Read Online The First Garden by Anne Hébert - Free Book Online Page B

ships laden with arms and munitions, with provisions and blue-uniformed soldiers. Never has the breakup of the ice, shattering and jamming, never has the cawing of the first crow after a winter without birds, been more eagerly awaited. But when at last the surface of the water started moving again, driven by an unseen force, it was English vessels that were making their way along the river, numerous and in orderly fashion. France had ceded us to England like a burden to be shed. What happened to us then, suddenly, like an ill wind, was almost indistinguishable from utter despair.

R APHAEL TALKS ABOUT A BYGONE time, long before the English conquest, at the very beginning of the world, when every step that was taken upon the naked earth was wrenched from the brush and the forest.
    They are all there on the shore, waiting for the ships from France. Governor, Intendant and gentlemen in their Sunday best, bedecked, beplumed and covered with frills and furbelows, in spite of the heat and mosquitoes. A few nuns resist the wind as best they can amid a great stirring of veils, of wimples, scapulars, cornets, and neckcloths. Newly disbanded soldiers, freshly shaven, following orders, wearing clean shirts, eyes open so wide that the sun looks red to them, waiting for the promise that is marching towards them along the vast river that shimmers in the sun.
    Below, at the top of the cape, is the sketch of a city planted in the wildness of the earth, close against the breath of the forest, filled with the cries of birds and muffled stirrings in the suffocating heat of July.
    This time it’s not just flour and sugar, rabbits, roosters, and hens, cows and horses, pewter jugs and horn-handled knives, lengths of wool and muslin, tools and cheese-cloth: this is a cargo of marriageable girls, suited for reproduction, which is the matter at hand.
    New France has a bad reputation in the mother country. People speak of a “place of horror” and of the “suburbs of hell.” Peasant women need coaxing. They have to turn to the Salpêtrière, that home for former prostitutes, to populate the colony.
    Now they are crowded here onto the bridge, huddled together like a bouquet too tightly bound. The wings of their headdresses beat in the wind and they wave handkerchiefs above their heads. The men, in ranks on the shore, stare at them silently. The decency of their costumes has been observed, at once and with satisfaction, by the Governor and the Intendant. Now they must find out, even before the women’s faces can be distinguished, whether they are modest and their persons carefully tended. The rest of the meticulous, precise examination will be carried out at the proper time and place, little by little, even as they make their way towards us with their young bodies dedicated unreservedly to man, to work, and to motherhood.
    In the absence of peasant women, they must now be content with these persons of no account who have come from Paris, with a dowry from the King of fifty livres per head. Though they already know how to sew, knit, and make lace (this they have been taught at the Salpêtrière, “a place as ignominious as the Bastille”), we’ll just see the looks on their faces when they have to help the cow to calve and change its litter.
    Now their features can be seen clearly in the light, framed with white linen and wisps of hair in the wind. Some are red and tanned by the sun and the sea air, others are bloodless and skeletal, consumed by seasickness and fear.
    The men stand on the shore, on this splendid day, as if they were seeing the northern lights. Now and then cries burst from their heaving chests.
    â€œAh! the pretty redhead! That lovely one in blue! The little one with curls!”
    When men have been without women for so long, save for a few squaws, it’s a pleasure to see such a fine collection of petticoats and rumpled linen coming toward us. It has been arranged, between Monsieur the