The Tale-Teller

Copyright © 2012 Susan Glickman
First ePub edition © Cormorant Books Inc. September, 2012

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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation, an agency of the Ontario Ministry of Culture, and the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit Program.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Cataloguing information available upon request.

Glickman, Susan
The Tale-Teller/Susan Glickman.

EPUB ISBN 978-1-77086-258-6 | MOBI ISBN 978-1-77086-259-3

Cover design: Angel Guerra/Archetype
based on a text design by Tannice Goddard, Soul Oasis Networking

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390 STEELCASE ROAD EAST, MARKHAM, ONTARIO, CANADA L3R 1G2
www.cormorantbooks.com

for my daughter Rachel
and in memory of Sheldon Zitner,
who always played Prospero to my Miranda

Y anoche, mi madre
cuando me eché a acordar
soñabo un sueño
tan dulce era de contar:
que me adormía
y a orias del mar.

(Last night, mother dear,
when I lay down to sleep,
I dreamed a dream
so sweet to tell:
that I had fallen asleep
on the seashore.)

ONE

“La fortuna no viene sólo, kali buxcarla.”
(Good luck doesn't arrive on its own; one must seek it.)

THE BOY THEY CALLED Jacques leaned over the ship's rail, squinting into the setting sun. There, shimmering in the distance, impossibly green against the pink evening sky, was New France. He inhaled in anticipation, and the welcome smell of earth and trees and grass and animals infused the salt spray he had been breathing for seventy-two days. He felt as though that relentless salt had scoured him inside and out, leaving him as raw as a peeled onion, and as full of secret tears.

It had not been a comfortable voyage. Like many of the other passengers, he'd developed a high fever within two weeks of boarding the
Saint Michel
. Unlike the ship's second mate and a prosperous silk-trader from Rouen, both of whom had

been buried hastily at sea, the boy had recovered, but he had not regained the weight he'd lost during his illness. After a couple of attempts that left him choking, he found himself unable to palate the shipboard diet of salt pork, salt fish, and hard biscuits. Once they'd finally reached the Grand Banks and were able to purchase fresh fish his appetite returned, but until then — except for one welcome meal of chicken stew contrived after all the captain's laying hens had drowned — the boy had subsisted on peas, beans, rice, and watered-down wine.

Small and wiry, with dark eyes and olive skin, he appeared to be sixteen at most, having as yet no sign of a beard. He was quiet and kept to himself, politely deflecting all inquiries into his genealogy or his place of birth in France, the topics of most interest to the others on board. All he would reveal was that he was an orphan from a good family and knew how to read and write; however, because his older brothers had inherited all his family's land and money and he had no affinity for either the priesthood or the military, he had decided to make his fortune overseas. His memories of home were so painful he preferred not to dwell on them, allowing only that he had nearly died during the same typhus epidemic that had carried off his beloved mother. Was it any wonder he wished to start a new life in the New World, inscribing himself on a blank page of history?

He was not alone in this resolve. Though most of the
Saint Michel
's passengers were indentured servants or soldiers going abroad for a fixed term of employment, there were about a dozen other immigrants paying for their own passage at a cost of thirty livres — at least two months' wages — apiece. This group consisted entirely of young men, though no one else was quite as young as Jacques. What was his trade, they wanted to know. He had apprenticed once to a baker and at another time to a tailor, so was handy at both occupations. He claimed to be very adaptable, and indeed whenever the sailors required an extra body on board he was the first to offer his help. The general consensus was that a nice lad like him should find employment easily; more easily than some of the rougher artisans such as the burly tanner from Bordeaux who persisted in giving Jacques loud and graphic instructions about how to seduce women.

