by Bill Gaston
But, the news. François offers it all ahush but voiced quickly and with some excitement, for things of import are taking place, and in some absurd way François in his excited posture reminds Lucien of his own sister talking to her friends.
First, his woman, the savage he has so famously befriended — François struggles to say the name — anyway, she has been here, to bring him —
“Ndene,” Lucien says, softly, and he feels an ache of another kind.
— to bring him some medicine. She was not allowed through the gate, at Poutrincourt’s instructions, and then the apothecary d’Amboise claimed he wanted first to study the medicine, and he burned and breathed some of it and mixed some with snow and with ice, and also mixed it with his own remedies and cures. It is said, and here François leans in closer and speaks lower, that the apothecary was making letters and words and shapes with the roots and herbs, and speaking over it, and “to all appearances, experimenting in Darkness.” When discovered, he made as if he would perhaps throw it all out, but Monsieur Champlain simply took it away from the apothecary, who has been ever more and more strange, and told Bonneville to see if it would taste well in a soup.
“The mapmaker said it was powders and ashes all amix. He says he doesn’t know if your woman’s dried things are in there or not. But he also put it in some special wine-drink for a feast, and you are drinking it now. Whatever it might be.”
Lucien pulls back from the cup but it is too dark to see into it. He returns his lips to the reed and sucks harder, with a new hunger, and he thinks, Ndene. And, yes, the wine tastes both good and bad as medicines do.
“This was two days ago,” says François. “You have been sleeping a lot. Which I have heard might be for the good.”
It is the only good.
“And then this morning the strangest event of all. Some savage boys came upon the apothecary in the snow. Seated in the snow.” He waits as if for Lucien’s response, and none comes. “He was waiting, only that. He was up to nothing else. He was not asleep. He had placed himself in back, up near the trees, away from public view. At the edge of the graveyard.”
“We have a graveyard?”
“East of the storehouse.” François points east. He holds his arm up while he speaks. He seems reluctant to say more, but appears to know how it is that a sick man needs any detail about his future, whether it entails health or the other. “Not truly a graveyard. The ground is frozen, of course. So, at this point, the men, the three who . . .”
“They lie waiting in the snow.”
“For spring, yes. And then”— François’s tone gains assurance, as if filled with happy news —“they will be given proper burial, deep and safe in the ground. And already they have good crosses marking where they are. And they are guarded, dawn and dusk.”
“Guarded?”
Lucien smiles gently in asking this but François has closed his eyes and shakes his head. He has said too much and will not consider Lucien’s question, the answer to which involves wild beasts nosing frozen bodies and ripping them to pieces. Lucien touches François on the arm by way of apology, and to ask him to please continue his story, which he does.
“In any case, there in the snow the apothecary sits, choosing where he did as if perhaps to sit bedside with them still, or perhaps feeling remorse that he had not cured them. Who can say? But he was sitting in the snow, resembling a stump, indeed he wore some new snow on his shoulders, and he was almost dead, but healthy otherwise — that is, his own choice sat him down and not some accident. Some say he was that far out of his head and was choosing this way to die.”
“Is he”— Lucien gestures with a loose wrist to indicate his own body —“is he sick?”
“With scurve, no. At least, there is no appearance of it. Monsieur Champlain has let it be known that, exactly this time after Yule last winter, on St-Croix, one man made himself drown, by taking a canoe far out into the bay and tipping it.”
“Yes . . .”
François speaks more quickly. “It is a secret to which he has held firm, until now. I believe he is concerned for all of us, and wants us to be alert to any urges.”
“Yes . . .”
“The apothecary is confined to his rooms, where he was given the full taste of Monsieur Poutrincourt’s anger. We could all hear the shouting. The window glass shook in the Sieur’s wind.”
“I think I heard it too. A curious . . . cure.”
“He is not in good spirits. He is well angered, red with it. His . . . Well, his boy has died, you see, and —”
“I think I knew that.” Did he? For hadn’t that particular moaning note, that lighter and less manly tune, issuing there from the corner, ceased?
“— and as you know, some men’s sadness burns, and shows itself in fighting.”
