They expected the bride, her dangerous-looking maid and the bony priest to come out of the house at any instant and get back into the wagon and roll away to France. But none of them appeared. The wedding guests could hear their voices — the bride’s hot and savage, upbraiding and sarcastic; Monsieur Trépagny’s cajoling, imploring and explaining; the priest’s murmuring and calming. As the hour passed the bride’s voice softened, Monsieur Trépagny’s soared.
Toussaint, Fernand and Chama had listened to it all before, as had René. Those familiar words! “Rich forests… unimaginable hectares of land… fertile soil… fish to feed the world… powerful rivers… beautiful cities of the future… the domus.”
Twilight fell and Chama, Elphège and Philippe Bosse built a bonfire. The voyageurs sampled the barrel of whiskey. They waited.
“After all, there’s the feast,” said Toussaint yearning toward the food. He and his comrades moved toward the table where Mari had set out the kettle of stewed eels, the roasted sturgeon, the fat duck in an expensive sugar sauce, platters of corn cakes, moose cacamos, the legs of venison done so they were crispy on the outside, tender in the teeth, various porridges and sauces. Down the length of the table paraded bottles of cherry brandy. Before they could touch the savory dishes there was a cry to wait. Monsieur Trépagny stood on the fine stone doorstep, and behind him was Mélissande du Mouton-Noir, her face red and corrugated in the light of the bonfire. Monsieur Trépagny spread out his arms as if he were a wild goose readying for flight.
“Attention!” he cried. “Will the guests please enter.”
There was an excited murmur and anticipatory cheers.
Inside the drawing room the guests sat on still-splintery plank benches, taking in the parquet floor, the ornamented couvre-feu, gaping at the fairy-like chandelier, its crystal prisms shattering the candle flames into a thousand darts that contributed the feeling of a cathedral to the marriage ceremony. The Wobik women gazed enviously at the elaborate wrought-iron chimney crane that could hold pots in three positions.
• • •
After the ceremony, the celebration began. Elphège built up the bonfire and the flames threw flaring shadows on the scene. The guests approached the table, the voyageurs rushing, stabbing and hacking, the Wobik residents picking at the feast meats with refined airs felt they were in fine society. Monsieur Trépagny produced bottles of many shapes: red wine, rum, brandy, whiskey — even champagne, real French champagne. Two of the voyageurs brought out fiddles and began to play while the others clapped and sang. The loud music and the violent stamping of the dancers, their sashes whipping and curling in the firelight as they leapt, drove off any pretensions to gentility. Even the red-faced bride danced, and Monsieur Trépagny was a madman of athletic brilliance. The distorted sound bounced off the forest trees and any nearby evil spirits shrank into the earth until it should be over. Under a bush, covered with a dish towel, waited the cornmeal pudding with its potent water hemlock seeds, Mari’s farewell dish for Monsieur Trépagny. She waited for the right moment to present it.
• • •
The sky was light when the last dancers rolled up in their blankets under the spruce. Only the voyageurs were still awake, sitting around the fire and passing one of the endless bottles. René pumped them for more information on Duquet.
Duquet, they said, was clever. He had friends high in the fur company. He knew important men. He made side deals, keeping all the marten pelts for himself. He brought forbidden whiskey into the north and got the Indians too drunk to strike any but the feeblest and most disadvantageous bargains for their furs. “And Duquet is very strong, the strongest among us. He has great endurance.” To be strong was everything. Duquet was becoming a legend of the country.
René thought the seigneur had retired with his prize, but he now saw Monsieur Trépagny standing on the other side of the fire, listening. The flames paled in the brightening morning.
“This Duquet,” Monsieur Trépagny said, beginning quietly, but speaking in a quickening, sharpening tempo, his eyes bulging and beginning to roll. “Duquet? Would that be Duquet who signed a contract to work for me for three years?” His voice rose to a furious bellow. “Would that be the Duquet who ran away like a dog? Is that the Duquet of whom you speak?” He looked at his brothers.
Toussaint said nothing, his beard limp and stained, but Fernand rolled his wicked Trépagny eyes at his bridegroom brother and said “Ouais. The same. He told us you were cruel.”
“Ah,” said Monsieur Trépagny. “He does not yet know how cruel I can be. Do you return to Wobik now? I will go with you. I will have the dog’s skull. He will serve out his three years and we will see who is cruel.”
“Brother,” said Toussaint, “you would do well to leave Duquet alone. He is a dangerous man.” Monsieur Trépagny, goaded by this apostasy, screamed “Saddle my horse” at Elphège.
“Your pudding?” said Mari, holding out the cold pot. But René noticed how the seigneur glared at her as he rushed into his house.
In the few minutes it took Monsieur Trépagny to make his excuse to his new wife for his precipitous departure, Toussaint and Fernand ran to the riverbank, leapt into Monsieur Trépagny’s canoe and began to paddle like demons, forty-five paddle strokes a minute, downstream toward Wobik. Monsieur Trépagny’s horse was slower, and when he galloped into Wobik in late afternoon the traitorous brothers and Duquet were gone. The stolen canoe lay onshore, a marten pelt draped over the thwart — Duquet’s mocking signature.
The bridegroom, exhausted and furious, slumped on the deputy’s porch until that official returned home from the wedding, then swore out a warrant for Duquet’s capture and return.
“I will not rest until I get him and when I do he will suffer.”
Monsieur Bouchard was thrilled by this pledge of vengeance, like something in an old ballad, but he had no idea how he could execute the warrant and told Monsieur Trépagny so.
“It will happen,” gritted Trépagny through stained teeth.
Mari turned the cornmeal pudding into the embers where at first it gave off a savory smell and then the unpleasant odor of burning grain and sugar; she walked back to the old house. The grey jay that watched everything below waited a day until the ashes were cold and then pecked inquisitively at the burned lump. A few days later Chama discovered the bird’s carcass with legs twisted into a sailor’s knot, a very strange sight.
Monsieur Trépagny returned to his house in the forest and brooded for some weeks while preparing his expedition into the wilderness to capture Duquet. There was a strange turn in his mind that moved him to delay. He more and more left his new wife to herself and spent much time in his old house with Mari, whom he had forbidden to go back to the mission. Under his direction she cooked handsome dishes and every evening Monsieur Trépagny put on his fine clothes and carried them to Madame Trépagny. There was no cornmeal pudding. The husband and wife dined in silence in the elegant dining room and after dinner, when the maid had cleared the table, when Monsieur Trépagny had drunk a glass of brandy, he said, “Good evening, madame,” and returned to Mari. Nothing seemed changed. Mari and her children talked and laughed together in low voices as ever, and their pleasure in each other’s company irritated Trépagny, who hissed “Silence!” René wondered, too, what she had to say to them in such long ropes of talk, often accompanied by gestures and widened eyes. Months later he understood that she had been telling them the old Mi’kmaw stories, and into the warp of that heritage had interwoven the woof of complicated jokes and language games that gave her people so much pleasure. But Trépagny was sure that he was the butt of their half-smothered laughter, and his red nostrils flared and he demanded silence.