Order of Good Cheer (36 page)

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.

This evening the foul man's plan is more brilliant still: below them, further covering the beast's noise, rise the laughter and song of a feast that has grown louder and more thoughtless with the hours.

Lucien has turned his head back away, but he hears the drunken mumble:

“O your bitch she's a shiny bug.”

He feels the hand, damp and thick as a haunch, press cruelly on the back of his neck. It doesn't close off his breathing, but it hurts enough and is a warning. He hears:

“You shut up.”

Another paw flings off the blanket and begins to rip down his breeches. The cold air assaults him first, his legs especially, adding rudely to their ache. But Lucien knows that is nothing. What has happened so far is nothing. He wonders who is alive still in the chimney box, and if they might hear him if he shouted words. Or if they would move, or could move, if they heard. Or if they'd care, or if they weren't already familiar themselves with what is about to happen to him. Now he hears:

“I'll have her through your back.”

The hand comes off his neck but is replaced with the full weight of the fellow lying on the length of him, and thrashing, cleaving Lucien's legs apart, trying for purchase, moving quick as a devil. Lucien feels several ribs bend, and break. A nether pain begins, and he knows it's but the beginnings of this pain, and he hears:

“I am fucking her now.”

But then, through his fright and thirsting for breath, he hears confused commotion, and shouts, and now Dédé has leapt off him, and Lucien sees he has also been pulled, and now two men hold him down in a sitting position, and another — it is Samuel Champlain — stands apart from the scene, breathing fiercely through his widened nose, his small sabre out, looking like he wants to use it. At his feet, a good pewter plate, heaped with the oddest family of foodstuffs, as well as a goblet that steams with spice. Lucien can smell clove.

Monsieur Champlain had come up here to see him fed.

SAMUEL SITS PONDERING
his sketches, unable to add artful ink to them, full as he is with good cheer. Also, reveries stay his pen. It is a fortnight now since the first celebration.

Lescarbot's night went well, despite the lawyer taking every opportunity to describe, in verse, each dish as it got carried to table. But there was a fine beaver tail made in a pie, with such addition of garlic and salt and butter that it could have been as exquisite as aspic of escargots. And he introduced a right clever song, to be sung in rounds, as an addendum to his Neptune play, which he did recomprise. He challenged the men to compose lyrics in the very moment, right where they sat. But since wine makes many different creatures at table, the lyrics shouted out were often leagues apart in meaning from the line that preceded it, or too rough-hewn. In any case, Lescarbot enjoyed playing judge, or in truth emperor, with his thumb up or, more frequently, thumb down, and the lyric was killed.

Following that, Ricou's feast was worthy too, particularly the cranberry marmalade that did well to overcrow the moose kidneys and tripe, the bulk of which was passed out of the dining room and into the other rooms where it seems every savage in the territory now awaits a morsel. But the evening settled into diligent labour at getting Lescarbot's song well turned out, and at last they agreed to entitle it “Without Doubt Mermaids Heed This Our Song.” No singer, Samuel stood in back and
aimed soft moans toward his feet. But he finds it both ennobling and fun to build a good song together.

Next, the apothecary d'Amboisee, whom Samuel understands was passed the steward's collar as an act of compassion and intelligence, for “never fall idle, never go mad,” as is said. The spitted otter was delicious, its crust of burnt herbs not the medicinal abomination some had feared. And the lobster crème that began the evening was the perfect goad to their healthful appetites. The lone curious spice the apothecary added to the affair was his request — more a command, truly, and lacking in any mirth at all, with nary a wink from him — that all men be served according to height, from tallest and then next tallest, et cetera, which was a lunacy bland enough but lunacy all the same. Samuel knew it also threatened their appetites by bringing too clearly to their minds the absence of the towering Dédé, who otherwise would have, for the first time in his life, been served first, before nobility. But the monster is in Poutrincourt's gaol for the rest of his stay here.

This same Sieur, whom the men have perhaps been too shy to ask and encollar, has finally tonight, through waving comically at Gagne, making his availability known, received the red collar, and tomorrow will bestow his feast. It is rumoured that in the morning he will perform his own hunting, accompanied by a small party of Mi'qmah.

