Narrative Of A Voyage...

Novel about the old voyageurs canoe route between Montreal and Cumberland in 1803.

NOTE: MOST OF THE ITALICIZED WORDS IN THIS TEXT ARE FOOTNOTED AND EXPLAINED AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE ON WHICH THEY OCCUR, BUT THIS SITE DOES NOT APPARENTLY SUPPORT FOOTNOTES. THE ORIGINAL WORK DOES CONTAIN THEM, HOWEVER.



Pointe-du-Lac
Quebec
Spring, 1803



Let me begin my story here…

My mother died giving birth to me. On the day I was born, my grandfather was away in our fields cutting hay. When he returned, he found my mother dead on the kitchen table and my Grandmother sitting at her feet, cradling me in her arms. I was crying. The tea kettle on the woodstove had boiled dry and filled the cabin with the smell of hot iron. It is grandfather’s opinion young children do not have memories, but I remember that smell, and even today can not abide it.

Since I was to be her first child, my mother’s death left me without brothers or sisters to grow up with. Nor did I have any relatives from her side of the family to befriend me, since she left them behind on the Gaspesie when my father brought her here to Pointe-du-Lac following their marriage. As for uncles and aunts on my father's side, there are none there either, since my Grandfather married my Grandmother so late in life they had time for only one child, my father. Even my poor Grandmother did not stay to raise me. She died from asthme when I was an infant, and fortunatly too young to remember that awful scene in our barn.

I should say my Grandfather does have one living relative - a younger brother, Maurice, who is nearing eighty now. But Maurice never married so he has been no help to me in the family regard. He lives in Montreal three days up the Ste-Laurent from Grandfathers and we visit with him infrequently, although as I shall relate, he plays an important part in my story.

As you can see, I led a solitary life during my boyhood. This is why I feel so loosely connected to this place - to my grandfather’s farm where he has raised me here in little Pointe-du-lac and to the life of a cultivator in general. I have no web of cousins, aunts, and uncles to fix me to these the farmfields. When I was a boy, I would sit and watch the fleuve Saint-Laurent1 rolling by our cabin. The Kings Road follows its shoreline. I remember sitting in the long grass at its side and waving to the drivers as they rumbled by on their high-seated wagons. What adventurous destinations they must have! That a wagonload of raw hides bound to the tanners in nearby Trois-Rivières did not have an adventurous destination never occurred to me. In my child's mind, whatever traveled that long road was caught up in the mystery of its distant ends.

This much is certain: From the time I was young, I always knew my future lay out there beyond this farm. I always knew I would escape the life of a cultivator and become a voyageur and a free man, and would never settle for life behind four boundary lines and a plow.

My Father
My father was a voyageur. I remember him leaving Montreal each May in one of the North West Company canoes to paddle the trade goods out to the rende-vous. Those years, he would not return until October when he brought back the bales of furs. He was only a contractual laborer on those boats, and as such made no percentage of the profit from those skins. He paddled the canoe in part for the adventure and in part for the few Spanish dollars the Company paid him on contract. But most of all, he rode them from pride in our family heritage. He and my Grandfather come from a long line of voyageurs stretching back to the founding of Canada. My father was a proud part of this tradition, as am I – or as I will be now that I am older.
But my father was not always away in the canoes. During late fall and winter, after he returned from the rende-vous, he lived with grandfather and I on the farm until he left again the following spring. I was always with him when he was home. To help earn our living, he was also a fisherman, a cultivator, and a timber cutter...a marchand, as we French say, a "jack of all trades" as do the English, and I helped him with his work.

I remember him skidding white pines to the mast-landing on the Ste-Laurent during winter. These were the huge Broad Arrow2 trunks the Royal Surveyor of Woods permitted him to cut for use as masts on English ships. These trees might be 120 feet tall and five feet across at the butt, and require 100 oxen to drag to the waters edge for the English navy to retrieve in the spring. Of course, not every tree we cut made it to the landing. There were times when my father gathered the men at a fallen trunk and they made a plan for it from what we French call la loi du marais,, and the British, The Law of The Swamp. Then our illicit trunk would heat many French hearths that winter, and be the backbone of more than one French barn come Spring.

