CHAPTER 2

1971 ~ 1955 ~ 1939 ~ 1821 ~ 1535

BY MOONLIGHT, TWO WOMEN MOVED AMONG TREES down a steep escarpment. Tricky going by daylight, riskier at night. They lugged shovels. A small dog scampered on ahead. Burdened by a backpack, the younger woman used her spade to leap a narrow stream of snowmelt, then stretched out the handle for the eldest to balance herself, pause, and traverse the ditch with a bound. A slippery ascent came next. Against a broad horizontal limb just off the ground at the hill’s crest, they sagged, gasping, and caught their breath.

Both waited there. Glanced around.

Then looked at one another.

“Ready?” the elder asked.

The two wore black.

“Ready,” the younger responded. Together they groped for a channel through a thicket, scant light reflecting upon patches of snow and ice that had persevered, concealed from noonday suns. On all fours, they scrabbled over the humps of keening grey boulders, their bare lives suddenly exposed.

And entered a silent stand of protective trees.

The women diverged from the customary trails. None were intended for a night passage. They moved wherever their trespass would be the most concealed. Down from the mountain they tramped and skidded, the pooch going on ahead, away from the upper cemetery towards a mid-sized American automobile, maroon, borrowed, a Dodge or Plymouth, parked and empty amid boulders and a cluster of evergreens off the main road that traversed the mountain.

By a culvert, where the mountain’s runoff was strong, they cleaned fresh clay from their long-handled spades. When accidentally the pair banged tips, the echo resounded off a face of rising rock and down across the meadows of the dead.

The breath of their exertion billowed in the cool air. Two women and a dog, departing a cemetery in the dark with shovels. What could they have been doing …

… in the year 1971?

The first warmish winds of the season whooshed down from wooded hills, crisscrossing the still-snowy fields of March all sodden from a swift melt. Black loam showed through in patches. Chickadees chased their tail feathers through cedars and bare maples as animals, both domestic and wild, twitched their nostrils at the secret scent, eyes blinking, the earth’s scuttlebutt decoded: spring.

Sniffing fresh mud stink, the boy felt it, too. As if regaining faith in a neglected deity, he sensed the possibility of summer again: free time—no school!—and games, swimming behind the creek dam, riding a horse into—this year, perhaps beyond—the woodlands. Although the promise of that paradise riddled his senses, the mood did not linger long. By evening, rowdy winds shook the shutters and whistled around the upper dormers of the home in which he had been born, the home in which his father had also been born in Saint-Jacques-le-Majeur-de-Wolfestown, Quebec. Yet the boy’s interest in one season’s discourse with another had flagged. The game was on the radio. The game! The playoffs were almost at hand. Now was the time to catch every static-encrusted syllable and root for his home team. Now was the time to be consumed by his winter passion—skate, check, pass, shoot, score, in his head, alongside his hockey heroes.

“A goal?” the boy’s father inquired, not fully removing the pipe from his mouth but taking up the weight of the bowl in his left hand to speak properly. From Quebec City, Le Soleil lay folded on his lap as he caught up on world news in the comfort of an armchair, the big, floppy one with the faded burgundy print of immense roses. A floor lamp’s shade, tinted with roses also, these a pastel mauve and a faded yellow, lurched over his left shoulder. Soft light illuminated the pages. The bookcase, built with his own hands into both corners of the wall behind his chair, reached from his knees to the high ceiling and included a short ladder made from the wood of a crabapple tree to assist browsing the higher shelves. Quaint, magisterial, a grandfather clock would have been heard ticking by the father and son had they not turned the radio’s volume up so high.

The voice of Albert Cinq-Mars sounded sympathetically gloomy, and the knit of his brow denoted a worry. His son reacted poorly to enemy goals, and in the background the crowd’s roar was apparent. The game was underway in Boston—that Bruins fans cheered did not bode well for les Canadiens, Montreal’s home team.

“A fight, Papa,” the eleven-year-old on the floor stipulated. “It’s the Rocket.”

“Mmm.” His father’s eyes and mind returned to the paper.

