Order of Good Cheer Read Free

now, if he sucks into the depths of his teeth he can still get some faint molasses onto his tongue. The event was lunatic, truly. The brute Dédé and he had been given the labour of cleansing Monsieur Lescarbot’s beloved window glass when it was lifted from its molasses. Lucien doesn’t know why he, a master carpenter, was paired up with a common worker for this task — perhaps it was to match his brains to Dédé’s brawn for the sake of care. Though Lucien was happy enough for it. A week earlier he’d watched with plenty of other men as that first pane of glass emerged from the safety of its molasses barrel after months of storage in it; they all saw themain thickness of brown syrup get scraped back into the barrel with sharp wooden spatulas; they watched as the first light won its way through and transparency was reborn. It was a kind of magic. Then two men were assigned the task of walking it tenderly down to the shore to wash it to its original perfection before the glass was installed into Sieur Poutrincourt’s frame. Many savages arrived for this, and some looked stricken or insulted as Poutrincourt himself appeared from within, behind his fresh glass, then rapped upon it and waved. Though two older women laughed to each other, and then one shouted something.
    Cleansing with seawater is what he and Dédé were this morning charged to do with Monsieur Lescarbot’s glass. Dédé insisted on carrying the pane to water’s edge unaided, and Lucien let him, guiding him with warnings of approaching stones or slippery clay. The huge man’s bare straining calves had the size and spirit of two piglets. On the beach Lucien rolled up his sleeves and went underwater to the knees, but Dédé did no such thing. He glanced back at the compound, grunted a version of “waste not, want not,” hoisted the heavy pane higher, and started licking. A few licks farther along he seemed to notice, through the tan glass, Lucien’s stare. He paused in his licking long enough to say, “Yours is this other side, here.” And from their clench his fingertips tapped the gummy virgin side.
    Lucien considered, but not long. Simply, what harm? He liked molasses. So he would have some too. He stepped up to the glass. It was nothing but bizarre and ribald to behold the hirsute Dédé, thick black pelt framing his immense red face, his pressed and liquid tongue and madly working jaw, all so close — and then to extend one’s own tongue out near it! Lucien first tasted a corner of the glass farthest from the other’s face. And it was good, wonderful, not just because unadulterated but also, in a sense, stolen. Lucien relaxed to the ease of a licking puppy; on their own hiseyes fell half closed. But there came a time when their two faces approached, and here, too close, was Dédé’s formidable and wide-open working head, and now Lucien was aware of the larger man’s noises from the other side of the glass, and the pane’s slight wobble, and then they were licking, it seemed, tongue upon tongue, for Dédé had manoeuvred to place his exactly here, and it was a moment of horrible clarity. Then, when Lucien dared look and found himself perfectly eye to eye, the beast winked, and his open mouth was also a smile, though it never paused in the licking. Lucien could not tell, and still can’t, what kind of wink it was. It might have said, “Aren’t we the best of thieves?” It might simply have marked each other’s lust for this sweet. Or, and Lucien hopes not, it might have marked lust of another kind. For this man Dédé looked to be reckless in all directions. In any event it was here that Monsieur Lescarbot caught them at it, and shouted, and strode down the bank to chastise them like boys for befouling his sacred glass, and such was the noble’s tone that Lucien didn’t dare offer the science that glass could not be