River City (41 page)

The boy had done this to him, provoked this bittersweet remembering.

At times, he felt as though he had never possessed his own life. He was not even positive that he had been born in Paris, although he said so when asked, as his first memories had formed there. He had arrived in Trois-Rivières from Paris, the equivalent, he thought now, of sailing upon the
Happy Return
from England and landing on the moon. As a youngster, he had been abducted by the Iroquois and treated as one of their own, learning their language perfectly, their customs, their woodland savvy and arts of war. He was one of them, and yet a separate part of him had remained French. He had continued to dream in that language. He could not share his red brothers’ bloodthirstiness for his own people. So he’d fled.

He had left the Iroquois at Schenectady and run all the way to Trois-Rivières through the woods afoot. Yet Mohawk warriors pursued him. At Trois-Rivières they captured him again before he’d placed a foot inside his father’s front door. This time, they did not treat him well, and never again as one of their own. They ripped at his skin, burned hot coals into his armpits, his chest and his arse. They smashed his fingers and broke his toes. They rubbed his testicles with poison ivy, and in the days ahead laughed in the glee of his anguish. They made him their slave. What was he then? He was not a Frenchman anymore, at least not one who could raise a pig and harvest cabbages and take communion on a Sunday and, within the hour, shoot marauding Iroquois off his back porch. He was more Iroquois than Frenchman, but the Iroquois did not agree. They made him haul the heavy loads and shackled him to a birch at night. They fed him old corn and ferns while they gnawed upon the thighs of tender deer. They never let him eat the berries they made him pick as the women did. He fled again, a more difficult task this time, yet he was wiser, knowing better than to suffer a third capture.

So he had knocked around, and visited Nieuw Amsterdam, the place the English were calling New York, and he had become a hero among the Jesuits that same summer, rescuing them from attack and destruction by leading an evacuation from danger. He had joined his brother-in-law and a lowly priest, Father Charles Albanel, on a voyage around the Great Lakes deep into the Huron, Cree and Saulteur territories. Yet, was he an explorer, like La Salle, Marquette or Joliet? Apparently not, for the king of France had grown more interested in the explorations that went west and south than those that travelled north. The north frightened the king—that land of snow and ice and darkness for months of the year. Talk of the north sounded like the coldest and darkest hell to him—not even the fiery furnace of his imagination, but worse, a place where there was no life, no movement, no colour. A place where he would freeze and die should ever he visit. So the explorers who went west and south, down the Mississippi to Louisiana, or out onto the plains to the Salt Lake, these were the true explorers in the king’s eye. Radisson and Groseilliers, who dared go north to expand the land of the furs, to wander where even the Iroquois feared to paddle, and who worked for the French one year and the English the next, could not be considered explorers in a true sense.

Which was one reason why he sailed upon an English ship again.

Who was he, then? French? English? Iroquois? A woodsman? A Londoner? A sailor? A
coureur de bois
? A soldier? A naval officer? He had been all these things, and still his fortune had alluded him. Nor could he indicate who Pierre-Esprit Radisson might possibly become. Perhaps he was finding himself in the boy’s eyes, believing that he was the very man the youth espied. The adventurer. The misfit. The wild, reckless and courageous man of dreams.

The myth.

“On that second voyage, lad, I had the good sense to take along Cartier’s dagger.”

“Then it’s true,” the youth confirmed. They were sailing under the stars, a half-moon five degrees above the horizon, setting. Spindrift lifted off the caps
of waves and blew across the sea. White spumes in the moonlight flew up from the bow wave, necessitating that Radisson, along with his new young friend, move farther aft from their favoured spot. “It exists.”

“The dagger exists, lad. That’s true.”

“Do you have it with you, on this voyage?”

Radisson knew what the boy’s next question would be:
Can I see it?
He smiled. “On this voyage, no. For I have given it to the safekeeping of my true love. She holds it in ransom for my safe return.”

“That’s what I heard.”

“Have you also heard of the knife’s great powers? I have married into the family that formed the Hudson’s Bay Company, and is it not the greatest company on the face of the earth today? There’s your proof. I took it with me on that voyage to the bay, and that’s when we formed the company. I gave it to my love as a wedding gift, and my marriage and the company’s fortunes have only prospered since.”

