Order of Good Cheer (12 page)

Samuel clears his throat and tries again.

“That is, one problem with settlement seems to be the settling. Itself.”

At this Poutrincourt raises his brows in polite agreement but there is nothing like the smile or chuckle Samuel hoped for. Indeed, his sitting room looks nothing like a place of smiles, or of settlement, for that matter. In the gloom, at Poutrincourt's side rises the staircase to his bedchambers, and the staircase lacks a railing or spindles yet. It looks dangerous, or like the painting of a maliciously vacant dream.

Samuel is again aware of the chasm between knowledge and wisdom: one can gain much knowledge and yet at the same time remain dumb to its
use
. Take the farmer who expertly raises the cow and yet remains all thumbs at the butcher's block when said cow's flesh needs preparing. Or take himself: his amateur study of musical performance and the levels of comedy leave him painfully aware that his knowledge of comic art sees him no better equipped for comedy itself. That is, he doesn't know how
to lend humour to a situation. He has seen how utterly he lacks wit, save the vengeful kind that flowers in the brain slowly, blossoming some minutes too late. Which isn't wit at all but a kind of rumination, a bitter chewing on comedy's dead petals.

He simply is not funny. The elements of comedy are much like those of music, and he lacks what is probably something like rhythm. Poutrincourt has cleared his throat, which sends his boy to Samuel's side, and now Samuel sees that his own cup is empty. With pinched fingers he shows the lad that he is not much thirsty tonight.

Even the brutish Dédé has a rhythm — the coughing barks necessary for low comedy, the shouts about farts and fucking, a comedy for souls which need improvement — still it is wit and it demands a certain rhythm. Sometimes it is quick-paced indeed, an onslaught well lubricated, and sometimes its practitioners employ a knowing delay before the crescendo, which is often of a physical kind, a slap or shove or mimed explosion.

However much he would love to discuss comedy now with Poutrincourt, the latter is clearly, and literally, not in the mood. Nor, Samuel is coming to understand, did his friend have much conversation beyond his own practical dreams — the size his manor was to be, the ideal
au pair
for his children, what sort of trap would best catch these too-wily river herring. Samuel would've loved to discuss not only the reason he has come visiting this night — that being the subject of middle comedy, of men who seek to learn about and laugh at their own behaviour — but also the rare nature of high comedy, and what discovery he had just made of it, right here in Port-Royal. He would've loved to have been granted the interested audience to describe his understanding of high comedy: that it begets more tears than laughter, for it is the heart being struck with strong loving blows; it is passionate, not with yearning but with sagacious awe; it has to
do more with death than birth, or more clearly with both at the same time; it has to do with man's folly and wisdom combined; it often sounds like the voice of God. He would have loved to explain and discuss all this with Poutrincourt, but even more, he would have been afterwards keen to have the man's opinion on the discovery he had just made — it is the
savages
here who, of any society he has yet seen, are prone not to low or even middle comedy, but to high.

It was the sagamore Membertou who instilled this thought in him. It was more than Membertou's nobility, of which all of them could agree he was possessed. And it was more than the elaborate theatre with which the savages embraced their dead and dying. No: it was more with their reception of daily events. The way Membertou, for instance, greeted a change in the weather — his face might widen in a kind of thanks, and awe, as if God Himself (though they have no god as high) had presented Membertou alone with a gift. Membertou's adoring face at hearing, for the hundredth time, the capture of a moose in leanest times, would similarly remind Samuel of someone sitting in audience to high comedy. It was the perfect opposite of frivolous, which middle comedy could sometimes be.

