Order of Good Cheer (19 page)

They were both just nineteen when it took her away again but this time dragged her farther than he was allowed to follow. She'd been in Toronto one month short of a year when the first of her final letters came, and it began:

Andy everything has changed. I don't know how to start or make it easier for you so I'll just say it. I'm having a baby about six months from now. The father is a dancer, Robert, who leads the company. We started seeing each other only a few months ago. I never lied to you, and I still won't. I still love you. I don't know if I love him. But I'm going to have the baby, so I want to love him. He says he loves me, he says he'll get married if I want to, but I don't know about that yet. I don't know how much to say about Robert, because of how this must feel for you
.

Everything I do and think has to be for the baby right now. This feels selfish and maybe looks selfish because I don't know this new person at all, and it's still more me than anything else. But I can't even say I'm sorry to you, because I can't let myself go in that direction even for a second. I've decided to be happy (such a silly word, but it's the one I'm shooting for) and I can see that happiness is a decision. Once I decided to have the baby, I also decided that everything is in service to it, even my moods. I can't look back. I can't be sorry. My career is also going to take a backseat. Maybe it's finished forever, even before it began. Like us. But I've decided to decide that that's only good
.

I can say that I'm sorry about what you must be feeling now. And for me to say that I still love you, might be a kind of torture, but I can't not say it, because it's what I feel, and I've also decided that it's good, it's only good, to love. Mostly, to love a baby. To love two men. To love anyone, everyone. To love the world if you can. That's what I've decided. If I turn back, if I have doubts about any of this, if I look in any direction other than the one I'm looking in right this second, it's only dark
.

Wet to the skin and tired, Andy passed Moose Tot Park, its carved wooden sign and name not charming tonight but absurd. He turned onto his street. He did feel healthier for the walk. It was darker on his street, with fewer streetlights, and patches of forest between houses each on their half-acre lot, and he could hear what were probably foot-high waves breaking on the beach below. He knew in his childhood bones this darkness and this sound, knew it more than he knew the town, its density and fret, and he felt more comfortable here than anywhere. Why then did it feel like a wraith could fly up from behind and take him by the neck and fling him way out over the black waters of the bay, where he'd drop and drown alone, anonymous, no trace?

Andy shivered, told himself that aloneness was no cause for fear of any kind. Striding his driveway, in a further act of bravery he forced himself to walk beside his house, trailing fingers on the wet siding, to the even more complete and windy darkness of his backyard. Careful to stay well clear of his new cliff, he stopped somewhere in the yard's middle. The wind carried the raw-earth smell to him, his property's wound. The wind felt fine on his face, actually. It woke him up further. He still felt angry in the gut.

He'd hated seeing red-haired Dan Boyd in his happy mood of attack. He was what drove Andy from the party in the end. A decade ago, because of drinking and a jail term for a hit and run, Boyd's wife lost custody of their young boy and girl. Out of prison, she kidnapped them and in a feat of disguises and stealth stayed free — and by all accounts a sober, doting mother — for seven years. They caught her in Nova Scotia; she went to prison again and the kids, now ten and twelve, were returned to Boyd, whose string of nannies were as mean to them as he was. People said the kids should have been left with their mother, and laws should be more common-sense human. For instance, they didn't even ask the kids what they thought. A social worker had told Leonard they were clearly afraid of Boyd, and that Boyd took as many shifts at work as he could. And once when drunk Dan Boyd said this to Andy: “Parents don't like their kids. They actually don't and they're too chickenshit to admit it.”

Andy had left the party if only to be free of Dan Boyd. Then, after avoiding Andy all night it was Drew who caught him as he fled out the door. Drew ran up and grabbed his arm and spun him round to face him. His friend was dripping sweat and he looked pissed off at everything and nothing. Laughing, Drew told him in a kind of hiss, “It's
all
sinking, man — don't worry about it.” He was being only mean. As if Andy could think of
nothing but his yard. Drew was beaten down and poisonous and wanted to spread it. He laughed again, shoving Andy to launch himself back into his father's rotting party, and Andy had never seen his friend quite like this in all the time he'd known him.