Other memories of my father: he and I would sit on our porch on Fall evenings and wait for the Post Rider to gallop by on the Kings Road below. When he did, we would cheer, and he might cheer back and wave his hat. If the rider was late, my father and I would invent stories why. In my mind, bandits or encounters with wolves were the reasons, while my fathers' centered on the public drinking house in nearby Berthierville.

I remember this: When the whip-poor-wills began to call, my father would take me in his big arms and carry me to my bed, and sit on its edge, and tell me stories of the wild country to the far north - of the storms on the big lakes and the wild savages living deep in the woods. This time I spent with him by candlelight, snug in my blankets, listening to the deep, slow cadence of his voice while the wind blew in our eaves - those nights made up for the months he was away in the canoes and absent from my life.

***
I was ten years old when my father was murdered. His canoe wrecked on the rocks in the backcountry and all the men in it were lost, save two, who survived to tell the story of the sinking. The other voyageurs in the brigade placed eight wooden crucifixes on the hill overlooking the rapids, one in the memory of each man lost. Then they said a prayer to Providence and to Ste-Anne, picked up their paddles, and continued down the river. Such is their stalwart way, a way inured to the heartbreak of the Water Road and to life in general.

I remember the September day I learned of my father's death. Uncle Maurice, my Grandfathers brother who I have mentioned, was also my father's employer, since he is an important Partner in the Company. He drove his carriage down from Montreal to deliver the news.

'Send the boy to the barn," he told Grandfather when we greeted him in the yard. As I walked away, I saw Maurice put his arms across Grandfathers big shoulders and lean his face close to his.

In that instant, I knew something terrible had happened. I fled to the barn. I remember kneeling inside, so overcome with dread my heart stopped beating there in the straw and dusty sunbeams. Nor will I ever forget the look on Grandfathers face when he came to get me. It was the look that told the real truth of life, the truth men try so hard to forget: that no man is ever free of life's pain.

Even now, years later, when I am alone in the barn and the sun falls between the vertical wallboards at a perfect angle; and when the horizontal cracks above the door and window frames let in sun-lines to fall across the first like a lattice, I see bright crucifixes scattered on the straw.
***
Following the news of my father's death, Grandfather and my Uncle Maurice returned to Montreal and remained there a fortnight to close his affairs. They left me with our neighbor, Maillot. The Company made an investigation into the wreck. Goods had been lost! Profit wasted! Good men drowned! My father was the gouvernail in the canoe that day and the man who caused the wreck, the devant. This devant was drunk. At a crucial time in the rapids, he stumbled and fell back among the thwarts. Released, the bow swung ‘round in the current and the rapids took them.

In the end, the Company assigned blame: the drunken devant was the cause. But what else could they do? The devant had also drowned, a victim of his own foolishness. His actions so shamed his wife and children they left Montreal for Batiscan and never returned.

My fathers’ actions that day were beyond reproach. One of the survivors told the story - of how my father stayed in the boat and steered it away from the rocks to give the men a chance to jump and save themselves. They did jump, but the current was too strong and took them anyhow. With his strong arms and shoulders my father was a powerful swimmer. Had he fled the boat the instant the bow turned, instead of staying behind to give an advantage to others, he would be alive today. His sacrifice is honored across the Trade. Say his name anywhere among the old voyageurs and they will nod and puff their pipes in appreciation.

My Grandfather
It’s true the losses in my life, starting with my mother and lasting through the murder of my father, have caste a certain melancholy over me. And I admit this mood has caused me to act in ways that have not brought out my best. Nevertheless, it is not a temperament I can do away with by will. In the years following my fathers death, I often used my fists to send my boyhood friends home in a bloody shirt. I regret these actions now, but this anger in me remains an indispensable part of who I am even today.

One person I have never directed this anger towards is my grandfather. I did not spare him out of respect alone, but because any sign of obstinacy on my part might spark his natural temper. He is a peremptory man given to violent fits. What would happen if I exhausted his patience for raising me? Would he put me out? Where would I go then? To the charity of the Church? A more miserable life I can not imagine. He is a difficult man but one I am dependent on, and as a consequence, I have always been moderate towards him.

You should know my father, my grandfather, and I have the same name: Joseph-Mathias Sainton.

