Barkskins (6 page)

“Ah! He has waited for us!” They were short muscular men with black beards, top-heavy with huge shoulders and arms, thick black eyebrows and red lips—
hommes du nord, voyageurs,
men of the north. But he knew them by their large eyes, Monsieur Trépagny eyes, ebon black irises in flashing whites. They were dressed in the mode of
voyageur
–fur traders, one with a red tuque, the other with a neckerchief tied around his head, both with deerskin leggings and Indian-style breechclouts, oblivious to biting insects. Both wore brilliant sashes knotted around their waists, both wore woolen double shirts. They were drunk and carrying bottles of spirits, which they swigged as they walked. They were Monsieur Trépagny's long-awaited brothers from the crowd of boatmen camped at Wobik.

They said their names: Toussaint, whose beard flowed down his breast, and Fernand, with a short bristle of whiskers.
Oui, Tabernacle!
Of course, by the Holy Tabernacle they were coming to attend Claude's wedding, and yes, they had followed René, but also knew to look for the trail blazes. Some of their comrades would follow, for the chance of a wedding celebration would never be missed by anyone alive in this empty country. Another of their company knew the path, though he preferred not to join the revelry as he said he had a strong dislike of Claude Trépagny. He would stay in Wobik and guard their fur packs. They passed their bottles to René, and soon he was drunk and the brothers grew more boisterous, bragging of their wild and untrammeled lives, singing songs with endless verses. Toussaint said he knew more than forty songs; Fernand boasted that he had mastered more than fifty and that he would sing all of them this moment commencing with
“Petit Rocher.”
He began well but stopped after seven verses. He turned on René.

“You think this is all that we do, sing songs and walk through a forest? No! What they say, we live hard, love hard, sleep hard and eat moose nose!”

Toussaint pressed a dark chunk of food into René's hand, saying it was not moose nose but pemmican. It had a burned, musty flavor and there were hairs in it and nodules of bright fat the color of a chicken's foot. It was chewy stuff and the more he masticated it the more it swelled in his mouth. He took a gulp of whiskey and forced the pemmican down.

René had been thinking of what they said of their companion who would stay in Wobik with the fur packs, thinking of the man he had seen disappear into the spruce shadow, and he knew with sudden surety who it was.

“This one who stays in Wobik, does he have bad teeth?”

“Bad teeth? No.
Chalice!
He has no teeth at all. He dines on mush and broth. He cannot eat pemmican and would be a liability did he not prepare his own repasts.”

“Is his name perhaps Duquet? Or something else?”

“Duquet. How do you know?”

“He was an
engagé
with me, on the same ship and hired to the same man—your brother Monsieur Claude Trépagny. He disappeared into the woods one day. Your brother believes he was caught and eaten by the
loup-garou.
”

“Hah! He was not eaten, or if so, only a little around the edges. He is a man of affairs. He knows the important men in the fur trade—even the English. He says he will be a rich man one day.”

René had his own idea of why Duquet did not wish to see Monsieur Trépagny.

•  •  •

The reunion of the brothers and their uncle Chama was noisy and sentimental. They all wept, embraced, cursed, swigged whiskey, slapped each other on the back, looked earnestly at one another, wept again and talked. The brothers disapproved of the clearing. Their own way of life left no scars on the land, they said, denuded no forests. They glided through the waterways and in seconds the wake of their passage vanished in the stream flow and the forests remained as they had been, silent and endless.

“Uncle, you must come back with us to the high country, what good times we'll have again.”

But Chama smiled sadly. He had a spine deformity that every year twisted him a little more sideways. He was no longer able to bear the hard
voyageur
life, a statement which motivated the pitiless brothers to describe tremendous paddling feats—twenty hours, thirty hours—without a pause. They named heroes of the water, wept for the memory of a friend who broke his leg so that the bone protruded from the bunched flesh. They had put him up to his neck in the icy water to die.

“Not long enough to sing all of
‘J'ai trop grand peur des loups,'
which he asked us to sing. It was his favorite, that song—‘I have a great fear of wolves.' And he sang the verses with us with chattering jaws until his heart slowed and he made the mortal change.”