“Yes . . .”
“And so, Lucien?”
“Yes?”
“You should know that the Sieur is also most angered at you.”
Lucien nods once, merely. The Sieur is but a small part of that which is angered at him.
“You must know that, should you become better, still you might not be free.”
Lucien smiles darkly at this. He thinks, None of you are free.
François says that he should be going, calls him “friend,” and squeezes his shoulder. He takes Lucien’s cup, which is empty, which Lucien has sucked dry with a hope so tired that it can hardly be called hope.
Standing, François lingers, tells him how he feels guilt to announce this, but that they will be having this grand party, a feast, tomorrow evening at supper, involving great food and a butt of the superior wine, and also surprises, and an entertainment. Not for the nobles only, but for all of the men, even some savages. François promises to sing so heartily that Lucien will hear it from here.
“François . . .”
Lucien spoke, but too softly, to the rough carpenter’s back, and the man keeps walking until he is gone. He wanted to ask if the surgeon has cut into any of the men who have died. He heard the surgeon Guillaume speaking of this early in autumn, when the scurve was still but a rumour, was a subject that aroused debate and interest, and the man had said that, like the surgeon at St-Croix had done, he too would cut into the sore legs and the loose faces of the newly dead, so to explore the ill humour to its source. Guillaume had heard that the blood is black in the legs but didn’t believe this, and in any case his desire is to seek out the source of the disease and, once finding it, intuit its cure. Guillaume, from Honfleur, Lucien doesn’t like. He is a man who almost never talks, and his face looks always hungry with something secretive. Lucien has seen him cut apart a pig, with brow knit, adjudging the mixture of fat and table meat. With that same temperament of face he will dissect a man, looking — for what?
Lucien wanted to tell his friend François not to let that stupid man come near his legs.
Lucien wonders if he will see his St-Malo home again. Then he wonders at his certainty, for he knows now that he won’t.
AND SO THE FESTIVE night arrives!
It begins with the mapmaker Samuel Champlain shouting, “Please! To your feet!” and, to a man, those assembled are excitable, smiling with rumours, made young simply because something new, something they don’t yet know about, is unfolding, breaking their habits in half, and Samuel sees this and is glad, because this is truly all he wanted. And now, as men finish rising and silence is once more gained, Ricou takes his fiddle to the peak of a haunting solemnity, and Membertou’s young niece, no more than nine years old, and looking even younger in height, wearing someone’s elegant blue linen tunic, eyes focused on her freight and tongue protruding with effort, bears the first dish into the dining hall, a platter heavy with the comically homely nose of a moose, upright with nostrils attempting to sniff the better odours of heaven. The roomful of men — even the nobles — had been restive and eager, waiting to learn the nature of this evening and its celebration, and because the appearance of the girl is a surprise, and her load a humorou
s one, and the music so bright behind her, the room bursts into laughter and applause. There is perhaps some nervousness too, for though none have eaten moose nose themselves, they are aware that savages enjoy it, and now they have come to understand that, tonight, so will they.
While jugs of hypocras are passed and emptied, Samuel directs the platter of moose nose be placed centre table and then he calls Monsieur Lescarbot forward. When the poet is standing quizzical in front of him, Samuel addresses the roomful of men, which includes, in the corner, Membertou and his main family.
“My good Sieur, and gentlemen all,” shouts Samuel, “on this night we gather at the warm hearth of King Henri”— Samuel gestures at the blaze; the room is jammed with bodies and it grows quickly too hot —“far from our home. But we celebrate, tonight, our new home, and our own good company, and the good cheer that God provides”— he gestures both to the brimming jugs of superior Bordeaux wine and to the table that now bears other dishes too, namely root vegetables, the tureen of stew juices from the moose’s cooking, and the salted eggs from the great sturgeon —“in such bounty. And, so, in the spirit that ’tis a sin not to enjoy His available feast, I do proclaim a new order of fellowship, commencing tonight but continuing through each night until the coming of the first green of spring, and I call our fellowship . . . the Order of Good Cheer.”
