Order of Good Cheer

by Bill Gaston

  So Lucien is gone from l’Habitation these past few days. He must be weak still, and either he is alive or he is dead, perhaps killed by savages, some of whom will be his rivals. These Mi’qmah are more peaceable than most, but there are those in any tribe who will kill who they can.

  In any case he is gone. And here Samuel will admit — he must turn and see himself to admit it — that Lucien’s leaving has made him sick with emptiness inside. He discovers only now that the carpenter is the closest man to a friend he has had in New France. Perhaps elsewhere. His leaving has shown not just how alone he is in these days but, more so, how alone he has been throughout this life.

  His friend is out there somewhere, beyond these walls.

  And Samuel finds himself envious of Lucien in this regard. They of l’Habitation will likely not stay here, not even in New France. None of them. Even the Sieur Poutrincourt, whose dream was to raise his children on this very land, is saying now that he may not, it is too hard, the winters too harsh and long, the land itself dangerous if only for its vastness. All will go home, if not this summer, then the next. Samuel himself will find new virgin shore, and make new maps, but first must await, as always, a benefactor with dreams, or a newly whimsical king. It is Lucien alone who will remain here, in Port-Royal, this darkly beautiful land, with its calm bay.

  Samuel notes the islet across the way, white with birds along its shore, their shared cacophony a single ragged note. And he cannot help but contemplate — still envious — that though the scope of Lucien’s world is small, circumnavigated by paddle in a tiny craft, or on foot, Lucien’s explorations will outdo Samuel’s own by leagues and leagues. For though his body will travel the least of any of them, the journey of needs undertaken by his head and by his heart is unfathomable. Lucien must wilfully become as the Mi’qmah. He must win a brutal new life.

  The cook signals the midday meal. Samuel feels no hunger but he will go and eat with the men. There is gladness in their planning. Gardens, apparently, will be everywhere. Lescarbot whispers rhymes to himself about the firmness and lustre of his haricots verts. The men speak of women and their throats swell closed. The Sieur wonders about the size of the Cross still to be milled and placed, magnificent, on the North Mountain.

  Before Samuel goes in, he angles his face fully into the sun, seeking some small heat, and for the first time finds some. So, after eating, he will scrape his cheeks free of winter beard, and be the first of the men to do this.

  11 mai 1607

  KNEELING BEHIND, in the canoe belonging to Ndene’s brother, he watches the turn and flex of her body in its paddle stroke, sees the poetry in that skill. He watches her hips for signs of swelling, but of course it is too early for that. She quietly vomited — soqotemun — again this morning. Twice there has been no blood — maltew — during her time of moon. She will not say the word for fear of turning their luck, but he has heard it from all the other women, always said through a smile, and the word is teleg. It is all too much to think about. It is easier to simply learn the words.

  He’s learning their language in part because Ndene has decided there is no need now for her to learn his. So be it. Her finality is not cruel, it is plainly honest, and he has never known her to be wrong. But with similar small regret did he burn the pages of his sole book, the Homer, to use as ripest kindling for his own and Ndene’s brothers’ fires, and in so doing gained their friendship, for paper is not only rare to them, it is so beyond their reach as to be almost a kind of magic. And in not many weeks the book was gone. Burning it took his breath away, but it also made him laugh. The leather cover he uses for a stiff window flap in the house, if it can be called a house, one that Lucien, with much argumentative and often useless help, cobbled up in a hurry. The carpenter in him was disgusted at having to use mostly bark; its lack of uniformity made him almost nauseous. He had to learn to laugh at himself, learning what seemed a child’s trade. Ndene, finally and properly angry with him and what she took to be his French arrogance, asked him if his new house didn’t keep out the draft as well the more pompous walls of l’Habitation, and in the end Lucien had to admit that it did.

  This morning they paddle to the farthest upper reaches of the bay, where he has been but twice, and he is excited to see it again, and in green bloom. But the paddle will tire him. He is not yet himself, though his legs have regained some thickness. Perhaps all that can still be seen of his disease is when he speaks, having lost three teeth, companions to one another, so that now there is a gap in the bottom front corner of his mouth, a place where Lucien has taken to resting his crude pipe, however infrequently it is filled.