***
It has been eight years now since my father died and for that entire time it has been Grandfather and I alone on his farm in Pointe-du-Lac, on the north shore of the Ste-Laurent. Montreal. He and I live in the same stone house he built for my grandmother when he retired from the canoes years ago. It has one large room inside overhung on each end by narrow lofts accessed by ladders. Grandfather sleeps in one loft and I in the other. Our most notable furniture is a large trestle table Grandfather built from oak planks. He claims these planks came from the side of an English ship sunk in the war (which war he has never specified), but in my opinion they likely arrived from the Pointe-du-Lac sawmill by ox-cart. This is the same table on which my father and I were born, and where my mother died.

As for our economy, it is sparse but sufficient. We have a large barn and a three-sided stable plus separate log sheds for our chickens, swine, and two milch cows, as well as a sheepfold. We also keep two horses - an ancient mottled mare I've ridden since I was a child and a big Cleveland Bay gelding to pull our carriage, sleigh, and field wagon by season. We also barter out our brace of oxen to other farms during spring planting. Our closest neighbor, Porte Maillot, who lives across the lot beside us, puts 40 acres to red wheat each spring and depends on them, since his horses alone do not have the strength to turn over so much land. Maillot does not keep his own oxen. If he did, he says, his fourteen children would break into the barn one night and eat them. He describes his brood as no better than a swarm of baptized locusts.

Most of what Grandfather and I need comes from our animals. They give us meat, eggs, tallow for soap, wool, milk, and butter. In the spring, we plant five English acres to peas and thirty more to red wheat, and in the summer get two cuttings of hay from our bottomland - three if the weather is neither too wet nor too dry in September. Wild plum and cherry trees line our property, wild grapevines entwine our fences in dark mats, and farther back on the high slopes behind the birches are the maples we tap during ishkigamisegi to make sugar. We find a ready market for this sweet among the French, English, and indians alike, and profit from it.

In short, Grandfather and I have lived a comfortable life free from physical want. He has grown me up with the proper food and clothing and moral direction needed to carry me forward with expectations of success in life. The only physical thing I lacked as a boy is a dog to run the fields with like the other boys my age. This is Grandfathers fault. He detests dogs in all ways but one: boiled in a pot with turnips in the indian fashion
.
***
My Grandfather was born in Enfant d'Jesus Parish on Ile Montreal during our French Regime. As a boy, he helped his father build bark canoes in the dirt outside their cabin door. His father was a coureur de bois, as was his father before him. From the time he was old enough to walk, he followed his father into the woods and helped harvest the rolls of bark they needed to make their boats. By the age of eight, he could use a drawknife to shape a cedar canoe rib or smooth a length of ash-wood to make a perfect gun'l. Canoes were in his blood then as they are now.

When he turned sixteen, he ran away from home and took up the dangerous life of a coureur.This is when he met Naawakamigookwe, a twelve-year-old saulteaux girl, and married her. Her name means “Middle of the Earth Woman” and she was the daughter of an important elder. Having a connection like this among the indians was important to him because the tribe would show him preference in trading. He still keeps the wiigwaasabak Naawaka drew for him. Only he understands what Naawaka scratched there – the symbols detailing their short life together – but he will not share their meaning with me or even suffer me to touch the roll.

Naawaka died from the picotte when she was fifteen and Grandfather abandoned the life of a coureur, moved back into settled country, and took a paddling contract on a Frobisher canoe. In this way, he came to the life he was meant to live. Through his natural intelligence and casual use of brute force, with his brass-shod hickory staff and his thick arms, shoulders, and bull-like neck, he soon rose from the low rank of milleaux12 to the respected position of guide13 in the canoes. For the next thirty years, he enforced a rigid discipline among the sixty rough voyageurs under his command.

Today, my Grandfather is in his seventy-eighth year but is still a man of physical consequence. He has kept his broad shoulders, thick neck, and barrel-like chest and can walk all day in the hot sun behind a plow. He has adjusted to life as a cultivator in his retirement when most men who spend their early years in the canoes can not. He is not completely content with it, however. When the ice goes out on the river in the spring and the clacking of the ice pans in the fleuve keeps us awake at night, he sits on the porch with his pipe and remembers. I believe he misses the glory of not having died in a canoe, of not feeling the cold water close over his head one final time. In his mind, drowning may have been a more fitting end than the life he has now - an old man on a Quebec farm, and all the bitterness that has accrued inside him from it.

