Order of Good Cheer

by Bill Gaston

  She has stopped talking. She regards him more calmly, and now she shrugs, and it is plain to Lucien that the shrug says, “I was foolish in trying to talk to you, but I tried.” He shrugs just as richly, agreeing. Her eyes flash and she smiles almost sadly now, for they are truly talking, and have entered something. Now their eyes hold, and both know how strange it is for the other in this time.

  An older woman shouts something like, “Bat-ta!” at her. Another older one looks up from her digging and smiles hugely, missing a central tooth. The girl turns to the old woman and calls something in response, and when she turns back to Lucien, her impatient glance to the treetops is the same look from any embarrassed daughter in St-Malo.

  She gives her eyes to Lucien again and her look pleads apology. But also humour at their state of affairs. For, look at the two of them! Here they are in mute collusion, intimate friends who cannot talk. He can’t help but answer her smile at this. But look at us closer, she tells him as she brings her muddy hand to his chest, and with a finger draws a gentle circle. Here we are, she continues, lovers with no place to go — except the entire forest at your back. Now her palm flattens on his chest and she begins to gently push, taking him there.

  Her magic overwhelms him and he doesn’t know what to do with himself. He feels they are both enveloped by invisible carnal flame. No woman has ever proposed to him before. He is growing hard, and abuzz. At the same time he feels faint.

  She shoves him and he is on his back, in the mud. Now the women laugh as well as the children, and when Lucien picks his head up to see her she is striding back to her onion hole, and he knows she is making comic faces to her tribe.

  Yet he also knows that they will become lovers — of this he has no doubt. Her shove had been for her people. Her eyes had been for him.

  Close Quarters

  NOSING INTO THE terminal parking lot, Andy realized his mistake when he saw the white Hummer. The Hummer meant Dan Clark, and Dan Clark had agreed to take Andy’s shift so Andy could go clothes shopping today because tonight was the banquet for the Chinese Wheat Women. Andy had got up at five, made coffee and eggs, and even read a little before driving the ten minutes to work — when he could have slept in. It was six in the morning and dark. His defrost was only now melting a hole in the ice bigger than the head-sized one he’d scraped. He was wide awake with four hours to kill before Pauline came over to “plan their attack” and take him shopping.

  A pink dawn germinated behind the mountains, faint as peace. The car fan outshouted it easily, the world so hectic a foot from his face.

  He put his car in reverse, reluctant to leave. He’d done all the work of getting here. But he was also aware — and this was a bit depressing — of wanting to put in a shift, like he had nothing better to do. There was no way he was one of those guys who retired and died, three months later, of nothing to do. No, his foot was light on the gas pedal mostly because the book up in the annex was a good one, and with this supervisor — Rogers — he’d have half the shift to sit and read. He wanted to get back to Port Royal. It was getting interesting. Amazing, the previous year on St-Croix Island, where thirty-two of sixty died of scurvy, and survivors returned to France on the single supply ship, which first disgorged fifty suspicious new guys. (What got whispered as horrified newcomers passed feeble survivors on the creaking gangplank?) Incredibly, Champlain and a few others stayed on, moving to Port Royal to be trapped not just by another winter but also by the irony that not one of them knew that, back in France, the King had cancelled their monopoly on fur trading and that their colony was bankrupt, futile, and doomed. An interesting time. Though how interesting was often hard to tell — Andy was just through the first of Champlain’s journals and the famous cartographer had to be the blandest, most oblique writer in history. “. . . Then I wrote a short account and made an exact map of all that I had seen and observed, and so we returned to Tadoussac, having made but little progress. Our vessels were there trading with the savages; and when this was done we embarked, setting sail, and went back to Honfleur. . .” It left you asking what got traded for what, who got cheated, and did these “savages” ever have personalities? What did Champlain eat that night? If he used a plate, what was it made of? Did they have toilet paper? Andy rapped a knuckle on the clear patch of his windshield. Did they have windows to watch the snow as it grew deeper and swallowed them?