The boy shifted onto his back while he absorbed details of the brawl. Could he ever battle that way, or would courage fail him? He enjoyed roughhouse play as much as any boy, but being in a real scrap was difficult to imagine. Getting beaten up worried him—what could that be like?—but Émile was also afraid of going berserk, punching a boy and, having hit him and hurt him, doing it again. He’d seen others do it in the schoolyard, but could he make someone bleed and cry and, once his foe was bloody and weeping, keep on punching? He was bigger than most boys his age. Would he instead offer his opponent a hand up, a Kleenex for his tears and a sympathetic comment? One of life’s curious mysteries.

Just then, a word broke through the roaring and the static that drew his father’s disapproving attention back to the game.

“Sticks?”

“Over-the-head swings—two!” Émile announced, spinning onto his derrière. He immediately updated himself with the announcer’s next words. “Three times! The Rocket! Three times he’s hit him with a stick! He’s got a teammate’s, Papa! He already broke his stick across that other guy’s back. He must be pretty damn mad!”

Dismayed, his father shook his head. Grown men, fighting, on skates. With sticks. Barbaric. Yet he plucked the pipe from his mouth and leaned in more closely to the radio. No ordinary punch-up. The game’s greatest player—for all Quebecers were agreed on that—the legendary Maurice “Rocket” Richard, had swung a stick three times across an opponent’s back, connecting with each fierce swipe.

“Don’t say damn,” he gently reproved his son.

“Sorry.”

“He’ll be thrown out,” Albert Cinq-Mars forewarned.

The boy made a chopping motion as though administering the blows himself.

Then the radio commentator announced that, in the melee, the Rocket had punched an official.

“A big fine,” the father persisted. “This will cost him. He’ll be suspended for a few games, you watch.” Attentive, he continued to lean forward, although he could never have reconnoitred that the political shape of a nation turned on these events.

“How can the Rocket miss a game? The scoring championship! He’s so close.”

“Kiss it goodbye now. Not that it matters. The Cup’s the main thing.”

“I guess so,” the boy relented. He felt dejected to think that the Rocket may have blown his chance at the scoring championship, the one feat that had eluded him throughout his career. Incapable of foretelling the future, he could not have guessed that the Cup was now lost also, or that history-making events would soon transpire. As the loss of an individual scoring title was rendered insignificant by the quest for the team trophy, so would that trophy, the glorious, mythic Stanley Cup, emblematic of hockey supremacy, be overshadowed by time’s conniving winds.

Young Émile, intently listening in, had assumed that the game was hockey—only hockey, and just a game. Over time, he would learn that he’d been eavesdropping on history in the making, that the fracas on the ice, of the sort that could erupt anytime, anywhere, among any number of players in the sport, would ignite the passions of a people, his people, never to be forgotten over the course of his lifetime, that the cultural fabric of his society was being knit with each swing of the stick …

… in the year 1955.

On the first day of September, deeply inebriated and almost naked, the premier of the province of Quebec sat in a plush leather chair in the tower of an immense, elegant, Old World hotel, the Château Frontenac in Quebec City. He discussed with a young woman the matter of her virtue. Fetching, yet admirably hesitant, the young lady from the legislature’s secretarial pool presented a half-moon face to him, the hidden portion darkened by brown curls that sprang back to her scalp whenever he gave them a tug. When they’d met, he’d pulled a curl before saying hello, and she had looked at him through her one uncovered eye, revealing a half-smile. She’d not yet consented to the fulfillment of their liaison, and had declined to unfasten all her clothing—determined, it appeared, to remain perpetually in half-shadow.

In advance of her compliance, the young lady needed to ascertain the level of this man’s faithful interest. In the oratorical gusto for which he was renowned, the premier had roared back, “Not only do I not love you, my beauty, but I never shall, nor will I marry you! What else do you wish to hear, sweet girl, to be convinced of my fidelity in this matter? You are, I suppose, with your flashing green eyes and soft pink skin, a lovely creature. I am Maurice Duplessis—le Chef! The soul of the French people! I wish to sink my teeth into you—yet draw no blood, impart no serious impression. What more could you possibly need to know, Mademoiselle?”

“Sir. Yes. For instance, do you know who I am?” pleaded the young woman.

“Of course! You’re … Charlotte, no?”

“Charlene!”

“The green-eyed Charlene! Close enough, no?”

“Do you want to sleep with me, sir, because you like me, or do you want to sleep with me because you’re too drunk to care?”

