Order of Good Cheer

THE ORDER OF GOOD CHEER

a novel by

Bill Gaston

Copyright © 2008 Bill Gaston

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.

This edition published in 2008 by
House of Anansi Press Inc.
110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801
Toronto, ON,
M
5
V
2
K
4
Tel. 416-363-4343
Fax 416-363-1017
www.anansi.ca

Distributed in Canada by
HarperCollins Canada Ltd.
1995 Markham Road
Scarborough, ON,
M1B 5M8
Toll free tel. 1-800-387-0117

House of Anansi Press is committed to protecting our natural environment.
As part of our efforts, this book is printed on paper that contains
100% post-consumer recycled fibres, is acid-free, and is processed chlorine-free.

12 11 10 09 08     1 2 3 4 5

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Gaston, Bill
The order of good cheer / Bill Gaston.

ISBN
978-0-88784-200-9

1. Champlain, Samuel de, 1567–1635 — Fiction. I. Title.

PS
8563.
A
76076 2008       
C
813'.54       
C
2007-907357-3

Jacket design: Ingrid Paulson
Text design and typesetting: Ingrid Paulson

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program
the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of
Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (
BPIDP
)
.

Printed and bound in Canada

To my grandchildren

Can we agree, the past is not dead but
the present is its surprising and complex flower?

— Felix d'Amboisee

SAMUEL SITS AT TABLE
, alone, eyeing the roasted fowl without hunger, when he hears the sentry's yelp.

Bonneville has but moments ago brought and deposited the meat platter angrily, perhaps because he knows he needs must deliver it again, reheated, once Poutrincourt and the others return. All day they've been off in the longboat seeking what salt marsh might be diked and drained. A wind has risen to fight their return, and Samuel hopes this is the sole reason they are late.

He nudges a bird breast with a knuckle. The flesh does not give. Perhaps it wasn't anger on the cook's face — perhaps Bonneville is shamed by his own fare. Samuel eyes the platter of five duck. That is, he tries to think of it as duck. The thin black bill suggests less a mallard than a kind of gull. His tongue knows it too, a taste more of salt reeds than of flesh. He can smell nutmeg rising from the pooled yellow fat, and also garlic, but no cook's magic helps. And one must wonder why the heads have been left on: these birds are not game, nor this the after-hunt, one's trophies displayed on the platter. These birds can be netted and broken to death by children, and are barely food. Smelling them, Samuel almost yearns — almost — for the salt beef and biscuit they chewed every day of the crossing, the mere
memory of which makes the floor pitch and move with swell. The common men eat from those barrels still.

He pinches up a bird by the beak, lets it drop, stiff-necked. He takes his knife and taps a black bill. It glistens well; and its shape is not unlike the curled thrust of a talon, the kind that adorns necklaces worn by the great sagamores to the west. He must remember to snap off these bills and collect them in a pouch, for a necklace of his own, a bit of craft he might fill some hours with, to complete and save and take back to France next summer and give to . . . whom?

Pretending appetite, Samuel hoists a dripping creature whole and takes a bite of skin. Bonneville won't want him eating this cold, when it tastes all the worse.

THE SENTRY'S NEXT YELL
has Poutrincourt's servant boy — who is one of the several fellows in this colony who can be smelled before he is heard — standing pungently at his side to tell him a lone savage is at the gate.

“Is he old?”

“Sir, I do not know that.”

“Please, quick, find if he is old.”

He walks rather than runs. Samuel wonders if the boy's risked impudence is due to Samuel's being the lone noble who hasn't a servant — even the priest has one. The boy would have run if Poutrincourt were here, and though Samuel will say nothing of it he guesses that before winter is out this boy will be flogged. Samuel also finds the whelp's red waist sash somehow impudent. Nor does he care for the up-tilt of the boy's nose, which allows a constant view into his nostrils — though Samuel knows one should strive to love whichever of God's designs a man is born with.

He has heard only that the sagamore is impossibly old, and that one of his names is Membertou. Membertou is the reason Samuel stayed behind today, and yesterday, and the week previous, the sagamore having sent word that he would soon come. Samuel hopes that Membertou is who it is, if only to get this waiting over.

He finds the Mi'qmah tongue twisted and mystical and often senseless, but of all the nobles he is most able at it and so his duty is to stay and make contact with the sagamore. Indeed, Poutrincourt made formal request that he do this, possibly suspecting Samuel's regret. For though Samuel knows their words he is less at ease with their ways — their false smiles, the bluster and sometimes interminably long speeches about vainglorious and unlikely deeds. Samuel is a mapmaker. He is a mapmaker who quite needs the sea and who on land is made edgy at the thought of anyone else in the longboat without him, face into the breeze, discovering even so much as the next league of mud and clams. They should have left behind the lawyer. Lescarbot could trick out the sagamore's trust with his winks and soft pinches to the elbow.