  Andy had already read Lescarbot’s Nova Francia, which was more satisfying, or at least more colourful. A lawyer, of old-school verbosity, he had to be interpreted as well: “We . . . moved above all things with a singular zeal and devout and constant resolution to . . . cause the people which do inhabit the country, men (at this present time) barbarous, atheists, without faith or religion, to be converted to Christianity, and to the belief and profession of our faith and religion; and to draw them from the ignorance and unbelief wherein they are.” Everything he wrote had the tone of sucking up to the King, who was a possible future reader perhaps, and his approach to the Almighty felt similar.

  In any case the story was getting good. Winter had set in; men were restive, and sickness lurked in an endless night. Odd how they thought scurvy had to do with mood, with the “humours.” (Lescarbot thought a humour could seep from the ground, like steam.) But a bad humour equalled, was, sickness. Maybe it was no different from today, how we literally worry ourselves sick. Stress, we call it now. Ill humour sucks at your immune system, knocks down your fortifications, and free radicals fly in like flaming arrows, doom self-fulfilled. He’d read also that voodoo, or actually vodun, works that way. The priest just has to get word out to the victim that he’s been victimized and, ouch, worry’s poison does the rest.

  Andy flung a glance up to the silo top. Even if Port Royal was more interesting than here, it would be foolish to be caught up there on his day off, reading and not getting paid. The boys wouldn’t know what to do with him.

  He pulled out of the lot, laying a little rubber as he did, because he had a car that could do it and because he had come to work for no reason. He gave Dan Clark’s car “the inch” as he passed it. Dan had taught them this southern signal, holding thumb and forefinger an inch apart whenever a Hummer went by, showing the driver how large his penis must be for wanting such a car. Lacking self-image problems himself, Dan Clark — some called him Handsome Dan to his face — laughed telling the boys this. He held his “inch” over his crotch and said, Hmm, yeah, looks about right. He also told them he got the Hummer for a song since they were a harder sell these days.

  Andy felt bad enough about his Mustang in this regard, though it was less a guzzler than the muscle-Mustangs of yore. He turned not right but left and headed for the coal port. He wanted a closer look at the ship tied there and, a quick half-mile later, here it was, not a supertanker but a supercoaler. Chinese. He couldn’t see the name (he could impress the Wheat Women tonight if he knew it), but the ship was huge. He had never seen a ship this size. Up on the stern the pilothouse looked tiny, the minuscule brain of a brontosaurus guiding an immense beast’s ponderous moves. The plain of its deck was three soccer fields long. That ship would take more than one train to fill it and four or five days of highballing round the clock, lots of overtime for the coal boys before the ship’s vast terracotta sides eased slowly into the sea.

  Andy pulled onto the shoulder and opened his window. Lately, when the grain terminal was between ships and their own noise dropped, which happened a lot these days, you could hear that coal belt humming a half-mile away. Maybe no one wanted grain, but there was big hunger for coal. From this distance the arc of coal flying off the belt into the ship’s hold looked for all the world like a hose gushing black fluid; it was easy to see it as a tanker getting filled to the gunnels with oil. Coal was basically hard oil, wasn’t it? In China it would be burned to make electricity to run the robots to build endless cars to burn endless oil. It was a giant fossil-fuel fest over there.

  Climate change had been in the news all week after the mystery of
the dead fish was solved. Prince Rupert had suffered a “dead zone,” like others that had happened off the coasts of Washington State and Chile. The cause was a huge algae bloom farther out, which died, sank, and was consumed by bacteria on the ocean floor, the bacteria using up all the oxygen in the process. Currents and last week’s storm brought the lethal water to shore, suffocating any life in the shallows. One eerie aspect was that this water was pristine — perfectly healthy fish killed by utterly clean water, water that just happened to lack oxygen. The only unnatural thing was the gargantuan size of the algae bloom — nurtured by global warming. So — said the experts — we could expect more of the same. (One scientist-wag noted the silver lining here was that the fish were fine to eat, and that a big dead zone was our most efficient fishing method yet. Sally Kitcher could have had a big fry-up after all.)

