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Jean Michaud's Little Ship, by Charles G. D. Roberts

The Naked Word electronic
edition of....
Jean Michaud's Little Ship
by Charles G. D. Roberts, 1905



Patiently, doggedly, yet with the light in his eyes that belongs to the
enthusiast and the dreamer, young Jean Michaud had worked at it. Throughout the
winter he had hewed the seasoned timbers and the diminutive hackmatack "knees"
from the swamp far back in the Equille Valley; and whenever the sledding was
good with his yoke of black oxen he had hauled his materials to the secret place
of his shipbuilding by the winding shore of a deep tidal tributary of the Port
Royal. In the spring he had laid the keel and riveted securely to it the squared
hackmatack knees. It was unusual to use such sturdy and unmanageable timbers as
these hackmatack knees for a craft so small as this which the young Acadian was
building; but Jean Michaud's thoughts were long thoughts and went far ahead. He
was putting all his hopes as well as all his scant patrimony into this little
ship; and he was resolved that it should be strong to carry his fortunes.
Through all the green and blue and golden Acadian summer he had toiled joyously
at bending the thin planks and riveting them soundly to the ribs, the stem and
the sternpost. It was hot work, but white and savory, the clean spruce planks
that he wrought with breathing sweet scents to his lungs as adze and chisel and
saw set free the tonic spirit of their fibres. His chips soon spread a yellow
carpet over the mossy sward and the tree-roots. The yellow sides of his graceful
craft presently arose high among the green kissing branches of the water-ash and
Indian pear. The tawny golden shimmering current of the creek lipped up at high
tide close under the stern of the little ship and set afloat the lowest layers
of the chips, while at ebb a gleaming abyss of red mud with walls sloping
sharply to a mere rivulet at their foot seemed to tempt the structure to a
premature launching and a wild swooping rush to oozy doom. Very secluded, far
apart from beaten highway or forest byway, and quite aside from all the river
traffic, was the place of Jean Michaud's shipbuilding. And so it came about that
the clear ringing blows of his adze, the sharp staccato of his diligent hammer
and the strident crying of his saw brought no answer but the chatter of the
striped chipmunks among the near tree-roots, or the scolding of the garrulous
and inquisitive red squirrels from the branches overhead. At the quiet of the
noon hour, while Jean lay in the shade contemplating his handiwork, and weaving
his many-colored dreams, and munching his brown-bread cakes and pale cheese, the
clucking partridge hen would lead her brood out to investigate the edges of the
chip-strewn open, where insects gathered in the heat. And afterward, when once
more Jean's hammering set up its brisk and cheerful echoes, the big golden-wing
woodpeckers would promptly accept the sound as a challenge, and begin an emolous
rat-tat-tat-tat-ing on the resonant sound-board of a dead beech not far off.
By the time the partridge brood had taken to whirring up into the maple branches
when alarmed, instead of scurrying to cover in the underbrush, the hull was
completed; and a smell of smoking pitch drowned the woodsy odors as Jean calked
the seams. Then the pale yellow of the timbers no more shone through the