River City (14 page)
“Do you know what this means?” he asked, excited.
“Diamonds, gold,” Cartier whispered. “This is the land of diamonds and gold.”
Deftly, he took the knife back from Gastineau, and the nuggets. “I will give this dagger to our king,” he vowed. “He will see the true promise of this land. He spends more on his precious painters than he does on these voyages to New France. This must change.”
Gastineau could now see the promise as well. If mere farmers of corn, and eaters of wild venison and squirrel, carried with them knives made of gold and diamonds, and had gold nuggets in their pockets they freely gave away, then all that Cartier had promised, and more, would surely hold true. This was indeed the magic kingdom, and he would recommend to King Francis I that treasure ought to be invested to support future expeditions.
Inwardly, Cartier felt aglow, transported somehow. The island and the mountain had been named. Whatever difficulty Gastineau might have had with either choice, whatever disappointment the king might yet express, such doubts amounted to nothing weighed against the promise of riches forecast by the knife.
Both men briefly separated along the trail, taking time for multiple farts and to sniff themselves, catching the enriched scents of venison and corn on the air.
An early winter that year. By November, the wooden ships were captured in ice. The
Émérillon
was shoved onto its beam ends at a twenty-five-degree angle, so that in his cabin Cartier slept against a wall sheeted in ice rather than risk sliding out of his bunk. The warmth of his body created a perfect shape in the ice for his comfort. Food was rationed, and scurvy broke out among the crew. Lives were being lost.
After the first deaths, Cartier ordered the ship’s barber and surgeon to perform the first autopsy in the New World. As the sailor was cut open, great amounts of poisoned blood flowed from his heart, then the barber and the ship’s captain gazed upon the body of Phillipe Rougemont rent asunder.
“The heart,” the barber said.
The organ was white, evidently rotten, awash in a sink of water, more than a quart.
“The lungs,” Cartier muttered. Black. Mortified. “Now let us bury him properly. We shall give our friend back to God. Do not show him to the others, Pierre. Record the evidence in your diary, but never speak of this to our crew or they shall lose the last of their precious hope.”
“Pray mercy,” the barber added, “for our own souls.”
Twenty-five died that winter.
When the scouting party had first returned to Stadacona from the adventure at Hochelaga, Cartier had been distraught to discover that, in his absence, relations between the French he’d left behind there and the Iroquois had not remained amicable. The Indians had grown nettlesome, and as the winter seized the visitors, they withheld a potion that would have saved the dying men. Cartier wept the morning he carried out the body of his cabin boy, Petit Gilles, onto the river’s ice. So apparent was his grieving that an Iroquois hunting party on shore noticed him and spoke of his travail to Donnacona, who then sent a group of women to the icebound ships with a cedar extract they called
anedda.
They were surprised, the women, to discover that ice had formed inside the hulls of the ships, that the French were living inside a giant house of ice. The white men were shivering through their long nights, and during the day were ill and in despair. The appearance of the Iroquois women, while distrusted
initially, proved a blessing. Those struck down by scurvy recovered, and for the new arrivals,
anedda
—which in their delirium, and unaccustomed to the native tongue, they pronounced as
canada
—became their salvation.
In the spring, the ice broke with such great roaring cracks in the night that the men believed their ships would be destroyed. The ships’ timbers cried out as though snapping. The holds flooded with the melt of interior ice. Cartier did not need to be persuaded by Gastineau, who raged and fumed, adamant that they return to France. Gazing upon his crews, he knew that the trip to the magic kingdom beyond the rapids of Montreal would have to be postponed. His men were depleted. Many of those alive were walking skeletons.
One ship had been severely damaged by ice, so Cartier departed with only two, taking with him—against their will—ten Indians, including Donnacona, his two sons and a young girl.
“You will see the Great White King, tell him your stories,” he told the Iroquois chief when they were first at sea. “You will see animals who talk to the white men. You will drink the milk of cows, and see a village as large as a forest.”
