“How long?” Corm asked.
He meant how long had it been since the old man died. The Midewiwin squaw priest thought he was asking about the afterlife. “Until his bones are dry and in the pit with the others, his spirit will be in the village. Ten moons, maybe twelve. You must stay until then.”
“I can’t. I mean no disrespect to my manhood father, but I am—”
“Listen to me, bridge person. This old man stole your death.” Shabnokis read the disbelief in his eyes. “I am telling you exactly what he told me. The last time you were here, when we spoke of kokotni, when was that?”
“Leaf Falling. Not the one just past. The one before that.”
“Yes, that was the time when the snow fell while the trees still had leaves.”
“I remember.”
“Before then your manhood father dreamed that if the snow fell on you while you were in this village, it would be the last time he would see you alive. That Leaf Falling, the snow fell on you.”
Corm remembered how anxious Bishkek had been for him to go. “A few flakes only. I was already leaving.”
Shabnokis made a sound of disgust. “Do you think a dream is only half true? Bishkek knew you were cursed. He fasted and made many prayers to take the curse from you to himself. Now”—she turned to look again at the corpse in its burial box—“you are alive and he is dead, because he offered Shkotensi his life for yours. You will stay until the second funeral.”
Corm shook his head and tried to explain, but Shabnokis had ignored him and began again to beat her drum and chant her prayers. She continued all day while the family prepared Bishkek’s body for burial, and while the village feasted.
A squaw came to the men’s blanket with a huge second portion of the corn and bear fat stew, scooping it from her tin cooking pot onto the flat wooden board that sat on the ground in the middle of the circle of braves and elders and young boys. The pot was a Cmokmanuk thing, traded for skins. The old art of making pots of clay was almost forgotten. Corm thought of Pontiac the Ottawa and his concern for the changes among the Anishinabeg, and touched the Crane People medicine bag that hung around his neck.
The honor of giving Bishkek his second helping fell to Corm as the eldest male relative. If Quent were at the feast the privilege would be his. The others waited while Corm scooped up a portion of the steaming food in his two hands, carried it to the burial box, and put it on the ground in front of his manhood father. Once Bishkek had been fed the other men eagerly dipped their fingers into the stew. They did not speak, but ate with enthusiasm, wiping their greasy hands on their chests after each mouthful. Corm managed only a few more bites. I wish I had seen you before your spirit left your body, old Father. I wish I had come even one day sooner.
When he arrived in Singing Snow Bishkek had not been dead for long. The old man’s corpse was still propped in a corner of the wickiup, leaning against the wall with the knees drawn up almost to the chin so he would stiffen in the proper position for burial. Bishkek’s daughters had dressed him in soft moccasins with no beadwork, because that was the Potawatomi way, and leggings made of fine elkskin cured without hair, and a breechclout of the same material. Corm had touched his manhood father’s hand and found there was still some warmth.
“I looked for you everywhere among the Cmokmanuk,” Pondise said “To tell you Bishkek was sick and that you should come home quickly. I left after the Cracking Ice Telling and did not return until the Telling of Much Fat.”
The boy had devoted two months to the search, much of April and May. “I was in a place very far from here,” Corm said. “It is no shame that you did not find me.” He’d spent much of that time with the Choctaw, trying nearly every day to see Marni alone, and mostly fading. When he did catch her without the snake trapper or the little girls, she refused to talk to him and sent him away. Finally he’d gone.
“I did not find Kwashko either,” Pondise added.
“He is in Québec with the redcoats.”
Corm heard the surprised murmuring of those who were crowded into the wickiup watching him pay his last respects to Bishkek. “First we will bury my manhood father,” he told them. “Then I will explain.”
By afternoon the corpse was rigid. Now Pondise and Corm painted Bishkek’s bare chest and his face in the red and black colors of a Potawatomi brave going to war. Corm thanked the Great Spirit that he’d at least arrived in time to perform this service for his manhood father. He thanked Miss Lorene’s Jesus God, too. Just in case.
