Silence of Stone

by Annamarie Beckel

  I am startled, and distressed, that Lafrenière knows anything about André Thevet, that he has been talking to Isabelle about Marguerite, about me. Of what interest can the Franciscan be to him?

  Of what interest am I?

  Isabelle continues to chatter. “Papa tells me that the men who write books about geography say the king’s cosmographer has never been to New France. Or Terre Neuve.” She looks from side to side, as if one of the other girls might be listening. She lowers her voice. “They say the monk is a liar who makes up stories about Indians.”

  “Wipe the slate. Now. You must work on your darning.”

  Isabelle’s face falls, as if she had expected me to welcome her confidences, had expected I would want to hear more. On her slate she has drawn a wolf with huge jagged teeth and a woman stabbing it with a spear. Isabelle pouts even more as she wipes a rag over her drawing. She wipes away the pointed teeth last.

  Wolves came to the island after the sea had frozen, after the deer had come across the ice. One morning late in December, Michel found a long trail of huge rounded hoofprints in the snow, several animals by his reckoning. Damienne worried that the prints were the tracks of monsters and retreated to the cave.

  Although the muskets had ceased to fire reliably, Michel was able to stalk and kill one of the deer. Returning to the cave with the animal draped across his shoulders, he grinned for the first time in months. Without a word, he laid it before them. Marguerite wept, her tears falling on the buff-coloured neck. She wept again when her teeth bit into the dark-red liver, still running with the animal’s warm blood.

  Michel dressed the deer, throwing only what was putrid in the bowels to the gulls and ravens. They roasted the meat over the fire and devoured the thick fat on the haunches. Grease dripped from their chins, and their bellies felt full at last.

  That night Michel and Marguerite loved. On the pink rock, warmed by the fire, they loved, and Marguerite slept within Michel’s embrace.

  They saved every part of the deer: hide, antlers, bones, even the contents of its stomach. What meat they could not eat right away, Marguerite and Damienne sliced into thin strips and dried near the fire in the cave.

  The deer gave them hope.

  Then came the eerie howls in the night, four-toed tracks in the snow as big as Michel’s hand, competitors for deer and for the few rabbits and partridge – predators who looked upon them as prey. Michel fortified the entrances to the cave with more stout poles, then he and Marguerite took turns standing guard, watching for copper eyes in the night and the flash of long white teeth.

  I hear an explosion reverberate off stone walls. I cringe and my ears ring.

  “When did your lover die?” The Franciscan is using a knife to smooth a ragged thumbnail.

  “Her husband died on the third day of March in 1543.”

  The knife stops. “You know exactly?”

  “Two hundred and thirty-four days after Roberval left them.” Scrape of stone upon stone. Lines counted. Marguerite’s belly round and heavy, her legs and arms like sticks, fingernails torn and bleeding as she dug at frozen soil and stones to place his body into a crevice beneath a rock slab one hundred and twenty-two strides back from the cave. It was the rock upon which they climbed to follow the path to the summit or to walk down to the harbour. Nearly every time she left the cave she would place her foot upon his crypt.

  They had no linen to spare for a shroud, so Marguerite covered his nakedness in death with the rabbit furs he would not wear in life.

  Using large rocks that she had to carry to that place, Marguerite stacked them to close off the opening as best she could to keep away wolves and foxes. There was nothing she could do about mink and weasels, and she would not think about them chewing on his meagre flesh.

  “How did he die?”

  “He lost hope.”

  “Lost hope?”

  “Did he not have cause?”

  “There is always faith, Marguerite, always hope,”

  Thevet says gravely. “Even in the darkest night.” He would admonish me with the same platitudes Marguerite tried so fervently to believe.

  La fille naïve. Foolish girl. Km-mm-mm. Saved by our grace, not God’s.

  “Oui,” I answer.

  While the Franciscan rambles on about faith, I stare at the stone wall behind him. I see Michel’s haunted eyes, glinting, but not with love. Even before he died, love had become a hazy memory for Marguerite, some wondrous thing that had happened to someone else in some distant time. Even when he lay beside her, she could no longer even imagine love. She could imagine only food, and when she dreamed it was of tables groaning with platters of roast pork, beef, and goose, golden loaves of bread, sweet butter, almonds, and fruit tarts. She woke to the granite walls of the cave, to the dry bones they boiled for broth.

