascetic vision.

  Outside her home, fur traders still brawled every spring, and as they returned in late summer, they fought marauding Iroquois, the bands who continued to vex the settlers through the fall and plot with the English, over winter months, to find ways to further harm the French. Peace remained implausible. Would Radisson’s return and seizure of the great northern bay help? The governor, some said, had been working towards a truce with the Iroquois. Could that come to pass—peace with an enemy governed neither by remorse nor sanctity, who profited by war? Annihilation remained a prospect. Of these things, Jeanne Le Ber professed no interest, although her father sat outside her door on occasion, and through the grille created for passing food spoke of such matters. The brawling voyageurs remained rambunctious in her dreams, yet during her waking hours she maintained a diligent schedule of prayer, needlepoint and the reading of religious texts to help her limit the world. As was true among the other settlers, fear crept into her consciousness, of Iroquois removing her from her private cell and slicing off the top of her head. She possessed a peculiar premonition, that one day the Indians would come to the island of Montreal and politely wait outside her door. She assumed that the only reason they would come would be to burn her at the stake. Yet she resisted such thoughts, not wanting to indulge in sweet images of affliction that mimicked her Lord’s passion. Whenever such images beckoned her attention, she prayed all the more zealously.

  Among her daily disciplines—though no one would have guessed, least of all Jeanne Le Ber herself—the quality of her needlepoint as much as the fervour of her prayer would be called upon to save the colony from extinction. Nor could she have guessed that the Indians would indeed come to Ville-Marie, and one would wait politely outside her door, but that a man, a great chief, would take no interest in furthering her suffering, but would arrive to plead only for her counsel.

  The cabin boy had been forewarned: he’d be entering another world, another time. Yet no such prophecy could prepare him for the eerie dimension of the immense salt bay. The largest beasts he’d yet imagined—behemoths, great white polar bears—loped along a scraggly beach of sand, rock and pale driftwood deformed into elaborate shapes bleached white by the sun. Small whales blew plumes of vaporous air from their spouts and tagged along behind the ship, patient marauders—or, like them, curiously cautious, too. Brisk air felt just born, as if it were an entity, and the sky, in its unique pale beauty, contributed to his sense that he had not merely entered another world or time, but timelessness, a place where worlds and all their unjust conceits were vanquished.

  Upon Radisson’s signal, longboats were lowered while the Happy Return maintained way on. Soldiers were dispatched into the stunted woods. As the ship eased into the harbour of Port Nelson and dropped anchor, Radisson, standing straight up like an admiral, was rowed ashore. He demanded the surrender of the community. Initially, the French traders chuckled, for they were well armed and sufficiently bored that they’d welcome a fight, but once their eyes had been directed to the surrounding woods, and it dawned on them that Radisson had arrived not merely with merchant sailors but with English soldiers, too, their capitulation was complete. Port Nelson was English again. Given its name, that seemed fitting.

  On he sailed to the Hayes River, and there, to his surprise, he encountered his nephew, Médard Chouart, Des Gros’s boy. By early dawn, Radisson had persuaded him, and his friends the Assiniboines, to support England. The territory, then, was restored to the care of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and he emptied the French storehouses there and loaded a season’s furs into the hold of his ship. The Happy Return would be making another happy return, this one to England and, he presumed, to his long-overdue grand reward.

  “Tell us a story, Radisson,” the cabin boy pleaded. Their new recruits, French and Assiniboine, were seated around the campfire, enjoying the shank of a deer.

  “What story do you want to hear?” he asked the lad back.

  “A new one,” the boy suggested.

  The voyageur thought a moment. With Indian and French and English ears attentive, he had best make certain that he offended none in this company.

  “Let me tell you true tales about The Rat,” he told them. “Chief Kondiaronk, of the Huron. For when the story of this land is put to rest, mark the words you hear tonight. The Rat will be one Indian who will have had his say. For he is the wisest of the Indian chiefs, more clever than the French guv’ners. He has more wit in his smallest to
e than can be found in the courts of either king, English or French.”

  The Assiniboines, in particular, were enjoying this account, and nodded, and rocked. Everyone around the campfire had heard of Kondiaronk, but none, save Radisson, had met him.

  “Kondiaronk is a sage man, but I know him to be a cruel man also when he needs to be. A determined man. Do you see this scar here?” In the firelight, Radisson opened his shirt and displayed the scar, in the shape of an X, across the centre of his chest. When all had had a good look, he said, “Kondiaronk, The Rat, gave me this. As a warning. For I had cheated him. I had taken two hundred and twenty pelts and told him only two hundred. So he marked my chest with his knife, to show me where he will cut out my heart if I try cheating him again. That, of course, will not happen. For he is too wise a chief, too clever a man, too cruel a warrior, for me to cross him twice.

  “This, then,” Radisson declared, and poked at the fire with a stick, sending sparks into the night sky as though summoning the spirit of the man of whom he spoke to attend these proceedings, although the man was still very much alive, “is the story of The Rat.”

  The boy leaned in, his attention rapt, yet no more so than the others.

  The French needed allies. The English hemmed them in from every side, and their colonies were growing with rampant immigration, while the French had to grow their community primarily, and diligently, through childbirth. The Iroquois were hideous in their attacks, and the Huron, so often defeated, were reluctant to continue on the French side. Or so The Rat, Chief Kondiaronk, led the governor of New France, the Marquis de Denonville, to believe.

  “If we are eliminated,” the governor pressed him, “if we either abandon this land or perish with Iroquois tomahawks planted in our skulls—”

  “A fortunate way to die,” the Huron chief demurred.

  “Excuse me?”