My Plan
I mentioned earlier how I always knew I would go to the canoes when I was older. I first understood this one night at siigwaan. In late winter - at the start of the season the saulteaux called siigwaan - Grandfather would take me into the woods and we would cut birch bark to sell to the canoe-makers in Trois-Rivieres. According to him, siigwaan is the best time to harvest this winter bark the Company uses to build canoe bottoms, because the barks orange inner rind was at its strongest and most waterproof. Unfortunately, winter bark is also difficult to peel off the tree, since without the sap to intervene it clings directly to the trunk beneath. Summer bark comes off easily but is weaker and only suitable for the sides of a canoe. The saulteaux women know to harvest summer bark it to make their cooking baskets when the raspberries were ripe in mid-summer. More than once, I remember Grandfather looking at a canoe passing by on the fleuve and snorting, ah! Summer bark!, with a dismissive shake of his head. You can tell the difference between them from afar: with the inner side of the bark facing out, winter bark turns a rich, ruddy umber, while summer bark lightens with time to a weak, sandy tan. No man should trust his life to a canoe made entirely from summer bark.

When I was a child, Grandfathers ability to time the arrival of this siigwaan was magical. For several days in late winter he would pace the cabin porch staring out at the bare trees, until one day he would shake me awake and off we would go to the birches. One year, I had already started my chores when he came into the barn and ordered, "We cut bark today!" Siigwaan must have just arrived, because it had not been there thirty minutes earlier when I went out to clean the horse stalls.

Years later as I neared adulthood, Grandfather told me the secret of siigwaan. 'In late winter, there’ll be a warm spell lasting several days,” he said, “This is the first sign of spring. The Saulteaux call it ahn-dayg-wag. This mild weather will pull the crows from their winter grounds so you’ll hear them in the trees and see them at dawn. But soon the cold will return and drive them south again. This cold will continue for as long as it does, but not too long. When the warmer weather returns, the crows will re-appear on a south wind. When they do, that is the exact start of siigwaan.”

The birch trees we cut for bark are in a grove an hours walk inland from our farm. This early in spring the snow would lay in scattered drifts through the woods. I would push through them in my childs snowshoes as best I could, with Grandfathers commands driving me on. But eventually the snow would become too deep for me and I would come to a stop and – when young – start to cry. This always enraged my Grandfather. He would bundle me aboard his tabaganne and pull me along in angry silence. No doubt my father received the same treatment from him when he was a boy. In truth, grandfather does not distinguishes between commanding voyageurs and raising children.

Once we arrived at the birches we would prepare our work area by stamping down a circle in the snow with our snowshoes. Grandfather made a game of this he called "The English Stomping Down the Dreams of Good Frenchman," and he always set about it with great energy. As a true Frenchman, he detests the English, and if he had his way we would go to war with them again. We put our fire here in the same place each year and hung a kettle for tea before going to work among the birches, where we would spend the entire day cutting. As dusk approached, Grandfather would wrap his crooked-knife in a cloth and slip it back into his old sack from his voyageur days. This was my signal to build up the fire. As the sun set red in the forest and the temperature fell, we would mix flour, salt, and water for beaten biscuits, fry them in bear grease, and eat them hot with molasses. Afterward, we would sit in the dark woods smoking our pipes and he would tell me long, rambling stories from his canoe days.

My life’s path in the canoes was made clear to me one such night. I was twelve years old at the time; it was two years after my father was murdered. We were listening to the owls when he leaned towards me, the firelight bright on his face.

'Now you listen to me, Mathias. I’ll show you this and you must remember it,' he said sternly.

I set aside my pipe and sat straight.

With his hands folded in front of him as if in prayer, he tilted the base of each palm back from the other and loosened his fingers, so that each extended finger slid down past the other until he clasped his hands together in an interlocked ball

'Pay attention I tell you! A voyageurs life is like this,” he said, holding his hands close to the firelight. “These four fingers locked in a ball represent what’s most impotant to us: knowledge of the Water Road, courage, strength, and loyalty to our family. Always those four. Now look at my thumbs!'

His thumbs had naturally crossed each other in front of his balled fists to form an "X."

“C'est l'aviron qui nous guide – it is the paddle that brings us. The paddle will guide you to what kind of a man you will be. None of us is born to a fate; do you understand this? We are not born whole, but only partly formed. You must construct your own life through acts of courage, skill, strength and respect for family, all bound together by the paddle. If you do not work at making yourself the man you want to be, the world will make you into a man you do not like. So we say faire L’Homme, make the man. You must claim your place in a canoe like your father and I did and there you will make yourself into an honorable man. You will be the fifth generation of Saintons to paddle, I swear it.”

