The Voyageur (eBook)

'Marvellous work of art' John Banville

Paul Carlucci (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
400 Seiten
Swift Press (Verlag)
978-1-80075-316-7 (ISBN)

Infos

'Exceptionally vivid and intense' Sunday Times 'A marvellously dark yarn' The Spectator 'Swaggering debut' Daily Mail But everyone expects at least a little bit of deception as they go through their days and nights, and there's a chance of winning nevertheless, so many choose to play Alex is a motherless stockboy in 1830s Montreal, waiting desperately for his father to return from France. Serge, a drunken fur trader, promises food and safety in return for friendship, but an expedition into the forest quickly goes awry. At the mercy of men whose motives are unclear, Alex must learn to find his own way in a world where taking advantage of others has become second nature. But will he have to abandon his humanity to survive? The Voyageur is a brilliantly realised novel set on the margins of British North America, where kindness is costly, and where the real wilderness may not be in the landscape surrounding Alex but in the deceptive hearts of men.

PAUL CARLUCCI is the award-winning author of three collections of stories. The Voyageur is his debut novel, and his first book to be published outside Canada. He lives in Ottawa.

Textauszug

11

They reached Mackinac Island late the next afternoon, and it was big and shaped like the back of a moose swimming between the two peninsulas of Michigan Territory. Much of the shoreline seemed low to the green water and harassed by gulls, though here and there they saw slate-grey cliffs and everywhere the bone-white trunks of birch trees and the familiar spread of maple leaves, but no sign of human settlement. Rénard said they’d have to make their way to the edge of the straits at the southern point, and wearily Alex dug his paddle into the current and heaved on. Over Séb’s shoulder, he saw both a smaller island and a fishing boat travelling between the two, and as they got closer a fort came into view high on a hill, sunlight glinting off the barrel of a bronze cannon, and even from a distance the palisades looked shoddy and worn. Alex had been labouring all afternoon, and with total exhaustion he heard the grumpy sound of the hull first nudging and then gouging the pebbly beach, then the sounds of two waves foaming and sighing and sliding back into the lake. Later on, a drunken Séb would claim to have howled a hoot of triumph as they arrived, but en réalité Alex knew without a doubt that Séb had been slumped over the side of the boat, his paddle lost to the straits and a thread of saliva hanging from the corner of his sunburnt lips.

The long beach spilled out from the edge of a village that rambled downhill from the gates of the fort. All along the line of trees were tents and the beach was swarming with people, a hundred or more, and the noises they made were thick and pitched: here a fat man in buckskins playing a detuned fiddle; there an Ottawa woman singing as she stretched a pelt to cure; up and down the expanse there were fires burning and the smell of meat and shit as well as men shouting through transactions, and it was clear many of them were drunk.

Rénard was wide awake and expressionless and he jumped out of le canot and glared at Alex and roughly shook Séb out of his sleep. He strode up the beach all strewn with people and tents, and he motioned for them to follow.

Later, they traded their fish and canoe for a few nights in a wedge tent owned by a Canadien named Simon, who was friends with Rénard. He slept in there with an Ottawa girl of maybe fifteen and said he was holding her as collateral for a gambling debt owed by her father. The tent was small and the place stank of sweat and alcohol, but this was the condition of many such tents on the beach and the smell was leavened somewhat by cooking fires but worsened again by curing meat. Most men were Canadien and they hailed from Lower Canada and Louisiana and the farms around Detroit, and scattered among the many white and mixed-blood faces were the Ottawa, some bare-chested with colourful feathers in their sky-black hair and others with the cotton shirts and red sashes and cloth trousers of the voyageurs and still others dressed in exotic clothes, red silk shirts and gauzy scarves, which they must’ve procured from travellers, who in turn had procured them from travellers, and on and on it went until the world seemed somehow small and negotiable, even though clearly it was not. Alex sometimes watched this activity through the flap of the tent and other times lay back and rested his head and slept without remembering his dreams.

He awoke early the next morning, hungry but rested. He was alone in the tent with Séb, who drooled in his sleep, and Rénard, who wore no clothes and slept face down with an empty bottle of rum held slackly in one of his hands and his body stinking of sweat and his breathing laboured and sporadic, and when he did exhale his wind smelled rotten even from a few feet away.

Alex left the tent and stretched in the morning sun. He walked down the beach toward the water, where three dogs fought over scraps around the charred remains of a fire. He waded into the shore and enjoyed the water’s light bite against the flesh of his ankles, and he kept wading until his trousers were soaked to the knees and then he dove in and opened his eyes and watched minnows dart from his approach. It was amazing to swim, and he offered a prayer of thanks to his brother for teaching him how. When he broke the surface and sloshed around to face the shore he saw Séb waving at him from the beach. He lifted his arm out of the water and smiled and returned the salutation, then dipped back under and felt the current stream through his hair as he swam ashore.