Wind in his face, seeing absolutely nothing, Andy felt better, and fully sober. He'd jump in a good, hot shower with these new clothes on. They felt tainted now, like the dirty filter for one lousy party. Tonight had put him in mind of a different sort of party altogether. Mussels. Moose nose. And odori. That was the word —
odori
.

Andy turned and had a fright when he understood he couldn't see his house, and that in one direction lay a cliff. But the wind, now at his back, was a sure guide, as were the waves' gentle crashings on the gravel. He began to walk precisely away from that. He walked slowly, in the grip of his senses, walking mostly with his ears, so wide awake now. Then, as if toying with his attention, the wind shifted. There was a brief hitch in the rain, almost like an in-breath, and it began to snow.

IN THE MUSIC
of settlement, boredom is a melody that begets foul, discordant strains. Twice now Samuel has seen men making onanistic use of themselves in the forest. Unlike the first man (Samuel thinks it was Simon), who scurried away shamed (one hopes), the second merely turned his back, paused in his devilish fever and waited insolently for the mapmaker to pass.

Last year before he fell sick with the scurve himself and ultimately perished, the priest said some words with which Champlain agreed. As they watched men fall to unease and listlessness and then to the disease itself, the priest contended that idleness and boredom were themselves the cause of the scurve. Samuel found himself agreeing with him (though he still believed, and believes, it is also bound up in one's intake of food. But is this entirely different? Don't we manifest the humour of that which we take in and make our own? That is, mightn't food be a cause of boredom?) The priest termed their malaise “a fall in spirit” and it angered him such that he seemed to withdraw his compassion for the ailing men. At this Samuel no longer agreed, because the priest went so far as to ask, how
dare
one be not always excited, having been given life by God and placed on earth amidst all of His wonders? (And Samuel was amazed that, when the priest fell ill himself, he didn't appear to change his
views about any portion of this. In fact he faulted a loss of faith for his illness, going so far in his arrogance as to
lose
faith to prove his point. Even on the day of his death, the priest's nostrils never did lose their ability to flare.)

It isn't the first autumn that Champlain has found himself pondering this: settled and safe in their sturdy compound, so much of their task done — all save the real and most onerous task called winter, and waiting — how were they to keep boredom at bay?

Unlike a storm at sea, when one is busy keeping the ship's masts pointed heavenward and the bodies of all one's men alive; unlike landing at an unknown shore and declaring it New France and then with all one's will building a shelter with which to block the wind and digging furrows in which to sow one's precious seed — unlike these most vital pursuits, the act of settling allows a routine akin to stagnation, in whose water blooms a thickening sea of bad humours and irritants.

The odd stench of one's shipmate is utterly of no matter in a storm.

The fights have for the most part stopped, the combatants finally seeing no reason in fisticuffs when the fight would only be compounded with a flogging. But there continues the whispered bullying, and mental tortures of a grotesquely subtle kind. For instance Samuel has twice seen Dédé walk past Lucien sitting at table and sink a foul thumb into the moist heart of the carpenter's supper, and from the undisturbed look on both their faces it looked to be ritual now, or even mindless habit.

One game appears to have ceased, and Samuel is only glad for it. Soldiers and nobles alike, while sitting on a ring of stools outside the east wall, play their parlour games in the dirt whilst waiting patiently for hummingbirds to come and suck, some thirty paces off, at the bits of red satin sash torn and fastened as
false flowers upon staves set into the ground. Taking turn, they train their muskets upon the flitting mirthful jewel, and fire. At first a hit was rare, but then some men got expert at it, and bird after bird met its end in a burst of shards too small to be deemed feathers. When questioned by none other than the Sieur of this land, Poutrincourt himself, the men, only half in jest, asked him back if there were another form of shooting practice as ingenious and beneficial as this, and added that they were training for the big war to come, and fell to laughing — Poutrincourt laughed too — about whether this war would be against Indian, Spanish, or English. No matter, they agreed, since we French can shoot hummingbirds out of the sky! Samuel wants to say that the real war seems to have been against these very birds, who seem now to have disappeared, so we have won. He wants to ask too that, if we have indeed killed them all, what kind of victory it is. He is reminded of his good uncle's caution: When you capture all the fish in your pond, you have in fact lost them. (In fact he suspects that these birds are amongst those that fly south to sip flowers still in bloom.)