He placed his hand on his heart.

“Sur ma foi de voyageur.”

In this way I came to understand with such certainty that I would go to the canoes when I was of age, and I would fulfill my family's heritage and become a free man and a voyageur like my poor father.

When we walked home that night through the dark forest, Grandfather pushed me forward and insisted I lead the way. I could not, of course, being a boy so far from home. I stood facing the woods with its night sounds and moving shadows, unable to move in any direction. Then grandfather was kneeling beside me, pressing his warm cheek to mine. He took hold of my hand and pointed it at the night sky.

“See the star there, the bright one above the hemlock? Nawaka called it giiwedin-anang.16 Here…put it over your shoulder like this and keep it there as you walk. Giiwedin-anang will always guide you home.”

And so it did.

My Plan Changes
In the years following my oath, or should I say grandfathers oath that I accepted as my own, I never lost sight of my Plan for a life in the canoes. It became my giiwedin-anang of sorts, guiding me towards my future. Grandfather continued to assure me he would do anything to bring it about, since he was as invested in it as I. This is why turmoil erupted one day when my entire Plan was suddenly cast into doubt.

Let me explain: Inside our barn door there is a thick support post. On my birthdays from the time I was old enough to walk my father, and later my Grandfather, would stand me straight against it and cut a chip at my head level. In this way they recorded my growth.

Like most boys along the fleuve, each with his own version of a notching post, I watched as the knife marks crept upwards. If they grew beyond five feet six inches, the Company was not likely to hire me as a paddler. It was a simple matter of physics for them: larger men take more space and weight in a canoe than is economical for moving goods across the continent. Short and strong men like my father and Grandfather made perfect paddlers. As a result, I was determined to claim my place in the canoe by growing no more than they.

Unfortunately, my poor dead mother had other plans. She had been a LeBlanc, an Acadian refugee returned from exile in St. Servan, France at the end of the war. Once back in Canada, she found work in one of Robbins fish camps on the Gaspesie, near Perce, where she met my father. He had gone there to buy a canoe and brought back a wife instead. As it was, my mother and her relations had more height to them than was usual for the time, and she managed to pass it all on to me in the nine short months we were together. As a consequence, I watched as the marks sped up the post.

My mother's height was not my only problem, however. From my father and Grandfather I inherited all the rest of me. I grew into their wide shoulders, heavy arms, and deep chest. By the time I was eight, I had an almost comical, top-heavy look. By the time I was thirteen, other men asked me to help turn a boulder from their field or haul up rafters for a barn when he and his own sons did not have the sgtrengh to do it alone. Today, I stand taller and more broad than any man I know, even my Grandfather, who I am a head above and two stone17 beyond.

For each inch of height, another inch of me grew out, and all these inches worked to my disadvantage in a canoe. This became undeniable by my fourteenth birthday. When Grandfather stood me against the post that day and took the chip, I saw the disappointment on his face. Fourteen and already well above the mark!

'Pah! It's a problem,' he said as he rubbed his chin and stared at the chip laying in the straw. 'But you are going to the canoes. I'll find a way!”

Grandfather was typically quiet when he was thinking his way through a problem. I had learned long ago that disturbing him at such times only brought a fiery response. A full week passed in this way until one night, as I was climbing to bed in my loft, he called me down to where he was sitting in front of the fireplace.

“Your height, not a problem, and not your weight, either. We only need to change your role in the Trade. Being in the Trade is what counts! Being in the pays d’haute is what counts! So if being a paddler is not the path for you, we must make you into a Company clerk.”

He explained how clerks, called commis, are the backbone of the fur business because they are the ones who trade face-to-face with the indians at the remote posts. It is the commis who keeps the exchange rate for furs and enforces discipline in the backcountry, and during the winter, when the indians begin to starve, he is the one who advances them food on account and secures their repayment in furs at a later date. He records this activity in a daily log, makes the goods-lists for the following year, keeps various ledgers, and corressponds with the Company back in Montreal through letters. Being a commis is responsible and well paying work.

"And standing behind a trading counter, you aren’t going to get yourself drowned," he concluded, and of course this was a reference to my fathers’ misfortune, and to his own fathers as well, who had met the same fate.