“I want to go home,” Donnacona insisted.
“Why did you take so long to give us the
canada
tea?”
“Why did you take our women?”
“I did not know about that. I did not approve when I learned these stories.”
“Better I not give to you
anedda.
Now I know.”
Sailing back to France, the situation remained dire, but all was not lost. In his possession he carried what the crew called the Cartier Dagger. They were excited by it. The handle’s gold and diamonds would impress the king. What pleased Cartier as much, the island of Montreal had been properly named, in keeping his promise to the cardinal.
Only in one circumstance did Cartier find himself thwarted. Gastineau saw to it that the river was anointed the St. Lawrence. The ship’s captain would not have his name inscribed upon the great river he had sailed, and because he had held out for this one substantial tribute to himself, he had neglected to attach his own name to any lesser landmark. Gastineau was pleased by this. The captain, a man of irritable habits and peculiar mind, who had placed him in mortal peril by staying over a winter, had successfully kept the name of King
Francis I off the charts, nor had he thought to name any promontory after Gastineau. At least the name Cartier itself would also remain invisible in the new land.
As he sailed into St. Malo, Jacques Cartier felt distinctly proud. Crowds formed to cheer his triumphant return. The Indians stood on deck alongside him, marvelling at the activity of a seaport, with so many ships and big buildings and animals that lived among the people. Donnacona nodded. His sons were not liars. He believed now that it was a good thing that he had arrived in the land of the pale-skins. He stood on the deck and observed their ships, and the smoke from their lodges, and the beasts like moose, called horses, and the beasts like wolves, called dogs, and he was glad he had come to the land beyond the clouds because now he could say to his people when he returned home, “More people live upon the land than live upon the land. More land stands up from the sea than has ever stood up from the sea in this world. We are a people who lived in the old time, when only the people and the animals walked in the forest, and no man was a half-animal. Our children will live in the new time, when other creatures walk in the woods among them.” He had learned from Kamanesawayga to speak with great eloquence. Unlike Kamanesawayga, and unlike his fathers before him, he had met the people beyond the clouds, the men who did not, and could not, exist. He was seeing what his fathers had not seen, and therefore he was a great chief, and the people of his time were blessed.
“Show me,” he said to the captain of the
Émérillon,
“a room which is only for shitting. My sons have seen this thing. I think they lie.”
Cartier clutched the splendid knife in his belt and dropped a hand upon Donnacona’s shoulder. He accepted the cheers of the crowd, even as he searched among the well-wishers for the mother of Petit Gilles. He did not know that meeting her would be the first of many sad moments that year, for of the Indians, only the young girl aboard the ship would survive, and she would not return across the sea because she had not enjoyed the voyage, choosing instead to live out her life in France. Donnacona, Domagaya and Taignoagny, along with the others who had been captured and brought across the sea to the land on the other side of the clouds, would remain forever beyond the clouds.
In his final moments, through parched lips, Taignoagny, the man who had been drawn by Michelangelo as a model for the flying angel at the top of
The Last Judgment,
begged Cartier for
anedda,
but there was nothing the sea captain could bring to him, and nowhere he could take him in the winter of that year.
C
APTAIN ARMAND TOUTON DROVE EAST, AWAY FROM THE ONGOING
riot. Delivering bad news had to be done promptly. Procrastination did no one any good, the cop least of all, and usually indicated that the detective was worrying more about his own discomfort than the pending time of sorrow for the family. “The loved ones,” he had lectured his squad of irascible detectives, “got a right to be told. It’s your job to tell them. Nobody says you have to put on a happy face—we got assholes in this room who wouldn’t know how to say a kind word if a dog licked their balls, and if they ever cracked a smile they’d look like shit warmed over.” The remarks earned a muffled round of chuckling, for in these late-night sessions Touton was expected to be profane, and the men laughed at anything irreverent. “But give them that much. Deliver the fucking news. Go in. Get it over with. Quietly leave.”