When the war paint was finished, it was the turn of Bishkek’s granddaughters to do him homage and they wound many strings of wampum around his neck and his arms, so in the next world it would be known how highly he was valued.
Then Kekomoson had come into the wickiup, carrying a headdress made of black beaver fur with two long quills of gray eagle feathers and another, smaller cluster of red feathers from the breast of a rare bird. Because he was the chief Kekomoson put the headdress on Bishkek. He watched while Corm placed the old man’s bow in the burial box with him, and Pondise brought a quiver of arrows and put it beside the bow.
When everything was ready four braves carried the burial box from the wickiup to the death feast and put it where it now stood, between the eating places of the men and the women, and Shabnokis told Bishkek that they were gathered to eat with him for the last time.
When everyone had eaten as much as they wanted, the squaws took what was left away and the men smoked the calumet. Then Corm and Pondise spent the night sleeping on the ground beside Bishkek’s corpse. Because it was Thunder Moon and warm, the daughters and granddaughters slept there as well. In the morning the same four braves who had carried the burial box to the feasting place lifted it again and brought it to an open area that had been prepared for first burial. Everyone followed in procession, with Corm and Pondise leading. The squaws came behind, carrying many parcels wrapped in skins and some that were large enough to require a hide for covering.
The hole prepared for Bishkek was deep enough so that the base of the casket could be set in it and it would stand firm for as long as necessary. “See,” Lashi said, “he can look back at the village and see us.” Lashi was Pondise’s mother and Bishkek’s youngest daughter; she had been his favorite. She put a woolen shawl in the casket with her father. It was bright red—Cmokmanuk work, like the metal pots—and Bishkek had brought it back for her the one time he visited Québec. “So he won’t be cold,” Lashi said. Corm added his tomahawk and Pondise a metal skinning knife. Corm wished it were made of flint, but he said nothing; Pondise had given what he considered his most valuable thing.
One by one the rest of the old man’s kin put in his burial box something he would find useful on the journey to the next world, then a conical lid woven in the same manner as the box itself was fit snugly over the top and tied down with leather thongs.
Ixtu the Teller came forward and began the story of Bishkek’s ancestors and how he came to be here in this place when it was his turn to die, and of his grandson and his two manhood sons. He did not say that one of the manhood sons was not here to honor his manhood father. If he added that to the Telling it must always be part of the story, but perhaps not a true part. The bridge person had promised there was an explanation.
They were all waiting for Corm to speak; he could feel their eyes watching him. He knew too that they were thinking that Bishkek’s male line was threatened. Neither Quent nor Corm had ever planted a seed in the belly of any squaw in Singing Snow, and Pondise was still too young to marry.
Maybe it wasn’t Marni who was barren. Maybe his seed had no strength and could not make any woman’s belly swell. But the hot juices of his manhood had never failed him. Besides, he hadn’t been Marni’s first or her last. Damned whore. Damned barren whore. But knowing she would never be his was like a festering wound stinking inside him. The way Bishkek’s flesh would stink as it fell off his dead bones. That’s why the burial box was not woven too tightly. The air had to get in and help r
ot the flesh and dry the skeleton. When the maggots had eaten away everything that could putrefy, the whitened bones of his manhood father would be taken out of the burial box and put into the great pit with the bones of everyone else from Singing Snow. And at that second and final funeral they would chant the same words they chanted at every New Moon Telling: Haya, haya, jayek. So, so, all of us together.
When Ixtu was finished with his Bishkek Telling the bundles that the women had carried to the burial site were opened and all of Bishkek’s possessions were given away. Corm got the old man’s calumet, and Pondise the sealskin tobacco pouch and all the tobacco that was in it. The other men in the village divided Bishkek’s blankets and the furs that kept his wickiup warm in the winter. Those that had needed a full hide to cover them were his birch sleeping frame and the cooking pots that his wife had left behind in his wickiup. Old-style clay pots, they hadn’t been used for all the years since her death. After their mother was gone Bishkek’s daughters cooked for him in the pots their mothers-in-law gave them. Because neither Corm nor Kwashko nor Pondise had taken a wife in the village, there was no one to inherit the cooking pots of Bishkek’s wife. “I will keep them in my wickiup until the squaw to have them is chosen,” Kekomoson said. Corm was furious with Quent for not being there to share the disapproval. Even though that was as stupid as saying he hated Marni Benoit and Pierre the snake trapper was welcome to her.