  It is full spring now, siggw, and with it the people are happy, their bodies eager to move, to work for as long as the sun is up. He helps as he can, and most are friendly as they teach him. But he finds it a trial to be away from Ndene for long, a half-day is almost too much, and no one minds this of him. To be alone — Lucien insists on the French habit of being alone to make love — they walk a trail together, or more often as they gain this warmer weather take a canoe to the grassy fields, like these they approach at the head of the bay. Today, as on others, they have with them her basket for any curled shoots of fern they might find and pluck (he so craves these, and even more so the small onions, though both need be well cooked). As well, pointed at the sky and useful as a cane when his legs weaken, he carries a long spear for the eels that any time now will come onto the muddy shallows, where they lose sight of danger as they twine and couple, just as Lucien and Ndene are about to do.

  He aims for a rockless groove in the mud, then sculls with paddle, slowing their glide. As one they both stab the mud with a paddle, halting the canoe before it beaches. He enjoys how little they need speak. Few tasks need more than pointing, sometimes with a finger, or even a blink. First Ndene and then Lucien steps out into icy water. The blonde bitch, which followed Lucien away from l’Habitation simply because he’d whispered a whistle to her, leaps into the water barking, thinking it play. Ndene named her Stag, which is funny to Lucien, but these people don’t see the sex of creatures in the same way, and Ndene smiled at his queries and said only that the dog has the same lift to her head as a stag does.

  They carry the canoe high, well above any rocks, and take it up to rest on the grass. A canoe with a hidden hole can mean not surviving a trip across this very bay, and since it is the season of watery sap, not yet the good gum — sqmugualaw— and holes can take an entire afternoon to repair, why not take care and win that time for exploring these grass fields, and each other?

  Canoe secure, Ndene begins the brisk walk upriver, taking what is almost a path. First Lucien stands to peer back across the water, in the direction of l’Habitation, for here is a most complete view of that entire shore. He sees the tall thread of their smoke. He feels a kind of homesickness, though not the full swollen heart that wants St-Malo and his sister Babette, and Mother, and his old bed. (He thinks Simon might try getting word to them of his true condition, but he isn’t sure.) Whenever he eyes the distant smoke from their wet-wood fires he feels mostly a hollow loathing, though he does miss his friends. Simon, and François, and Leduc, and Bonneville, who so loved to feed them. The map-maker too, in a way. And now, as testament to what remains of them in his heart, he wears the necklace — so noisy with rattles it is no good for hunting, so misshapen it is no good to trade — that Monsieur Champlain forced tearfully into his palm as they stood in the snow. For this, they’d taken him just beyond the gate and the knowing eye of the Judas hole, a furtive and hasty farewell and then — he was alone.

  Once, a fortnight ago, in the dark, after the moon set, he paddled past, not a stone’s throw offshore, so close that the hair rose on his neck, for he could see the sentry move when his paddle was heard. The sentry called a warning — it sounded like Leblanc — and in his excitement Lucien wanted to shout back a jibe, a comedic bird call, anything, to let his friends know he was here and alive, perhaps as happy as they were, perhaps more so. But he q
uelled an equal urge to shout something obscene, and a list of names for Satan to take for his use. Neither kind of theatre won out; silence was and still needs must be uppermost in Lucien’s relations with them.

  Has he changed? He bathes more than he used to. He eats less. Some days he eats nothing, and some days, like a dog, he eats until he sleeps. He can speak with his new people but not well, and many of them still think he is stupid. The children pretend that he is, for they enjoy his teasing and know he is not. And though Ndene has decided that there is no need for him to teach her any more French, he is teaching it to Ndoxun, Membertou’s grandson, who in truth is the sagamore’s great-nephew. Lucien sees that Ndoxun, who might be his own age, will become his closest friend.

  Lucien is sometimes content. He has discovered that he feels relief for a world become smaller. In this life he might see little beyond this bay, or a few leagues inland from it, where apparently this summer they will hunt certain birds and roving deer and porcupine — he has seen one, it is real — and trap de Monts’s precious beaver, and collect vegetables for drying. He will learn from Ndene’s people how they make their houses, and with his several tools he has shown them some small things too, but not much. He will not frame himself, nor anyone else, as Sieur in a fine French house.

  Living in marriage with Ndene he has known children were forthcoming, but this speed is almost too much, he isn’t sure he has the strength to witness, let alone partake in, what’s to come. No, he is excited: it feels not unlike yet another voyage! Perhaps the main mystery in this is how many, and will he love them so well as to be subsumed by them, as many fathers are and his own father was not. And would he then spend his years of fatherhood quietly smiling, as though, somehow, naught can now go wrong? He does know this is merely romantic, as is: each child would grow up as rich with private thoughts as a book has pages, and they would grow well beyond his body as well, peopling the lands west of this bay. This vision is so clear it is like he has always had these offspring and has only to make their acquaintance. Again, Ndene will speak of none of it, wary of dashing their luck.