  The days began to lengthen but were still bitterly cold, the winds so fierce Marguerite’s eyelashes froze together and she could hardly breathe. Often in the morning she had to clear away snow from the cave’s entrance, then her eyes would ache from the sun’s brilliance. Michel now left the cave only to relieve himself, so Marguerite had to learn how to set snares and to hunt with the arquebus and fusil, though the large musket’s recoil sometimes knocked her to the ground and bruised her shoulder.

  She had long given up trying to poison the tenacious child within, but she still dug roots and stripped the inner bark from birch and alder to boil for broth. She used the axe to chop holes in the ice of the ponds so that she could fish and Damienne could dip water.

  By late winter the rabbits and partridge were starving as well. They were scrawny with no fat at all. Marguerite saw no more deer tracks, but occasionally they ate a wolf she had managed to shoot from the entrance of the cave. In her dreams then, she would see wolves feeding on their bodies, ripping the baby from her belly, and tearing it apart. She would wake terrified and weary, as if she had not slept at all.

  They became skeletal, and Marguerite could not comprehend how her belly could swell even as her arms and legs wasted away, how the child could kick and be so alive when she was dying. In half thoughts that drifted and meandered with the smoke from the fire, Marguerite came to believe that God was punishing them all for her sin, not for the sin of loving Michel, but for the sin of not wanting her baby.

  O Lord, rebuke me not in thy indignation, nor chastise me in thy wrath. Have mercy on me…Praise the Lord, for he is good, for his mercy endureth for ever.

  “Foolish, foolish girl,” I say.

  “We must never–” The Franciscan stops mid-sentence. “What? What did you say?” He waves a quill as if the words he seeks are hanging in the air between us and the feather might gather them in. “What did you say?” he repeats.

  “Foolish.”

  “Oui, your young man was foolish. Tell me, how did he really die?”

  “He died because God did not hear her prayers. Or because he chose not to answer.”

  Now the quill points. “Blasphemy,” he shouts. “Take care what you say.”

  “Or what?” I feel a smile pull at the corners of my mouth. “Would you have me executed here – in the stronghold of the Huguenots? Or would you take me back to Paris?”

  “Impertinent wench,” he spits. “Tell me, how did he die?”

  “Hopelessness,Père. I told you, he died of hopelessness.”

  Marguerite came to fear the man whom only seven months earlier she had loved with every part of her being. Michel’s dark curls had dulled and thinned, and his beard was matted and filthy. His gums bled and his front teeth had fallen out. Michel’s face looked like a skull, grinning hideously, even though he never smiled. Marguerite could no longer bear to look at him. His countenance repulsed her, and his glinting eyes frightened her. He had begun grumbling incoherently about Roberval, about demons and the Devil, about dying like mongrels, eyes picked by ravens. His words, rarely intelligible, descended to a growling monotone.

  Marguerite took Michel’s dagger and kept it close at
hand. She began to sleep only when he slept and always left Damienne armed with the sabre.

  One day when Marguerite returned from hunting with only a few frozen berries to show for her efforts, she knew that something had changed. As soon as she entered the cave she could smell it. Death, the dusty scent entwined with grey smoke. When her eyes adjusted to the cave’s perpetual darkness, she saw Damienne huddled against the wall, staring at Michel, who lay sprawled on his back, toothless mouth grinning.

  Marguerite knelt in front of Damienne. What happened? she said.

  Damienne looked over Marguerite’s shoulder, to Michel. They have come, she said.

  Who has come?

  The demons. They came for him.

  Non, that cannot be! Marguerite pushed herself away from the old woman.

  He began talking to them, Damienne said.

  Talking to them?

  Oui, he talked and laughed with them. But it was not a good laughter. His eyes glowed just like a wolf’s. He reached out to them and they took him.