So, perhaps naively, Samuel has come to regard Membertou's life as a kind of simple but sacred opera. What else could be said of one for whom clouds meant more than the possible onset of rain? Though what would Poutrincourt make of this? Dare he tell him? For this whimsy has also changed his mind as to the savages' mode of government — which both Cartier and La Roche insisted they lacked entirely. This was an easy mistake to make, the sagamore's word being law in times of war and dispute and marriage only, while the rest of the time his people did what they pleased, save, perhaps, murder. But Samuel has now remarked that, of each of the seven or eight sagamores he has
encountered in the several years he has voyaged to this world, most of them shared, at least to some extent, this nobility, this attenuation to high comedy, and it was this attitude and general bearing that the rest of the tribe could respect, and learn from, and to some extent emulate. Even when a sagamore lied to you as transparently and bald-faced as a clumsy child, you could just as easily tell that something in the man's very bones would not allow him to lie similarly to his own people. In fact it seems to Samuel that, compared to what he has seen of his own Royal Court at home, here in the land of savages a more natural hierarchy reigns — though this is something he will never dare record in his journals, published or not.

But what Samuel has wanted to do, and why he visits this night and seeks to gain Poutrincourt's advice, is to introduce to their settlement a series of banquets, with entertainment. Poutrincourt has some wit, and appreciation of wit, though apparently both had lessened as this season died and leaves fell upon the ground.

Poutrincourt listlessly raps his empty glass on the chair arm, and it takes a while for either Samuel or Poutrincourt's boy to understand that the man is calling for more wine. The boy jerks as if dragging a stuck leg and is for one moment unsteady on his feet, and Samuel hopes to God that this isn't a sign of one so young falling ill.

But Samuel begins:

“It seems, sir, that once shelter is well built, and fuel secured, and the belly filled, and God properly thanked, one needs some mode of pleasure beyond survival.”

“It seems.” As if to illustrate, Poutrincourt downs half of his freshened wineglass. Seeing this, his boy simply stands beside him with jug at the ready. He is pale yet glossed with sweat and truly does not look well.

“I have means in mind by which to introduce some middling comedy into our midst. That is, a way to rouse the men to a more cheerful humour. Without relying solely on —” Samuel lifts and waggles his own wineglass. On the chance he has just insulted his host, he adds, “Which has proven itself well, but which, in the morning, does tend to balance last night's pleasures.” Samuel has heard enough vomiting to last him all winter.

“And then some,” Poutrincourt agrees, tapping his temple, though rather brusquely and not smiling. “Please, do go on. Reveal your genius.”

“No, I am no heroic figure. It is a modest suggestion.”

“I was being facetious.”

DEATH'S YELLOW IN
these uppermost leaves is a hard sign it's autumn, but Lucien will let this gloom pass him by. Why ponder the growing cold, and future snow, when one can stay in the warm middle of this moment as it comes?

He is far up a giant old birch looking for branches of size for the spindles of the Sieur's staircase. If one can find them already grown to a near fit there is less need for lathe and measurement, all asquint in the dark of the shop. But he lies to himself — if he truly wanted made-to-measure he should be down there amongst the saplings. In truth he mostly wanted to climb this wise old tree that happened also to be white. Such a vast white tree should be the premise of a fairy story, though he isn't aware of any. In winter a huge white tree would be invisible — and wouldn't that be a good story's beginning?

He doesn't bother unpocketing his drawknife. No branches are straight. Even the youngest have taken their parent's gnarl. But he pauses for the view. He can see the whole of the bay and the entrance into it, that fissure in the mountains through which their ship brought them, a gap that's hard to see without feeling a pang inside. He strains to see the settlement, but aside from two lines of smoke issuing from a notch where there are no treetops, there is nothing marking the scar they've made in this vastness of forest.

Though it's not quite the tallest tree, such is its magic that, while in it, Lucien feels he is in the forest's very centre. He's about to descend his grand white tree when he sees them, the scatter of women and children in a meadow he hadn't noticed before. All of them are hunkered down and digging at something, lunging rhythmically as if kneading the ground's intestines. Around the perimeter the youngest of them run and play unabated. Curiously, now that he sees them, he can also hear them. There: a shrill laughing scream, and an answering young roar.

