The Deserter (21 page)

Thomas stood as one dead, at the same time surprised at the largesse of his mentor, giving all that money.

“I did try to stop those marines coming to apprehend you just now—” Thomas lifted his head. What was he saying? “—but they fall, as you know, under another jurisdiction.”

“Thank you very much, sir.”

Captain Hawker heaved a sigh, and pondered. “Young Thomas, I do believe you have reached the level of self-sacrifice where His Majesty would largely approve, although he might not wholly approve of the object of your largesse.” Meaning the humble savage? Thomas thought. Well, fie on him.

“I for one am pleased to have known a young man who would willingly sacrifice his life for another. I am even proud, yes, I do believe I am, that you have, for a time, served under me. Though I’m not sure Wickett would have agreed.”

Thomas looked up, and frowned. Past tense? “I managed to have him leave the ship in Portsmouth, on our call there. I doubt he’ll cause more damage to His Majesty’s Fleet.” He gave Thomas a meaningful look. So the Captain had known all along what was going on. Well, of course, it was his business to know.

Thomas watched him carefully, hanging onto every word.

“So now my advice would be, you should move rather quickly.”

“Move, sir? Quickly?” What was he saying?

“The reward that came my way, to be shared with my Admiral, has largely wiped out your misdeed. The Major of marines overstepped himself, as he does only too often. So now, lest I cause a mutiny, I am leaving you in the hands of two sturdy crew members. If they decide to row you ashore under the cover of night, what can I do about it? Your escape may be blamed on many things.” Escape? He’s letting me escape? Thomas could hardly believe his luck.

“You see, I can divulge that your lord Marquis took the liberty of writing to the admiralty. On my next voyage, the rumour is that I might possibly be elevated to Commodore, due in no small part to my having helped you. So I now return the compliment. Go ashore a free man. But please, do take care to keep out of sight of His Majesty’s Royal Marines.” He reached out to shake the hand of his former Midshipman. “I am sure you will continue to lead a full and righteous life here in the New World. Good luck.”

Paddling back to his brook in the canoe with the Chief, Thomas reflected on that unexpected outcome. The Good Lord had blessed him again. And happily, the Chief was improving. Little Birch had wasted no time after the operation in explaining to the Chief and his paddlers the nature of the punishment Thomas had faced. His reputation grew enormously, as a result.

Thomas, momentarily at peace with himself and with the world, tried to avoid looking ahead. Here and now, the Gaspé sun was glistening off the waves, and the cormorants and gulls were screaming their anguish at the intruders. His money could not have been put to better use, and although now there would be no safety net for the future, he thanked the Lord above that he had at least been instrumental in saving the life of one so important to his tribe.

But look ahead he must. He could winter in the cabin with Little Birch and try to live off fish in the frozen brook. Little Birch thought it was likely, though not sure, that the trout would continue to bite under the ice.

Thomas had memories of One Arm fishing in the lake, so did not actually hold out too much hope for that. They could enlarge their own trapline, going farther back along the brook, snaring some of the small animals that must be around. But from what the Micmac had named his brook, Shegouac, empty, and from what he had seen, game was not as plentiful as around other rivers. And the Micmac always headed to the inner plateaus for winter food: he should take heed.

As the canoe thrust through the sea, he remembered the splendid offer that M. Huard had made, before he had left with the Micmac Chief. With the approbation of James Robin, he had offered Thomas a position in the woods. His going out to the man o’war to face certain death to save his friend had been noised about on the
barachois,
and Thomas found himself held an object of admiration.

“I see the way you work with oakum,” M. Huard had said. “Why not you work in woods this winter? Four of my best men have leave. I pay you well.”

“Well?” Thomas grinned. “I have heard what you pay lumberjacks, M. Huard, and I don’t think—”

“Okay, okay, I make for you special price. Maybe I give for you heavy
vêtements
(clothing), too. Usually the men, they pay for dat.” “But I have no tools.”

“I give you best tools, you only pay me half.” Thomas had to admit, it was an offer he should think about. Not now, later, when he had time.

And now he had time... Nothing but time. A decision had to be made. Here was a genuine alternative.

But what about Little Birch? Bring her to Paspébiac to live alone while he worked away in the woods? Wives did not go into the lumber camps with the men who themselves were packed into bunkhouses. Rent a room in town? Where, at one of the French settlers’? Would she enjoy being in one room, all winter long, with strangers — not for a second.

Discuss it all with Little Birch? Of course, but after they landed, after they were comfortable again in their routine. Later as maple trees began to spread their flame across the hills, she resolved this problem neatly. She came up where he was working at the new site, cutting trees. She came over and said, almost shyly. “Thomas, I have some news.”