“Now it is time I explain why Kwashko my whiteface brother is not here, though he honored his manhood father and honors everyone in Singing Snow. It is the story I came here to tell,” Corm added. “If Ixtu and Shabnokis agree that it is proper, I would like us to sit on the ground here so that Bishkek too can hear my words.”
The Teller and the Midewiwin priest consulted, then said it was permitted. Everyone sat on the ground and Corm began the story of his dream and the gift of Memetosia the Miami chief, and of the great war that the English and the French Cmokmanuk were fighting. “And when it is over and the English have won, all the Cmokmanuk will leave this place and it will be for the Anishinabeg,” he finished. “That was the meaning of my dream, and whatever dream it was that caused Memetosia the Miami to give me the Suckáuhock that comes from long ago.”
Corm took the medicine bag with the crane symbols from around his neck and gave it to Kekomoson. “Inside is the Súki bead marked with eeyeelia, the possum. It is the last of the stones and I have kept it for my people and my village, because the Anishinabeg half of my bridge is here and will always be here.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 1759
QUÉBEC LOWER TOWN
TWO BUILDINGS IN the Lower Town had miraculously withstood the day and night bombardment of the city and become symbols of hope for the habitants, the little church of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires and the Monastery of the Poor Clares. Now, after nearly two months of punishment, they too were gone. A huge fire fanned by a northeast chinook had spread from the Lower Town to the Upper. The bucket brigades were endless and useless. For days afterward the air was choked with smoke and a thick black cloud covered the sky in every direction.
Quent stood in the gathering dusk of the evening, looking at the rubble that was all that was left of the monastery. He could still feel heat rising from the stones. Probably the only time the God-rotting place had ever really been warm. “Les religieuses,” he demanded of a habitant poking through the remains. “Où sont les religieuses?” The man looked at him oddly—Quent wasn’t sure if it was his stiff and unconvincing French or his appearance—and shrugged, muttering something about not being God and therefore not required to worry about nuns.
He was going to grab the man and beat some information out of him if necessary, when he heard the three-note whistle. Jesus bloody Christ, Cormac Shea. It took you long enough. Quent whistled a reply, and waited. The scavenger began backing away, stooping to retrieve a large sack before squeezing between two big boulders into what had been the alley beyond the front door. “Allez, larron!” Quent called after him. He wanted to add that he would do something terrible to the man if he caught him here again, but he didn’t have sufficient French.
Routing the looter had kept him from hearing Corm’s answering whistle. Presuming there was one, and that it was really him, not a bird confusing the issue. Quent whistled again.
“If you were my enemy you’d be dead by now,” a voice whispered from just over his left shoulder. “You must be losing your touch.”
“My mind, more like. Where in hell’s name have you been?”
“In Louisiana for a time. And since the beginning of Thunder Moon, in Singing Snow. Bishkek is dead.”
Quent felt the grief rising in him. And the shame. “God-rotting hell … Were you there for the funeral?”
“The first funeral, yes. I promised I’d try and return for the second.” The promise hadn’t satisfied Shabnokis or anyone else, but it was the best he could do.
“I should have been—” Quent broke off. He should have done many things, and not being at Bishkek’s funeral was only one of them. Right now, not even the most important. “I came on this God-rotting expedition so I could protect Nicole. Look what a fine job I’ve made of it.”
There was a loud boom before Corm could answer. After an hour or so’s rest the bombardment had started up again. The shells lobbed from Pointe-Lévis exploded overhead like fireworks, their flashes illuminating the devastation. Corm looked around, spotting a half-buried section of the iron grille he remembered from behind the altar. “She’s not dead, is she?”
