by Caron, Maia;
Gabriel nodded. Before they had left Sun River on the return trip to Batoche, Riel had said he wished for his old supporters around him, and could not do without his loyal Métis, André Nault and his war lieutenant, Ambroise Lépine, who had been by his side during the Red River troubles. Gabriel had sent a messenger on a fast horse to Manitoba to bring Nault and Ambroise to Batoche.
“We need the Anglais half-breeds in Prince Albert,” Riel said, sipping at his tea. “But we need the Indians more.”
Gabriel studied the broad vault above, bright with moonlight. There might be weather starting up in the east. But the sky was clear, not a wisp of cloud across the stars. A prairie chicken gave one last, low call on the bluff and another answered in the backfields. Madeleine said the garden was dry to the finger, and women were obliged to wander the plains and coulees rooting up prairie turnip and bugleweed. He spat into the flames and watched it sizzle on a burning log. “Sioux marks on your petition are useless. We need a powerful Plains Cree chief to bring the Saskatchewan chiefs and their warriors to our side.”
Riel fished in his pocket, bringing out a pipe. “Chief Piapot was always a rebel. Send runners to him and all the chiefs within a hundred miles,” he said, unrolling some plug tobacco. “The more of us grumbling and growling, the better.”
“Piapot’s been brought to his knees by Ottawa,” Gabriel said. “He was forced to take a reserve last year.”
“Big Bear’s the only holdout,” said Carrière, his eyes on the fire.
“I thought he took treaty.” Riel tamped the tobacco into his pipe bowl and struck a match against a rock to light it.
“He did,” offered Dumas. “A reserve’s been parcelled off for him at Frog Lake, but he refuses to move on it until Ottawa delivers their treaty promises.”
“Ottawa’s punishing him the way they did Piapot, to force him on,” said Carrière. “The Indian agent there’s a son of a bitch.”
Gabriel admired Big Bear for holding out. But it bothered him that one of the old eagles of the Cree was begging for treaty rations. “Big Bear’s like a fox circling the trap,” he said to Riel. “He knows the food in it will save his people, but to take it … he’ll lose the only power he has to change the treaties.”
“He’s legend to young braves in the territory,” said Lépine. “Many have snuck off their reserves to join his band.”
“How many?”
“We can’t go to him,” Lépine said. “Ottawa watches him too close.”
“Get into his camp,” said Riel. “Tell him we’ll add his grievances to our petition if he signs his mark.”
Nolin put up his hands. “No more talk of Indians. Macdonald has gone to great expense to pick lands for the last rebel chiefs. Their reserves are far apart for good reason. If word gets to Ottawa you’re meeting Big Bear, Sir John will take it as an act of war.”
“Ah-hai!” Dumas said in Cree. “Macdonald needs to hear.”
Riel scowled and looked to Nolin, as if he wanted to say something, then thought better of it. He turned to Gabriel. “Ride out in the morning and find Big Bear. Ask him to come south.”
Gabriel took one last draw on his pipe and knocked the remaining charred bits of tobacco against a log. “We’d have to feed his band. This drought … ” He shook his head. “We’ll be snaring muskrats and gophers soon enough. He doesn’t trust whites—and half-breeds have too much white in them.” A thought occurred to him and he raised his eyes to Riel. “He might listen to Josette Lavoie—his granddaughter. She and her husband have the land north of me. The Indians call her She Is So.”
Riel looked at the dancers around the main fire, as if he expected that she would somehow appear.
Gabriel turned to Alexandre. “Go find Norbert’s wife. Tell her Louis Riel wants to meet her.”
Riel laughed as he watched the boy go. “This morning I prayed for a way to approach the Indians, and here is Big Bear’s granddaughter under my nose.”
“Oui,” said Gabriel. “It won’t hurt to remind the old chief he has some blood in Batoche.” He remembered that there was something to do with Josette earlier, after the cart brigade came in—Norbert looking for his wife and riding like a demon after her. When Gabriel asked Madeleine where Josette had gone, she gave him a strange answer. What was it? Now he remembered.
