Order of Good Cheer (2 page)

Samuel narrows his square: surrounded by forest, a field of stumps fills several acres. In patches faintly greener than brown, small gardens have sprouted. It is late season, but the rooted crops might store under snow.

Narrowing his view farther, he frames what they've built: a sturdy outer wall of well-pointed logs near twice as tall as a man and not possibly broken by wind, beast, or savage. They have a sturdy but welcoming gate, closed to the evils of the night. Inside it, the dwellings are done, save that they wait on the carpenters' slower art to cut in windows and properly hang doors. Bringing last year's planks across Fundy Bay from the damned ruin of St-Croix saved time, though some men bear superstitions about the wood itself, not wanting death's taint in their dwelling, in particular not wanting a bed frame that cradled a corpse. They have been assured by surgeon, apothecary, and priest that the scurve that carried off last year's men is not a pestilence that itself lives in wood. (While surgeon, apothecary, and priest all deem the scurve “a failure of the
spirit,” it is interesting to watch them disagree on exactly what that means, for no one's truth is remotely alike.) But they have cookhouse, storehouse (with eight-foot-deep cellar this time, so naught will freeze), smithy, a nobles' house, a manor (nearly done) and a common house for the men. An inner courtyard, its freedom from stumps their most hard-won labour yet, dug, burnt, and tackled, with ship's rope, for they lack oxen. In the very centre sits their lovely well, a deep hole into earth's clean belly, the blessed wound ensheltered with peaked and shingled roof. There, the handmill (so large is its stone and so taxing the job of turning it, any man who labours there is typically suffering punishment). They own three barrels of salt beef and six of biscuit, and twenty cask of wine, three of which are superior. Two barrels of grain, one cask of salt. The sagamore Membertou boasts that within months all will have moose for the asking, for the snow will come and deepen and they will chase the hobbled moose at their leisure. And, as if God kindly noted their weariness of codfish, the first river herring have arrived up the brook west of their clearing, and though bony they are excellent stabbed through with willow skewer, mouth to tail, and touched to the embers.

The men's mood is good.

Owning the tallest roof, Poutrincourt's manor begins to look fine. Planks for the floor were sawn here, of oak. It will be near as fine a house as a gentleman's country retreat in France, though smaller. In the meantime the Sieur stays next door in the nobles' house, which, though it too will have a glass window, is made of logs and rarely will a day reach its end without a beetle or spider landing excited on one's shoulder. Poutrincourt speaks fondly — eyes shining — of the year his wife will dwell in the manor with him, and the nobles are gladdened by this dream that, with God's giving hand, indeed might come to pass.
Poutrincourt has asked Lescarbot to compose a descriptive journal to carry back next summer to read to Madame Poutrincourt, so to convince her of Port-Royal's healthful beauty. (Judging from the number of pages Lescarbot composes in a night, Samuel suspects the lawyer has aims for audiences larger than one friend's wife.)

And, there: the gentle Poutrincourt has had a path of one mile cleared to a future flower garden and trimmed woods, a place of contemplation and healthful walking. He has also had a smooth-milled cross of some ten feet erected just outside the gate so that, when a man puts his eye to the Judas hole, it commands his vision. A cross of greater size he has ordered placed atop the North Mountain, behind where Samuel stands, but twice again as high. Cutting a path there will take many working days to fulfill, not to mention the milling and transport of such a cross — and some men have grumbled (not to noble ears, of course, but one can see it in their eyes), eager to begin work on their own gardens and fish traps, always in fear for their own survival. But in the end they trust in the wisdom and benefaction of Sieur Poutrincourt, and of God.

There is a small chapel, but also giving comfort are three small cannon fierce enough to hole any longboat trying to land.

Samuel is breathing hard and, discovering himself near tears, he thrusts his hands' frame at it, at l'Habitation, three times, and declares with certainty that New France is born. He decides he will compose a proper portrait of it in map's ink as soon as he descends this hill and rejoins his brothers.

Who are one at the top: Sieur Poutrincourt, of good heart, who lacks a fortune but has been given this land by de Monts, and loves it so.

Who are eight in the middle: nobles of several kind, of birth primarily, in whose number Samuel Champlain takes a modest
place. They serve God and King, and otherwise take their own counsel.