Ah, so that was it, and a good question, one the intoxicated premier now had to worry his way through. Never before had he encountered an objection laced with such pert eloquence.

Just then came a frantic knocking at the door.

Unsteady on his feet, wearing only briefs and socks held in place by garters, Duplessis swung open the oversized door to confront his aide. “Imbecile! What is it? I forbade you to interrupt—”

“—except in the case of an emergency, sir.”

“What emergency? Out with it!”

“The Germans, sir. Hitler. He’s invaded Poland.”

The premier stood in the doorway, swaying, assessing the news. “Young man,” he declared, after an interval of a half-minute, “Poland is not an emergency!” And slammed shut the door.

Turning back to the room and his consort for the evening, the most powerful man in the province remarked, “My dear, I am sleeping with you tonight, not because I love you or even know you, not because you are beautiful, although perhaps you are—who can tell under those delightful curls?—but I am sleeping with you because we’ve reached a moment in history that cannot pass without …” He burped, stalled, and swayed awhile. “What was I saying? … commemoration. In time you will recall this fateful day. When Germany invaded Poland, you were in bed with le Chef! Is that not reason enough to stay the night?”

She considered his take on the matter a moment. Then the lady accepted that the justification met her standard.

Later, smoking, her limbs indelicately akimbo and her round, alabaster face aglow upon the pillow, her hair finally off her face, she inquired of him, “What will become of us, sir? The world?”

Duplessis stretched an arm to retrieve the Scotch. “That, Mademoiselle, remains to be seen.”

“I’m frightened.”

“My dear, why trouble yourself? We’re in greater danger of your cigarette igniting the mattress than we are from Hitler in Poland. Who is your premier?”

“You are, of course. Maurice Duplessis.”

“In whose arms do you lie tonight?”

“In yours, sir. Still, I worry. What will I do when you forget me tomorrow?”

“Don’t let that happen! Be unforgettable tonight!”

“Oh, sir. What’s a poor girl to do with you?”

“No one does anything with me, my child. If anything is to be done, I am the one to do it! But don’t despair about this war. A week ago, a speaker was quoted in the papers. He declared that, rather than fight on the battlefields of Europe, French-Canadians will fight on the streets of Montreal!”

“That’s why I’m frightened,” Charlene said. “The uproar.”

He sighed, and tousled her curls. He tugged a few and smiled as they snapped back. “That is why you must depend upon your premier. Now come closer, my pet. Let us drink this bottle down.”

“What about the war?” the young woman inquired. She inhaled smoke to the depths of her lungs. His penis was deformed. The sight still unnerved her.

“Poland is not a war! What about our bottle?”

In the morning, he’d more fully discover the news. Nations were declaring war, including his own, thanks to that wretched prime minister, Mackenzie King, who’d promised no war only to bound at the chance to declare. Politicians and their promises. They should all be hanged.

Except, of course, himself.

Lines were being drawn, outside the country and within …

… in the year 1939.

The English were coming. The English were coming. Again! Les maudits anglais.

The bishop rarely uttered the words aloud, yet endlessly they’d drum in his head. His sleep had been fitful. Damn English. He woke to a new day muttering the phrase out of a dream in both languages. A report of fresh arrivals at the port in Montreal had reached him the night before. For a moment, as he opened his eyes, he yearned to believe that the news had visited him in a dream, that it was all some wretched nightmare, unreal. His perpetual frown furled into a scowl. No dream. More damn English were coming. By his perspective the invasion had achieved epic proportions. Would it never stop?

A more troubling issue agitated him as well: what would be required of him before this human brush fire burned itself to ashes?

At the outset, the matter had been less problematic, the convenience of good choices apparent. Canada had oodles of room. Why did Upper Canada exist if not to accommodate the aggravating, infernal English? As well, New York State had agreed to accept stragglers. Americans, after all, were both infuriatingly friendly and encumbered by their own largesse. They spoke the same language, practised a retrograde quasi-Christianity similar to that of these pitiful migrants. Initially, the bishop’s conscience had not been disturbed as boatloads of suffering émigrés arrived. He had traipsed down to the docks with his entourage in tow, grand men in their illustrious capes and hefty rings and bejewelled crosses, accompanied by a pod of pale priests in black who’d help their superiors down from the carriages, open a gate, then sweep nosy riff-raff aside. Bishop Lartigue would sagely whisper in the ear of a ragged English representative, “New York, mmm?” And more often, with a knowing wink, “Upper Canada.” He’d smile, then shoo les maudits on their way.