Besides the tradesmen, soldiers, and servants, there were also several merchants and government officials travelling for business, an elite group who had paid one hundred and fifty livres each to eat at the captain's table and sleep in better quarters. There were only a handful of women aboard: the wives of a couple of the officials, who were rarely glimpsed by the general population of the ship, and a trio of nuns who had undertaken a holy mission to convert the heathens. The nuns resorted to prayer at the slightest hint of danger and kept resolutely away from the ribaldry and drinking of passengers like the irrepressible tanner, who seemed to enjoy embarrassing them. When not telling their rosaries or reading sacred texts, they were preoccupied with maintaining a semblance of modesty despite the absence of bathing facilities and the cramped conditions below deck. There was barely enough water to drink and cook with, and hygiene consisted mostly of rubbing a damp and stinking cloth across one's face. Not even the men stripped down entirely; no one ever got clean.

The quarters assigned to the lower-class passengers — a corner of the gunroom — were crowded and dismal. A sudden movement of the ship would fling the sleepers rudely on top of each other and, as most slept in clothes that were filthy and crawling with lice, this was an unpleasant way to be wakened. During one violent storm the occupant of an upper bunk, failing to scramble down in time, had vomited over Jacques's already fetid blankets. There was no possibility of acquiring fresh linens and the persistent smell made him gag, so he begged for permission to sleep elsewhere — anywhere else at all. He went so far as to ask permission to sleep in the nuns' corner, which was separated from the public barracks by a sheet of canvas, but the holy sisters would not agree to have any man, even a beardless boy, in their virgin territory.

Finally a vacant hammock was found in between decks with the crew, and thereafter Jacques had even less reason to socialize with the other passengers. Though he drank little and cursed less, he seemed to enjoy the company of the rough and rowdy sailors and said that he had dreamed all his life of undertaking such a voyage. When one of the other young tradesmen, a carpenter from Saint-Jean-de-Luz who cried himself to sleep each night, asked Jacques what he liked so much about being tossed up and down relentlessly and being cold and wet all the time, he replied that this was the greatest freedom he could imagine. Suspended between sea and sky in the cupped hands of God, he was free from the expectations of others. For the first time in his life he was only and truly the person he knew himself to be.

The carpenter was moved, despite his own misery, by this uncharacteristically passionate speech, and wished Jacques would share his thoughts more often. The boy, however, preferred to ask questions of others rather than answer them himself. Nights when the weather was fair he could be found on deck listening to the sailors' conversation, eyes half closed against the fug of tobacco or fixed overhead, tracing the summer constellations. The Great and Little Bears shone brightest, welcoming him to the boreal forest, but just above the horizon lurked Camelopardalis, the Giraffe, as if taunting those who persisted in seeking a passage to the Orient by the Atlantic route.

The existence of this northwest passage was the cause of much animated discussion among the crew, some believing that it had yet to be found, some that it never would. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of the New World continued to bear the name of “Indians” given to them mistakenly by Columbus, though they were a different sort of people altogether. Jacques would often ask the crew penetrating questions, revealing that he had been paying careful attention to everything they said; moreover, he seemed remarkably well-informed for someone so young, particularly someone with no previous maritime experience. The boy was aware, for example, that an Englishman named John Hadley had recently invented an instrument for determining latitude which he called the “octant,” even though the captain of the
Saint Michel
, the Sieur de Salaberry, did not own one, relying instead on the traditional backstaff. He also understood the principles of celestial navigation despite having never held an astrolabe, and often offered to stand at the stern of the ship counting the knots on the log-line to help calculate the speed of travel.

He was particularly interested in the mariners' tales of adventures in distant lands. No fact was too obscure, no story too outlandish to merit his attention. Everything fascinated him: the inadequacy of armaments on trading vessels as compared to those found on pirate ships, the prevalence of marriage between African women and French soldiers on the Guinea coast, the sordid particulars of the slave trade. Indeed, the main reason the sailors indulged his curiosity was that his questions made them understand their own experiences in strange new ways. They were so taken with the lad that they urged him to join the crew on the return voyage to France. He would make a good sailor, they said, given his affinity for all things maritime. But although he was flattered, he declined; at latitude forty-six degrees forty-nine minutes north and longitude seventy-one degrees thirteen minutes west this voyage would end. Soon he would step ashore in Quebec, a place whose very name, meaning “the narrowing of the waters,” resonated in an alien tongue. And who knew what prospects awaited him there?