by Maia Caron
Dense clouds drifted over the moon. The great shadow of the barn, a sensation of standing on the edge of the universe, and the name of a ruthless God issuing from that mystery, overwhelming his senses. King David had murdered Uriah, the husband of Bathsheba. Finally admitting his sin had been the only way to win God’s forgiveness. Riel had weighed every sin he himself might have overlooked. Had God abandoned him because he had failed to stop Thomas Scott’s execution? He refused to admit guilt for a murder he did not commit.
You struck down Uriah, killed him with the sword of the Ammonites. Now, therefore, the sword will never depart from your house.
God had already struck him and his family. Marguerite was pregnant and ill with consumption, dying. Jean and Angélique were surely cursed, as God had visited the iniquity of the father on the children. He wanted to confess, unburden all of these worries and be clean again.
He went back toward the house, the egg in his pocket. He was fasting to rid himself of the last vestiges of pride, but his wife and children would eat. He froze at a sudden movement in the trees, the shadow of a horse and rider. In a moment, he was able to see by the shawl and long drift of skirt that it was a woman. She turned in the saddle. His confessor.
“What are you doing here?” he said, as Josette dismounted. “Who is with you?”
She told him that she had made Moise tell her where he was hiding. Riel listened as she spoke of the chaos in Batoche, how Middleton would not let the women and children leave. “We slipped away this morning,” she said, “while they held funerals for their dead.” She took a wrapped bundle from her saddlebag and handed it to him.
Grease had leaked through the cloth; it smelled like cooked meat. Despite the coming dark, he could see that her hair was unbound around her neck from the ride, and she was distant—removed as she had been when he had first tried to win her to his side.
“The soldiers have killed all the cattle,” she said. “We butchered and roasted what we could. Your wife and the children should keep up their strength.”
It did not escape his notice that she had failed to mention him needing strength. He found it difficult to read her expression. She seemed distracted, agitated, turned inward to herself.
“Has Norbert surrendered?”
“He’s dead.” Her voice was flat, emotionless.
Riel dropped the bundle on the grass and looked back at the house. He had told Marguerite and the children to stay in the root cellar no matter what they heard.
“We found Norbert on the prairie,” she said, almost ruthlessly. “Both he and Damase Carrière had been shot in the pits by the church.”
Riel passed a hand over his eyes. Moise had failed to tell him this.
“They did not have mortal wounds when the soldiers dragged them out,” she said. “A rope was tied around Damase’s neck.”
Riel shook his head. “I don’t—”
“They dragged him from the back of a horse.” Although a low moan escaped him at this news, she did not pause. “When the women found his body, his hands were still clenched upon the rope.”
The memory of Damase’s face came to him, laughing at a joke one of the men had told at the council table. Damase, riding out in the dusk alone so many times over the past month to scout Middleton’s camp. When Riel could trust his voice, he asked what had happened to Norbert.
She was very still, her face controlled, without expression. “The soldiers dragged him, too.”
“Non.” God had truly abandoned them if the best of their men had suffered the same fate as their worst.
“The bones in his hands were broken, the nails black with blood where he’d clawed the ground.”
Riel was appalled to hear her speak in such a voice. And why the need to tell him these unbearable details? “You can be at peace now,” he said to placate her.
“I will never be at peace.”
Riel was thankful to have the meat for his family, but now wished she hadn’t come. He took the letter out of his pocket. “Middleton has asked me to surrender. I will go in the morning.” He hoped, perhaps expected, that she would try to dissuade him, but she continued to give him that dark, resolute look. He lowered his eyes. “My mission is not over. The world cannot ignore our morality, our humanity. All our good actions will be rewarded in heaven. And Macdonald, by his actions, will be punished in hell.”
“What of my Mosom?” she said. “How will he be rewarded?”
Now he knew why she had come. God had sent her as He had sent Nathan to David. “Mary Magdalene was with the Lord until his very end,” he reminded her. She seemed rooted to the earth, great waves of indignation rising off her like heat from a stove.
“Mary Magdalene did not have to bear enemy soldiers making an effigy of her grandfather,” she said. “The Magdalene did not watch them take turns stabbing it with their long knives as they did on the Jolie Prairie yesterday.”
The faded moon had risen over the trees, the features of its stippled face arranged, it seemed to him, in accusation. He took off his hat and dragged a hand through his hair. “What of your relations in his camp?”
“They have fled to the north country,” she said, her voice bitter.
“Did Parenteau bury my papers?” She shook her head. He did not bother to ask her why, just accepted the answer. “After I surrender, I will be taken to Montreal—there will be a Supreme Court trial.”
“Perhaps you will be put in a cell with Honoré Jaxon.”
The little resolve he possessed had worn thin. It was a struggle to stand upright, facing her. “I heard that Honoré was taken.”
“I saw him when they were loading the prisoners on the steamship. I tried to tell the guards that he was harmless, insane …”
She was turned now and he studied her face. He had admired her mind and liked her very much. He had not—as some had accused him—used her only to get Big Bear to his side. He had chosen her as his Mary Magdalene, his confessor. Now, in the moon’s light and in her ragged coat, she looked both aggrieved and impossibly beautiful.