  He catches up to her. Waiting for him, she stands just off the trail, her hand fondly embracing a young tree. She turns when he comes, smiling, pats the trunk, and says, “Malip qwanj.” It is the nut tree he has heard of, with nuts that are sweet, seggw.

  She continues walking. Trails, when they exist, are never wide enough for two, but he is happy to follow her, for it has become her custom to walk before him and point out leaves or objects and say their names. To make sure he is listening, she might call a mushroom an armpit. One time, she called a hummingbird a penis. (There is always some slight poetry to her ruse.) Then, some weeks afterwards, he called his penis a hummingbird and she laughed, remembering, and they paused and saw into each other’s eyes to know once more how much they are together in mind. And also now, more and more, how they are in the other’s memory.

  In this same way, Lucien can see that, soon enough, this day will be in their past. And sometimes, when he thinks of his life here, his future so tightly enmapped, his days and nights so closely twined with these new people, he feels vastly alone and he grows afraid. Yet he seems to have found remedy for this dark humour. He calls it kindness. He gives it to himself most of all. He may have won this notion from his reading, he does not know, but when he gives it, kindness, it eases his blood and also goes beyond his blood. He knows that if he ever doubts this remedy he will begin to cause harm.

  Today, as on some other days, they do not get to their destination — to check a weir for early river herring — right away. They are but half the distance upstream when Ndene bends to pluck a sprout, saqaliag, and brings it to his mouth. It is delicious, the mixed bitter and sweet of endive. And now they spot a clearing with some sun on it, and she pulls him by the hand, or perhaps he pushes her, and they fall to the warm ground, making honeyed songs in their throats, a wordless moaning language that they have learned together and is possibly theirs alone.

  And so it goes. A first blackfly of the season fights the breeze for purchase on the carpenter’s neck. Lying on the earth, the breeze and the bug in a dance on his bare skin, Lucien feels, again, all there is to feel. It could be any place. All he knows is that, as he goes into Ndene, in the push of entrance itself, all other routes are vanished and there is only this one. It might be the only thing he knows. It is a moment that, after firmly held breath, two souls trumpet with a gasp — a vast thing. As he enters her, there is no more need. All maps and questions are burnt. When he enters her, and she him, the road is clear as one already taken, the acorn is already the oak. It is as if they have been long, long dead and come to life only now.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  READERS OF CANADIAN history will know the liberties I’ve taken with Samuel de Champlain and his time spent in what is now Annapolis Basin, Nova Scotia. The biggest alteration, which simply made the story easier to tell, was the condensing of the events of two years into one. Aside from primary texts, such as Champlain’s Voyages and Explorations and Lescarbot’s Nova Francia, I found most helpful the lesser-known Gentlemen and Jesuits by Elizabeth Jones. I’d also like to thank the helpful and informed folks at l’Habitation, the Port-Royal National Historic Site of Canada. Merci bien.

  As for the Prince Rupert story, I’d like to thank Karen W., and the many friendly people of that town, who didn’t know they were being spied upon.

  I would also like to acknowledge the assistance of the Canada Council, the British Columbia Arts Board, and the University of Victoria.

  And cheers to Bobo the Wheatboy for the grain lore.

  Otherwise, thanks to those who read versions and chunks of this book as it took shape: the lovely Dede Crane, Joan MacLeod, John Gould, Gentlemen’s Fiction Club cohorts Mike Matthews, Jay Ruzesky, Bill Stenson, and Terence Young, and lastly, my editor, Lynn Henry.

  AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH: CLOWNBOG STUDIOS

  BILL GASTON is the author of several collections of fiction, including the Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Mount Appetite, the Governor General’s Literary Award finalist Gargoyles, and the acclaimed novels Sointula and The Good Body. His work appears in Granta, Tin House, and Best Canadian Stories, and has been translated into several languages. Gaston was the inaugural recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada Timothy Findley Award, for a distinguished body of work. He lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Fowl

  Fish

  Comedy

  Close Quarters

  A Little Necklace

  The Metronome

  The Order of Good Cheer

  The Party

  New World

  Author’s Note