  Between the dead-zone news and then Raymond’s visit yesterday, Andy’s head was full of climate change.

  Raymond was maybe ten years younger than Andy but had a natural air of authority about him. He had a Quebec accent but pronounced his name the Anglo way. Andy had called him because his white pickup, Ray’s Excavation on the door, often parked on his street a block down. At first Raymond spent a near-silent ten minutes striding the backyard and down on the beach, sifting soil from the bank in his fingers, smelling it, pacing the exact length of frontage and noting an unfortunate lack of bedrock. Eventually he turned to Andy, looked him bluntly in the eye, and told him there were four methods available: granite boulders barged in and bulldozed against the bank; a wall of pile-driven log pilings; a poured-concrete wall; or sprayed-on polyceramic. No, Raymond didn’t do the work himself, he would contract it. No, he couldn’t give him an estimate on the spot. No, no ballpark figure either.

  “Can you just tell me if it’ll be, for instance, a thousand, or a hundred thousand, or a million?”

  They both stood facing the fresh dirt exposed by the little slide. It had the sharply sour smell of construction sites. Raymond considered Andy’s helpless question and he eyed Andy anew. Something in him settled down. He exhaled and dropped his professional bearing.

  “Hey, I’d just forget about it, eh? You don’t wanna know how much it would cost.”

  “That bad?”

  “And there’s no point. Not unless you get your neighbours to do exactly the same thing, and they get their neighbours, and you get this whole shore walled up. But even then. See, you wall just yours, the water rises, it eats into both sides there”— Raymond pointed at the McLeods’ frontage and then the Wagnarskys’— “and gets you anyway. So there’s no point.”

  Andy asked, “You on waterfront? I’ve noticed your truck.”

  Raymond smiled. “Girlfriend. You know Nadine? Nadine Dick?”

  Andy shook his head, then asked, “You think the water’s going to rise?” not meaning to, polar ice caps not being Raymond’s line of work. But for some reason he didn’t feel stupid asking this question, and Raymond didn’t seem to think it stupid either.

  Raymond smiled again. “It’s what all the smart guys are saying. So down the road I think it’s gonna to get bad maybe, yeah.” He nodded at the raw earth wound that revealed nothing less than the vulnerability of Andy’s property.

  With the tiniest shiver, Andy knew he was letting himself understand that when the oceans rose as the smart guys said they would, he’d lose his land and his house. Even a one-foot rise would mean that, in a storm like the one they’d just had, the waves wouldn’t just be pounding on the gravel beach, they’d be pounding this dirt wall that held up his yard. Apparently it was possible that he’d be alive to witness his yard shrinking with every winter storm, edging in toward the picture window he stared from, sitting in his rocker. If he’d had children, there’d be no house or land to leave them.

  Consultation over, they started up the path. Neither had bothered mentioning the several gull-picked ling cod skeletons stinking at the tide line. After a few steps Raymond jabbed Andy’s arm, smiled soberly, and said, “Any time you start talking walls it’s not a good sign.”

  HE TURNED HIS CAR off. Pauline wasn’t due for hours, this coal ship was a sight, he might grab a catnap in the car, and he really shouldn’t be idling. The air was clean here, it was easy to forget the state of the planet, it took a dead zone to nudge you awake. Though there was evidence a bit north, and not just the polar bears losing ground or the Inuit slogging in their no-longer permafrost. It was glaciers going. Andy hadn’t seen it himself — two tourists told him about it.

  What will Laura think of this, Rupert as cruise-ship destination? He didn’t know what to think himself. It was somehow heartening to learn you lived somewhere worthy of stoppage.

