Cook gave me a piece of the applesauce cake when it was done and wished me a happy birthday, but she made me promise to go straight to bed and not sneak out to fish. “It’s too dangerous tonight,” she said. “The soldiers will shoot you.”
The British Redcoats were everywhere. New France had fallen in 1760, and ever since then it had been nothing but war. So I climbed the stairs, went into my room, and sat on the bed. I ate my cake in the dark and watched the Moon and the unfolding eclipse. I jotted down some observations in my journal the way Brother Jean always encouraged me to do.
Lunar Eclipse: April 2, 1776
The Moon is a strange reddish colour like a penny. It is a glowing copper ball in the sky. Every so often there is a lightning flash and a flurry of snow. Cook is right. Something strange is going to happen.
Even so, I was determined to go fishing. Solar eclipses could end in seven minutes, but an eclipse of the Moon could take several hours, and I wanted to see if the fish were biting. Cook worried too much. If it wasn’t soldiers, it was Boo Hags. She was right about one thing. The fighting was bloody.
In November last year the American Richard Montgomery captured Montreal from the British. In December Montgomery’s soldiers joined with Benedict Arnold’s forces, which had marched overland from the Maine coast to Quebec. Together, between the hours of four and six on the morning of December 31, they attacked Quebec City. The battle was a disaster for the Americans. Arnold was wounded, and Montgomery was killed by a lethal volley of cannon and musket fire. The Americans met with unexpected hostility from British soldiers and armed citizens of Quebec. The Rebels lay bloody all over the streets and alleys of Lower Town. I saw the corpses with my own eyes.
The American troops were half-starved. Hundreds of American soldiers were taken prisoner by the British and confined in the town’s seminary. They were allowed fresh air and exercise but no pens or paper. (I cannot imagine being forbidden to write. I would go mad.) The remaining American troops who were not killed or captured or who did not die of disease or exposure were camped now on the plains outside the city’s walls. They were desperate. Brother Nessus, a Loyalist, had said, with a smile on his face, that two Rebel mercenaries were arrested the other day for stealing a goose from a farmer and were hanged.
The British troops were waiting for the Americans to attack again. Everywhere you looked there was war. Someone was nailing up posters on walls and trees, signed by General George Washington, the commander of the American army:
After all, are we not one people?
Who are the British but our masters?
Was it not European soil we fled
when we came to this land to seek our freedom?
I did not know which side I was on and did not really care. I just wanted to fish. The war did not interest me the same way as, say, a fat salmon or a flapping rainbow trout. It was not my problem that the Americans and the British could not get along, was it?
I glanced at my new fly-fishing rod that was leaning against the wall. It was my birthday gift from Brother Jean. It had an actual reel and was made of bamboo directly from Japan. I had never seen such a luxury. I was used to cutting a length of willow branch, tying horse-hair line to the end of the pole, and simply casting the line out in water where I thought the fish would rise.
As I finished the last of my cake, I remembered how good it felt to whip the line back and forth in the air to dry the fly. It had been a week since I had last gone fishing, and now it all came back to me — the coolness of standing knee-deep in water, the beauty of the river, watching the line snap out into the wind when the water was troubled and the fish were biting. Most of all, the sensation of a silence that was not only my Deafness but the utter stillness of nature.
I thought of Madeline and White Dog and wished they could sneak out with me. I had taught them how to fly-fish. White Dog, though, did not care for fishing with a pole. He would rather wait in the water and scoop the salmon out with his hands. He had a liking for raw fish.
White Dog and I were about the same age. He slept outside in the barn on account of he was what Brother Jean called a “wild child.” The Brothers tried to civilize him, but it was no use. He slept during the day and went out hunting at night. He liked the taste of raw meat and fresh blood but ate other things, too. I introduced him to roasted potatoes, but he liked them best when they were only partially cooked and covered with ash. He also ate beech and hickory nuts, berries, roots, wild onions, and roasted corn. Sometimes he ate in the dining room with the other boys, but that was rare. If we had corn for dinner, White Dog would hide a few uneaten cobs in his shirt and bury them outside. He had a secret cache of food somewhere in the woods and a cave along River No River.
White Dog loved to hunt. Because of this, Brother Jean let him help at slaughtering time. He was good at killing chickens with a swift bite to the neck and at killing the hogs with a knife, too. Brother Jean always gave him a pint of fresh pig’s blood for his labour. Sometimes Brother Nessus slaughtered the hogs, but they ran away from him and squealed mightily when he chased them around the corral. It was eerie the way they seemed to stay calm when White Dog was there.
Brother Nessus did not want White Dog and me to sit together in class because he said we were bad influences on each other. To him, White Dog was just an animal.
Brother Nessus did not like me to sign my words, either, and always tried to make me speak.
“Say O! O! Say Mo! Mo! Say Moses was a baby!” Brother Nessus yelled, his face red as a beet. “Michael! Flynn! You! Sinful! Unrepentant! Loafer! Speak!” He tried to pry open my mouth and grab my tongue, seizing my face with both hands and forcing me to watch his mouth when he pronounced the vowels and consonants. But I would squeeze my eyes shut. I hated him! Sometimes, when we were fighting like this, White Dog would growl at Brother Nessus and he, afraid for his safety, would release me.
I looked out my window at the Moon. How many times had it felt the shadow of the Earth move across its face in an eclipse just like this one? I wondered about what Cook had said about the world of the living and the world of the dead. Brother Jean said Madeline was going to be adopted soon. Eliza Fisk, a wealthy widow in town, was going to be her mother. Mrs. Fisk had already signed the adoption papers. Madeline had only one more day left in the orphanage. I hoped to see her before she left.
At the end of the hall Brother Nessus sat in his room reading the Bible by a three-candled lantern. My door was open, and I saw the reflection of the flames playing on the hallway ceiling. My guess was that his feet rested on his gout stool. Brother Nessus had the gout because he drank too much wine. That was why he walked with a cane. His custom was to finish reading, sit in his musician’s chair, and play the violoncello angrily for a few minutes. Then, and only then, would he climb into bed and fall asleep.
I waited for about an hour after Brother Nessus had extinguished his candles and gone to sleep before I put on my clothes. I stuffed a quilt under my blanket to make it appear I was asleep, then slipped on my deerskin vest with all my favourite flies attached in rows. When I needed one, say, a Black Widow or a Silver Moth, I just plucked it off and tied it to my line. I pulled my fur hat over my ears and buttoned my wool overcoat. In the inside pocket of the coat was my ragged copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress. I kept it there so I could look at the pictures and read about monsters. Sometimes Cook would read it aloud to me, but she would have to read slowly and carefully because reading lips was not as easy as you might think. There were many words that sounded different but looked the same when they came out of your mouth.
I tiptoed down the hall so the floorboards would not creak and wake Brother Nessus. I was almost out the front door when I bumped into Cook.
“Michael Flynn!” She shook her head. “One of these days you’re going to drive me crazy.” There was flour on her hands, and it fell to the floor in clouds as she wagged her finger at me. “Where do you think you’re going?” But she knew just by looking at my fishing rod what I was planning. She shook her head again and signed that I should be careful.
“There are spirits out tonight,” she said. “I can feel them. An eclipse of the Moon makes a hole in the sky where the spirits fall to Earth.” She took a bottle filled with sewing pins out of her apron pocket, opened the front door, and set it outside on the steps. “If there’s a Witch Hag, it always stops to count the pins and then you can make your escape.”
She crossed herself three times, and I put my arms around her. I loved her. I made her swear to the powers that be not to tell the Brothers I had left.