A Land Apart

by Ian Roberts

  “He does have good taste,” says de Clemont.

  “I was only five at the time but I remember meeting him. The savage from the New World, they called him. My parents took me to see him. But he did not strike me as savage, especially dressed in court attire.”

  “The Jesuits got hold of him for awhile,” continued Champlain, “hoping to convert him so he might help them back here. But he hated being with the priests and even managed to return to court for awhile before the Jesuits shipped him back to Québec. They hoped and believed that once he saw the way his people lived, after his exposure to civilization and Christianity, that he would be inspired to help convert them. But to their great chagrin, he escaped within a couple of weeks with the next trading party and returned to the Wendat.

  “He often joins the trading group to Québec hoping I think that he might be able to go back to France. Or that Anne-Marie might have come to see him. She still sends him a coat every year. I have it with me to give him.”

  Champlain sips his wine, and then, aware he has the nobles’ attention, continues, “When Savignon first came back he asked me if I thought he could buy Anne-Marie.”

  The nobles sit up in alarm.

  “Buy! Whatever do you mean?”

  “For thirty beaver pelts. It was a lot at the time. At least for him.”

  The nobles are aghast, horrified. “Buy the Duchess Anne-Marie de Navarre? With furs?” The idea is absurd to their European ears, an affront to their entire world-view. To their mind, this wasn’t a dowry among peers so much as a brutal kind of animal barter.

  “He was caught between two worlds. Imagine Savignon trying to describe the French court to the Wendat using the words he would have from a life here — a palace hall covered in gilded murals, the scale of it. Or a horse-drawn carriage when they have never seen a horse, a wheel or roads. When he started telling them these stories, they simply laughed at him. Brulé was the only one who could understand what he had been through.”

  “Well, personally I would say he was mad — thinking you could buy a duchess with a few beaver skins.”

  “It is ironic,” continues Champlain, “how the lives of Savignon and Brulé mirror each other. A Wendat who longs to be in France and a Frenchman who longs to be in this wilderness. At least Brulé is here, where he wants to be.”

  “But why is he out here? Why would anyone choose this?” asks de Clemont. “It seems absurd.”

  “The first year we were here, it was 1609. We had no idea what winter would be like. No one could have imagined the cold. Brulé had spent much of the summer with the Algonquin, hunting and learning their language. Their language is devilishly difficult to understand. I have spent twenty-five years trying to learn it and still I can express only the most basic ideas. But Brulé just seemed to understand it. That first winter he hunted and helped keep us in food. Even so, only eleven of us survived. Of thirty-eight. A Wendat trading party arrived to exchange goods with the Algonquin the next summer and Brulé took one look at them, I think, and saw his future.

  “The Wendat brought excellent furs. I knew the fur trade might help support us here, I still hoped then we might find a route to the Indies, and I needed someone who could translate for me. So I sent him off.

  “The Wendat were worried that if anything happened to him, we would be angry. I assured them that would not be the case but I do not think they quite trusted me. So they sent one of the chief’s sons to stay with us. That was Savignon and we immediately sent him to France on the next ship.

  “I remember that the following summer Brulé was supposed to arrive back with the trading party. But I looked in each canoe as it came to shore and failed to see him; I was seriously worried something had happened. But then suddenly, there he was standing right in front of me, looking so much like a Wendat I could not tell them apart.

  “I remember taking him aside and scolding him that we were in New France to civilize the savages, not become like them. But it was obviously too late. He spoke Wendat well and the people loved him. He traded very fairly for them too. He refused to let them waste their furs in exchange for useless trinkets. I was furious at the time but over the years we and the Wendat have grown to trust each other because of it.

  “He slid into their way of life completely. Each year he would return with the trading party, full of stories. He could hold a room spellbound with his adventures. He even married a Wendat woman, had children…”

  “Married a savage?”

  “She was the most sought after woman in all the Wendat villages, Savignon told me. Brulé won her heart.”

  De Clemont catches de Valery’s eye and smirks. “Ah, a savage dish I’m sure.”

