River City

by John Farrow

  In her cell, Jeanne Le Ber permitted herself to smile at the sound of the guns. The Iroquois wars were over. Never again would her people fear being scalped overnight or live with the horror of knowing that their children might be roasted or that they themselves might be slowly burned from the feet up. Peace with the Iroquois had depended upon the acumen of the governor and the vision of a far-flung Huron chief who lived all the way in Michilimackinac, and she was glad that in his final days they had had a chance to speak. God had arranged that meeting, a knowledge that strengthened her faith. Even from her cell, she might be of use to others.

  The second call upon Jeanne Le Ber came in 1711, a decade after the peace with the Iroquois had been signed and Kondiaronk had died. The English, finally realizing that the continent was becoming French, that the Iroquois no longer imposed their will on the people to the north or moved to restrict their movements or commerce, embarked upon a full-scale attack to rout the French once and for all and seize the entire colony for England. They moved an army overland toward Montreal and sent a great fleet up the St. Lawrence to Quebec. The people heard the dire reports and knew that their military was ill prepared. Once again, the colony lay in mortal peril, with scant hope of salvation.

  Jeanne Le Ber was told of these perilous circumstances and was exhorted to intercede. To the dismay of the clergy, she turned to her needlepoint.

  Normally, she slept only briefly, rising at 4 a.m. between Easter and All Saint’s Day, and at four-thirty through the darker, cold months. Now she did not sleep, but embroidered a banner. On one side, she created an exquisite image of the Virgin Mary, and on the other she inscribed the words, “She is as terrible as an army in battle array. She will help us to vanquish our enemies.”

  When she was done, she called for the abbé to visit her again.

  The banner was blessed by the Abbé de Belmont, although he feared it might be too little, too late. But that night, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, a storm ransacked the English fleet. Ships were damaged, a few floundered on rocks, others lost their bearings, and every ship lost contact with the other. One by one, the surviving vessels limped back to Boston. As the commanders in the field were informed of the disaster, their own interest in the expedition quickly faded, and after days of deliberations, the army returned home as well. Once again, Montreal had been spared. This time, Jeanne Le Ber did not indulge herself in a smile, but prostrated herself before the altar of the chapel at night, and pleaded forgiveness for her ongoing involvement in temporal affairs.

  She would live three more years, and near the end of her days she received another visit from the Abbé de Belmont. He asked her if she had benefited well and been sustained by her life of devotion. She told him she had received sweetness and tranquility from her life of prayer when she had been at home in her father’s house. Since entering her cell, she had experienced no such blessings, but had given herself to the gloom and despair of her days, receiving no divine guidance or consolation, no satisfaction or delight. Yet she persevered, and as she lay dying, she dispatched her nurse to the chapel so that she would be more alone, and she had the curtains drawn to complete the coming shroud of death. At nine o’clock in the morning, on the third day of October, at the age of fifty-three, after twenty years in her crypt, Jeanne Le Ber stepped into the death she had so long cherished, and this time it proved both real and final.

  The gentleman who called in 1710 was dressed smartly, if not as a man of royalty, then from a class that had not crossed Radisson’s door in many years. He had heard the man give his name—perhaps it had rung a bell, perhaps not—to be sure, his recollections were not what they had once been. “You are, sir, by name?” he asked, perhaps for the fifth time, but he could not be confident of the number of repetitions either.

  “Charles Smythe Hamilton, sir,” the man replied, smiling, willing to indulge the feeble man his proclivities. “I am waiting for you to recognize me, sir. Perhaps that will be best. If you come to understand that you know me, I think it will be the preferred course for our discussions.”

  “You confuse me, sir. You are who, did you say, by name?”

  Radisson received his visitor from his bed. When the knock had come upon the door, he had barked out the command to enter, twice, three times, before he heard the squeaky hinges on the door respond and heard the announcement of boots upon the floor. A man’s. He had shouted out again, so that the visitor would know which way to turn, and soon enough, the smartly attired gentleman in a waistcoat with cummerbund, a tall hat held under one arm, stood to face him squarely in the doorway. If this was Death, he possessed accoutrements superior to those Radisson had expected. If he were the devil, his kingdom could not be so bad.

