by Ian Roberts
Brulé sits slouched, absorbing the wise chief’s words, feeling the burden that rests on his shoulders for the vision laid out before him. There is really no way to respond to Atironta. He sees now he is called to the destruction of the Iroquois, and the Wendat. Tears well up in his eyes.
“I do bring flame and ash to the Wendat…whether we win or lose.”
“No brother,” continues Atironta, seeing Brulé’s grief, “that dream speaks the truth. But it does not lay blame.”
“Yet I forge it myself.”
“Fate sometimes gives us a destiny we do not ask for. But we sing the songs of the warriors for their courage in following the destiny handed them. Your acts would be songs for the sacred fire of our people. Those songs create the bond that protects our people and feed young warriors the purpose that keeps them sharp. This is your destiny, White Hawk. If not you, who?”
Brulé has known since leaving Siskwa’s village that he must get guns. Still, the idea torments him. But he knows Atironta has spoken the truth. It is too late to worry about blame, and honour, and vows from the past, and right and wrong. Fate has laid this mantle on him.
Atironta immediately addresses a practical issue. “I have seen what we trade for axes and blankets. These muskets will need many more furs than we have.”
Brulé has the all important answer to that problem, “I have gold, Atironta. The white man loves gold. It is better than furs.”
“You have enough to buy these guns?”
“I trade with the French for you. The French pay me in gold. Year after year. That is their way. I have enough gold to protect the Wendat.”
Atironta nods, knowing this is something between white men he doesn’t really understand. Brulé had shown him the gold coins before, but he could think of no practical use for it. He sits quietly for some time. Then he says, “You should take Tonda.”
“There is no one else I would rather have with me if we meet Iroquois. But if Tonda knows they are coming here, he will want to stay to protect the villages.”
“True, but your journey cannot fail. We cannot waste the extra weeks traveling by the north route. So you could meet Iroquois as they travel here. Tonda should join you.”
Atironta rises and walks with Brulé to the doorway of the longhouse. Both Atsan and Savignon stand to greet them as they approach.
“So we go,” says Brulé. “Tomorrow. Just the three of us and Tonda.”
“Tonda!” exclaims Atsan, clearly happy to have him along.
“He will not be happy that I am joining you,” says Savignon.
“My friend, he will learn how courageous you are. And true. I would never leave without you. With just the four of us we will travel light and fast and hope the Iroquois will be over-confident and reckless with their new guns, and we will slip around them.”
In his longhouse later that afternoon, Brulé removes the woven baskets under his sleeping ledge and digs into the hard-packed earth with his tomahawk. With a few strokes he hits metal. Clearing away more dirt, he retrieves a small metal box. Inside, are two heavy leather bags. He unties one and pours a stream of gold coins into his palm.
Just then a bell rings. Brulé swings around, cursing. Quickly replacing the box under the bed, he bolts for the door.
LeCharon hangs his head, eyes closed, as he yanks the rope on the bell beside the chapel door. The loud, piercing peel reverberates in the clearing. He is so self-absorbed, he fails to notice the Wendat men approaching across the field from the village until they are but a few feet away. He looks up just as one of the men shoves LeCharon so hard he stumbles forward, hitting the chapel wall. The bell clangs erratically. A second Wendat pushes him again and he falls to the ground.
Cowering, he raises his hands as if pleading, shocked and confused by the sudden appearance of the Wendat as they stand threateningly above him. Tonda grabs LeCharon’s robe and hauls him to his feet. He raises his fist to strike the priest, but just as he is about to swing, Brulé catches his arm. Tonda, thwarted, turns his rage now towards Brulé. But Brulé pulls in so close to the war chief he can’t strike.
“Let me deal with that dogface,” whispers Brulé. “You will bring ruin and disgrace to the Wendat if you do this.”
Slowly the fire seeps out of Tonda’s eyes, the tension in his body releasing. He turns a ferocious glare at LeCharon, lets go of his robe, pulls his arm free of Brulé’s grip and turns to walk away. The bell rings its last fitful notes as the other Wendat follow behind Tonda back to the village.
