River City
RIVER CITY
A NOVEL
JOHN FARROW
FOR JACQUES CINQ-MARS,
1920–,
CAPTAIN OF THE NIGHT PATROL (RETIRED),
WHO FOUGHT;
AND IN MEMORY OF JOSEPH GUIBORD,
1808-1869
(BURIED
1875),
WHO THOUGHT.
The earth in its devotion carries all things,
good and evil, without exception.
—I CHING
If this sprawling half-continent has a heart, here it is.
—TWO SOLITUDES,
HUGH MACLENNAN
Contents
CHAPTER 2: 1971 ~ 1955 ~ 1939 ~ 1821 ~ 1535
CHAPTER 4: 1535 ~ 1534 ~ 1535–36
CHAPTER 6: 1608–09 ~ 1611 ~ 1628
T
HROUGH SPACE, TIME AND DEVASTATION, LAND FORMS.
Foursquare, sheer, the cliffs of a muscled terrain stand stalwart to the sea, their dawn shadow a broad river’s awning. Tilting northeast, the strata of rock ascend steeply, legacy of a time when rock ripped from rock in fire and blast and polar shift, continent from continent, plates skid loose and from the rupture a hard surface arose from an ocean’s buckled floor.
A northerly forge.
Land heaves. Erupts. Ground rolls, in agony sways, then rests awhile.
Along the shore of what would become a grand estuary to and from the sea, three hundred and fifty million voyages around the sun before the diminutive, pale Frenchman Jacques Cartier anchored on the spot, a meteor’s impact shattered the earth’s crust. As measured in a future epoch, a crater punched a plateau fifty-four kilometres in diameter. Away from the epicentre, the surface crumpled into mountainous waves.
Over eons, the dazed planet wobbled back from the blow.
In another time, the hills were struck again, albeit mildly, a deep, circular lake the residual souvenir.
Upon the plains south of the great river, hills took shape as glacial deposits, the prodigious ebb of tidal ice scrapping rocks into giant rogue waves before setting them gently down at select locations, marking the passage of sluggish time in ceremonial nubs. North of the fault line delineated by the river, ancient rock eroded under the stress of the elements. The oldest mountain range on the continent slumped nearer to the level of the sea
again, debilitated by age, in summer mere green hills and under a winter’s blanket windswept creases.
One peak formed from vacant space. An empty volcanic crater, backfilled by glacial debris, compressed by ice miles high. The ice receded, the outer lava mould washed away. The tougher inner plug revealed itself and remained ever the more tenacious, a scrap heap of rock to be anointed in time as a royal mountain.
The warm melt of glaciers, the fall of winter snows, the rains of spring and the thunderclaps of summer storms conspired to create a green land. Rivers etched the landscape. Lakes became plentiful. Fish swam the freshwater currents or lazed in the arbour of shoreline trees. Bear and moose, lynx, wolf and deer prospered and found their balance. Caribou roamed the northern pelt. A crafty, industrious creature, the beaver, dammed streams and ponds and constructed community lodges from sticks that rose above the water, altering the landscape for those who depended upon its engineering acumen.
The land’s genius lay in its waterways. Loon alighted each spring, forerunner to waterfowl that would arrive and go in great masses to dapple along the shores or dive to the depths of cold lakes. Upon the rivers appeared the first people, eleven thousand migrations around the sun before the present moment, as glaciers receded. Russet-skinned and curious, they travelled in tune to the seasons as did the birds, and a few tribes learned to cope with the vigour of enduring winters. In the far north, the people lived along the shore of an immense saltwater bay, an ocean of ice, where they fished through short, bright summers and in the forests through sunless months trapped and hunted the four-leggeds. They chose to live where the land was unforgiving, where peaceable lives could prosper.
Generations lapsed in this way, one folded upon another.
Where the forests and rivers were generous, the weathers becoming less extreme, tribes competed for land. Those who spoke the language of the Iroquois roamed the great inland waterway and along the rivers and lakes south. To the west dwelled proud Huron and Algonquin, and to the north ruddy Montagnais. They fought the Iroquois when one tribe encroached upon
another, and battled for rivers and lakes, for shorelines, for whole forests, and at times the wars were great furies and at other times mere skirmishes among rowdy young men anxious to test their mettle. Generations lapsed in this way, striving to persist.
Time immemorial, so it seemed, lapsed in this way, striving to persist.
CHAPTER 2
1971 ~ 1955 ~ 1939 ~ 1821 ~ 1535
B
Y 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 rough-house 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.