Order of Good Cheer by Bill Gaston

and all those women, until Monsieur Champlain interrupted his own translation — for the sagamore loves to make long speeches —to tell them simply, “The keeping of slaves would not go well for us,” which appeared to embarrass the rest of them, or at least bring them to their better senses. And the lawyer Lescarbot then made a joke, proclaiming slavery to be a hobby more favoured by the English. And then the Sieur bit himself on the inner cheek and shouted. Not a minute passed before he bit himself again where it had swelled, as it sometimes will, and now he both shouted and stood.
    Lucien inhales deeply the smells of nocturn. It is his first week in this dwelling, and his first lying indoors in months, if you don’t count that loud and malodorous ship. Here the main smell is a most pleasant resin of fir, issuing from bed slats, wall logs, floorboards, and ceiling joists. The newly violated wood smells most. It is the smell of their injury, and they bleed a perfume for the benefit of man’s nostrils. For the several weeks this wood continues to bleed, Lucien will smell neither his pillow nor the breath or bodies of his fellows, all of whom are asleep buthim. He decides to enjoy this night and not hurry sleep. Indeed, it might well be the best time he spends here, with the resin at its most benevolent. Nor have many bugs — the spiders, beetles, and small biters — followed them in to take up lodgings in their pillows, beds, and beards. On ship a man was bitten right inside his asshole and he had for days a fair agony of itching, and such were his intense postures to satisfy this itch that all the men laughed, and Benet finally laughed at himself too, and thereafter the unknown creature came to be known as “Benet’s bug,” leading to the chorus of one of the colony’s first songs: “Commit no sin, lest ye be bitten within, by Benet’s bug.”
    It is good to be indoors again. The carpenter’s curse: everyone’s place save his own is attended to. The nobles have been indoors for weeks. Of course, many of their planks were brought from St-Croix, place of pestilence, and though no physical evil abides in the wood, there is something of a malevolent spirit in the grain, looking like the long eyebrows of ill will, though of course this is only in the mind of observance. But better to start fresh, from innocent wood that has heard no moans, no cursing of God’s own name. And still smells of sweet pitch.
    Lucien realizes, in a moment of greater wakefulness, that for all the dwellings he has constructed, both from the ground up or torn down in part to make anew, he has never before built his own dwelling. Not even his own sleeping room. Of course not — his father and uncles, carpenters all, would at any hint of rot or divorced joinery pounce upon it and see it fixed. Make your own house another’s envy, his father once told him, and you will never lack work.
    It seems his father was wrong. St-Malo was overfull of enviable houses and notable carpenters, and even the best had often to travel miles to find the next endeavour. Lucien was trained on the rough doors of barns, and fencing for pigs, and Babette’sstuck windows, when she let him. He was not the best but good enough when he put his mind into the wood, and to find employ had had to travel not miles but an entire ocean, to a new world.
    Though not entirely against his will. And when, God willing, he returns, he will have the money to begin his own small enterprise, perhaps a village or two inland from St-Malo, and he knows he will not lack for work because, sadly, he will now be famous, and be expected to tell stories of exploration. To do so he will have to change his nature. Though little do the people at home know that, here, boredom soon enough becomes the biggest story, that after doing what work one can with the body, it becomes yet harder work to entertain the mind.
    Children’s games