  “That was his first wife.”

  Both de Clemont and de Valery wait expectantly.

  “About ten years ago Brulé stopped coming to Québec. I worried he had been hurt or even killed, but the Wendat assured me he was fine. When he finally did return to Québec, he was changed. Darker. Withdrawn. He would tell me nothing, but he had terrible scars, burns, all over his neck and chest. Eventually Savignon told me what had happened.

  “While Brulé was far away to the west on a trading expedition, an Iroquois raiding party attacked a Wendat fishing camp. Nuttah, Brulé’s wife, and his two children were taken. When he returned he gathered what clues he could and somehow pieced together the trail back to the village of the Iroquois who had taken them. I think a number of Wendat joined him. But they could not attack the village and so they waited, watching for days.

  “The Wendat lost patience and returned home. Only Savignon stayed with Brulé. He said they lay there for weeks in hiding and then one day he saw Atsan, his son, playing in the fields with some of the boys of the village. He would have been seven or eight by then, I think. Brulé managed to grab him and escape and brought him home. But he wanted his wife, and decided to go back. All the Wendat warned him not to go. But he went. Savignon was the only one to join him and again, for weeks they were in hiding, watching the village.

  “Eventually, despite everything Savignon tried to do to stop him, Brulé hatched a plan to sneak inside the village. After awhile, Savignon knew something had gone wrong but did not know what to do. He said he wept when he saw what crawled away from the village that night.”

  “After that, for God’s sake, why would he not go back to France? Get away from all this,” asked de Valery.

  “He changed. That is sure. But I think he somehow connected even more deeply to the life here; I cannot explain it. But he spent more and more time going further and further into the wilderness. The excuse he gave of course was that it was for the fur trade. And it was good for trade — new sources of fur from new and more distant tribes. Yet I think he found something out there, something he tried to explain to me one time. He talked of spirit, of the Great Spirit, but certainly not any spirit that a Christian would know. He actually told me he had found Paradise.”

  “Paradise?” said de Clemont. “I thought Paradise was lost, not found.”

  “It is the English who have given this idea to the Iroquois,” explains Brulé, who, immediately upon his return, has gone straight to talk with Atironta. “Not only to fight, but to conquer. Take our land. They want our fur routes. The English get the furs, but let the Iroquois soil their hands with our blood.” This was the inevitable conclusion Brulé had come to after reflecting on what Siskwa had told him. He felt the chief had wanted him to know. Maybe he didn’t want to see that fierce, honorable rivalry between the Iroquois and the Wendat, one he had lived with, and his father, and his father before him, destroyed in a flurry of shameful English bullets.

  “But if we are inside the village, what can guns do to us?” asks Atironta.

  “They burn our crops, village by village,” answers Brulé. “This is the white man’s warfare. Destruction. The Iroquois will learn it quickly enough.”

  Just then Savignon enters the longhouse. “Father LeCharon said he wanted to see you as soon as you returned. H
e wants to talk to Atironta.”

  “Tell him we can talk later,” replies Brulé.

  “He is outside now. He is desperate, Etienne.”

  Brulé glances at Atironta, who looks up at Savignon and nods. The clubbing of the priest has weighed heavily on the chief’s mind and heart; he has anticipated this conversation with apprehension. Savignon leads the priest into the longhouse. LeCharon looks haggard, lean, his eyes bloodshot. Atironta motions for him to sit with them by the fire. LeCharon watches and fidgets restlessly as Atironta lights his pipe. After several puffs, the chief passes it on to LeCharon but the priest cannot restrain his impatience. “I want this man punished,” he bursts out. “There must be justice.”

  Atironta looks up. Brulé motions for the priest to calm down. He knows that such an emotional outburst, acceptable in the culture of the white man, will be perceived as a terrible breach of custom to the Wendat, who when faced with internal conflict, sit together quietly, smoke the pipe, and build, however slowly, a sense of common purpose towards a common resolution.

  Brulé tries his best to intervene. After translating for Atironta, he tells LeCharon, “Justice is a difficult word to translate in Wendat — at least in the way that you mean it.”