  Seated on a wooden chair he’d pulled up alongside the bed, Charles Smythe Hamilton took hold of the old man’s hand, a gesture that startled the invalid for its tenderness and sympathy. Although he flinched briefly, he did not pull back his grip, permitting his palm to rest in the visitor’s. In a moment, he mustered a measure of strength to exert a responsive pressure through his fingers.

  “You are who, sir, by name?” he asked again. He rocked his head from side to side. “It’s no use testing my memory, for it has failed me. You say I know you, sir, but my recollections are feeble. From where do I know you?”

  “Do you remember the Happy Return? A stout ship, you called her.”

  Radisson nodded. He gestured for a drink of water, and his guest passed him the ladle. “Surely,” he recalled. “A stout ship. We took back Hudson’s Bay with her. For the English … I think it was for the English that one time. Was it for the French?”

  “The English. Then you returned, I understand, to the Great Salt Bay.”

  “I returned, yes. I thought to make it my home.”

  He bore all the marks of having lived a difficult, yet active, life, one that had succumbed to age, disease and imminent dissolution. His thinned white hair, scraggly and unwashed, fell down the sides of his face upon the filthy pillow. Careless scissors had haphazardly chomped away at his beard, his skin had turned a sallow colour, and the old man frequently coughed, spitting up bloody phlegm. His nose was moist, and the visitor noticed how it had been bent out of shape, this way and that, during the man’s lifetime, most probably from the famous fistfights in Ville-Marie each spring before the voyageurs embarked for the Indian lands. His nightshirt lay open to expire his internal heat, and Smythe saw the X carved there by Chief Kondiaronk to warn him against cheating. The man must have been born under a lucky star not to have had that incision struck through to the quick.

  “I loved the wilderness,” Radisson recalled, as though in a reverie now, finding his strength and voice. “My wife in England, here, was not inclined to respect my nature. My own children know not my face. So I procured for myself an end to the marriage, under the Lord. These matters can be arranged, under the Lord, when your wife is the daughter of a powerful man. I went back to the Great Salt Bay to harvest my days. A wilderness, the wildest a man can know, yet with no Iroquois! A paradise to me. I could make a coin there. No fortune—I gave up all promise of that. But I could make a coin for my old age and live beside the icy water.”

  “So what happened?” the visitor asked. He relished hearing the old man’s storytelling voice again, and so posed the question even though he knew the reply.

  “I had gone where no man could find me. But the French, they found me. They held some grievance. Louis XIV, silly arse, the king himself, issued a proclamation for my arrest and sent a lackey, some sort of chevalier, to fetch me out.” Radisson paused, then asked for more water, which he promptly received. “Groseilliers, now he was a knight, a Knight of the Garter.”

  “I heard that,” the man recalled. “A distinguished honour.”

  “A chevalier—the same as a knight, but of low rank. Chevalier Pierre de Troyes, that’s who they sent. Do you know him? Are you French or English, sir?”

  “I’m an Englishman, sir, in the merchant marine.”

/>   “Oh yes? What do they call you, by name? I was a sailor myself one time.”

  “I know that. In the French navy—”

  “The navy, and in the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company, too.”

  “My employer now,” the visitor noted.

  Radisson, in his infirmity and frailty, fought through the vagueness of his perceptions to place this man, even to comprehend that he had a visitor at all, one more distinguished than the usual riffraff that filed through his doors.

  “Employed by the company, you say?” he asked the man. “On ships? What rank, sir, if I may so inquire of you?”

  “That, sir, may depend on you.”

  “Me?”

  “You, sir. Pierre-Esprit Radisson.”

  Now the ailing man was confused, although not in the same way as before. Instinctively, he believed that a man in full command of his faculties might be no less beguiled. “Even when I lived in toil for the company, I dispensed to no man his rank. Why do you say, sir, that your rank depends on me?”

  As though to indicate the delicacy of his mission, the visitor lugged his chair under him a tad closer to the bed. He leaned near enough that his breath could be felt upon the old man’s pale, weathered skin.

  “Radisson,” he whispered, “do you remember the keen blade? The Dagger of Cartier, they call it?”

  “Aye,” Radisson made known, yet whispering also.

  “You had given it to your wife, for safekeeping,” the visitor reminded him.