This started them off on stories of
coureurs de bois
who suffered untimely ends.

“. . . And Médard Baie, who suffered painful stomach cramps and died of the beaver disease?”

“That poison plant that beaver eat with great pleasure, and I have heard the Indians, too, eat of it, but it is death for a Frenchman.”

•  •  •

The wedding was four days away as the bride was traveling from Kébec and not expected for at least another three sunrises. A priest, not Père Perreault, but a more important cleric from Kébec, would accompany her. The marriage sacrament would take place in Monsieur Trépagny's big house. Even now, still in his lightly soiled Parisian finery, the
seigneur
was directing two Mi'kmaw men loading a wagon of goods for transport to that elegant structure. Fires burned in the great fireplaces to take away the damp, the floors were strewn with sweet-grass. Those same Indians, with Chama's help, had constructed a long table under the pines. Everything was ready—except the food.

“Mon Dieu!”
shouted Monsieur Trépagny. He had forgotten the need for a cook when he sent Mari away, and only now realized the great problem.

“What problem?” bawled Toussaint. “Feed them pemmican! We feed twenty-five men a day on the stuff and it does them good.”

Monsieur Trépagny turned to René and said, “
Vite! Vite.
Hurry back to Wobik and get Mari. Bring her here. Bring whatever she needs to make a wedding feast. We will procure game and fish while you are gone.
Vite!
”

•  •  •

Mari and Renardette were sitting outside the mission house plucking birds. Mari heard Monsieur Trépagny's demand stoically and kept on pulling feathers, which she dropped to the ground. The light breeze sent them bouncing and rolling. The minutes passed and Mari said nothing.

“So will you come right now? With me? I am to carry any provisions you need. Monsieur Trépagny gave me this for you”—he showed a bright coin. “And this for what you need to make this feast”—and he showed the second coin.

“Elphège shoot good duck with arrow,” she said, turning it so he could admire the fat breast. He glanced at Elphège, who grinned and put his head down shyly.

“A very handsome duck,” he said. “Finest duck in New France. Maybe Monsieur Trépagny would pay you for that duck.”

“It is for Maman,” said Elphège, then, overcome with so much social intercourse, he fled to the back of the building.

Renardette stood off to the side, rubbing the dirt with her heel in a semicircular design. “I have good beer back at Monsieur's house.”

René understood that Mari preferred to stay where she was and roast Elphège's duck. But she stood up, and he followed her into the mission house.

She put the cleaned duck in a pack basket. She gathered jackets, then said, “Père Pillow not here. Not know. Letter write me.” She got a pen and inkwell from the shelf, found a scrap of paper and, sitting at the table, made a parade of marks on it.

“What did you write?” René asked, consumed with curiosity.

“That feather say, ‘Cook three suns.' That write me.”

He could see with his own eyes that Mari knew writing, though he thought her letters looked like worm casts, nothing like his exquisite
R.

On the way Mari made several side forays to gather wild onions, mushrooms and green potherbs. She spent a long time searching along the river for something in particular, and when she found it—tall plants with feathery leaves—she stripped off seed heads and put them in a small separate bag. When they arrived at Monsieur Trépagny's clearing, the brothers had butchered six does and Chama was crouched over a large sturgeon, scooping roe into a bucket with his hands. Mari said nothing to any of them but went into the old house and began to haul out pots and kettles to be shifted to the wedding house. From the cupboard she took dried berries and nuts. She found the sourdough crock, neglected in her absence, scraped the contents into a bowl, added flour and water and covered it over, carried it to the cart. She put the seeds she had gathered at the riverside into the cupboard on the top shelf. She spoke to Monsieur Trépagny in a low voice, so quiet in tone only he heard.

“Tomorrow bread bake. Tomorrow all cook. Then mission.”

“Eh,” said Monsieur Trépagny. “We'll see.”