  “Of course they have no word for justice because they are damned and heathen wretches living in chaos.”

  “No, I mean your idea of justice and the punishment you want.”

  “Yes, punished, exactly!” exclaims LeCharon. The priest, he knows, understands but one view of justice and that view is bound to another for punishment — and a very specific, brutal kind of punishment.

  “Try to understand how the Wendat approach this. We have a grave imbalance —”

  “Balance! You cannot protect this barbarian with such mindless drivel. He is a criminal. He clubbed Father Marquette when he was saving that boy from damnation.”

  “Marquette was about to baptize his son, taking him to the French Land of the Dead. In the father’s mind that is the worst nightmare he could imagine,” clarifies Brulé.

  “Superstitious rot!” LeCharon spits in anger. “We offered the Wendat Heaven and in exchange you give us chaos and misery.”

  “I have heard of this heaven from Savignon. Your Land of the Dead,” says Atironta.

  Brulé translates the chief’s comment for LeCharon. The priest corrects him, “Heaven is not a Land of the Dead. We live there in glory with our Lord, Jesus Christ, in His Kingdom.”

  “That little dead man on the stick?” asks Atironta, incredulous. LeCharon shakes his head in disgust; he is dealing with a child.

  “No, Heaven is there,” he points to the sky.

  Atironta looks up, perplexed. “How far?” the chief asks. “How do you get there?”

  Hearing Brulé’s translation, LeCharon is stunned; he cannot believe the question. “Is he really that stupid?”

  Brulé closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, desperately trying not to react to the priest’s rigid, pious arrogance. “You do nothing to understand the Wendat.”

  “In the Lord’s name what do you want me to understand about this savage witchcraft of theirs?”

  “You could start by trying to understand the Wendat Land of the Dead.”

  LeCharon heaves with frustration and rage at this useless exchange, at Father Marquette’s condition and his own fear of being left alone, abandoned, in this grim hellhole.

  “Fine. Where is the Wendat Land of the Dead?” he asks Brulé who translates for Atironta.

  “There,” Atironta points west, “where the sun hides herself in the evening.”

  “How far?” asks the priest.

  “Three days,” answers Atironta.

  “How do you get there?”

  “On foot.”

  LeCharon glares at Brulé and rolls his eyes. Turning to Atironta he states what, for him, is an irrefutable truth, “You will burn in the flames of Hell forever in your Land of the Dead.”

  The chief listens as Brulé translates and then levels an intense, penetrating gaze directly at LeCharon. “No Wendat is coward enough to fear the torture of your Christian hell.”

  Brulé laughs at the audacity of the chief’s words. The statement stops LeCharon in his tracks. His fear of hell is absolute. His mouth hangs open, speechless. Atironta continues, “You feel the Wendat attacked your friend for no reason. But our Land of the Dead is real to us just as yours is real to you. That warrior believed he would never see his son again. That his son would live with your black robes forever. You —”

  “He must be punished. He must go to prison or be hanged,” interrupts LeCharon, increasingly unnerved by the direction of this exchange.

  For a second time now, Atironta is taken aback by the priest’s high-minded rudeness; interrupting another person as they speak is the height of disrespect to the Wendat way. Even more so, interrupting a chief. Atironta is losing patience with the priest and his narrow, dogmatic solutions, and a world-view so rigidly opposed to his own. Brulé looks at Atironta, who nods for him to continue translating. Brulé stops at the word ‘prison’, searching for a way to explain it.

  He tells Atironta, “The man must be put in a cage.” Then he turns to the priest, “Do you see any prisons here, Charon?”

  “Not here. But I visited that other village with Savignon and there was a man in a cage. A small cage.”

  “Iroquois,” says Brulé.

  “What difference does that make?”

  “A Wendat would never do that to a Wendat.”

  “I want that savage in a cage.”

  Brulé shakes his head. “And I have no word in Wendat for ‘hang’, to hang someone the way you mean.”