LeCharon is about to speak when Brulé slaps him hard across the face. “You are such a god-damn fool,” he says. “I have told you how they react to that bell. You have seen it before. What are you trying to do?”
“I rang it for Father Marquette. When I came back he was dead.”
Brulé lets out a long sigh and slumps down onto a nearby log. He drops his head to his hands.
“He…” LeCharon’s lower lip quivers and tears fill his eyes.
Brulé looks up at him, “I’m sorry.”
The priest muffles a cry, “Father Marquette lived for our Lord, and these savages’ salvation. We could have saved them. But you turned them against us. You…”, but here his rage runs out, turns to grief and he is reduced to sobs.
Brulé feels a deep sadness seep into his being. He’s exhausted by everything about these priests and their zealous need to change the Wendat. He watches LeCharon, now without Marquette’s rigid stability to bolster him, casting about alone, afraid and confused.
He suddenly stands, “I leave for Québec tomorrow morning. You will have to come with me. I cannot leave you here. They will kill you before I get back. Bury Marquette. Take what you need, then I will burn this place. The Wendat hate it. You will not come back.”
Early the next morning with sunlight just touching the hilltops across the river, Brulé stands with Kinta outside the village. They watch as two-dozen sick, either walking on their own or carried, are slowly being led to huts deep in the woods. They are being relocated as the shaman Okatwan had advised. Kinta lays her head on Brulé’s chest and he puts his arms around her. “We could never have children, Etienne. But I can be mother to my people and care for them when they are sick.”
He holds her. “I am proud to call you my wife, Kinta.”
Kinta pushes away from him to look into his face. “You must come back. If you were gone….” She can’t finish.
They embrace once more before Kinta leaves his side to join the sick as they head for the forest. Brulé watches her slender figure, ever straight and determined, move into the distance. She turns to wave one last time before disappearing into the trees.
Brulé then makes his way down to the shore of the river where Atsan, Savignon, Tonda, LeCharon and two canoes await him. The crucifix that had hung above the door of the chapel floats out on the lake.
“I am bringing that crucifix,” wails LeCharon to Brulé. “Tonda hurled it into the lake.”
Tonda looks from the priest to Brulé, “Evil spirits. Both of them.”
“If you bring it, Charon, you carry it.”
*Georgian Bay
Part 2
On the far side of the lake, the setting sun casts the tops of the trees in a soft gold while just below, everything else now lies in shadow. A slight breeze murmurs through the trees, filling the evening air with the dense fragrance of pine and cedar. It ripples the water; arabesques of light dance over its dark surface. Atsan ladles stew from a kettle into a wooden bowl and hands it to his father. Savignon opens a tin box and takes out a china bowl and blackened silver spoon. He hands the bowl to Atsan.
“Your time with the Jesuits refined you, Savignon,” Father LeCharon observes.
“What, this?” says Savignon, taking the bowl back from Atsan. “A dainty bowl for a savage, is that what you mean?”
“Well, no, I meant the experience civilized you.”
“The whole experience was a curse.”
“A knowledge and love of t
he Lord. A curse?”
“My love was for a duchess, Father. Not the Lord.”
“So you too were blinded by the glitter of court.” LeCharon pauses, reflecting a moment, then adds, “Like so many.”
Atsan hands the priest a bowl of stew. He takes a spoonful, “Ah, meat.”
“Porcupine. Enjoy it. This will be the last time we risk lighting a fire.” LeCharon digs in, famished. He sucks meat from a bone and throws it in the fire. Tonda yells at him. Savignon pulls the bone out of the fire with a stick, explaining, “We keep the bones, bury them together. Then Porcupine knows we honor him and he offers himself to us again.”
LeCharon snorts. “Superstitious nonsense! After all your instruction, did you come away with nothing?”
“Not really. At court I learned to eat with a knife and fork, and I learned to like French clothes. Neither much use here.”
“No, I mean your religious training with the Jesuit. Did you learn nothing?”