P
hilippe Bosse was to bring the bride, her maidservant and the priest to the wedding house in his freshly painted cart. The brothers and their trapper comrades drank and wrestled under the pines. Monsieur Trépagny paced up and down, dashed into the house to adjust something, out again to look into Mari's pots, then to peer into the gloom of the dark
allée.
Elphège had built Mari's cook fire, a long trench where the venison haunches could roast on their green sapling spits and the great sturgeon, pegged to a cedar plank, sizzle. Mari ran back and forth between the fire trench and a small side fire, where she cooked vegetables and herbs. In one pot she simmered a kind of cornmeal pudding with maple syrup and dried apples, a pudding that Monsieur Trépagny loved to the point of gluttony. As it bubbled and popped she sifted in the seeds she had gathered at the streamside.

In clumps and couples the guests from Wobik began to arrive and they sat about drinking Renardette's good beer and talking, admiring Monsieur Trépagny's fine house. They looked into the great bedroom hung with imported tapestries and with inquisitive, work-worn fingers touched the pillows plump with milkweed down.

“It's like old France.”

“
Dieu,
maybe too much like . . .”

•  •  •

They heard the bride long before they saw her.

“Hear that!” said Elphège. The company fell silent, listening. Suddenly three deer burst out of the forest, scattered in different directions. They all heard a distant ringing sound that gradually grew louder until it revealed itself as a high-pitched, strident female voice in a passion shrieking, “I refuse! Cheat! Impostor! Skulking savages! Uncivilized! Peasants! Nothing but trees! I have been duped! My uncle has been duped! Someone will pay! I refuse! I will return to Paris!
Je vais retourner à Paris!
” And it was still ten minutes before Philippe Bosse's fur-lined cart turned into the
allée.

Toussaint said to Fernand, “She is so ugly she must be very, very rich.” The bride's face was crimson, enhanced by a liberal application of French red, her orange hair protruding from under her wig. The lady's maid looked as if she might carry a
poignard
in her garter. One bony hand gripping the side of the cart the imported priest, Père Beaulieu, sat stone-faced. The bride's eye fell on Monsieur Trépagny.

“You!” she said. “You will explain this monstrosity”—and she waved disdainfully at Monsieur Trépagny's fine house. “What a shack.
C'est un vrai taudis!
Explain to me how this hut in the forest is a fine manor house and the site of a great rich city as you told my guardian uncle.” She sprang from the cart with the elasticity of an Inuit hunter, and the
voyageurs
applauded. She scorched them with a fiery look of disdain and marched into the house with the maid, Monsieur Trépagny and Père Beaulieu following.

Philippe Bosse complained in a low voice to his listeners. “I said, ‘Madame, I have contracted to bring you to Monsieur Trépagny's fine house in this fine forest and I will do it. What follows is for him to decide.' ”

They expected the bride, her dangerous-looking maid and the bony priest to come out of the house at any instant and get back into the wagon and roll away to France. But none of them appeared. The wedding guests could hear their voices—the bride's hot and savage, upbraiding and sarcastic; Monsieur Trépagny's cajoling, imploring and explaining; the priest's murmuring and calming. As the hour passed the bride's voice softened, Monsieur Trépagny's soared.

Toussaint, Fernand and Chama had listened to it all before, as had René. Those familiar words! “Rich forests . . . unimaginable hectares of land . . . fertile soil . . . fish to feed the world . . . powerful rivers . . . beautiful cities of the future . . . the
domus.
”

Twilight fell and Chama, Elphège and Philippe Bosse built a bonfire. The
voyageurs
sampled the barrel of whiskey. They waited.

“After all, there's the feast,” said Toussaint yearning toward the food. He and his comrades moved toward the table where Mari had set out the kettle of stewed eels, the roasted sturgeon, the fat duck in an expensive sugar sauce, platters of corn cakes, moose
cacamos,
the legs of venison done so they were crispy on the outside, tender in the teeth, various porridges and sauces. Down the length of the table paraded bottles of cherry brandy. Before they could touch the savory dishes there was a cry to wait. Monsieur Trépagny stood on the fine stone doorstep, and behind him was Mélissande du Mouton-Noir, her face red and corrugated in the light of the bonfire. Monsieur Trépagny spread out his arms as if he were a wild goose readying for flight.