  “How can you live in this lawless nightmare?” He points a finger at Brulé, “but I will make them pay for this.”

  Brulé realizes how hopeless it is to imagine the priest will even try to understand the Wendat concept of justice. For even in the most serious circumstance, the elders, Atironta, the man accused, LeCharon, and Marquette if he was able, would sit and talk. They would talk it through until a solution was discovered to restore balance to which everyone, including LeCharon, and Marquette, could agree. Brulé had no idea precisely what that solution would be — perhaps, for the Wendat warrior, exile to another village, a terrible disgrace. But if, in the end, they all agreed, balance could be restored, and justice achieved.

  Brulé could see that LeCharon would not budge. He was locked into his own idea of justice — jail or punishment by hanging — and would never find peace of mind with anything less.

  “Your friend was our guest,” says Atironta. “We have failed badly. For that I am sorry. But I tell you, we think you are sorcerers. We fear you. Some of our people are sick. We wonder, is it you who bring this sickness we cannot heal?”

  LeCharon blurts out, “But we are not —” The chief holds up a hand for silence so firmly and with such a regal grip on the energy between them that the priest falls silent. Atironta continues in Wendat, “You wish for,” he looks to Brulé for the word, “justice? You think we will have balance if we put this Wendat in a cage so he feels the misery you feel. I see your idea, the more misery he feels, the more justice you feel. This restores nothing. As chief, I must find a way to restore balance. I do not yet know how. Maybe this Wendat could take your oaths and become Christian. You want that. He would be your first. But I am not sure. We must give it more thought and act wisely.”

  As Brulé translates for LeCharon, the priest cannot contain himself. He blurts out, “This is wrong. That man must be punished. There must be justice.” He’s seething, as much out of his own fear and uncertainty as for the crime against Marquette. He turns now on Brulé. “You were supposed to help us,” he hisses. “You said you would show us how to work with them. This is your fault, you know that. You are the cause of this.”

  “Charon, you do not listen. You never listen. When you arrived I did everything to help. They welcomed you when you came. They offered you their longhouses t
o live in, and their women to help you learn Wendat. But you rejected their offers. You wanted to live apart. You insulted them. And I told you how they reacted. But you did not listen. You saw only one way, your way. They had to change to suit you. But I tell you they think you and your kind are no smarter than dogs because of your beards. I told you that but did you shave? No! And your robes. They see only evil sorcerers. And the cross. And that damn bell!” He raises his hands in exasperation and then nods to Savignon.

  Savignon grips LeCharon gently by the arm, and lifts him to his feet. The priest realizes he is being dismissed, the meeting is over, the meeting where he had planned to get justice for Father Marquette and have that black-hearted savage hang for his actions. And now he is being led out with nothing. Nothing. “You will burn in hell. Do you hear me? Forever.” He lashes out with these last words at Brulé as Savignon maneuvers him from the longhouse.

  “Champlain will be furious about this. The black robes will want revenge. And it will be me they will blame,” Brulé tells Atironta.

  “The black robes say no guns unless the Wendat take their spirit-man, this Christ.”

  “Québec needs the fur trade. They need us. Champlain would never let Québec fall because of the Jesuits. All because of one of their religious rules. But attacking the priest…” He trails off, distracted by another idea that he has wrestled with since leaving Siskwa’s village. “Tell me Atironta, do I bring doom to the Wendat? If I get guns or if I do not, both condemn me.”

  Atironta sits quietly for a long time. He watches the glowing embers in the fire and smokes his pipe, then turns to Brulé. “White Hawk, you are a brother to our people. For that we love you. You have made it possible to trade with the white man so they do not ruin us the way they have ruined the Algonquin. For that we love you. But I will tell you now something I have never told you before.

  “When you first came to us so many summers ago, I had a dream. In it the Iroquois came upon us breathing fire, scorching our people, our villages, our land until all was smoke and ash. I could not understand this dream. And I told no one. But now I see its meaning, and why I had that dream when you came to us. Because it is the white man behind that fire and ash. It is the white man that is our ruin. Not the Iroquois.”