As I stood there listening to him explain my future to me, I was dismayed. Was I to abandon my boyhood dream of paddling? But later that same night as I lay in bed, I understood it was my only way forward. If my size and weight kept me out of a life in the canoes, what choice did I have?
In the days ahead, I found peace with the new plan, until one night another problem occurred to me, this one even more problematic than the first: to keep ledgers and written correspondance, I must be literate, but I was not. I spoke both French and English, of course, but was unable to read or write either. There are no schools in Pointe-du-Lac for French farm boys like myself. Illiteracy trapped us on our farms and to the life of drudgery that followed, as surely as the furrow follows the plow. Had Grandfather found a solution for me after all? If I was both too large and illiterate, what work was there left for me in the Trade? What future was left for me other than a plow? Why did my grandfather not see this?

Uncle Maurice
You must understand my Grandfather: he is a man of action in the same manner as a bull. He understood the impediment my illiteracy would cause; he was passe-partout. So when the spring sun of my fourteenth year - 1799 – had dried the mud on the King's Road enough to allow for at least the theoretical chance of passage, he hitched the Bay to our calèche18 and drove to Montreal to place the question of my education before his older brother, my great-uncle Maurice.

From his position as a Partner in the North West Company, Maurice was an influential man, and Grandfather was determined to use his influence to arrange my education, and thereby my future in the Trade. Maurice was literate, but as an active Partner he did not have the time to teach me. However, Maurice's favor-granting in the past involved transporting the local priests by freight canoe to their missions in the pays d'en haut. Not only did he ferry them across thousands of miles, he gave them their food, tobacco, and other necessities for the Road at his own expense. The Father need only arrive at the dock one morning with his straw sun hat and his vellum copy of The Spiritual Exercises of St-Ignacious to claim a seat to anywhere in Canada a French-speaking paddler might go – in other words, to anywhere.

As a result of this largesse, Maurice had long ago befriended an influential Jesuit Bishop named Father Jean-Joseph Casot. Even today in his old age and forced retirement, Father Casot held immense authority as the last remaining Jesuit in Canada - the others having been expelled by the English for Papist intrigues against the English Crown. From his elevated and now secular position, Father Casot had managed to amass a fortune from business deals brought to him by, among others, Maurice. In short, favors were owed. So when Grandfather arrived in Montreal the spring of 1799 to discuss my future with him, Maurice knew immediately to whom he should turn. And since Father Casot was in Montreal then by invitation of the Sulpician Seminary, the three of them met and agreed on a New Plan for my life.

This was it: For the following four years, I would spend each winter at the old Jesuit Manoir House in Trois-Rivières, a short day’s ride downriver from Grandfathers farm. There Father Casot – an educated man - would give me my learning free of expense. In exchange, I would help with chores at the Manoir and relieve him of the expense of taking on a new hired man, his previous one having just fallen through the river ice and drowned while washing Father's chamber-pot. During the remainder of the year when I was not at the Manoir, I would continue to live with Grandfather and help him with planting and harvesting. I would continue this back-and-forth until I turned eighteen, at which time Maurice – as a Partner in the Company - would Contract me as a junior commis for three years at the Companys distant Athabasca post. I would be his man there behind the trading counter. At the end of those three years, he would bring me back to Montreal and teach me the ledger books of the Trade, these being his domain more than the canoes. Once I proved myself competent in both back-country trading and the sophistry of a Montreal ledger, he would retire and I would inherit his Share in the Company. With it, I could make my fortune in the Trade the same as he and maintain our family heritage as well, not directly in the canoes, perhaps, but at least in the business of them.

***
When Grandfather returned and explained their Plan for me, I was horrified. Given the losses attending my childhood, I was not eady to leave this cabin, even for a season, let alone four. This place was my sole connection to my mother and father. I did not object to the Plan outright, of course, for fear of Grandfathers reaction. Instead, I turned sullen and kept my distance.

While my resistance must have been evident, Grandfather showed uncharacteristic restraint by not demanding my immediate submission. In the following days, the endless chores on a Quebec farm in springtime distracted us from our disagreement. Then one night the topic surfaced again. It happened while we were sitting in our chairs in front of the fireplace. My eyes were shut and I had nothing on my mind besides my bed, while he, with his constant pipe and its slow fumaroles of smoke rising into the dark rafters, was equally distant. I happened to look across at him - and saw him already looking back at me. I watched as his chest rose on an in-breath. I watched as he drew the pipe stem from his mouth. He was going to speak, and in that instant I knew the issue of the Plan was about to be resolved between us. I surrendered to his authority even before he spoke.