But the days march, apace. This evening after supper, several of the men complained to him and asked if, during the savages' next session of bartering, it could be held outside the compound, “and when there's a stout wind.” True, some furs do carry a bad stink, and the savages do not smell as the French do, for they lack perfume and use no salt in their diet. For almost all of them it is a first encounter with the natives of New France and so their smell (which is really no worse nor much different than the flats at ebb tide) is highly noticed by them — but this is the kind of petty irritant he ponders. He promised them that smell will not matter come March if they are near starving; he declared that all the peculiar smells of New France, not least the savages', would be drawn hungrily into both nostrils as if it were
food. And he told them last what Membertou had only very recently revealed, that the savages hate their smell just as well! Membertou told him that, often, before these same meetings to barter, his braves will draw a mustache of pine resin under their nostrils! (In fact Samuel had wondered why it was that, by the time the savages left, especially if the fires were smoky, their upper lip would sport a new mustache of soot.)

Samuel believes the men then went next to Lescarbot, to see what
he
might say about bartering, and stink, and a stout wind. Sometimes Samuel thinks the men see him as Poutrincourt's right ear, and Lescarbot the left.

But in any case it seems that the problem with exploration lies in the act of
stopping
, in the lack of forward motion, in the compass being stowed, in the encavement of vigour within the walls of routine. Once shelter is built, and fuel secured, and the belly filled, clearly one needs distraction beyond the wants of survival. One needs now to explore the smaller maps of pleasure. They have no women, but they do have wine, and so they also have song. And though Samuel has not much ear for it himself, he will continue to encourage poetry from one and all. If only to suggest that exploration can be within. (And if only to give pause to the endless poetry of Lescarbot, which flows out unimpeded by competition. He has succeeded in making Samuel forevermore tired of the words “wondrous,” “France,” “lark,” and “king.”)

And, an idea he has been pondering: they have spice, they have meat in the forests untried. A day barely goes by without rumours, often from Membertou, of intriguing food — the egg mass of an immense armour-plated fish; mussels smoked under resinous pine needles; even the entire humped nose of a moose in its own especial gravy. So perhaps they might engage in making more poetic with their food? Even Lescarbot agreed with him in this when together they witnessed once again the saddening
sight of the men chewing at their salt beef, in their eyes nothing remotely like cheer.

CHAMPLAIN IS LATE
to rise this morning, though even from his pillow he's heard some commotion without. At first he thinks it a joke, these tidings that Dédé has found three dead bats in the courtyard. (The first joke being that Dédé, so vast and bearded of body, owns the wit to find anything at all.) But to hear that he has found not only the Devil's creature, but in the number of the Trinity! Israel Bailleul, who has brought the news to his door, speculates while Samuel pulls on his breeches and coat that this very number cancels the harm of the Beast itself, and that, because Each of the Trinity had killed Itself a bat, instead of an omen of evil it was a reminder that God works in their midst in New France and has sent them a sign of exactly this wondrous fact. Bailleul adds that this explanation has become Lescarbot's official decree on the matter.

Samuel goes out to see them himself. All three are on the ground, two of them some ten paces from each other, the third being some fifty paces distant, lying over by stores. The morning is warm enough, and with the dew off them they look rather fluffy and innocent, and the pleasant deep brown of sable. Dédé is still promising to all who listen that he has not moved them (save to crush the first one's head with a foot, “to see if it was dead”!) Yet each was in the identical position, that is, on its belly with wings folded tight against its sides, chin flat out upon the ground.