“Away from Riel.”
he saves that
for you
At first light, Josette stood among an aspen grove north of her house. Already she sweated in her long dress. She leaned against La Noire’s muscled withers and waved her hand to ward off the swarm of mosquitoes that had found her, rising out of the grass. The sky was bright and cloudless, sun filtering through the trees. Soon it would heat the dew-covered banks and pastures and drive the bugs away. One of Norbert’s dogs had caught her scent. When it trotted up to investigate, she took a quick step toward it, for Cleophile had just come out of the house. Her daughter hesitated on the porch and Josette moved behind a tree, hand on her horse’s reins. She would not show herself until she knew that Norbert had left.
What had her children thought when they awoke this morning to find her gone? Cleophile headed to the summer kitchen with matches in her hand to make a fire. Josette had almost convinced herself that Norbert was not around, when he emerged from the house and disappeared into the bush on the other side of the barn to check the snares. She would wait for him to saddle his horse and ride out before showing herself and avoid punishment for disobeying him twice.
Last night she had ridden north a mile or so and tied La Noire to a tree. She had pushed herself into the centre of a thick stand of wolf willow and watched the moon rise like some fell sign, listening to the strains of fiddle music from Riel’s welcome celebration. At one point, she heard Norbert’s horse plunge through the brush near the riverbank, her husband swearing and calling her name. Wrapped in her shawl, she had stayed there all night, sleeping in fits and starts.
Norbert reappeared from behind the barn. The body of a prairie chicken dangled from his hand, its head almost twisted off. His four dogs barked to get at it, and he yelled for them to quiet. His anger would be less from killing something, but he seemed to brood. She stood still, praying that she and La Noire blended into the trees.
As if satisfied that he was not being observed, Norbert went into the summer kitchen, closing the door behind him. Josette thought of Cleophile in there, starting the fire. But Norbert would not bother her, for he would be intent on the trap door in the centre of the room, which hid steps to the root cellar where he kept a bottle of rum. Last year, she had made the mistake of following him down and caught him drinking. He’d almost knocked her out, but she had never seen him raise a hand against the children.
A wave of nausea swept through her. Was it more than hunger that made her feel faint? Only two days had passed since Norbert had forced her. Two days. But she’d prayed to the ancestors to make her womb cold. It was fearful thinking that convinced her she was pregnant. She had stores of gumweed and devil’s club in the root cellar. There was no harm in taking them as a preventative.
She had begun to worry over her three youngest in the house—Eulalie was nine, not old enough to be left so long with her younger brothers—when the door of the summer kitchen flew open and her daughter hurried out. Josette bolted from the trees, heading across the pasture toward Cleophile, who raised her head, wiping away tears, and ran past her to the house. Josette stopped short near the garden. She turned toward the summer kitchen and lifted a hand against a glare of sun in her eyes. If she hadn’t been away all night, Norbert would not have punished the children.
He came out of the summer kitchen, his face red, as though shocked to see her, and she braced herself, ready to face his wrath. The dead prairie chicken still in his hand, he turned and went into the barn. She wanted to see the children, but Norbert had already come out, leading his horse and the saddle slung over his arm.
She took a step toward him. “If you hit her,” she said, “I’ll
kill you.”
Norbert heaved the saddle onto his horse’s back. He did not look at her as he threw the reins across its neck, and she ducked to avoid being hit. He reached for the dead chicken and draped it over the saddle, making his horse baulk. Wahsis had come out of the house and stood on the porch, crying when he spotted her.
“Your son is hungry,” she said, glancing at the prairie chicken. “You will not leave us without meat.”
He kneed his horse in the stomach, and cinched the saddle tight over its heart. There were oats enough for the cow that it still gave milk, but Norbert knew the flour sack was almost empty and most of the yard chickens had escaped the heat of the henhouse and roosted in the bush, making it difficult to find eggs. He swung himself onto the horse and she tried to get out of the way, but a stirrup hit her across the cheek. She reeled back, yet resisted putting a hand to her face.