Who are thirty-six at the bottom — including cook, surgeon, gunsmith, apothecary, carpenters, soldiers, workers — men of diverse talent and good fellows all, even the several who came from gaol, their ill deeds minor enough. Some came seeking adventure, some escaping adventures past. All will earn their one hundred and fifty livres, which is thrice that for the same year's labour at home.

Who are one off to the side: Fr. Vermoulu, priest, sees that their souls stay clean and offers a food and a wine most necessary for their survival, both earthly and eternal.

Though perhaps the scurve will not visit this time.

PENETRATING THIS FOREST
of mediocre trees, forearms up against endless chafing branches, the carpenter Lucien realizes how much he misses roads. Here, there is no unhindered walking except in the compound, or the path to the cesspool, or a tilted gambol along the sloped and rocky beach at low tide. Beyond that, one chooses either the deadly sea or the thick forest. At home, even if he never went another place, there were roads to allow escape, if only for the mind. Possibility is itself a freedom. Here he has the morbid sense that this lack of roads plugs his daily dreamings. And at home, when one did walk a road, one could do so without thinking. Here, to walk the forest lost in even a moment's thought is to have one's face pierced, fall off a cliff, or find oneself hugging a nest of wasps.

Though it was hours ago now, if he sucks into the depths of his teeth he can still get some faint molasses onto his tongue. The event was lunatic, truly. The brute Dédé and he had been given the labour of cleansing Monsieur Lescarbot's beloved window glass when it was lifted from its molasses. Lucien doesn't know why he, a master carpenter, was paired up with a common worker for this task — perhaps it was to match his brains to Dédé's brawn for the sake of care. Though Lucien was happy enough for it. A week earlier he'd watched with plenty of other men as that first pane of glass emerged from the safety of its molasses barrel after months of storage in it; they all saw the
main thickness of brown syrup get scraped back into the barrel with sharp wooden spatulas; they watched as the first light won its way through and transparency was reborn. It was a kind of magic. Then two men were assigned the task of walking it tenderly down to the shore to wash it to its original perfection before the glass was installed into Sieur Poutrincourt's frame. Many savages arrived for this, and some looked stricken or insulted as Poutrincourt himself appeared from within, behind his fresh glass, then rapped upon it and waved. Though two older women laughed to each other, and then one shouted something.

Cleansing with seawater is what he and Dédé were this morning charged to do with Monsieur Lescarbot's glass. Dédé insisted on carrying the pane to water's edge unaided, and Lucien let him, guiding him with warnings of approaching stones or slippery clay. The huge man's bare straining calves had the size and spirit of two piglets. On the beach Lucien rolled up his sleeves and went underwater to the knees, but Dédé did no such thing. He glanced back at the compound, grunted a version of “waste not, want not,” hoisted the heavy pane higher, and started licking. A few licks farther along he seemed to notice, through the tan glass, Lucien's stare. He paused in his licking long enough to say, “Yours is this other side, here.” And from their clench his fingertips tapped the gummy virgin side.

Lucien considered, but not long. Simply, what harm? He liked molasses. So he would have some too. He stepped up to the glass. It was nothing but bizarre and ribald to behold the hirsute Dédé, thick black pelt framing his immense red face, his pressed and liquid tongue and madly working jaw, all so close — and then to extend one's own tongue out near it! Lucien first tasted a corner of the glass farthest from the other's face. And it was good, wonderful, not just because unadulterated but also, in a sense, stolen. Lucien relaxed to the ease of a licking puppy; on their own his
eyes fell half closed. But there came a time when their two faces approached, and here, too close, was Dédé's formidable and wide-open working head, and now Lucien was aware of the larger man's noises from the other side of the glass, and the pane's slight wobble, and then they were licking, it seemed, tongue upon tongue, for Dédé had manoeuvred to place his exactly here, and it was a moment of horrible clarity. Then, when Lucien dared look and found himself perfectly eye to eye, the beast winked, and his open mouth was also a smile, though it never paused in the licking. Lucien could not tell, and still can't, what kind of wink it was. It might have said, “Aren't we the best of thieves?” It might simply have marked each other's lust for this sweet. Or, and Lucien hopes not, it might have marked lust of another kind. For this man Dédé looked to be reckless in all directions. In any event it was here that Monsieur Lescarbot caught them at it, and shouted, and strode down the bank to chastise them like boys for befouling his sacred glass, and such was the noble's tone that Lucien didn't dare offer the science that glass could not be harmed by many hundred tongues. Quite the opposite.