  It must have been angels, said Marguerite. Michel is at peace now. He’s in heaven.

  Non. I saw them. Uncountable. Like black smoke.

  Marguerite grabbed for her New Testament and held it to her chest. Angels, she insisted, they must have been angels.

  Non, whispered Damienne. They were not.

  A sliver of icy doubt slipped into Marguerite’s heart. She did not really believe that angels had come for Michel, but she could not, would not, believe that demons had been in the cave. Michel and Damienne had conjured them from their own fear.

  Marguerite knelt and gathered Michel into her arms. She tried to feel grief but could manage only a profound weariness. And anger. Why had he given up? Why would he not fight to live long enough to see his child?

  “Hopelessness does not kill,” Thevet protests. “How did he die?”

  L’homme faible. Weak. Weak. Weak. Km-mm-mm.

  “Oh, but it does,Père, it does.”

  “But you lived. Damienne lived.”

  L’homme faible. Kek-kek-kek. L’homme faible.

  “Her husband was a good man, but weak. He lost hope, and then the angels came.”

  “Angels?” The Franciscan’s face brightens.

  “Oui, angels.”

  My belly is hollow, and blood pulses across that painful emptiness. I am carrying a brace of rabbits, gutted but not yet skinned. The fur is soft in my hand as I run up the stairs, two at a time, and into the garret. I cannot wait. I rip the skin from the meat and bite into cold grey flesh. I chew until I can close my eyes and breathe. I swallow, then bite again. I look up and see the striped cat. She does not move. She is watching me from the open window. I see now what she sees: my teeth sunk into raw meat, eyes savage.

  I pull the rabbit away from my mouth. The cat turns and flees.

  I set the rabbits aside and kindle a fire in the hearth. I will use the iron pot, cook the rabbits into a stew, and put the stew on a plate with bread.

  I sit by the fire, my hunger satisfied for now. I have even left a small portion of stew outside the window. Now and again I turn from the hearth to see if the cat has come back. Why do I care? She is scrawny and ugly, her ear tattered, and she would bite me if she could. There is no mercy in her green eyes.

  But I have seen her distended belly, and I worry. She is starving. She might eat them. I cannot let her eat them. And so I keep watch.

  The spider spins, patient and painstaking in her weaving. She listens more attentively than the Franciscan, and I decide to offer her something beautifu: a butterfly. The spider is sated now, so the butterfly is safe. I see the flash of iridescent wings.

  Marguerite began wearing Michel’s clothes. She tied his breeches with hemp rope below her swollen belly and tugged his soldier’s thick doublet onto her shoulders and across her chest. She held the cloth to her nose and breathed in the scent of his skin – salt and berries – still lingering beneath the stink of sweat and fear. She pulled on his long wool stockings and stuffed dry grass into his boots to make them fit.

  She willed herself to forget what he had become and to remember only what he had been. Marguerite began to think of Michel with love and tenderness, recalling how he had spoken with joyful expectation about children –our many, many children – and how she would teach them letters and numbers, teach them with books brought from France. It was as if she could carry him gently within her, shaping him to fit within the spaces in her heart the way she had shaped his clothes to fit her body. She could remember now how he’d held her close, how he’d touched her with his fingertips and tongue. She could close her eyes and see his smile. She could see love now, and not anger and despair, in the golden flecks of his jade eyes.

  L’amour. L’espoir. La fille naïve.

  “Oui,” I answer. “She was foolish to love, foolish to hope.”

  The spider lifts a leg, testing the air. Perhaps she too hears the voices. I direct my question to her. “But what else could she do?”

  One morning, about ten days after she had buried Michel, Marguerite emerged from the cave to see the ice beyond the large islands littered with dark spots. Sabre in hand, she walked slowly down to the harbour and across the ice, approaching cautiously. As she crept closer, the crying bleats became deafening, and the spots resolved into seals – scores of small white pups accompanied by grey adults whose dark markings meandered across their shoulders and backs.