The dining hall shakes with affirmative bellowing and goblets are thrust high with such lack of care that hypocras breaches many a rim, and Samuel catches sight of Membertou’s sons shrinking back in possible dismay, for of course they have not minded a word of his speech and are dreadfully surprised. At the height of cheering, men fling open the several parchment windows, for it has got thick and hot, and the effect of casting open the frames is a not unpleasant though rather immodest one of lending their shouts beyond l’Habitation to all the ears of New France. Then a breeze carries some coolness in, and the room is at once smarter for it.
“Fellows!” The men are so eagerly in accord that their silence is instant. “Given that I, your humble son of Brouage, Samuel Champlain, am steward of this first night, I would now like to confer upon tomorrow eve’s steward, this collar of the Order of Good Cheer.”
Amid more lusty cheering, Samuel removes from his own throat the loose, red-ruffled collar, with its three dangling bronze amulets, lifts it high, pauses long enough to catch Monsieur Lescarbot’s eye, waits for the man to dip his head, and then drapes it on. And the hall finds yet another full lung for shouting its approval.
It still feels right to have done this, that is, to choose a successor now, for the next night, though this one has yet even to begin. What he wants is for the men to know that it is not this night only, and not the next night only, but rather a feast that does not stop. A state of lifted humour, of thanks and of appreciation, ongoing in its effect. As well, he hopes this gives spirit to the others, most of them savages, and their women and children, who did not fit in this night’s shoulder-against-shoulder dining hall, that they may well take their turn here tomorrow, or the next night.
In bestowing the collar on his nemesis Marc Lescarbot, he does it as much to challenge an enemy as to offer a wreath of forgiveness to a friend. And he sees from the gleam in the lawyer’s eye that it is taken more as a challenge. Also, indeed, the lawyer no doubt knows that accepting the collar — and how could he refuse! — means that tomorrow morning, instead of nursing hypocras’ head with the rest of them, he needs must be up planning, rehearsing, and procuring new and better cheer. As for tonight, Samuel already has the lawyer’s promise that later, before the course of sweets, he will recite several of his poems, one of them lengthy, making pretty about wine and venison and flowers — so Lescarbot will have to look farther for his main entertainment for tomorrow. (Perhaps he will hasten to resurrect his Neptune play!) Nor can Lescarbot call upon Poutrincourt to play his flute, for the Sieur is already doing so tonight, before the meat course; nor can he ask Ricou to compose yet another three-part song to be sung, for that is commencing now.
It is a beautiful tune! Ricou has begun with a trill of fiddle and, when he stops and tucks it under his arm, both Branchaud and the pilot Champdoré step up beside him and they three sing a simple melody but in three different voices, or keys — Samuel is not adept at music — one voice feminine, another middling, and Champdoré’s a deep bass, and they do not hurry to reach the next note but linger, and then bend the note so that it rises rather than stops, and the effect is lovely — though not so lovely that the men fail to notice the evening’s pièce de résistance: the grand sturgeon-fish, longer than a man and near as thick, lying on a plank fresh milled from a grand birch, borne now to table by Bonneville the cook and two others. Though the fish is no secret to anyone, for it has spent two full days hanging in the smokehouse, to be peered at by yet another small crowd whenever the door was opened to add more wood, and perhaps they have heard his own rumours of the fish’s excellence, for he has tasted it prepared this way in Hochelaga, and he let slip out that in the mouth it will feel more like pudding than like flesh; and indeed this is the same beast from which an entire cask of sleek beige eggs has been scooped and pickled; still the sight of it now resting freshly and well cooked upon the table is enough to bring the men once more to their feet, and they applaud yet again — not so much a bellowing this time, but rather a reverent murmuring, and hands well struck and at length, and, in some cases, noble rings rapped earnestly against pewter.
HE HEARS THEM. Mouth limp and half open, lying only on his back, tits up, he hears them down those impossible stairs and across the courtyard and through the open windows of the dining hall. Singing, shouting. He can hear individual speeches bellowed, sometimes even some of the words. He can hear the trained, blade-sharp tone of the lawyer proudly giving dramatic voice to one of his own poetic compositions.