The lad craned his neck, studying the stars. He had a sextant in his kit, a gift from a sailing uncle. Developing a facility with celestial navigation formed an aspect of his education on this, his first distant voyage. Radisson looked up also. He adored these times upon the ocean the most: at night, the seas whipped up, the skies still clear, the firmament so bright and salutary that no distinction seemed to exist between air and water.

“There’s an aspect to the knife that’s not been considered. For at one time it had fallen into the hands of the Kirke brothers, when they raided Quebec, before they bequeathed it to their king. Now it remains in the care of my true love, who is a Kirke herself, and it is another generation of Kirkes that has formed ‘The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England, Trading into Hudson’s Bay.’ Now, for short, we call it the Hudson’s Bay Company. Don’t you see? The fate of the family appears blended to the northern part of North America, despite the fact that that part is considered French. English merchants don’t countenance my people, except for me and Des Gros. So their fate is also married to the Cartier Dagger. Interesting, isn’t it, the fates the stars decree?”

The boy considered this tale, yet it only whetted his thirst for another. “After that?” he asked.

“After that, me and Des Gros made our voyages, year after year, to the land of the Great Salt Bay—Hudson’s Bay, they are calling it now—and the years were good to us. We prospered from our furs. Prices were paltry, commissions paid to the king’s court too great, but we prospered. I have no lasting complaint.”

“Then what happened?” the insatiable boy inquired.

Radisson continued to gaze high, to the stars, as though he might find the answer there. “This brings us to 1674, does it not?” he asked the boy. “What turn of fortune would cause us, deep in Hudson’s Bay, to come across a Frenchman there, a man we knew from the old days, a Jesuit, an Assiniboine captive, one Charles Albanel? What bend of starlight, lad, could cause a meeting with an old friend to occur in that far-flung place?”

He paused, as though his own question had so snagged his attention that further progress to his tales might be delayed that night. The boy did not press him, and yawned, and watched as the man took up his pipe and filled the bowl, tamping the tobacco down with his thumb, curving his hands over the match to light his pipe in the wind. For sure, the man was a mariner who could light his bowl with a single match in gusty conditions yet think nothing of the skill. The boy observed the ritual, awaiting the day when he might enjoy his own smoke this way.

“Charles Albanel,” Radisson repeated, as though summoning a spirit from the deep of the night as the moon behind a cloud bled orange, “a prisoner, a slave, prevailed upon Médard and me to return to the love of France, to work in the service of the king of France again.”

“Did you?” the boy asked, rapt.

Radisson nodded. “We did.”

“Why?” the youth inquired, for this seemed an odd disclosure to him.

Again, Radisson paused, to mull his words.

“Am I not French?” he asked. When the boy shrugged his skinny shoulders, Radisson gazed up at the stars again, as if to make the same inquiry, as if to revisit that question.

“Are you not French?” Charles Albanel demanded to know.

These Jesuits. You had to admire them, even though, as Médard would say, they were the scourge of the earth. Tortured, maimed, enslaved, horribly slaughtered and never particularly successful in their missions, they continued to come back to the wilderness, to what they called their Indian children, whom they so adored even as these same
sauvages
burned their toes or yanked out their tongues or before their eyes consumed captive infants from another tribe. Always so intent on the welfare of a man’s soul, the Jesuits would forgo the welfare of their own lives. “A praying Jesuit,” Groseilliers had said one time, “is like a canoe.”

They had been paddling on the Rupert River, through that hardscrabble land of scruff jack pine and worn rock, where the animals and birds they’d encountered had likely never spied a two-legged before, certainly not one with a white skin and a full black beard, and whenever the pair stepped ashore their footprints were likely the first upon that soil in all the human account. Radisson brought his canoe alongside Groseilliers’s so that they might enjoy a few moments’ respite while merely running the river’s flow.

“Tell me, why is a praying Jesuit like a canoe?”

“The time comes when we must carry both on our backs.”