“I will tell you what Honoré said to me as they led him on the boat,” she said. “‘Do you see there are only two kinds of people? Those who eat and those who are eaten.’”
Riel fought the desire to fall on his knees, humble himself before her and God. But she had already gathered her skirts and swung up into the saddle. She looked down at him, long dark hair falling across her face.
He laid a hand on her horse’s neck. “I have been mistaken all this time, waiting for God …” He paused, telling himself that he would not break down. “I did not know that God has been waiting for me.”
i will not fall into
their hands
It was dark when Gabriel jerked awake, his back against a tree, senses alert to any movement. A full day had passed since they had lost the war, and the top of his head hurt more than at the moment he had taken the wound. Cold had got to his lungs. When he coughed, he almost passed out from the pain. He had slept for a few hours, a luxury, but it now felt that he was closer to death than he had been during the battles.
The moon stood bright in the sky overhead, shedding light upon the path as he unhobbled his two horses and brought them to a creek that wound down through a shallow coulee. He knelt where a pool eddied and cupped his hands to drink, then leaned back, closing his eyes. A dark smell rose out of the mud, the smell of rot and life shifting on the wind that brought it like an unfound ghost.
That morning, Gabriel had roamed the bluffs north of the Jolie Prairie, trying to find his younger brother, Édouard. Many of the fighters had turned themselves in, but some were holding out in the bush, too worried about their families to run, yet fearful of poor treatment from les Anglais if they surrendered.
When he had come across Métis horses running loose in the trees, he told the men to take them or the English would. He had found Josette’s horse, La Noire, grazing below a small bluff and caught her. It was more difficult to hide with two horses, but he woul
d not let her be stolen by Anglais patrols. Shortly before sunset, he had found James Short hiding to the north of the Jolie Prairie and listened to him tell of seeing Joseph Vandal’s dead body bayoneted so many times, that the Anglais soldier who tried to get his powder horn off as a prize had to wash the blood off his hands. Of André Letendre killed in the shadow of his own brother’s house. Michel Trottier and John Swain—shot in the back. And two girls who had died, caught in the crossfire. When James said that he’d heard that some of the women and children were seen that morning on the riverbank trail north, escaping Batoche, Gabriel had given up on trying to find Édouard.
He rose from the creek bed and held his breath to quiet the beat of blood in his ears. If he found Madeleine, he might find Riel. He stood for a moment to get his bearings before leading the horses down the creek to the river. When he thought of his wife and then Josette, a vicious ache bore into the centre of his skull, blurring his vision.
He had not gone far on an old cow trail north when he heard movement in the bush ahead. Gabriel dropped into a squat and quietly flicked the knife sheath at his waist. The call of a prairie chicken in the night air, a bird that lived out on the plains, not here, so close to the river. He whistled back and watched the trees. The shape of a man formed up on the other side of the trail near a low run of willow. Michel Dumas.
“Your wife sent me to find you,” Dumas said, after they’d clapped each other on the back.
“You’ve seen her?”
“The women are up at Fayant’s.”
They walked the horses along the bank, and Dumas told him of evading Anglais patrols to watch some of the Métis straggle in to Batoche. “You should have seen Maxime Lépine turn himself in. He was broken down—didn’t want to speak to anyone.” Dumas said that more than seventy of their men had surrendered or been caught and charged with treason. They were held aboard the Northcote, which had been repaired after the battle and was docked at the ferry crossing.
“Why hasn’t it sailed?”
Dumas punched him lightly on the shoulder. “The general is waiting for the big prizes.” He glanced at Gabriel. “I will never put myself in Anglais hands. We will ride for the border, oui?”
“We must find Riel, before they do.”
“Moise Ouellette found him today—”
Gabriel stopped in the track. “Where?”
But Dumas was uncharacteristically evasive. “He said Riel made him promise not to tell us.”
Gabriel spit into the mud. “Do you have any food?”
“The women have some beef.”
Yesterday, after the battle, Gabriel had watched soldiers run down their cattle on the prairie, shooting them one after another. Was he hungry enough to eat his own beef slaughtered at the hands of les Anglais?
Within an hour, they were climbing Fayant’s cutbank trail, and Gabriel heard Madeleine before he saw her. A coughing fit that ended in wet gagging. Blood. The floor of Fayant’s house was crowded with the bodies of women and children wrapped in their blankets.
Madeleine got up at the sight of him and kissed the rosary around her neck. It was dark in the room, but she used her hands to feel up and down his arms for wounds, and finally his neck. He winced when she touched his head, her fingers light upon the wet bandage. “I will fix this,” she said, and he could hear the trembling in her voice. “You will eat. Then you will ride for the boundary line.”
He pulled away from her. “I won’t let him surrender. I’ll find him first, Madeleine.”
She took firm hold of his shoulder and steered him out to the porch. Dumas’ own wife Veronique had gone to him in the yard where he stood with the horses.
“Leave the black one in the barn,” Madeleine called, “and give the other two oats for the ride south.” She put a hand to her throat and faced Gabriel. “You have found her horse, I see.”
He shrugged. “Why let the English take her?” The porch was dark, but he could imagine her deep-set eyes, staring him down.