LUCIEN ASCENDS A
forested slope. The dog picks up its pace to lead him, and under his feet there is almost a path. It is a path made by him alone, one he has trod perhaps a dozen times now, breaking the weakest of twigs, retarding new foliage. It leads to the promontory overlooking not just the harbour but out between the two mountains through to the great French Bay and on to the west. Looking west is less painful than looking east, and homeward.

Walking a half-path lets him be half lost in thought, and Lucien notes how the pains of homesickness are not unlike those of hunger: not altogether disagreeable, in that their plea augurs
a future fulfillment. And a sweetness in the pain resembles that delivered by certain music. There is also some philosophy to be had in homesickness: though these trees are sadly not France's trees, in their newness is both a horror and a joy at meeting God's limitless imagination.

Lucien considers it an act of wisdom that they've brought the three dogs across the ocean, one of whom, Bernard, leads him now. Stooping to caress a dog and receive its love is the same here as it was in France, so when he caresses a dog he is wherever he wishes to be, the spirit of the act being primary, not the particular mud under one's boots. He loves these dogs with his true heart and tries to copy their humour as they sit alertly guarding doors. Their manner reveals that the very best life has been found for them: half in the wild, half at their master's hearth. Never has he seen dogs so content; they are quick to a command and yet, at rest, they sit so confident in their gazing at the vista, which they seem to feel they own.

It begins to rain and, as is often weirdly the case in New France, it grows warmer for it. At home it rained the whole week before departure and in today's rain he feels the sweet pain of envisioning his oldest brother, Albert — Albert laughing at the beer he holds in his hand, laughing at smiling women and duck farts and the surprise of a sunset. And the pain grows even sweeter in thoughts of his lovely sister Babette, closest to him in age and in heart. He will never forget the night before he put to sea. Neither of them could sleep, and for this they blamed the heat blown down on the early mistral winds. They spoke in whispers so as not to wake anyone else, and grew used to this kind of voice and the intimacy it needed — almost a touching of foreheads. They became giddy at having passed sleep by. At one point Babette took her portrait from the wall, bade Lucien come watch, placed it on her lap, and let fall numerous candle drips
upon it until her face was obscured fully. Then announced, “There, I am dead.” But the marvellous thing about her is that her mood was made content by this, and it was only a momentary depression, or perhaps even a purgative.

They left the scraping of wax from paint to the artistry of Charles the cook, who always boasted of his delicacy with knives, claiming in full seriousness that if they would only give him a knife sharp enough he could split and split a pig's bristle until it became a feather.

LUCIEN'S SCALP LIFTS
and he leaps an inch as Bernard roars into the trees, disappearing. The dog has begun to find food of his own, though usually it amounts to nothing but a long chase. And once the noble Breton, his head half white, half black, returned to the compound with his muzzle and the brow of one eye pierced with an agony of spears. White barbed little terrors, some an inch deep, they apparently came from a fearsome creature no one wants to meet. The mapmaker Champlain, it is said, claims to know of the creature. He likens it to a beaver that launches these harpoons with its tail, but no one believes him. Lescarbot, whose camp of allegiance is larger than that of the quiet Champlain, publicly refers to the unlikely beast as Champlain's “
petit googoo.”

Lucien continues uphill, into the rain. Bernard will find him. Perhaps because he commenced his walk while thirsty, and continues thirsty (or perhaps it is the molasses), the rain causes the foliage and its myriad greens to look lush and sweet-tempered, as if all could be eaten and enjoyed.

How is it, Lucien wonders, that the savages hereabouts know what can and what cannot be enjoyed as food? Has it simply been a process, undertaken countless years ago, of tasting?
Swallowing a slight bit, then putting one's ear in one's stomach, as it were, to listen for first whispers of illness? And had this trial by fatal error possibly taken place in France in its darkest early years too? For how else would their own knowledge have come about? The Bible makes mention of husbanded foods and of some others profane, but there is no list of wild plants, no warning as to which mushroom causes a devilish shouting death and which is as fine as meat in the stew. At home, in the forest behind St-Malo, none of these thoughts would have come to him; but on this path, amid all these glistening and seemingly beckoning leaves, shoots, cones, curls, pods, hoods, mosses, of which at least half he is ignorant, the savages' knowledge as to what here is
food
seems like wisdom of the most miraculous kind.