He looked down at her. “You make a fool of me at the feast,” he said, “after I ask you not to. After I ask you not to. There is talk that you rule the house. What do you think was said when Louis Riel himself asks for Josette Lavoie and you are not there?” He wheeled his horse. “I am a laughingstock—Norbert Lavoie cannot keep his own wife.”
She felt herself spinning. “Did he ask to meet the other women?”
“I was Gabriel’s first captain on the hunts,” he said, lifting his head. “Riel will ask me to be part of his council when it is established.” His horse danced, mouthing the bit. Only after Norbert rode off in the direction of Batoche, his four dogs running after him, did Josette realize that she had been holding her breath.
She stared blankly at the ground, her mind working feverishly. Riel asked to meet her last night. Had he wanted to apologize, even beg forgiveness for causing her father’s death? Non. Something else. The impulse to run again was overwhelming. She went back to the house and climbed the steps, picked up Wahsis. When she entered the kitchen, Cleophile stood at the table pouring boiling water from the kettle into a tin tub to do the dishes, her arm shaking from the strain. Wahsis ran to his brother and sister playing in the corner.
Josette lifted a tentative hand to Cleophile. “Where did he hit you?”
Her eyes went to her mother’s cheek, where a welt had begun to rise, and said, “He saves that for you.”
“Was he drinking in the root cellar?”
Cleophile shook her head and turned away.
“You must have seen him. Did he have a bottle?”
A wedge of bannock had been left on the table, and Josette took a bite of it, enough to keep herself from fainting. She touched her throbbing cheek. Louis Riel had asked to meet her. Riel. He had heard that she was the daughter of Guillaume Desjarlais and wanted to honour his sacrifice. Nothing more. She put a hand to her belly. There had been enough bad omens in two days to last a lifetime. By taking her, Norbert had shown that he no longer cared whether she lived or died. Her mother had been raised in Big Bear’s camp, on stories of Wîhtikow, a monster that craved the flesh of those who looked to their own selfish needs rather than those of the band. Her Nôhkom, grandmother, would say this drought had brought the creature, or perhaps Josette herself was possessed. Hadn’t she prayed to keep her womb cold? It was told that within the Wîhtikow beat a heart of ice.
The Old Crows knew that Louis Riel had asked for Josette Lavoie. Their contempt for her had most likely turned to a kind of obsession. She could disguise the vomiting from devil’s club and yarrow as food poisoning, but it would be near impossible to conceal a third miscarriage. The old gossips were like dogs on the hunt when it came to sniffing out a pregnancy and might suspect that she had committed a mortal sin. How to throw them off the scent? She took up a cloth for the dishes, a plan forming in her mind. She did not believe in their God, but of all the possibilities available to her, there now seemed to be only one.
an indulgence
Around midday, father moulin lowered himself into a chair at his kitchen table in the rectory. It was a relief to be indoors, but he could feel the temperature build in the house, the walls almost expanding and pulsing with heat. He crossed himself with a sigh, praying for rain. And for something to fill his stomach. He had eaten well at the feast, but that was almost a week past, and the ruthless prairie sun had destroyed his garden. “Dirty weather,” the white settlers called it. Even the udders of his milch cow had dried up and festered with bloat.
The episode with Riel still stung him. A priest’s blessing from a rebel! For years, the half-breeds had relied on the Church to help them understand new laws that had come into the territory from Ottawa, complex rules on land surveys and local governance. It had taken time and great effort to build their trust and dependence on the clergy for more than spiritual guidance.
Absently, he bit at the fingernails on his right hand until the cuticles were bloody. When he realized what he was doing, he sat on his hand to deny himself, muttering a prayer for moderation. Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not.
He would chew his nails down to bleeding stumps if not for the grace of God. Father André had sent word that Riel had held meetings in Prince Albert for the English half-breeds and white settlers, and had barred him from attending. Father André had enlisted both Charles Nolin and Lawrence Clarke, the Hudson’s Bay Company Factor, to watch Riel, but André had directed Moulin, “Find someone else in Batoche to watch him, someone who can be trusted.”