“News? Where, from the band?” He frowned, how could that have happened?

She shook her head. “Just from you and me.”

Thomas put down his axe, and mopped his brow. Though the days were definitely colder, his work cutting trees made him sweat. “I’m ready. What news?” “I think I am making a baby.”

“Little Birch!” Thomas was ecstatic. A new life? How much better could it get? He grabbed Little Birch and swung her round and round, laughing, with her joining in. Finally, they fell on the leaves in a tumbled heap.

But his next thought was, Oh Heavens! Winter! Now what?

That night after their chores were done, they sat eating round the fire in the cabin. She had fried tasty brook trout, about six inches long and golden brown, and boiled dandelions and tubers, with some Micmac bread. They washed it all down with wooden mugs of clear water from the icy brook — what more could a man want? “That means you will have the baby in the spring?”

“Yes, eight more moons.” She calculated on her fingers.

“Just before the longest day of the year.”

So what now? “Should we stay in our cabin for the winter, and risk having enough game?” She shrugged. “You must decide.”

“Oh no, we both decide, Little Birch, we both decide everything. Not the Micmac way, our way. We shall discuss it.”

Thomas thought, more than ever, now she needed a good sturdy house, a fire with lots of wood stacked outside, and food for all winter in the larder. But how could he give that? He racked his brains. But try as he might, he could not see a way of making that wish a reality, this year. Soon perhaps. But not right now.

“I think you should be near the
Buowin
this winter. You might need him.”

“Thomas, I need nothing.” But she did look a bit doubtful. The
Buowin
, he would know what to do if anything happened while she was pregnant.

They discussed the matter until the fire died down, and agreed that perhaps, yes, he should work in the woods and Little Birch go back to her family for the winter. It would be an enormously painful separation, but he had to make money for the years ahead: they needed oxen and supplies; they could not stay locked in a cycle of need, summers at the cabin and winters in the interior, subject to starvation.

“I still don’t like it, Little Birch,” he said, “I mean, how will you survive? Who would help you and your family survive back in those desolate moose woods?”

“The Chief, he will arrange everything. You saved his life. He will take me and my family with him. Thomas, I am not the first woman to have a baby in our band. He will make sure it is well. He is a great hunter.”

That did make a difference, Thomas thought. But he still wondered how he’d bear being separated from her for six long months.

But this was the only possible course of action. And so one day, when the first frost lay down a white sheen upon leaves and grass, the two of them began preparations. Finally, Thomas accompanied his wife back to her band for their winter’s hunting.

Nothing, Thomas swore to himself, could ever be as beautiful as a Gaspé woods in winter. The falling snow covered all the limbs, leaves, trails, and rotting refuse from a long summer. Across this virgin counterpane, the deft tracks of martin and lynx, hare and squirrel and bobcat, could be picked out among the lumberjack’s spoon-shaped prints when they moved on snowshoes from the beaten trail into new areas for logging.

The air crackled with crisp light. The high clouds, bundling up as if in comforters against the freezing winds of the Gaspé winter, wandered across the deep blue sky, much deeper blue than summer. Chickadees chattered away with the nuthatches as they searched the icy trunks for bugs and sleeping caterpillars.

Never far from his thoughts was Little Birch, especially when the northern lights danced about the sky. He would lie at night on the straw thrown across the flattened logs of his bunk bed, and remember their first kiss. Although he was still worried about her, he forced himself to focus on the job at hand and prayed she would be all right back there in caribou country with the Chief’s family.

The men worked in groups, each pair assigned a long strip where they would fell the trees, limb them, cut them into lengths for skidding by the oxen. The brush they tossed onto piles for later burning. Axe cuts rang through the muffled silence, echoing off the hills around; they worked always within a mile of their simple log bunkhouse. Give me some oakum and I can make this drafty place twice as warm, thought Thomas, or at least, half as cold. The floor was mud, save for a walkway down the centre between the bunks of flattened logs. Their fire sent its smoke up from the small stone circle into a hole in the roof directly above. No, the men were not taken care of quite as M. Huard promised. But Thomas’s co-workers, used to this treatment, did not object, apart from cursing every morning as they awoke in subzero interiors to break the ice formed on their washing tubs.

Having to pair off, Thomas joined Marc Blanquart, an able young Frenchman who had been apprenticed to the company three years back, when only fourteen. He had arranged for his out-of-work father to come from France last year; he lived in a small cabin out by the woods in Paspébiac, whittling figurines and model boats that he sold to passing sailors during the summer. Marc’s mother had died when he was young, and soon after that, his father had been injured in a mine accident near Lille. Marc’s two sisters had been sold into domestic service in France, and Marc apprenticed to the adventuring Robin’s clan. He could neither read nor write, as was the case with many of the indentured servants who worked for Robin’s.