  He often went to meet one, for the spectacle. It loomed over the waterfront, a fresh white office tower on its side, the largest structure in town, a line of tourists streaming out like freed ants. All wore hats, likely having been told about the rain, and all heads were up, eager to see what justified this stop. Some unsheathed cameras for the first photo op, having seen the eagles (there were always anywhere from a pair to a dozen) perched in the cedars across the street from the docks.

  Many in town saved up the nuggets, those lame blurts of tourists anywhere. Some had taken to believing all tourists stupid, but Andy knew it was because one tended to hear only the blurtings of the less sophisticated. The smart traveller kept eyes open and stayed quiet until some kind of nuts-and-bolts understanding was reached. As in, from the number of empty commercial buildings, with unsteady people leaning against their brick, it was likely that this town of Prince Rupert was suffering some sort of recession. The smart tourist would generally not see the eagles and blurt, “Are those real?” Andy had heard not only that question but also a spectacular response to it, from an all-knowing dad: “Yes, but they train them.”

  Andy did understand his Tsimshian friend Leonard’s anger over certain blurts though, acid dismissals of the Drum ’n’ Dance enacted upon the municipal lawn on cruise-ship days. Smarter, quieter cruisers stood and smiled gently at the costumes, at the raucous drumming, the knee dips, the effort, while the ignorant might toss the dancers a glance as if they were panhandlers or some kind of ethnic booby trap trying to impede their hasty waddle back to the safety of the ship. (Andy had heard, “That sure wasn’t worth it,” about a performance that was free.) Andy generally knew half the dancers. Some were Leonard’s relatives, fresh off a village, seduced into joining the group, assured it’d be fun. Often a few did it as part of their detox, to connect spiritually or culturally, plus for exercise. But the costumes were marvellous — hand-loomed, the traditional red and black dye, and the conical hats woven from cedar bark, tight and soft as linen. If the dance looked a bit haphazard, so what? A loose choreography allowed self-expression, Leonard told Andy, it let dancers express their people’s problems and wishes. Leonard, prone to spouting funny venom, went on to ask, rhetorically, What did the cruise ship expect? and proclaim that the only dance in the entire world with “that freakish perfect unison” was in Las Vegas or Hollywood, or maybe Les Folies-Bergère —but wasn’t that for tourists too? Just like that new Moulin Rouge was built for Nicole Kidman? Who was an Australian acting American in order to act French? But didn’t you want her most when the Oz accent slipped out? At which point Leonard laughed, as usual not knowing at what point he’d stopped being serious.

  Sitting in his car, watching dawn’s light bring out the name of the coal ship — Ningbo — Andy recalled what he’d heard from those two tourists about glaciers. It still bugged him. Just off graveyard, finding himself downtown in a fresh ant stream of cruisers, he’d tuned into a whiney conversation between a guy Andy’s age and an always smiling older man who had curled, waxed moustaches and otherwise didn’t look like he fit a cruise ship.

  “All this way and we don’t get up the inlet to see the damn glacier!”

  “A shame,” said the older one, smiling nonetheless, hearing what he already knew.

  “Too
much ice? Can you believe it? We wait and —”

  “And they say the Hubbard’s a magnificent sight.”

  “— We wait out at the mouth, you can see all the bergs clogged in there, sure, but we wait a whole day and they tell us, ‘Too much ice, we’re not goin’ in.’ ”

  “Well, they’re protecting their investment, aren’t they. Plus the lawsuits from all the relatives of all us drowned loved ones?”

  Andy liked the old smiler. The other wasn’t really listening.

  “We came for that glacier!”

  “And it’s a shame.” Here the smiler whacked the other on the elbow. “All that ice, and all this talk about global warming!”

  The other said, “I know,” and scoffed.

  What bothered Andy wasn’t so much that the dumb guy somehow didn’t know all the bergs were from the glacier melting, calving faster than usual. What bothered him more, what made the world feel doubly stupid, and doomed, was that he didn’t get the old guy’s joke.

  But that’s what his yard was doing: calving.