“Riel will surrender, and you are going to run.”
His wife only wanted to save him. Yesterday, Riel had asked him to do the same. You will be pardoned by both God and men.
“Riel will hang for this,” she said, “and you too, if you are caught with him.”
Women were coming out onto the porch, as if to convince themselves that Gabriel Dumont was still alive; the older children were awake now too and pushing past the door to gather around him. Alexandre was there and Isidore’s children with Patrice, Josette’s oldest boy. Gabriel glanced up before he could catch himself.
“She took off on one of Fayant’s ponies,” Madeleine said from behind him, “right after we cooked the meat.”
One of his nephews clung to his leg. Gabriel patted the boy’s head. “And you let her?”
Madeleine’s voice had grown cold. “Who can stop her doing anything.”
Gabriel knew that Josette had gone after Riel. To convince him to surrender? Non. To face him one last time.
The women seemed to realize that Madeleine and her husband were in the middle of an intimate conversation, and they herded Alexandre and the children back inside. The door had not closed when his wife’s voice took on an undertone of hurt.
“Is it because I was barren?”
He did not think it was possible to feel more physical pain, but she had managed to deliver a blow that almost sent him to his knees. When he had discovered that Madeleine was ill and dying, he had pushed Josette away from him, prayed to love his wife the way she deserved. He did love her.
He was about to turn when she added, “Or is it because she does not break your balls?”
“She breaks them too,” he said bitterly. “They are broken—are you satisfied?”
“Ah then,” she said, “you are no use to either of us.”
He pulled Madeleine into his arms, but she pushed him away in another coughing fit, got the handkerchief to her mouth in time to catch the blood. “If you love me,” she finally managed, “escape.”
Too tired to argue, he nodded. “Oui, I will go.”
She drew him indoors, where his brother’s widow, Judith Dumont, had already started a fire in the stove to heat water. He sat on the edge of the kitchen table while the women bound his head with a piece of cloth torn from someone’s coat lining. They told him of finding Norbert Lavoie’s body with Damase Carrière’s, dragged behind horses until they were dead. Gabriel listened with his head down, hand clenched upon his knee. Norbert’s death did not move him, but to think of Damase, suffering this low form of torture and murder … When Riel heard, it would devastate him.
The women had a leg of beef they had cooked on embers to avoid revealing their location to les Anglais. The meat was mostly raw inside, yet Gabriel and Dumas ate and accepted more for the trail. Dumas went out to bring their horses to the gate and tighten the cinches, swing up the saddlebags.
The moon washed the tops of the bare trees and the slanted roof of Fayant’s house. By Madeleine’s formal and hesitant manner, Gabriel knew that she was not done speaking of Josette.
His wife followed him to his horse. “After the first day of battle,” she said, “I went to the rectory.” He faltered, one foot in the stirrup, unable to look at her. “I asked Père Moulin to grant you absolution. Do you know what he told me? How you came to him with Josette the night of the New Year’s dance, after Norbert beat her.” He took his foot out of the stirrup, knew that he deserved this. “Why did you keep it from me?” she asked. A coughing fit overtook her, and she almost choked on her next words, “I am not an old buffalo cow to be left on the prairie.”
“I never thought you were.” A feeling of desolation came over him, and he thought of taking her with him. She was dying. He did not want this scene to be their last. But he and Dumas must stay off the trails, places a wagon couldn’t go. “I will send for you when I get to Montana,” he said, the words heavy on his tongue. He grabbed her around the waist, buried his face in her neck, as he had done almost
every day for the past twenty-seven years.
She had never been one for emotion and patted his shoulder, even held out the stirrup for his foot. After he mounted and turned his horse, she put her hand to his leg, to the garter that she had beaded for him by their kitchen fire long ago. He told her that he would surrender to the authorities as soon they reached the States, ask for amnesty, and she nodded, gave his horse a slap on the rump. He and Dumas rode away with Gabriel looking back at her solitary figure until they had gone into the trees and she was lost to him.
As soon as they had found the trail at the edge of the Jolie Prairie, he turned his horse north.
Dumas called after him, “What are you doing?”
Gabriel would no longer listen to detractors. He would give it one last chance. “We will go as far as the bend in the river,” he told Dumas, “to Calixte Lafontaine’s. If we don’t find Riel there, we’ll give up and ride south.”
she spoke his
name
Hours before dawn, Josette rode past the abandoned houses—Napoléon Nault’s farm, Gervais’ and Laplante’s. The trail she had taken so often when visiting Riel and Jackson in St. Laurent. Would Middleton burn these houses too, as his army moved north? When she had come to Lafontaine’s farm, an indistinct murmur of voices drifted to her on the wind, and she turned her pony into a stand of young poplar trees behind the barn. The moon glowed white within a ring of cloud, lighting up the trail like a lantern held high. She dismounted and listened carefully, her ears searching for any sound through the bare branches. Nothing but a hush of river in the near distance. There it was again—a man talking in low tones, another answering. She led her mount further into the trees and before long, two riders appeared on the trail. One of them reined in his horse, which almost reared, champing at the bit. Soldiers this far north? After Riel.