“No, I’m sure not. I’ve found no evidence of any bodies. I think the nuns left soon after the shelling started.” He told how he’d urged them to go before the bombardment began, and how they’d refused to budge. “The abbess said they had taken a vow to remain in this place, but I don’t think she had any idea how bad it was going to be.”
“You didn’t see the priest, Père Antoine the brown robe?”
“No. I’ve been looking for him.” The constant barrage of English shells had become background noise. They ignored it much as the Québécois had ignored it for seven weeks.
“His house is … was in this same alley, three doors nearer the harbor. I suppose it’s a total rain as well.”
“Everything’s a ruin.”
Corm reminded himself that it had to be that way if the Anishinabeg were to have Canada. All the Cmokmanuk things must be destroyed so they would leave and not come back. Still, the destruction he saw sickened him, the white half of him anyway. Easier to talk about something else. “You get your dirk back yet?”
“Not yet. There’s been no sign of Lantak.”
“Other Indians, though? Fighting with the French?”
Quent heard the bitterness. “Not many. Fewer than there might have been. It wasn’t likely the Suckáuhock would be perfect, Corm. Nothing ever is.”
“If the English had said what was to happen, if they’d made a proclamation about Canada being for the Anishinabeg after they won the war, it would be perfect then.”
“That’s not their way, saying things flat out like that.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not sure, but in London they call it diplomacy. It’s how they do things.”
Corm walked to where the old alley used to be and watched the shells being lobbed from the opposite shore. “Are the English going to storm the Lower Town?”
“That’s the one thing they’re certain not to do. The French could just pick them off from the heights. Wolfe wants a battle, but on his terms. He’s got to get his army up the cliffs before they engage.”
“That won’t be easy.” The steep cliffs either side of the city were of monumental height. The only other approach was the Côte de la Montagne. If Wolfe’s army tried to fight its way up that road they’d be slaughtered by troops on the walls above. A turkey shoot, with the outcome assured.
“Impossible,” Quent agreed. “At least that’s how it looks so far.”
“I
take it you’re staying over the way with the redcoats.” Corm jerked his head to indicate the English camp on Pointe-Lévis.
“Yes.” Another round of cannon fire punctuated his answer.
“Go back there. Let me look for Nicole; When I find out something, I’ll come and tell you.”
“Corm, I—”
“Go. Even got up like a Christian Huron you’re too easy to spot. The habitants will tear you apart if they get the chance.”
“I wouldn’t blame them,” Quent said softly.
In the middle of August, after Wolfe had been shelling Québec for over a month without luring Montcalm into the battle he craved, he had declared his so-called restraint at an end and loosed the rangers on the surrounding countrywide. Their orders were to burn every house and barn, but not harm women and children or destroy churches. Only Indians and Canadians dressed as Indians were to be scalped. Having issued the order his conscience was apparently clear. The rangers went off singing about giving the locals hot stuff, and Quent had to live with the knowledge that it was thanks to him they existed. He’d gone on as many of the raids as he could because his presence went some way toward protecting the habitants from the worst excesses, but he couldn’t be everywhere, and even his towering authority sometimes wasn’t enough.
“Go on over to Pointe-Lévis,” Corm said again. “I’ll find out where she is, then come and tell you.”
Quent waited until Corm had started for the Upper Town, then went to do some investigating on his own. The house belonging to the Franciscan priest was three doors down the alley. It appeared to be remarkably intact. The front wall looked much as it had when the houses either side of it still stood. The closed door was rough and thick, made of ill-planed oak There was no bell, and if there had been a knob, it was no longer there. Quent thought of knocking but was struck by the absurdity of the gesture. He put up his hand and felt the marks made by the axe that had originally fashioned this door from a single massive trunk. When he pressed lightly it easily fell backward, as if someone had recently propped it in place. He had the sensation that he was being watched.
Shadowbrook Page 61