For breakfast Séb and Alex sat on driftwood scattered round a firepit and they ate fried eggs and ham that tasted like sulphur, passing between them a jug of warm beer. Séb said he’d gone to report the slaughter to the authorities, who’d send a small company of armed men to retrieve the bodies from the forested lands of the territory’s northern peninsula, which was vast and stretched from the bottom of Lake Superior to the top of Lake Huron. He said this was less an earnest search of the woods than a gesture of good will to the families and a show of strength to les Indiens, whom Séb had blamed for the massacre.

They passed the morning drinking beer and smoking a pipe and they watched fishing boats tip through the straits and on land they saw people wander from various tents to the shore and also up the beach and into the village, where the American Fur Company ran its supply store. The store was the subject of a thick-tongued rant issued by Rénard when finally in the early afternoon he roused himself and clothed himself and lowered his thin frame to the driftwood between Alex and Séb, and immediately he extended his hand to receive the jug of beer, but when he discovered it was empty he scoffed and shook his head and spat in the sand and continued his rant against the company.

Rénard said they’d been gone two weeks and yet again the company had tightened its terms of trade and the conditions of indenture. He knew because Simon had explained it all the night previous, and any Canadien who complained had his contract suspended, and if enough men complained the company would simply recruit other Frenchmen, for since the Second War of Independence the French had crawled across the land like lice across the hide of a cow, why shouldn’t they, and if the company couldn’t beguile them, then it would turn to the Ottawa, who were filthy and desperate and would accept even slavery if it meant a heel of bread in the morning and a piece of pemmican for lunch. He cursed John Jacob Astor, the real estate mogul who owned the company, a scoundrel, and his treatment of les Canadiens amounted to revenge for when they outmaneuvered his agents in the west and along the Missouri, and a man like Astor needed the armed imps of government to rescue him from his incompetence, whereas les Canadiens relied on themselves and each other and no one else.

‘And yet we’re not resisting the company these days,’ said Rénard, ‘not sufficiently. Me and Simon are disgusted. We’re just sitting here and many of us are lazily forgoing our expeditions and all that results is the company recruits other men and those of us who don’t go trapping owe it more money, and so everyone takes home less come winter, and the company leaves us only with the hope that next year will be better, which of course it will not.’

They spent the afternoon roving the village, which was a sad nest of muddy streets flanked by weather-beaten buildings: a schoolhouse and a tavern and a blacksmith and row of sloping homes, but not a stone building to speak of, rather everything had been built from the forest of pine and birch and maple that reared up over the settlement like a wave, and in comparison the village gardens looked tiny and haggard and lost. They brought along two axes and three hammers and first they took their tools to the church, where they proposed to cut wood for the lanky, grey-eyed reverend, but this man was a Protestant and so was his church, and he couldn’t keep scorn from twisting his thin, white lips as he pronounced there to be no work for French Catholics, at least not around those most holy of environs. Rénard spat at the man’s polished shoes and shouted ‘Va t’enculer, ’tit fils d’pute’, and the reverend turned pale and retreated up the steps of his church and the three of them walked off and grouped again farther down the swampy road.

Rénard began again to lament the lot of les Canadiens on Mackinac, because wasn’t it the French who first settled this area, oui, c’est vrai, they’d built a grand fort on the mainland and it had mighty palisades and deep ditches and ramparts too, but they lost their position to the British and watched as the British lost it to les sauvages but then regained it and moved the fort to the island, only to lose it to the Americans. The fighting between these two had briefly divided les Canadiens, those to the south of the Great Lakes and those to the north, but they’d since forgiven each other the violence of war, and today the whole place was overrun with bluecoats who were neither subtle nor kind about the advantages they held. The three were now passed by an Ottawa man with a pole across his shoulders and a bucket of shit hanging from each end, and Rénard redoubled his outrage, because this was work that not even un Canadien could get but rather un maudit sauvage who’d gone to the Indian agent and disavowed his chief and was too struck blind with gratitude to realize he was merely a slave, except recently his shackles had become invisible, and so what, because how quickly the Americans had forgotten their debt to the French, oui, la mère-patrie, and how quickly they’d come to see their independence as God-given rather than supported by the French. Here Alex mentioned the Captain and the...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 18.4.2024
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Historische Romane
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Schlagworte: Canada • Colonialism • Cormac McCarthy • fur trapping • John Banville • Margaret Atwood • Morality • Nineteenth century • State of nature • war of all against all
• ISBN-10: 1-80075-316-0 / 1800753160
• ISBN-13: 978-1-80075-316-7 / 9781800753167