Order of Good Cheer

by Bill Gaston

  Wind in his face, seeing absolutely nothing, Andy felt better, and fully sober. He’d jump in a good, hot shower with these new clothes on. They felt tainted now, like the dirty filter for one lousy party. Tonight had put him in mind of a different sort of party altogether. Mussels. Moose nose. And odori. That was the word — odori.

  Andy turned and had a fright when he understood he couldn’t see his house, and that in one direction lay a cliff. But the wind, now at his back, was a sure guide, as were the waves’ gentle crashings on the gravel. He began to walk precisely away from that. He walked slowly, in the grip of his senses, walking mostly with his ears, so wide awake now. Then, as if toying with his attention, the wind shifted. There was a brief hitch in the rain, almost like an in-breath, and it began to snow.

  A Little Necklace

  novembre 1606

  IN THE MUSIC of settlement, boredom is a melody that begets foul, discordant strains. Twice now Samuel has seen men making onanistic use of themselves in the forest. Unlike the first man (Samuel thinks it was Simon), who scurried away shamed (one hopes), the second merely turned his back, paused in his devilish fever and waited insolently for the mapmaker to pass.

  Last year before he fell sick with the scurve himself and ultimately perished, the priest said some words with which Champlain agreed. As they watched men fall to unease and listlessness and then to the disease itself, the priest contended that idleness and boredom were themselves the cause of the scurve. Samuel found himself agreeing with him (though he still believed, and believes, it is also bound up in one’s intake of food. But is this entirely different? Don’t we manifest the humour of that which we take in and make our own? That is, mightn’t food be a cause of boredom?) The priest termed their malaise “a fall in spirit” and it angered him such that he seemed to withdraw his compassion for the ailing men. At this Samuel no longer agreed, because the priest went so far as to ask, how dare one be not always excited, having been given life by God and placed on earth amidst all of His wonders? (And Samuel was amazed that, when the priest fell ill himself, he didn’t appear to change his views about any portion of this. In fact he faulted a loss of faith for his illness, going so far in his arrogance as to lose faith to prove his point. Even on the day of his death, the priest’s nostrils never did lose their ability to flare.)

  It isn’t the first autumn that Champlain has found himself pondering this: settled and safe in their sturdy compound, so much of their task done — all save the real and most onerous task called winter, and waiting — how were they to keep boredom at bay?

  Unlike a storm at sea, when one is busy keeping the ship’s masts pointed heavenward and the bodies of all one’s men alive; unlike landing at an unknown shore and declaring it New France and then with all one’s will building a shelter with which to block the wind and digging furrows in which to sow one’s precious seed — unlike these most vital pursuits, the act of settling allows a routine akin to stagnation, in whose water blooms a thickening sea of bad humours and irritants.

  The odd stench of one’s shipmate is utterly of no matter in a storm.

  The fights have for the most part stopped, the combatants finally seeing no reason in fisticuffs when the fight would only be compounded with a flogging. But there continues the whispered bullying, and mental tortures of a grotesquely subtle kind. For instance Samuel has twice seen Dédé walk past Lucien sitting at table and sink a foul thumb into the moist heart of the carpenter’s supper, and from the undisturbed look on both their faces it looked to be ritual now, or even mindless habit.

  One game appears to have ceased, and Samuel is only glad for it. Soldiers and nobles alike, while sitting on a ring of stools outside the east wall, play their parlour games in the dirt whilst waiting patiently for hummingbirds to come and suck, some thirty paces off, at the bits of red satin sash torn and fastened as false flowers upon staves set into the ground. Taking turn, they train their muskets upon the flitting mirthful jewel, and fire. At first a hit was rare, but then some men got expert at it, and bird after bird met its end in a burst of shards too small to be deemed feathers. When questioned by none other than the Sieur of this land, Poutrincourt himself, the men, only half in jest, asked him back if there were another form of shooting practice as ingenious and beneficial as this, and added that they were training for the big war to come, and fell to laughing — Poutrincourt laughed too — about whether this war would be against Indian, Spanish, or English. No matter, they agreed, since we French can shoot hummingbirds out of the sky! Samuel wants to say that the real war seems to have been against these very birds, who seem now to have disappeared, so we have won. He wants to ask too that, if we have indeed killed them all, what kind of victory it is. He is reminded of his good uncle’s caution: When you capture all the fish in your pond, you have in fact lost them. (In fact he suspects that these birds are amongst those that fly south to sip flowers still in bloom.)