The bare trees, shorn of leaves, stood in a great silence that seemed to stretch almost back to the beginnings of the earth. Against a crisp icy landscape, pine and spruce added their dark green background to the stark skeletons of maple and spindly birches, all soughing in a wind that often rose to chill the bones and ice the fingers.

At dinner midday when they were far from the bunkhouse, one of the group would break off to coax life into a small fire on which they’d boil a container of tea. As the fire burned, it would sink deeper into the snow, so that after a few days it ended up two or three feet below. Not a lot of heat.

In the evenings, Thomas taught English to Marc and Marc taught him French. Hearing it all day long as well, Thomas was quick to pick it up again. Well, Thomas thought, I’m approaching the wisdom of Tongue, who knows four languages. How radical had been his change in attitude to the “simple savage” of his Navy years. That would be a battle against prejudice he’d fight the rest of his life, he figured.

One day the weekly messenger, who brought them supplies, handed Marc a letter received by Robin’s on the last ship to arrive in the autumn. It had gotten mis-laid by the administration, but in the end it reached Marc’s father, who was now sending it on to Marc. Thomas watched his face as the letter was read to him by the Frenchman who had brought it. It really upset him. A girl? Thomas wondered. Yes, his little sister, in fact, who had been sold as a servant to one of the families in the middle of France. Much against her will, the master had forced himself on her, and now she had found herself pregnant. Once this was out in the open, she had been dismissed. She wanted his help, or that of the father.

What help could they give, he wondered. And what would happen to her, a young pregnant girl out of wedlock, wandering the streets? Marc was tremendously upset, but didn’t seem able to share his feelings.

The next day, as the two of them worked at cutting their lot of trees, Thomas could see Marc’s output was suffering. But he too, like Marc, felt stifled. Whatever could they do?

“I’ve got to go,” Marc finally volunteered in French. “I cannot stay here longer. They must let me go back.”

But as Thomas knew, no ships would ply the bay till spring, another month away. The shores were all iced in and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence was far too hazardous with many icebergs. No ships ever came or left the New World in winter.

And so the two friends, with Thomas comforting Marc as much as he could, struggled on through the long hard winter in this kind of captivity, with no respite from Marc’s burning anger.

***

After what seemed to Thomas an everlasting age away from Little Birch, he woke to find that the low overcast clouds had brought forth rain. The snow began to melt. This meant hard slogging through the mush, but it did herald the end of logging. And with that, of course, Marc could make plans to get back to France and try to find his sister. Thomas would see his wife once again. He couldn’t wait.

When finally the Robin’s company brought the men back in a horse and sleigh to Paspébiac, Marc set about finding a way to leave on the first boat out. Luckily one appeared to be setting off momentarily, having been loaded during the spring breakup.

Marc brought Thomas to meet his father. A thin man whose frame seemed still too large for the wasted flesh that sat upon it, he embodied a life of deprivation born out in his pale, lined features. Most of all, Thomas would not soon forget the look in his eyes: a haunted stare without hope, without cause, a man who would surely himself succumb only too soon to the rigours of pioneer life, struck such a blow as the shame of his daughter.

Thomas forced himself to stay a couple of days with them. The old man was glad of the company, and talked a lot about his daughter. The father determined that he himself would stay, on the off-chance Marc might return with his sister and baby, so that they could all become a proper family. There would be opportunities for the sister to work here, Thomas knew, for many of the immigrants had pasts they did not want evaluated; here a man or woman would be judged only on the kind of work they turned out.

Thomas, with the old man, saw Marc off, a sad day for them both, but they wished him well.

Before Thomas left, M’sieur Blanquart made a point of giving his son’s implements to Thomas: axe, saw, his peavy (pivot) and other items, including some clothes, so that now Thomas could dress like a Frenchman and was so much better equipped to clear his land. But he was aching to get back to see Little Birch and prepare for the birth of his new baby.

Marc’s father had one friend, a fisherman, who agreed to take the two of them back to Thomas’s brook. Having come to terms, in a sense, with His Majesty’s Navy, and it being some two years after the actual desertion, Thomas felt secure enough to trust the two old men not to reveal his whereabouts.