Quebec was to remain forever French. Any astute interpretation of the terms of surrender dictated that obligation. Yet with the passage of time, the bishop had had to confess that his conscience was growing muddled. The new travellers were not being welcomed into the established societies to the west and south. Malnourished as they emerged from famine in the Lake District of England, they boarded ships to the Canadas. Assailed by illness and catastrophe throughout the crossing, many travellers lost their lives. The survivors who disembarked at the port of Montreal were wretched, exhausted, recently bereft of husbands or wives, abruptly childless. They slumped on the pier in their misery and in their stinking rags and upon their knees begged for a sliver of hope. As if hope had proved to be a commodity only Bishop Lartigue could properly dispense.

“Your Grace,” they pleaded. “Your Grace.”

As if they were Catholics themselves. Were they Irish? If they weren’t Irish, they weren’t Catholics in the Bishop’s eyes, and if they weren’t Catholics they should not be begging food or land from him, much less be pleading for their lives.

Still, word had come back on the fate of the first arrivals he’d dispatched up the St. Lawrence River. A number had perished, including children, the journey too difficult for indigents in their condition. Of those who had arrived alive, so sorry had been their state that they were maltreated at their destination. At the time, the solution seemed perfectly reasonable: point the way to English Canada. Move them along, a few shiploads initially, an appropriate response to a regrettable problem. And yet, more shiploads were coming, still more were expected.

In the past, the English had arrived on these shores as soldiers, flaming in the arrogance of their red coats, claiming victories across the continent—including here, in Lower Canada, where trickery, or so those defeated in battle claimed, had earned the day. Who could doubt it? The English were fiendish, arrogant, dour, dim-witted, pompous, dull, foul-smelling and, with striking exceptions, infuriatingly victorious. Who could not despise them? Until this latest foray. Now they were arriving in tatters, skinny, dismayed, their mouths bleeding, their teeth falling out if they spoke too rapidly, their eyes sunken to the backs of their heads like the most pathetic ghouls of hell. Their children—if alive, and often a few had just been born, bred in the holds of ships where rats fed upon the placenta—so sickly that to gaze into their suffering eyes was tantamount to enduring the Lord’s own passion. What was he to do with these English children?

The new migration altered the political compact, which had been partially adversarial, so that Bishop Lartigue was unsure how to consider the new arrivals or how to conduct himself among them. In his heart he could no longer think of them as les maudit anglais with an abiding conviction.

He pushed himself out of bed and carried the immensity of his girth to the door, where, languidly, he scratched his belly and, stretching, indulged in a flagrant yawn. He wore only his white nightdress and the small gold cross on a chain that hung from his neck. In sleep he would lie modestly attired, secure in his humility should death find him in the night, although five rings sparkled upon his fingers. Over the years his flesh had expanded everywhere and he had long since forsaken the idea of slipping any ring loose again. The door opened from its centre. He thrust its two halves apart and snapped his fingers. Young priests scurried, as they should, one to draw his bath, another to attend to his breakfast. Another brushed past him to prepare for his grooming and the formality of his dress. A fourth priest, this one not young but grey-haired and sallow, a year from seventy but closer to death, approached with his eyes downcast and kissed the archiepiscopal ring on his right hand, which the bishop extended while gazing absently elsewhere.

“Your Grace,” the skinny old priest dutifully, somewhat fearfully, informed him. “More English have arrived. A ship—”

“Yes yes yes,” Bishop Lartigue, in early-morning temper, snarled back. “May I not take my bath in peace? Must you besiege me before my eyes have fully opened!” He took a step toward the man, as though to flail him with an invisible whip.

“Your Grace.”

“You fool!”

Bowing, the secretary-priest retreated, his eyes downcast in supplication …

… in the year 1821.