  “Aye,” suspiciously, Radisson concurred.

  “Yet, when you and your wife parted company, you took back the knife.”

  “Aye,” the old man recalled. “Her father had promised me an estate. He did not give me an estate when I sailed back to England on the Happy Return. A vow to me, broken—as all men, it seems, do. They may keep their vows between one another, but to me and to Des Gros, we are not worthy of any man’s faithful word. That’s what I learned in my comings and goings throughout my long life. No king, no chevalier, no wife—and I’ve had three—no child—and I’ve had nine, I’m told—no company—though I have toiled only for the one—has stood by a significant vow to me, sir. I took the dagger back from the man who took back the estate that I had most solemnly been promised.”

  “And where,” the man whispered, yet more quietly with each word, and more slowly, “would said knife, the Dagger of Cartier, sir, be now?”

  Radisson glared at the man awhile, and a glimmer seemed to register in the darker patches of his mind—a memory, perchance, but he could not be certain or trustful of his own reactions. He was enjoying the company. That’s all he really knew. “Who be asking?” he wanted to know. “By name.”

  “Charles Smy—”

  “I know that much!” Radisson spit out. “I’m not clueless yet. Who are you, lad, and be quick about your answer if you know what’s good for you!”

  “It’s been a while,” Charles Smythe Hamilton replied, and he grinned broadly, “since you’ve called me ‘lad.’”

  The glimmer in the dark patch of his mind began to glow a bit, and the old man could see a light. “Hey, there … hey there, now, you’re that lad. That cabin boy!”

  “Aboard the Happy Return, sir. I’m proud to make your acquaintance again.”

  “Look at you! All grown up! Straight and true! What are you, lad? Speak your rank to me. It’s not cabin boy, I can see!”

  Hamilton smiled, and told him, “It could be captain, sir. That’s up to you. I could have my own commission, if only you would wish it.”

  “I wish it upon you, lad! But how can this be? What are you saying to me?”

  Resorting to a conspiratorial tone of voice again, Hamilton explained. “The company, sir—specifically the younger Mr. Kirke, sir, he knows about our fondness for one another, from the old days. I’ve spoken of it often enough. Proud, I am to have made your acquaintance, to have shared conversation under starry nights.”

  “We knew a few rough days at sea, lad!”

  “We did, sir. At any rate, Mr. Kirke, sir, knows that you possess the Dagger of Cartier, for you took it back from his aunt—that would be your wife—and rightly so, I must say, when your nuptials failed to endure as you had reason to expect.”

  Radisson regarded the young man with a cold eye, wondering what villainy had breached his portal this time. “What do you want from me, lad—the knife?”

  “Radisson, your time is nearly done for this earth. If you go and the knife remains hidden, the knife is forever gone also. Certainly, it is gone from the hands of the younger Mr. Kirke, sir.”

  The old coureur de bois nodded, comprehending. “His family took everything from me that I delivered to them. My furs by the shipload. Hudson’s Bay itself. My true knowledge of the north that did guide the company west. I have been stripped of every sweetness in life, and all good comforts, and the only payment I have received is my citizenship as an Englishman. Citizenship! That’s what they offered, and that’s what I have claimed! A knighthood? No, no, only Groseilliers deserved that. Me, they made a mere citizen, like all the rest. They had to. France would not have me. And now—” A hacking fit interrupted him.

  “Sir, I have not knocked upon your door to torment you—”

  “Listen! And now, as I lie dying, when I hope that death comes running like a hare, the company desires the one thing I have left. The Cartier Dagger! This, too, your young Mr. Kirke wishes to extract from me. From one generation to the next, do these gentlemen have no depth to their greed, their desire, their endless need to extract from me all that I might possess?”

  The visitor had no kind answer to that question, and so kept his peace.

  “What’s in it for you, lad?” Radisson asked.

  Hamilton looked up. He felt dispirited, forlorn, defeated in his mission here. “A commission. I am to be made a captain, if, and only if, I deliver the knife. I will be given my commission so that I can seek my fortune, as you did, sir. Perhaps I shall find it, perhaps not. Perhaps, like you, I will find it many times over, only to have it denied me by those of lofty authority. But I have come here to you, sir, to plead that I be offered the opportunity in my time. That once more we go forth, your spirit in me and upon my ship, once more we go forth to seek our destiny.”