'You'll need new clothes.”

He slipped the pipe back in his mouth and resumed his meditation.

And so the matter was settled. I would go to Trois-Rivières in the fall and I would reserve my first gallant stand against his authority for a later time, and a safer distance
.
I Am Tested
According to Father Casot’s agreement, there was one precondition for my entering the Manoir: I must first undergo an interview with Father, following which he would make the final decision if I was worth his efforts to educate. According to him, minds have a natural timbre representing their potential. This timbre is visible to a trained eye (his) even if the mind in question (mine) had evaded all schooling (as mine had). A mind with the necessary timbre would benefit from an education, but one without would not, and any attempt to chain it to one like an ox to a post would only end in everyone’s embarrassment.

So on 17 July 1799 - the hottest summer day of my fourteenth year - Grandfather hitched the bay to the caleche and we made the three-hour drive to Trois-Rivières to have my timbre tested.

I remember my first sight of the Manoir House. It sits three hundred yards from the flueve at the head of a cut meadow overlooking the banks. Riviere des Trois-Riviers, a small stream, runs beside it on the west side and joins the fleuve a short distance away; the Manoir sits in the crook created by the two, beside the old indian portage. The building is two stories, with steep gables and a mortared fieldstone chimney on each end, all built from limestone blocks. Four large dormer windows stretch across the front eaves, their frames freshly painted with cinnabar.20 To the north beyond lay scattered birch woods and the old Jesuit cemetery.

Although called the Jesuit Manoir, it had not been home to the Order for years. Following the Jesuits expulsion from Canada, its ownership had passed to the Ursulline Sisters. These nuns kept a Convent and chapel nearby from where they worked to save the local country girls from their natural sinful ways. By agreement, however, the nuns had no control over the Manoir House proper until such time as Father Casot died or was also expelled from Canada. This clause left Father in possession of his chosen residence during his chosen season - winter - since he preferred the Manoirs large fireplace to the smaller one at his summer home in Quebec City.

Father Casot's slave, a seventeen-year-old nègre boy from Madagascar Father had named Olivier, met us on the porche that day. Olivier is thin and nervous, with bright, crooked teeth and an oversized round head. He is also mute, and gestures constantly towards his mouth, as if trying to pluck the words out by force. He is pleasant enough and understands what is asked of him. He showed us in and left us waiting in the vestibule while he climbed above-stairs to find Father Casot.This downstairs room was large but bare to the floorboards. To the left through an archway lay a chapel with several wooden pews and a large crucifix overlooking an altar, and to the right was the refectory.21 The only furniture was a long table and assorted chairs where once the monks ate their dinner. At the far end of the refactory, a narrow staircase accessed the second floor, and before long Olivier came back down. Through pantomime, he let us know Father Casot was napping and we should wait, so he took us to lunch in the kitchen.

As a protection against fire, the kitchen was in a separate outbuilding in the sideyard. In the terrible heat of the day, the woman inside bent red-faced over their boiling pots. They cooked for Father Casot and also for visitors from Montreal and Quebec City, as well as for the mendies22 who arrived outside their door expecting a meal on the largessse of the Church. The women also sent a portion of their cooking to the nuns in the Ursulline Convent a mile farther down the road, so they were always busy at their pots and the bread oven outside. These women slept in a loft above the kitchen. A girl named Elise gave us bread, butter, and water, and we ate outdoors in the shade beneath an oak while we waited for Father Casot to wake up.

In time, Oliver returned and led us back to the Manor and up the narrow staircase in the refectory. The second floor opened onto a central hall in the middle of which sat an ancient Three Rivers stove surrounded by cords of firewood, with the the ceiling beams above it black with soot and smelling of smoke. There were eight rooms above-stairs, three of them without windows and only enough space for a cot and a crucifix; a poor monks cell. One of the remaining rooms was larger and contained a window with a leather flap for a curtain. I learned through Oliviers pantomime this was to be my room when I returned in the Fall.