After they beached the boat, Thomas led M. Banquart back to the brook to show him round his cabin, while the fisherman waited on the beach and smoked a pipeful. Walking up the now well-trodden trail, Thomas was apprehensive. How had the cabin weathered? Had it been discovered in the winter? Was it intact? He noticed that on the north slopes the snow still lay melting. The flat areas of the Hollow were running with a thousand rivulets from the heavy drifts along the sides. He was pleased that Little Birch had per suaded him to build their “real house” up on the flat land to the west.

As they reached the clearing, they stopped. On the worn face of M. Blanquart, the look of despair broke into pleasure as he saw the homestead. Thomas described his new life and promised that later, he and Little Birch would bring their new baby to see him in Paspébiac. It was almost as if the old man had found another family, and he later left with his fisherman friend greatly cheered.

Thomas was anxious to get down to Port Daniel, but he realized that he would have to do some preliminary cleaning of his cabin site after the long winter. He wanted it in good condition for the arrival of Little Birch.

Having said goodbye to the men, and put in a good afternoon of cleaning up, he fell into his makeshift bed in the cabin. Oddly enough, malevolent projections began to take over his dreams. The ghost of the cougar that had mauled him kept haunting his sleep. Finally one night, half-ghost but also very real, it snatched Thomas’s newborn and carried it off in its jaws. In its lair, it began to feed the baby to its kittens, tearing it first into edible pieces. He watched the cubs chewing away on the baby’s fingers. The little thumb, chewed, swallowed, now the next finger, while the cougar licked the cubs with a large — in fact, vast — tongue, slobbering over the remains of the baby, and nudging its armless torso toward the cubs. There, as a final gesture, she put one paw on its stomach, and ripped out the tiny guts. Thomas screamed and leapt off his mattress of cedar boughs and hides, panting. No more sleep that night. He stayed, swaying hands to head. Slowly his breathing returned to normal, and he dropped to his knees. He addressed his Maker earnestly, calling upon Him to chase away any returning chimeras. Then he dressed and went out to greet the thin, pale slip of dawn smudging the eastern sky.

***

Soon, May ended and he set off for the encampment, knowing his band would be back from the highlands. He longed to see Little Birch with the new life inside her. He made the journey quickly, and tramped back, circling Port Daniel mountain, upriver into the encampment, heart in his mouth. Suppose something had gone wrong? He had not even let that cross his mind.

Two Micmac girls and a boy saw him and ran up gleefully, chattering excitedly. Would he play with them? He rubbed their little heads and eagerly headed for the wig-wam of Full Moon.

He stood outside. “Little Birch?”

He waited, as he heard a rustle inside.

Through the entrance crawled his wife. She stood up awkwardly with her big tummy. And then they both fell into each other’s arms, hugging as though there were no tomorrow. “You’re safe.”

“Of course. And so are you!”

Several other children had gathered around to watch, and Elders on their conference log turned to smile at the happily wedded couple.

They just spent the rest of the day strolling and talking, while Little Birch happily recounted the many exploits back in caribou country and he the long days without her in the woods. He touched on the shame of Marc’s sister, which seemed to make an undue impression on her. Too many omens.

Quite soon afterwards, Thomas was awakened by Little Birch. “I think the baby is coming.”

But she had a look in her eyes that worried him. “Is everything all right, Little Birch?” “Yes, my love, do not worry. All will be well.” Full Moon got up quickly and went to rouse the
Buowin
,the healer. She moved on to the next tent where Sleepy Cedar, the midwife, got up quickly and began to prepare the cloths and hides that she had ready, expecting this birth.

“Help me up, Thomas,” Little Birch said.

“My love, you’re fine where you are.”

“No no, we go into woods.”

“You what?” He frowned.

“It is our way: my mother and Sleepy Cedar, we go off to the birthing place of our band, and if we need him, the shaman, the
Buowin
, will come. We will return when the baby is born.”

“I cannot go?”

“No, my love, that is not our way. You must stay here. I will be all right.”

With some misgivings, Thomas helped Little Birch get up. By low moonlight they made their way to the edge of the clearing, where the little group had assembled.

“We have the place near the stream. All is prepared.” Thomas heaved a sigh. He wished he’d known all this before, but yet, what could he have done? “Sleepy Cedar, the midwife, will look after me. If we need him, the
Buowin
, the shaman, will bless us and pray over us. We will be in a sacred place. All will be well.” “You’re sure?”

She nodded, looking at him with her large eyes, wanting somehow to communicate something that she herself did not even know.

He forced a bright smile. “Whatever is your tradition, I am happy,” he said. “You will have a fine baby. And I will love this baby as I love you.”

He saw to his satisfaction that Little Birch smiled. And off she went with the three other women to give birth in their sacred birthing place.