Their glad noise makes him more lonely than silence has ever done.
In years to come, all they will find, he thinks, all that will outlast his bones, is his cup here, and the brass buttons from his shirt up on that nail. They might mention his name, if his name is remembered by anyone at all, when — to Poutrincourt’s future children perhaps — they point out the well-joined handrail, with the curl and simple fish head carved at its bottom end. A carpenter named Lucien did that fine work, someone might say. And, look at how tight this frame is around the window glass. But that would be the sum of it. Of his life made visible, that would be it.
He knows he should have done more while he owned his life, but this could be his fever’s voice. Still, he remembers, upon seeing the short height of the proposed ceiling in this same common room in which he lies, his urge to say it should be taller. The tall men, like Lucien himself, true, but Dédé especially, almost are made to stoop, and what does this to their moods? And does it not lower how they value themselves? He even had a joke ready — Surely now, let’s have a few more inches! A higher ceiling will give us a small taste of Heaven and not scrape the hair from our heads! — but he was timid to say it to the Sieur, Poutrincourt himself, who stood there saying yes and no over plans for the building, one of which he held and read upside down.
Heaven, yes. Here, it may already be Hell. Here, what will stay here are his cup, and buttons, and tools — awl, plane, and six good drill bits — that are his father’s, and not yet paid back, so not even yet his. All the wooden rest-of-it, and all this sore flesh, will change colours and become other than itself, and then mud. He will leave this ache, this red phlegm, and this falling tissue behind, its foulness accepted into the bestial ground, while his fresh soul flies, on a perfect route, in Heaven.
And what of Ndene? How long will it still live, her wondering after him? She seemed always so proud and happy to walk beside him, turning no eye to any of the young Mi’qmah who could otherwise be her suitors, and who, indeed, were not shy to eye her. How long would her love stay her from the embrace of others?
Cup, buttons — otherwise, nothing. Upon his death his father’s tools
will be taken back aboard the first ship, for that was written down.
As such thoughts scrape through him, they soon fade to become ghosts of themselves. Often he lacks strength for these more brashly coloured thoughts, and he can wrestle only the grey wisps; and then sometimes the biggest part of him is breath. A breath is loud, and then it happens again, and then again, and it saves his life every time. Though he knows he sometimes moans, the breath is constant, and loud enough in his ears. Maybe breath is itself the middle place, is Purgatory. Breath marking time, while we are mortally judged. Time will continue, a breath will rise again, and then probably again, but then there will be . . . a last one. And never another. That moment will come. In this truth, he has the company of every soul now living. It is hollow comfort, but a comfort.
One more thought is muscular as it rises: that final breath will be the biggest proof that we were ever alive.
HIS SLEEP IS PILES of dirty gossamer, and through it he hears laughter and some refrains of song. But Lucien comes back to his mind and understands his plight only when he hears Dédé laugh. This man the size of a door, this man who has grown wider these past months while the other men shrink, who has gone silent as well; whose head hair has begun to fall out while his fetid beard grows dense and tangled, this man whose smell has not once abated — he has entered the sickroom and stands robustly as ever. This man with whom Lucien once licked molasses, and suffered his wink; the man who stood in line behind him and tortured his ribs with a knuckle, and twice slapped his book right from his hands.
Lucien lies on his front with his face against the wall. Now with no small effort he lifts his head and pivots it to face the room and his visitor. At this, Dédé laughs a louder, welcoming laugh, somewhat surprised, it seems, that Lucien is awake. He whispers, but only to himself, Ah, bonjour.
Lucien hears himself moan. He knows what Dédé is about. And in his moan he can hear the past moans of others, in particular the moans of Poutrincourt’s boy, who had lived his last days alone in the chimney box. Indeed, Lucien thinks now that he once saw Dédé slink in there, as much as slinking is possible for that man, and at the time he may have thought it a dream. But Poutrincourt’s boy also would have known why the beast had come, and it was a brilliant plan of Dédé’s to visit himself upon the sick in this way, because in this room any moan was just another moan and he could do what he did with impunity.