The larger room facing onto the fleuve was Father Casots bedroom and office combined. It was the only room with a door, and it was closed. This left a single room Oliver had yet to show us. He slowly pushed back the blanket that served as a door. Beyond lay a tiny, windowless room. Shelves lined three of its walls from floor-to-ceiling, the fourth being the door-way where we stood, looking in. On the shelves sat rows of leather-bound books, their gilt bindings gleaming like embers in the dim light.

I stepped in and ran my finger along a row of book spines - and was immediatly embarrassed by my action. Wasn't this what an illiterate farm boy like me would be expected to do? To play with the colored bindings? Was I an Imposter for even coming to the Manoir with my improbable expectations of being educated? My confidence for my approaching interview drained out of me.

Let me explain. Books are a rarity in the countryside. I had seen only a few in my life, and they were always associated with educated and wealthy men. And who was I to aspire to such things? I, whose homespun chemise smelled of cow manure as I stood there in that tiny, hot room? I, whose response to those volumes had been no different than a childs: to play with the shiny bindings? Was my mind - as evidenced by my identical response - no more advanced than that childs? Surely Father will recognize me as the Imposter I was and turn me back out onto the hot road and my miserable future. Surely, he will find me timbre-less.

This was my greatest fear. After years spent in high opinion of myself as having been born for a better life than the plow, that I would be found by objective measurement to deserve no better. As long as I avoided any hard assessment of my true abilities, I could keep the pleasant belief of my natural superiority compared to the other boys along the fleuve. But to be tested and fail?

A cough from behind Father's door broke my gloomy thoughts. When Olivier led us into Father’s study, he was seated behind his desk and did not rise to greet us or even extend his hand, which I found cold of him. After a few pleasantries, Grandfather and Olivier excused themselves back down to the kitchen for more tea and I was left alone with the Venerable in his sunlit study.

I took the chair facing him across his broad desk. When he leaned back in his chair, I knew he was measuring me, so I took his as well.

My first impression was of his frailty and great age. His white hair lay in scattered remnants across his head where they had been pushed into unruly crowns by his nap pillow, as if he were The Last of The Plantagenants. Certainly, considering his age, he was close to becoming the last in his kin-line. The skin on his hands shone with the tight, spotted translucence often seen on the very elderly, as if a lifetime of washing had worn it down to the least possible wrapper needed to hold his finger-bones together. He was bony, which is to say, he was all bones. His face was a yellow parchment stretched over a jumbled pile of them, and only coincidentally resembled a physiognomy. From inside the cave created by his bushy brows, his left eye squinted out at me, but his right had long ago disappeared behind a gummy white cataract the size of an acorn. No doubt he was blind in the one eye and coming on it in the other. From finding him unfriendly, I now understood him to be an unfortunate Being clinging to what was left of him in this world, as I might cling to a cliff to keep from falling.

'You are Maurice's nephew.' he declared in a squeaky voice.

'Yes, Father,' I responded, 'his Grand-Nephew.'

'Yes. Moreover, you know who I am? And why you are here? Do you know why you are here?”

'I do, Father.'

'Yes. Well then...good, good."

Then he came to it abruptly, as if he had spent a fortnight planning his attack. He leaned towards me, his one eye bright...

'And how many illegitimate children are born in Quebec each year?' he snapped, “Need not, I say, against the will of God!”

I sat straight in my chair. I did not know the answer, of course, but assumed I should not look confused by the question.Without allowing even a breaths gap between his question and my response, I replied:

'Too many, Father. Sadly, too many. But what can we do in times like these, when the Holy Church is persecuted by the English?”'

I shook my head for effect.

He leaned back in his chair. A faint smile crossed his lips.

'Can you read, my son? Do you know your letters?'

'Not a word, not a letter, Father,' I confided in him. 'But I will learn.'

I was careful not to shift about in my chair and give him the impression I was an unsteady person. On the desk in line of sight between us sat a life-sized stone bust of an old man with a hooked nose. I watched as Father's questionable eye wandered first to me, then sideways to rest against the bust - before drifting back again to me again. Did his poor eyesight leave him confused as to which of the two heads shimmering in front of him he was interviewing? Another moment of silence passed as he studied me. Then he lifted his hand in the clear direction of the stone head and blessed it.
'Be here on 5 October,' he told it. 'I'll leave instructions for you if I'm still in Quebec City.'

And so my Plan lumbered forward another notch because, apparently, I was chock-full of timbre.