The policy was not an easy one to implement, as Touton was discovering for himself. The death of Roger Clément affected him more deeply than he might have expected. He was experiencing an acute regret, and while he would not delay his mission, he was not driving swiftly to his destination, either.
He had delegated the task of informing the coroner’s family to Detective Sloan, while Clément’s would be his own obligation. A few cops found it odd that he chose to speak to the wife of the dead thief rather than the dead coroner, but he refused to explain himself.
He did not know the thief’s family, although anytime they were together, Roger Clément wanted to talk about little else. From the outset, the man’s love for his wife and daughter informed the nature of their interactions, setting
them both on a course to become better acquainted and appreciative of one another’s lives. Just as Touton lived an exceptional life for a cop, so had Clément lived an atypical life for a small-time hood. In the choices they made and the experiences they encountered, the two unearthed a rare friendship.
Now Clément had been killed, a priceless dagger thrust into his chest. He had died amid chaos and intrigue, true to the violent world in which he’d lived.
Shocked.
Perhaps for the first time in his career, Touton could apply the word to a perpetrator’s story. He was
shocked,
years ago, to learn that while he bullied himself to survive a German concentration camp, Roger Clément was also interned. Not as a POW, which might have been merely surprising. Nor had he been incarcerated in a domestic prison for petty crime, which might have been expected. Roger Clément, the family man, the enforcer and a former battling left winger in the National Hockey League, had served time in a Canadian internment camp, one set aside specifically for political malcontents. To attach political motives to a petty thief and a back-alley bruiser had altered Touton’s perceptions of him, especially as Clément’s political views contradicted his understanding of the man. What the alley ruffian stood for took time for Touton to unravel. Eventually he deduced that, as in the beginning of their acquaintanceship, the man really believed in nothing in particular except his love of family.
Now Touton had to tell his wife and daughter that their beloved husband and father was dead.
To become a cop had been no snap accomplishment after the war, despite a hiring boom. Armand Touton did not resemble the barrel-chested tough nut he was repudiated to be. The man had worked on railway extra gangs in western Canada as a teenager, in a hardscrabble environment, and defended himself against all comers. His fists had kept him alive. After joining the army as a volunteer, never a popular choice in Quebec, he had given an impressive account of himself both in battle and while imprisoned. Yet the man standing in line at a police recruitment centre failed to live up to his press clippings. Half-starved
in the POW camp, further wracked by hunger, dysentery and cold in the dead of winter on the long march out of Poland back to Germany, he’d passed close to the brink of death. Before being demobilized, he remained wan and undernourished. Neither his body nor his mind had fully recuperated.
Then, suddenly, he was returned to Montreal.
A large number of soldiers found work in the construction industry, which was starting to move with the spurt of immigration from a war-ravaged Europe, while others chased opportunities in the gaming business. The city was expanding, and with it the police department, so soldiers were also being given a nod to become cops. Touton desperately wanted to be one of them.
Once his war record had been reviewed, he’d been a shoo-in, but first he had to pass a medical. Although depleted, he seemed to be breezing through the exam until the last moment, when the physician informed him he had varicose veins.
“Excuse me?”
He knew that the war had damaged him physically, but he associated that particular condition with robust old ladies in support stockings. He may have aged prematurely, but he was quite certain that his gender had not been altered.
“Varicose veins,” the doctor stated flatly, offering no note of sympathy. “The condition makes it impossible for you to enter the police academy.”
“Men get that?”
“All the time.”
“Where? Show me one of those veins!” he implored the doctor.
“Your legs are hairy, sir. Trust me. Under all that cover … varicose veins.”
Touton didn’t trust him. When he’d been examined before being demobilized, no one had mentioned it. He submitted to a physical by an army surgeon. “Do I have varicose veins?”
The army physician laughed heartily, as if he’d heard a good joke. “Ask the doctor,” he advised, “how much it costs to be cured. Then come back and see me.”