The odorous boy barely pokes his head in the door to tell him, “The savage is old. No weapon. Not very large, but tall.”

So it is Membertou, and it is the day Samuel has both wished for and not, this meeting of France with New France. Poutrincourt has expressed some worry about their welcome by these savages who have for the most part presented themselves as a scatter of ghosts off in the trees: first several men, peering out, then more emboldened, standing in postures with weapons in view, and later the women, and then also children, who laughed and sometimes bent to aim their bums.

Samuel finishes chewing and rises. He plucks a serviette to wipe his lips and beard of bird grease — though some savages
would veritably enshine themselves with it, with grease of any kind, in these parts preferring, apparently, bear fat. He wonders why Membertou is alone. Up the great Canada River Samuel met more than one sagamore and none of them ever appeared without entourage, braves to fetch things and to yell at, not so unlike the King's own military.

The air of the courtyard is fresh as he strides through. The westerly has some scowl to it, and scalloped cloud says rain comes tomorrow. Samuel sees that Bonneville has wedged open the door to his hot kitchen and, inside, the cook stands on tiptoes to peer out his vent, toward the gate. One door along, the smithy's clanging and rending has likewise stopped. Samuel wonders if Membertou is truly over one hundred and, if so, how well he walks.

At the barred double gate, Poutrincourt's boy leaps laughing away from the Judas hole and stands aside. Samuel hesitates and, feeling watched by the boy, says, inexplicably, “Oui.” He clears his throat and stoops to peer through the hole. No one stands without. There, empty, lies the field of fresh black stumps running down to the beach and the choppy waters of the bay. To either side, more stumps, and then the dark forest. But there at the beach he spies the thin grubby beak of a canoe, aground where the longboat normally rests. But no old sagamore, no Membertou.

Now, an inch from his bare eyeball rises some dirty, greasy hair. No topknot, no part or braids — it is hair made by the wind and also, so it appears, by sleep. Now a forehead, though not that of an old man. Now eyebrows, grey and fine and glistening with grease, two narrow pelts trod upon by snails.

Still in his prank, the savage continues rising to the hole slowly, delaying the show of his eyes.

Now the eyes do come, and both they and the skin around them are deeply those of an old man. Hardened in duty, Samuel
will hold Membertou's gaze, setting himself the task not to look away first. For today his own eyes are his King's eyes, and those there are the eyes of New France. They have risen full centre in the Judas hole and they widen in surprise at seeing Samuel's. Now Samuel sees the smile in them and understands that the surprise was actually feigned, was mirroring his own expression. Membertou's eyes hold this humour but Samuel sees something more behind, a strong quality he cannot put a word to. If wisdom and curiosity could become one gleam, it would be that.

In a tongue Samuel must tilt his head to know, the sagamore Membertou lisps softly, “I smell duck.”

CHAMPLAIN REACHES THE
promontory huffing hardly at all compared to before. He has grown his land muscles again, from these weeks walking it.

Daily he has climbed to this spot for reasons other than healthful exercise. Up here there blows a harder and finer wind than that down in the compound, one that barely ruffles hair. This higher wind carves in between two mountains, in through the gut that serves as entrance to their port, and this wind smells of that true wilderness — the sea. Samuel never tires of this smell, which makes straight for his innards and draws him. But the loveless spirit of sea wind also humbles him and makes him glad to be up here for a second reason: to see his present safety, below. For l'Habitation is born. The mapmaker makes an artist's square of his hands and there, through it, captured entire, is his world:

A sheltered harbour of such size that it may one day hold a hundred of France's ships. Three rivers flow into it, and they are
named the Eel, the Antoine, and the Mill. Much of the shore is shallows of mud bottom, which keeps many birds, some of which are good enough at table. Some spans of mud are dense with clam, which the men hesitate to eat, for it makes dysentery unless taken with fresh bread. From the north wind they are shielded by this shelf of mountain at Samuel's back. Everywhere lie pockets of a soil that is black and deep. Their forest boasts seven species of tree, one of which presents an unknown nut. Trout hide in all three rivers, and salmon might come late summer, sculling shoulder to shoulder in so thick a school that, says Bonneville, their future children already run across their backs. Membertou promises to show them how to catch a fish long as a canoe. A copper mine lies undug, twenty miles north, in a steeply cliffed bay. The region lacks vines.