  Her stride ungainly, Marguerite had to stretch across a narrow vein of open water to reach the floe upon which they rested. Though the seals seemed only mildly wary of her approach, she watched them closely, her stomach roused to hunger, the baby kicking hard in anticipation. Finally she saw a small one, bleating, apparently alone and unguarded. Marguerite crept closer, raised the sabre, and stabbed. Again and again, in a frenzy, she stabbed the writhing body so that the seal stained its white fur with its own red blood. When the pup lay still, she gutted it at once and ate the liver, hot and steaming.

  Curious black faces turned and watched, but did not threaten.

  Though small, the seal pup was heavy, and Marguerite strained to move it. As if her baby understood, it lay still and quiet. Marguerite, strengthened by food, managed to lift the seal across the vein of open water and then tug and slide it toward shore. She carried it to the cave like an offering, every muscle aching with exhaustion.

  Roused from emaciated lethargy, Damienne was ecstatic. She quickly ate the heart, though it hurt her teeth, which had loosened in her swollen gums. She licked crimson blood from her lips and grinned.

  Using the sabre, the axe, and Michel’s dagger, they stripped the seal of its heavy white fur, cut the body into pieces and carried them into the cave. Their stomachs rumbled as they watched and smelled the roasting meat, fat dripping and sizzling in the fire. Unable to wait for the dark meat to cook fully, Marguerite and Damienne ate until they were glutted and drowsy.

  Eyes heavy, Marguerite stared into the fire, not quite believing their good fortune. She rubbed her swollen belly and murmured psalms of praise: I will love thee, O Lord, my strength. The Lord is my firmament, my refuge, and my deliverer. My God is my helper, and in him will I put my trust…And they cried to the Lord in their tribulation, and he delivered them out of their distresses.

  Marguerite praised and thanked God, but believed it was Michel who had brought her – and the baby – this gift of food. Her love for him, and her grief, grew larger.

  She slept then, but fitfully. Marguerite fretted, anxious for the dawn, fearing the seals would be gone before morning. Then she worried that the baby would come too soon, that she would be too weak to hunt. She put her hands on her belly and whispered, Wait, child. Wait. Let me hunt, let me find food.

  Marguerite agonized over how they could preserve the meat. They had no salt. How could they dry it and yet keep the wolves away? She wondered how she could tan the heavy white furs to make cloaks and boots.

  Très inquiète. Km-mm-mm.

  “Ou
i,” I answer. “She worried. Always she worried.”

  Marguerite was granted nearly a fortnight to kill seals. She and Damienne ate as much as they could, then they rendered the fat, saving the oil in the seals’ own stomachs and bladders. They cut the meat into thin strips they could dry outside during the day. At dusk they laboured to move everything into the cave to keep it away from the wolves, foxes, and weasels.

  Then, crystallizing out of white fog, the white bears came. Enormous and ferocious.

  I hear again the huff-huff-huff just outside the cave and see a huge white paw snaking in between the rocks and pulling at the wooden barriers. I tell the spider about the bears and about Marguerite’s terror. Lifting her front legs, she captures my words and wraps them tightly in her silky thread, confining the memories – and the fear – within her web.

  Isabelle leaves her bench and sidles closer. She shows me her slate, the letters neat and carefully formed. She has drawn a small bird in the corner. Each foot has five crooked toes. “Do you think God is too busy sometimes?” she asks.

  “Too busy?”

  “Papa says that maybe God was so busy with the king’s wars that he couldn’t hear my prayers for Mama.” Her voice is small and quiet, words lisped through the gap in her front teeth. “And that’s why she died.” Isabelle waits, wanting an affirmation – or a denial. There is anger within her, but a great sorrow beneath.

  How long, O Lord, wilt thou forget me? How long? Deaf to her prayers.

  She sighs loudly, then tucks her slate under her arm and returns to her bench. She knows her letters are well-formed and that I have no answer.

  “The Indians there live almost exclusively on fish, especially seals, whose flesh is very good and delicate to them,” says the Franciscan. “And they make an oil from the fat, which, when melted, is a reddish colour. They drink it with their meals as we would drink wine or water. They make coats and clothing from its skin.”

  Has Thevet forgotten already that he told me all of this only three days ago?