Radisson took his friend’s meaning. At Long Sault, three Jesuits had been kneeling in prayer just as the hour had come to portage. They refused to respond to the voyageurs’ requests to keep moving. So he and Groseilliers and another man each picked up a praying Jesuit, slung him over his shoulder and carried him across the portage, and the Jesuits never stopped murmuring prayers all the way across, not until they were dropped down into their canoes again and the paddling recommenced.

“This is what I don’t understand about Jesuits,” Radisson continued in a similar vein. Apparently, for their morning entertainment, they were going to make fun of priests. “Always there’s more, but they’re celibate. How do they procreate so well?”

They were the scourge of the earth, but the woodsmen and the Indians admired them. Here, at the mouth of the Rupert River, a Jesuit priest, Charles Albanel—a slave to Indians, a man with burn marks on his arms, his fingers
gnarled where they’d been broken and blackened where they had frozen, with each of the long nails missing, for they’d been extracted by the Iroquois just so they could watch him wince—was presuming to rail at Groseilliers and Radisson for failing to be properly French.

“I’m as French as you!” Radisson shot back. He had a few days’ ration of the Englishman’s rum in him. “Maybe more French!”

“I’m Frenchier than both of you,” Groseilliers maintained.

“What flag do I see on the stern of your ship? Is it Spanish? Is it Dutch? Is it Portuguese? Hmm. That looks like an English flag to me.”

The flag was English, the two conceded, yet Radisson remained undeterred. “The flag—what does it matter? Me, I’m still French.”

“Your wife—tell me, is she an English girl or French? Your children, Radisson, English or French? Do they ever speak a word of French? Where do they live—in London, or in the English countryside?”

“Stop pestering me,” the fur trader complained.

“Pestering you? When will
you
stop pestering
me
? When will you stop pestering every Frenchman in the world? Stop pestering your king! Your French king, I’m talking about. I don’t know if you pester your English king, though you probably do that, too.”

Radisson was becoming more furious while Groseilliers chuckled lightly to himself, getting a kick out of the exchange. They knew the man from the old days, from Radisson’s first voyage to Lake Superior, when Albanel had taken leave of his mission at Tadoussac and come along, as he had said then, “for the experience.” Not a priest who had distinguished himself, he was poorly considered by his superiors. But the governor had called upon him to investigate the Great Salt Bay and a report of English ships guided there by Groseilliers. Albanel had come to the bay and told the Indians that he had pretty much single-handedly dispatched the Iroquois from their trading routes. He’d been under the misapprehension that the Indians were living so far north out of fear of the Iroquois, but few of them had actually seen a member of that southern tribe. Albanel returned to Quebec and hand-delivered a report, but the governor had to conclude that he had not exacted any promise from the Indians to desist from trading with the English, and his Jesuit superiors had clucked their
tongues as though to suggest that they’d forewarned the governor that Albanel had been the wrong man for the job. He’d come back to make amends, but this time the journey had exhausted him. As he had arrived at the Great Salt Bay near death, and not knowing what else to do with him, the Cree gave him to the Assiniboines to be their slave, and, by extension, their problem.

The largest of the three, Groseilliers, was sitting on a log, whittling a maple branch he intended to implant in a wobbly boot. He continued to chuckle.

“What are you talking about?” Radisson complained. “I pester nobody! I don’t even pester you, although I should, the way you pester me with crazy talk. Are you crazy, Father?”

“Are you?” He was a dour-looking priest, as though he’d never had a proper meal or a decent laugh in his life. Yet no one could doubt his wiry strength or the resolve of his frail constitution. Exhaustion and slavery had not broken his spirit.

“I’m fine. At least I’m not some Indian chief’s cook, like you are now.”

“You’ve noticed. That surprises me.” He was picking at an aching molar, and on occasion spitting.

“What’s so hard not to notice? How’d you get to be a priest, Father—a lame fool like you? I’m surprised any chief would take you as a slave. You’re lucky you didn’t have your throat slit.”

Albanel folded his arms across his chest, as though he was a burly man when he was not, and glared with his rather large grey eyes at Radisson. “You notice that I’m a slave. Have you noticed how you’ve enslaved your own people?”