“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.”
5. the wedding
Philippe 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.’ ”