  But the days march, apace. This evening after supper, several of the men complained to him and asked if, during the savages’ next session of bartering, it could be held outside the compound, “and when there’s a stout wind.” True, some furs do carry a bad stink, and the savages do not smell as the French do, for they lack perfume and use no salt in their diet. For almost all of them it is a first encounter with the natives of New France and so their smell (which is really no worse nor much different than the flats at ebb tide) is highly noticed by them — but this is the kind of petty irritant he ponders. He promised them that smell will not matter come March if they are near starving; he declared that all the peculiar smells of New France, not least the savages’, would be drawn hungrily into both nostrils as if it were food. And he told them last what Membertou had only very recently revealed, that the savages hate their smell just as well! Membertou told him that, often, before these same meetings to barter, his braves will draw a mustache of pine resin under their nostrils! (In fact Samuel had wondered why it was that, by the time the savages left, especially if the fires were smoky, their upper lip would sport a new mustache of soot.)

  Samuel believes the men then went next to Lescarbot, to see what he might say about bartering, and stink, and a stout wind. Sometimes Samuel thinks the men see him as Poutrincourt’s right ear, and Lescarbot the left.

  But in any case it seems that the problem with exploration lies in the act of stopping, in the lack of forward motion, in the compass being stowed, in the encavement of vigour within the walls of routine. Once shelter is built, and fuel secured, and the belly filled, clearly one needs distraction beyond the wants of survival. One needs now to explore the smaller maps of pleasure. They have no women, but they do have wine, and so they also have song. And though Samuel has not much ear for it himself, he will continue to encourage poetry from one and all. If only to suggest that exploration can be within. (And if only to give pause to the endless poetry of Lescarbot, which flows out unimpeded by competition. He has succeeded in making Samuel forevermore tired of the words “wondrous,” “France,” “lark,” and “king.”)

  And, an idea he has been pondering: they have spice, they have meat in the forests untried. A day barely goes by without rumours, often from Membertou, of intriguing food — the egg mass of an immense armour-plated fish; mussels smoked under resinous pine needles; even the entire humped nose of a moose in its own especial gravy. So perhaps they might engage in making more poetic with their food? Even Lescarbot agreed with him in this when together they witnessed once again the saddening sight of the men chewing at their salt beef, in their eyes nothing remotely like cheer.

  CHAMPLAIN IS LATE to rise this morning, though even from his pillow he’s heard some commotion without. At first he thinks it a joke, these tidings that Dédé has found three dead bats in the courtyard. (The first joke being that Dédé, so vast and bearded of body, owns the wit to find anything at all.) But to hear that he has found not only the Devil’s creature, but in the number of the Trinity! Israel Bailleul, who has brought the news to his door, spec
ulates while Samuel pulls on his breeches and coat that this very number cancels the harm of the Beast itself, and that, because Each of the Trinity had killed Itself a bat, instead of an omen of evil it was a reminder that God works in their midst in New France and has sent them a sign of exactly this wondrous fact. Bailleul adds that this explanation has become Lescarbot’s official decree on the matter.

  Samuel goes out to see them himself. All three are on the ground, two of them some ten paces from each other, the third being some fifty paces distant, lying over by stores. The morning is warm enough, and with the dew off them they look rather fluffy and innocent, and the pleasant deep brown of sable. Dédé is still promising to all who listen that he has not moved them (save to crush the first one’s head with a foot, “to see if it was dead”!) Yet each was in the identical position, that is, on its belly with wings folded tight against its sides, chin flat out upon the ground.