  Again, Radisson requested water, and this time the visitor held the ladle to his lips himself while the old man drank.

  “Of all the bargains I’ve been offered in my long life,” he said, slowly, thoughtfully, “this must surely be the poorest one.”

  The man’s eyes were downcast.

  “But you have not come to steal from me, have you, lad?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You have not come to cheat me.”

  “No, sir.”

  “You spoke an honest word. No guff. That means something to me. I have nothing. Soon I’ll be dead—may the hare be swift. I will give you what I cannot take with me. Make certain, lad, that you gain that commission. Promise me! Have the ship under your feet and your crew about you, have your captain’s papers in one hand and your sailing manifest in t’other. Only then, lad, do you hand over the knife to our young Mr. Kirke, the son of a rascal and a rascal himself! Promise me!”

  Hamilton grasped the old man’s forearm, which still contained the sinew, if not the muscle, of a bygone day. “I promise, sir. I vow it.”

  “You’ll need a pick and shovel.”

  “I’m capable, sir.”

  “You’ll get yourself more dirty than an Iroquois set for battle!”

  “I’m willing, sir.”

  “Then go forth, young man. Captain Hamilton. Seek your fortune. I ask: do not be cheated of your commission, and take me along, sir, in spirit.”

  “That I vow, sir.”

  Taking his leave the next morning, Charles Hamilton was unable to say his final thanks or farewell. All he could do was to close down the lids on the old man’s eyes and walk forth, determined to keep his promises. Which he did. He did not deliver the Cartie
r Dagger into the hands of the Hudson’s Bay Company until after his feet stood upon his ship, and the young Mr. Kirke, knife in hand, had to scamper with great urgency to disembark as the bow and spring lines were being tossed.

  The following year, Captain Charles Smythe Hamilton carried a cargo of soldiers from Boston for a jolly raid on Quebec, intending to drive the French from North America forever. A banner of the Virgin Mary, created by Jeanne Le Ber, rose up against the stout ship. The doomed sailors and soldiers did not know that, and would have considered it a laughable fortification. Yet they were further entreated by the most violent of storms. Hamilton’s ship floundered. Many of the ship’s company washed up on shore, alive, to be imprisoned and later returned to the English. A score drowned. Hamilton himself drowned, his body recovered on the beach and buried near Tadoussac. Old men who dug his grave didn’t know him or care that he was a captain, although he would have welcomed their acquaintance, for they were all aging coureurs de bois of whom he’d heard so many tales.

  Slowly, with their old bones and weary muscles, they dug.

  A wind whistled up from the river, passing through the trees.

  As one, the old men ceased their chore and gazed up a moment, then into the dark forest. As one, they felt the ghost of an old friend pass by, paddling the rivers inland. How had he arrived again, and made his way here, upon this shore? That iron will. Did he paddle again to the Great Salt Bay?

  BOOK TWO

  CHAPTER 13

  1958

  THREE YEARS AFTER HER INTRODUCTION TO HER DECEASED FATHER’S erstwhile cronies at the Copacabana, where she babbled silly sayings into the microphone and ran off giggling—once, straight into the arms of the most flamboyant of Montreal’s former mayors—eleven-year-old Anik Clément was on her way to visit that illustrious, sage carnival of a man again.

  She did so routinely.

  Alive, her father segregated his family from his rough work. They lived away from the nightclub scene, and no high rollers hung out on their block. For a while after his death, her mom cut herself off from her father’s old pals, but that changed with the funeral for Michel Vimont. Anik never understood the sudden shift, but neither did she regret that her quiet home became a livelier place overnight. Men popped by to fix things. Or dropped in to crack open a six-pack and a monstrous bag of chips to shoot the breeze. Anik loved the chips, which were never allowed in her house otherwise. If her mom had nothing to do on a Friday night, she might make a phone call, and just like that she got to hang out in a crowd while a babysitter with a toothpick between his teeth and a revolver on his hip slouched down on the sofa in her home. He watched the black-and-white TV another of her gun-toting sitters had purchased. Anik didn’t dare sneak out on these guys, but as long as she hopped into bed the moment her mom was dropped off, she could stay up as late as she pleased.