Drawn by a light nor’easter, pitched against a fair current on the bow, the Émérillon plied the river waters cautiously, gaining little more than a half-knot an hour towards the hilly island ahead. Indians at Stadacona had foretold this place, and the French mariner Jacques Cartier knew that he was soon to be confronted by the limit of his exploration for the summer. Cold weather approached, and the Indians had impressed upon him that the island lay surrounded by treacherous rapids. Only the exceptionally brave or the ardently reckless need persevere beyond this threshold, and none by ship.

Masts creaked, sails flogged as the wind shifted, waves gently lapped at the prow. Overhead, geese by the tens of thousands flew in V-formations from one horizon to the next, wave upon wave across the sky, their bellies lit bright orange by the setting sun, their manic honking incessant.

South with Verrazano, Cartier had already proven his mettle, and this was his second exploration with his own command to the north latitudes, to most minds an act of foolhardiness. Both stubborn and astute, he believed that the challenges that faced him here and beyond this island would be greatly superseded by the riches they sheltered.

The trick would be to survive.

Jacques Cartier readily followed his instincts, but he was no fool. A year earlier, he had sailed the coast of an impressive island on a broad, magnificent sea bound by imposing coastlines and an abundance of birdlife and fish. Combining his wits and experience with stories gleaned from Indians, he’d deduced that the current indicated a great river flowing to the sea. Winter stood guard against him, and with the season the wild, frigid winds of the north Atlantic. Having returned to France without exploring what lay ahead, he had spoken of his belief with sufficient zeal—and produced two Indians to corroborate his opinions—that his second voyage was financed and its scale increased. His calculation proved shrewd, for on this next journey he sailed into the inland waterway, which he declined to name. (An anomaly of which his crew took notice. Cartier named an insignificant bay for St. Lawrence, anchoring there on that saint’s day, but the mightiest river known to him, the only river upon which he’d sailed a vessel intended for the sea, went unnamed. Most of his men, but not all those aboard, remained puzzled by this.) After a brief sojourn at the native village of Stadacona, he left two ships there and approached, more than a hundred nautical miles south, the place the Iroquois called Hochelaga. In the shank of the evening, with a distant silhouette of the mountain behind which the sun had set, the Émérillon dropped anchor to weigh the adventures of morning.

Ducks descended from the sky like a darkening rain and fell upon the broad bays and out from the river’s shore.

Cartier stood upon the deck while his men struck sail. In the distance, elevated on a squat mountain, he observed tiny specks. Fires within the Iroquois fortifications. Evidence of habitation in this vast domain bewildered and excited him, and he listened to the robust silence of a continent awakening to his presence.

“Jacques.” Only the king’s man presumed to speak to him without proper formality.

“Gastineau,” acknowledged the captain. Neither did he return the appropriate recognition, failing to use the king’s man’s Christian name or to address him as monsieur. If the courtier considered him a boor for being a mariner, he would allow the opinion to stand, and behave, whenever he felt the need, boorishly.

The two men stood side by side in the vast twilight while seamen worked aloft and along the deck. They were not the sole inhabitants of their planet, but in this realm it was easy to imagine that they persevered among the scant few.

“Come sunrise, Jacques, what are your expectations? What do you hope to find here? In this … Hochelaga. The way you speak the name … the reverence in your voice. This place is important to you.”

Cartier considered a response. How could he explain the magic in the word? Or dare reveal that Indian stories describing the Land of the Saguenay, its access beyond this river island, had seduced him? He had paused in Stadacona only a few days—compelled by the weather, but more importantly by a sense of destiny, a compulsion to prove the island and speak to the Indians there, hear from their lips tales of the marvels over which their island stood guard.

From the outset, Gastineau had been skeptical of the voyage, reticent to accept the potential of a land beyond the sea. Sailors were impudent liars by nature, clever with a tall tale or an outlandish claim of riches calculated to inspire a king’s investment. The most resilient among them if confronted by a disappointment, Cartier was also the most persistent, both as an explorer and as a spokesman for his cause. Not a trustworthy combination in Gastineau’s mind, an opinion shaken in recent days as a land of astounding scale had arisen before his eyes. The broad hills, the majestic waterway—in all of Europe no river of similar breadth existed. He had already participated in perplexing adventures and conceded that Cartier had never overstated his impressions gleaned from previous voyages. If anything, he should be judged deficient at invoking the continent’s majesty and wonders. Upon reflection, Gastineau had come to believe that he now knew why—for no speech could summon this dominion to life. What words could recreate its wild enchantment, pay homage to its particular glory?