  Samuel hears more murmurs. That they had chosen to die as one is taken as evidence of either Grand or Evil design, and so he takes it upon himself to protest and offer a less exciting alternative, that, for example, they might all three have been blown down by a single tremendous gust of wind, or eaten a similar noxious food. (This second argument of his is a poor choice, in that the men instantly counter in one voice that it is well known that bats do not eat.)

  Their priest, Fr. Vermoulu, has been pulled out into the yard as well. He appears woeful and silent on the matter and indeed he looks afraid himself. That the priest comes from the hidden low mountains east of Gap, where they are more superstitious than good Christians should be, Samuel has kindly never pointed out to the men, though perhaps he should have, and perhaps some day will have to. Fr. Vermoulu strides about in that heavy manner of his, as if fuelled by duty but weighted down by the Lord’s own knowledge. He stands over the first beast, makes as if to nudge it with a foot, then seems to think better. He now makes a strange motion with his hand, strange in that it began as a blessing and then crumbles into something unknown to them, almost as if the man lost himself. And it is this mistake, this hesitation, that gets the men grumbling and crossing themselves in a mass, and for this Samuel is rightfully angered by Fr. Vermoulu, who is young, and foolish, and in any case very much just a man.

  Risking trespass of the priest’s authority in this matter, Champlain approaches the bats himself. For indeed the priest has failed to take authority in assigning neither Divine nor Evil machination to three bats being identically dead in their yard. Instead he has half inserted his hand, so to speak, and withdrawn it half burnt; and he has caused everyone, even Poutrincourt — the good gentleman almost as agitated as the common — to regard these fumblings with fear and to cross themselves like widows in a boneyard. (Samuel dares admit to himself how much he sometimes does dislike priests; this dislike happens whenever they fail to remind him how much he loves his God.) Superstition — of which he himself has been accused, yes — must not be allowed to take root here and own them all.

  He picks up the first bat by the wing. He himself is startled — but tries not to show it — by how shockingly little it weighs. Though far bigger they weigh less than an acorn, he’d guess. They weigh so little they are like not to exist at all. And yet they do, they marvellous do: half bird, half beast, they are almost pretty of face, yet so hideous in arm and wing and claw. It is their misfortune but not their fault to look like the Devil Himself. And they fly at night, getting into what sorts of mischief no one knows and, yes, perhaps they do not eat. If they do, they do not eat much.

  “A bat,” Samuel states, then flicks the poor imp at a bush. It catches and stays like a sick leaf.

  “There are three?” he asks cheerfully, and at this the men nod and mumble, amazed and afraid, though he can see a few men, Lucien in particular, smirking. Lescarbot smiles too, but with hatred for Samuel, who alone among the educated has thought to use the tack of reason. He has also made an enemy of the priest, but that does not bother him as much. There is a priest back home in Brouage who likes him, and that is where he intends to die.

  “If Dédé was to venture outside the walls I’m sure he’d find a fourth, and a fifth,” Samuel offers. “Someone go ask Membertou if he has ever found more than two. Maybe out in our bay last night a fish died. Maybe all along the shore are some dozen crab lying on their backs.”

  Some men shrug and some nod in allegiance to his sarcasm and he thinks he has changed the course of some minds, at least on this day. For he does own the authority of having lived longest in this New France. He has seen some of its strange creatures and he has been misled and been made afraid, and then ashamed of that fear. He has never made secrets of this.

  He wishes he had more talent to say what he wants to say, something that would incur the priest’s wrath all the more, for the words should be his: that watching them here is the same God who watched them in their cradles at home. This present wilderness might be without religion, yes, but there is no place a man can step that is without God.

  THIS SAME MORNING Membertou announces himself in the savages’ traditional way, shouting “Ho-ho!” from a distance, and he pushes into Champlain’s chambers so wild of face that at first he wonders if the old sagamore wishes to do him harm. Membertou looks the buffoon, yet wily, as Samuel sees in his countenance some sly intent. But so drawn is his face and so distended his eyes that Samuel now sees he is excited on top of being very tired. Even from the door Samuel can smell him, and underneath his usual odour the old man smells like the sourest of mud.