This morning, Moulin was woken early by a few traders forced by their wives to beg confession before they left on a freighting expedition to Qu’Appelle. He had tested their allegiance, hinting that Riel was dangerous, but they listened only long enough to receive penance before hurrying off.
Most of the breeds had kinship ties going back generations to Quebec, Red River, and a multitude of Indian tribes. When the buffalo died out, they had found ways to survive. Some had established stores in the village and become prosperous from freighting. Men like Xavier Letendre, who had been here longest, counted their wealth in cattle and horses. Moulin could depend on the farmers and carpenters and blacksmiths to show up at Mass. But the buffalo hunters like Gabriel Dumont followed the old ways of the plains, and were undisciplined, operating the ferries or saloons.
There was a knock at the door and he opened it to one of the half-breed wives, only her eyes showing over a shawl wrapped around her head against dust on the trail. When she removed it, he gave a start to see that it was Josette Lavoie, and with a purple bruise across her cheek.
“Oui,” he said to cover his surprise. “This is why I did not see you at Riel’s feast.” She coloured, made some excuse of getting in the way of a horse rearing in its stall and handed him a small hide medicine bag.
He quickly tucked the bag behind a book on the table. A year ago, Josette had observed him scratching through his soutane during a sermon and guessed that he suffered from carbuncles. Shortly after, she had brought him the powder of salsepareille root with instructions on how to make a poultice. She had insisted that he surrender his soutane to be washed. He had refused her the soutane and the powder—the painful boils on his back and sides were God’s punishment for sins that he had committed as a young man—but she’d pressed it into his hand, and the root had given him blessed relief. He should be glad of Josette’s concern, yet there was something about her that was anything but charitable.
“Bon,” he said, when Josette brought out a chunk of bannock wrapped in cloth. He accepted a straggle of carrots she offered, too. His parishioners would not let him go hungry, although Josette was not one of the women who came to the rectory to feed him. She was the product of à la façon du pays, a marriage in the fashion of the country, her parents flaunting their disregard for the Church. The devout women in the South Branch had half-breed mothers and grandmothers. Josette’s mother was a Cree who had married an untamed French breed somewhere out on the plains. The man had most likely paid a bride price of horse or cow to her mother’s people and a pipe was smoked to mark the deal, the couple l
eft free to separate at any time. Yet they had not been so heathen in their ways to deny Josette schooling from the Grey Nuns in Red River.
There had been a Church project of sorts, at the time, to educate Métis girls. The priests had hand-picked those with aptitude to become nuns, planning to send them out and minister to the Cree tribes on the prairies. Josette had found it impossible to give up her heathen spirits and remained half in and half out of the true Church, no more than an odious heretic who thought she could freely interpret scripture and avoid the Sacrament of Penance. She attended Mass only to appease the pious matriarchs—who called her La Vieille—and her eldest daughter, Cleophile, whose admirable devotion made up for her mother’s lack of faith. Moulin had tried to reach out to Josette, for he had never seen a more wretched soul. She was like one of the old witches: either kept to herself during the Métis gatherings or danced with her skirts around her knees, and could often be seen riding out into the woods, hair flying, to root up herbs. She was as the Magdalene, imprisoned in her own sorrows. Or like Eve, consigned to a lifetime of suffering for her sins.
He expected her to leave, but she made the sign of the cross and said, “Bless me father, for I have sinned.”
Father Moulin tried not to look shocked. “How have you sinned, child?”
“I refused my husband.”
“Refusing the marriage debt is a mortal sin!” He had been livid to hear that the midwife Caroline Arcand had told Josette her life was at risk if she became pregnant again. It was time to visit Madame Arcand with a reminder that God would punish her for warning women of danger in childbed, when any choice to avoid pregnancy was sinful.
Josette had managed to lower her eyes. “It is a cruel God who would wish me dead.”
“Non! A wife hath no power of her own body, but the husband—”
