Order of Good Cheer by Bill Gaston Page B

is not a place for meat.”
    Samuel knows not to explain salting to Membertou again, for clearly he is feigning ignorance.
    Membertou visits today only on the pretence of discussing trade for fresh meat. Samuel knows the man’s real reason is to once again ask Samuel to make him a Christian. The old sagamore will wait and wait. Today is Sunday, and Samuel wonders if it could be that Membertou has taken note, has counted days, and is here today because of it.
    They sit erect in the room’s two chairs, and Samuel flags a boy passing the open door and asks him to go to Bonneville and bring back bread, and tea. Scratching himself, hunching to glance out the square hole cut for a window, Membertou speaks casually of tomorrow’s weather, then explains how one might repair a canoe even in deepest winter, by putting fire against a tree and thereby melting out — but don’t burn it! — enough precious pitch. Only later, when the Sunday bell rings calling themin for prayer, does he rise and touch Samuel’s shoulder to ask him the important question. Samuel looks at the floor, finding it painful to deny the man, especially when he is about to abandon Membertou for the same Christian service he is requesting. And Samuel finds it ironic that this man in front of him desires this service more than Samuel does himself.
    â€œI am sorry,” Samuel tells him and turns to leave. He knows that sorry is as difficult a word for the Mi’qmah as it was for the savages in Hochelaga. “I will ask the priest again.”
    He wishes Membertou would ask the priest himself, but knows he won’t. The priest is the one man Membertou is shy of.
    â€œPlease.” Now Membertou has him by the arm and is not letting him go.
    The savage does understand that Samuel himself is unable, that he is not a priest. Membertou, though, seems to have heard of and clung to the rumour that some Frenchmen are not of the priest’s religion, and that some who are not priests but pastors can also welcome a savage into the Christian family. Samuel has no intention of entering this story with the man. Last year, in St-Croix, their settlement was blessed by the presence of both a pastor and a priest, and the two hated each other so much that they twice came to blows and de Monts (himself a Protestant) was of a mind to flog them. Truly, if one said apple, the other said plum. And when the scurve saw them both in bed they still would not forgive, and when they died within a day of each other all saw this as somehow fitting, so much so that both priest and pastor were buried in a single grave, in a forced embrace. And while other reasons were given for this act (frozen ground, too few able men with enough strength to make a second hole, and such), all knew it was to end their fighting, and Samuel sensed that all approved of de Monts’s ecumenical spirit.
    So for reasons of peace there is only a priest in Port-Royal. Samuel has no idea as to how a savage might be made a Protestant. Nor has he nearly the subtlety of language to explain how one god can have two families.
    Samuel has been to Poutrincourt for advice on Membertou’s behalf. Twice now he has told Fr. Vermoulu of the sagamore’s request, and twice the priest has simply stared at him, a stare too dense with opinion for him to read, but one he suspects is telling a mapmaker to mind his own business. While the King has decreed that Christianity be given to savages far and wide, it seems that the priests charged with this task will decide for themselves the timing of it. Indeed, Samuel thinks the priest a dark scoundrel, one whose selfishness surpasses any other’s here, a man of scant nobility who tests the true nobles’ patience (Vermoulu would call it piety) by commanding this man and that to tend the priest’s private garden and fish pond, taking the men away from their many other needful duties. Using God as his emperor, he tries to be a small king