  Wearing this agitated look he approaches while holding his birchbark quiver hidden behind his back — another reason Samuel wonders at his intent. Then he brings it in front of him and holds it out between them and shakes it. There is no evidence of arrows protruding, but something makes a dense rattling from within. Then he holds the quiver in front of his chest and now lifts it farther up, regarding it with his eyes, then thrusting it out in so noble a position that one might suspect it holds the waters of eternal life.

  Membertou says, “Sir!” and spills the contents of his quiver onto Samuel’s table.

  Oh! Escargots! The snails fall out and fill the tabletop. Shiny-wet with dew and their own lovely excretions, the sound produced as they issue forth is a thousand moist clicks at once, more rush than clatter, almost a hiss. He is instantly excited by these beings, this beautiful food. They are slimmer of shell here than at home, but they carry the same pattern of beige and black lines. Wet and made brilliant in the morning light, they are lovely.

  “Eat!” the old man announces, and then laughs, as he often does at his last word when there is nothing more to be said, though no joke has been told.

  And so Samuel learns that his savage friend has been up before sunrise three mornings running, gathering this surprise for him.

  He hadn’t been aware that Membertou was listening, some nights earlier, as some of them were going down to supper, when Samuel had moaned, dreamlike, that what he craved most was a feast of escargots. He does recall Membertou asking after them, and someone thenceforth describing their shell and nocturnal habits, their slow nighttime journey, their glistening trail, and their escape to hidden dens before the sun. But listening he had been, and Membertou has been out hunting the forest floor under the moon, plucking these treasures up.

  Samuel thanks Membertou, who bows his head. Reaching into this private bin of stores he brings out not just a knife but also two iron nails, placing them on the table apart from the snails, some of which have made themselves upright and begun to move. Samuel hopes it is not a flash of disappointment he sees as Membertou hesitates before placing the barter in his wet quiver. The man had worked very hard for Samuel’s pleasure and had seen his joy, and Samuel wonders if perhaps he shouldn’t have given him more nails. Or perhaps even a hatchet. Or it seems perhaps Membertou would be happiest if Samuel had given him nothing at all; perhaps what the sagamore wants most is what he asks for now: nodding his head and walking backwards while leaving, like savage
s do, Membertou mumbles quietly again that he wishes to become Christian. But most of all he looks ready for sleep. It is easy to forget the man is past one hundred years old.

  In any case, though Membertou already knew of the escargot, it seems the savages use them only as forage in difficult times, eating them uncooked and without salt or anything else. No wonder escargots are not savoured by them, for salt truly opens the gift of their flesh. Even as Samuel counts the several dozen on his table he imagines their many brethren that still roam the woods, unaware that no longer are they safe! Still, if in three bouts of searching this agile old hunter found but sixty-three snails, it does discourage Samuel somewhat.

  He likes them as a favourite aunt made them, with shallots and fennel, and of course salt. The fennel is perfect, for are escargots not like fish who carry an encaved pond on their backs? More like fish than flesh in any case, in the same way that the dolphin-fish they speared during the crossing was more flesh than fish — indeed, it was more rich even than beef, and consequently some men were startled off their enjoyment of it. That it blows foul mist and noise from the top of its head is unsavoury enough.

  Sadly, they lack fennel here, though there are rumours of a fern-root that approximates its taste. In the meantime, they have in their gardens some garlic that, though still green in the bulb and the size of a pea, will grace the butter, which will grace the salt, all of which will grace the snail. Tonight Poutrincourt and he will eat escargots. Having for so many of these months been fed on ship’s rations, food that is really not much more than common fuel for a body’s basest fire, he finds that the anticipation of beautiful food is the rarest and best thing. He rolls a snail, in its slime, between thumb and forefinger, and wonders if exalted food, that is, unnecessary food, isn’t, in fact, necessary. He means no disrespect to God when he wonders further if humble men like him are not honouring their lives simply by being, when they can be, magnificent eaters.