To date, Fougeray de Vitre has supplied a night, as has Champdoré and it seems any man of means amongst them, those who have a knife to trade for a rare haunch. But the collar will circulate the stewardship throughout the common men too, as they have been told that good cheer is not necessarily of any expense at all, but can come of their own labour at hunting, or favours for the savages. And all they needs must do is put forth some effort at leading the toasts, and song.

He sees he has as good as ruined a sketch of the fields and forest trees up the River Eel, so he flips the sheet to write on its back. His mood is again unlike that of wanting to record events in his ship's log. He moves the feather on his lips for more of its sweet tickle. He will write his true thoughts down, much like an assessment of damage done by a storm, and of progress made despite it.

21
janvier
1607
(to burn)
IT GOES WELL ENOUGH
. We are depleting our good wine, and much of our spice, not to mention a goodly number of knives, blankets, and nails in exchange for the best and freshest and hardest-to-procure game, and with insistence of an exact day of deliverance to us — even so, Poutrincourt and the others would not for a moment argue that the Order of Good Cheer is not a godsend for its remarkable lifting of our common humour. Not to mention our health, in particular those with the scurve.

I confess that I did very much savour the time when Poutrincourt himself remarked upon their changes: their skin gaining back robust colour and their night noises ceasing, and then their blackmouth losing its odour and then beginning, after the bad flesh fell out, to heal instead of fester anew. I waited until I was certain these changes were good ones and true, and only then did I confess to the Sieur to having secreted food — the freshest, and the organs especially, and broth most rife with herbs — to their bedsides each day and each night. At first Poutrincourt answered with thoughtful silence, and Lescarbot snorted, though warily, while watching the Sieur, and then the Sieur said, “It's likely good, then.” So dull and vague a statement was this I
could take it to mean permission at least to continue the medicine. In any case, Bonneville is now pleased he need no longer prepare plates in secret, this having made him anxious because, though he was carrying out my orders, my rank is not the highest.

I have instructed poor d'Amboise to cease his struggles in the sickroom. The apothecary's fumigations of vinegar brought forth only needless tears. The elaborate poultices of bread grated and mixed with strong powdered lead caused only a new kind of festering to the leg sores, wounds not pacified but made more angry; plus it appeared to make the men fall stupid. Though it marked his failure, d'Amboise appeared relieved to be released from this duty.

The beast Dédé and the good carpenter Lucien are both charged with crimes against God, and confined to their separate rooms within the compound. After Poutrincourt made this most obscure decree, and saw me linger while the other men left, he read what was on my face and held his palm up against me speaking. He told me, simply, that he acted solely on what had been witnessed and that upon our regaining France in summer there would be a fitting trial, and innocence would come out, if indeed any existed. I believe this is when I raised my voice at him, but before three words were out he shouted, and I held my tongue. I know that his logic lies in the carpenter not defending himself against his assailant, not even to voice his displeasure. I suspect he knows full well that Lucien is innocent of the crime. Perhaps he is using this facsimile of a crime to put a stamp of greater certainty on the other crime, of loving a savage. Or, perhaps something in Poutrincourt's ordinary good nature can simply not fathom, cannot bring to mind or to words, that any man could take carnal knowledge of another man who
lay that sickly and that near death. Perhaps to admit Lucien's innocence would also be to admit the awful truth about Dédé, whose life is one of God's mysteries.

But the men know, of course, what we stupid nobles do not know, or will not know. Though it sorrows my soul that I cannot be seen to disagree with the Sieur's censure, the regular men visit Lucien frequently with gossip and songs, and once, I've been told, they put on a play for him, rehearsing it for the feast later that evening. They also, I believe, bring small treasures from his girl, one of them a bone ornament he wears openly, that is, defiantly, from around his throat. (Perhaps some proof that the Sieur knows him innocent is that Dédé is by comparison kept shunned in his own especial gaol, the sail room, where he waits patiently. What is left of his hair is apparently becoming grey, a sure sign of some extreme unease.)