Such wonders. Seals by the hundreds of thousands barked at their passage. Whales cavorted in a river far inland from the sea. Seabirds by the millions, their cries louder than the roar of armies. Fish in such thick abundance, at times they reversed a ship’s progress.

The shape of the world was being forever transformed.

And what of those they called sauvages? Severe in their smoky tepees, asquat in animal skins, gazing coldly upon him, they stank. Such a foul odour that his eyes watered and he veered towards faint. He had no standing in their midst—he could not announce the king’s name to assure his passage—yet he had been obliged to sit among them, mindful of protocol. On this side of the sea, his very life, he had come to understand, had to be entrusted to the care and acumen of Cartier.

“Last summer,” spoke the captain of the Émérillon, and he possessed a slow manner of speech, each word carefully considered, which indicated to Gastineau that he had either to be plotting something or maintaining a rigorous mental diary of his lies, “at the approach of autumn, I stood on an island out to sea. I felt the flow of water between my fingers, observed its ripple despite the tide. This confirmed stories told by Indians of a great river. Now we have sailed its upper portion. My friend, the river will continue for miles without end, through what riches? Ask yourself, how vast a land must exist to provide for such a river? The tributaries, the lakes? Together, all the lakes and streams of Europe are no more than puddles and creeks compared to this river! No man has seen its end, the Indians say. So, we are not passing through a narrow barrier to the Orient, the one Verrazano envisioned. He was searching for what he saw in his mind, failing to comprehend what his eyes could plainly see. What lies beyond us is what the Iroquois say: a land without measure. A land, as you may advise our king, rich in diamonds, abundant in gold.”

The king’s man nodded and continued to watch down the river for the occasional infinitesimal flicker of fire. With the fall of darkness, he could feel the continent rising in his mind, as though to mirror the immensity of the starry space above them, equally as mysterious and unknown. He felt that he now understood why the captain had named his ship after Merlin, a sorcerer. Yet he was a practical man, and checked himself before he was fully undermined by the poetry of this boundless space. “My dear Jacques, my mind has been opened to the girth of the land, yes. But God has not entrusted my eyes with evidence of treasure.”

“All that the natives have told me has been proven true. Why not this?”

The king’s man no longer challenged Cartier’s logic with any special vigour. During the voyage, he had lost every argument he had pressed and the exercise now lacked merit. If Cartier was leading him, and their king, to gold and diamonds, he no longer wished to be dissuaded of the possibility. Indeed, with the proper inflections, an adroit word, he could recast himself as the true proponent of the enterprise.

Gastineau had guessed Cartier’s motive in not naming the river. The mariner had to be hoping that a clever cartographer, or the king himself, would name the river after him. Fleuve Jacques-Cartier. The king’s man would have none of that. He had gazed upon the map the captain was creating and noticed a small bay that now bore the name St. Lawrence. As soon as they were back in France, he would speak to the cartographers, and, through whatever means necessary, impress upon them that St. Lawrence was the name intended and best suited for this river without end. He wished the mariner no ill, but what extant mortal deserved a river of such immensity named in his honour? Certainly not a ship’s captain. If he personally accomplished nothing else on this voyage, Gastineau would sink that ambition to the bottom of the sea.

The travellers gazed upriver into the darkness there.

Unbeknownst to either man, at the smoky village beyond their vision, an Iroquois hunter had arrived on the shore by canoe. He told of a strange canoe the size of a hill seen afloat on the water days earlier, heading upstream. News of similar sightings had previously reached the ears of these men and women. White-skinned men, bearded men, men without women, sea creatures whose wretched seal-stink and sordid wolf-breath had been much discussed among the coastal tribes, men who lived in canoes as tall as trees and travelled from a world beyond the waters, beyond this land in another land, or so they claimed, had found the path down the great river inland from the sea, into the depths of their forests by giant canoe.

This, then, would be their time to meet.

These were Mohawks, one of the six nations of the Iroquois people. They kept watch that night, and awaited morning and the days ahead, their vigil a lengthy one …

… in the year 1535.