HE THOUGHT HE
was quiet, but when he arrives out of the trees and into their meadow the women and children have stopped their digging and already stand up facing him, all with the identical expressionless face. Lucien cannot read if it is fear, or just an abiding caution, or even a common request that he leave. It is no meadow but a kind of swamp, and the savages are digging up white bulbs, onions perhaps, but barely the size of acorns. They hoard the muddy little globes on squares of birchbark at their sides. He smiles and waves. None moves, so he waves again and this time shrugs, and as he enters farther from the woods, wearing his largest smile, one foot sinks deep in muck and he flounders and yells, “Aghh!” The children erupt as one with laughter and, Lucien can tell, derision. Half of the dozen women turn away and resume digging. At the same time, paying Lucien no attention at all, an old woman passes him by as she comes out of the forest too, cinching closed the hide strips of her nether garments, clearly having just accomplished her toilet.

A younger one has risen and approaches him from the back of the group. She simply and easily strides up to him and stares. He could be a fish lying on salt at the market and she someone's
daughter with orders to shop. Is she sixteen, or his age — twenty — or even older? Impossible to tell. He has not seen so many of them in a group before. All looked the same at first, partly because of their similar hides, and black hair, and olive skin. Now he marks their odd and differing ornaments, beads and small conical shells, and strings of coloured hemp, and some women are wrinkled around the eyes, and fringes of human winter in their hair. This present girl, eyeing him as if to determine his freshness, decides to ask him a question before she purchases him for dinner, for she begins speaking and doesn't stop for some time. Her language is full of breeze and softly snapping twigs. His instant wish is to have some language lessons from Monsieur Champlain, for he can hear clearly enough that her words offer not just facts but also shades of meaning and angles of the heart. She wears mud to her elbows but seems not at all shy about that. Lucien can smell this mud, blended not unpleasantly with a smell that is her own, one like rank apples. She's not so pretty as some he's seen but Lucien can tell she will laugh at herself. In her round face her eyes are underlarge, though he thinks he can see that when she is an older woman, she will be in some way wise.

She has stopped talking. She regards him more calmly, and now she shrugs, and it is plain to Lucien that the shrug says, “I was foolish in trying to talk to you, but I tried.” He shrugs just as richly, agreeing. Her eyes flash and she smiles almost sadly now, for they are truly talking, and have entered something. Now their eyes hold, and both know how strange it is for the other in this time.

An older woman shouts something like, “
Bat
-ta!” at her. Another older one looks up from her digging and smiles hugely, missing a central tooth. The girl turns to the old woman and calls something in response, and when she turns back to Lucien,
her impatient glance to the treetops is the same look from any embarrassed daughter in St-Malo.

She gives her eyes to Lucien again and her look pleads apology. But also humour at their state of affairs. For, look at the two of them! Here they are in mute collusion, intimate friends who cannot talk. He can't help but answer her smile at this. But look at us closer, she tells him as she brings her muddy hand to his chest, and with a finger draws a gentle circle. Here we are, she continues, lovers with no place to go — except the entire forest at your back. Now her palm flattens on his chest and she begins to gently push, taking him there.

Her magic overwhelms him and he doesn't know what to do with himself. He feels they are both enveloped by invisible carnal flame. No woman has ever proposed to him before. He is growing hard, and abuzz. At the same time he feels faint.

She shoves him and he is on his back, in the mud. Now the women laugh as well as the children, and when Lucien picks his head up to see her she is striding back to her onion hole, and he knows she is making comic faces to her tribe.

Yet he also knows that they will become lovers — of this he has no doubt. Her shove had been for her people. Her eyes had been for him.

NOSING INTO THE
terminal parking lot, Andy realized his mistake when he saw the white Hummer. The Hummer meant Dan Clark, and Dan Clark had agreed to take Andy's shift so Andy could go clothes shopping today because tonight was the banquet for the Chinese Wheat Women. Andy had got up at five, made coffee and eggs, and even read a little before driving the ten minutes to work — when he could have slept in. It was six in the morning and dark. His defrost was only now melting a hole in the ice bigger than the head-sized one he'd scraped. He was wide awake with four hours to kill before Pauline came over to “plan their attack” and take him shopping.