“They scared me with their stories of hell and damnation. It still haunts me.”
“As it does me. That at least is the kernel of truth.”
“No, Father, that is the saddest thing of all.”
“But why? It shows you the need for salvation, for God. Where do you find God otherwise? To whom do you pray, and worship?”
Savignon makes a broad gesture above him.
“Yes, exactly, you need God.”
“No, I mean the sky.”
“What do you mean, that the sky is your god?”
Savignon realizes that would be inaccurate, at least in terms the priest might understand. “No, not exactly. Aataentsic lives there.”
“So he is your god.”
“She.”
“She!” Savignon enjoys watching the priest’s incredulity. “And she is the one who you worship, and she protects you.”
“No, generally she wants to harm us.”
“What? But who protects you? You must believe someone protects you.”
“Her son, Iouskeha. He created the rivers and lakes, and makes sure the crops grow.”
“Ah, so he is like your creator… who gives you life.”
“That would be oki.”
“Oki? Who is that?”
“That isn’t a who. Oki is the spirit that lives in everything. A great warrior has great oki. The rivers have oki. The rocks. The animals. Everything has oki. The porcupine has oki and so we honor him.” Savignon knows he is confusing the priest and enjoys it. What he says is true, but he knows he doesn’t clarify much.
LeCharon feels Savignon must be muddled about all this and asks, “Who instructs you? Who are your priests?”
Atsan, who’s been listening all the while, now responds, “Instructs us? About what?”
“About God. How do you become worthy to know Him?”
“Worthy?”
“Yes, we are not worthy. That is why He sent us His Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, because through Him we can know God.”
“He is your dead man on the torture stake.”
“But He is not dead. He is resurrected. He…”
He trails off, realizing he is loosing the thread of what he had wanted to say. “We need to understand our place in the world. God gives us command, mastery, over nature, including the animals. He gives us the porcupine for food. You don’t need to honor a dead porcupine.”
“You mean,” asks Atsan, “your god makes you ruler, like a king, of nature?”
“Yes, in a way.” replies the priest.
Atsan laughs at the idea and Tonda who hasn’t understood anything, asks Atsan why he is laughing. When Atsan tries to explain, Tonda doesn’t understand the idea of a king, an idea of leadership quite different to a chief, and when Atsan describes it, he responds, “If we leave him out here alone we would see how long he would last as king of nature.”
In all the time the priests had been living with the Wendat they had never asked Savignon about his religion like this. Because he was the only one, other than Brulé and Atsan, who spoke French, they had sought him out to talk to. But all their efforts, or at least Marquette’s, who dictated the conversations, had been directed towards converting him. This was, he realized, the longest conversation about his beliefs he’d had with either of them in a year.
Seeing both Atsan and Tonda laugh at him, the priest again picks up another bone from his stew, sucks it clean and then deliberately throws it in the fire. Tonda gives him a vicious blow sending him sprawling backward. Atsan gets up, once again picks the bone from the fire and sits down.
LeCharon looks up at Savignon, then Brulé, looking for some kind of sympathy, help or justice. Blood trickles from his mouth. Brulé feels sorry for LeCharon, for his confusion and the pain so evident in his face. But what made him even sadder were the porcupine bones. Even though the Wendat still practiced collecting and burying the bones of their kill, Brulé had watched as that fine sacred interplay between hunter and hunted had begun to unravel. This was hardly evident yet to the Wendat themselves. But as the fur trade had grown, he had watched as animals were stripped from the forest for goods, for the white man’s goods. And now, on this trip to Québec in particular, he felt keenly aware of his role in the slow erosion of their ancient way of life.
LeCharon, unsure what to do, but desperate to get away from the anger directed at him, scrambles to his feet and heads into the woods. With every step, dead branches snap underfoot.
“The king makes more noise than a moose,” says Tonda, and the others laugh.
The priest keeps walking, moving further and further into the dark forest. He can still see the fire flickering through the trees and hear the murmur of voices. He knows he needs to pray. He feels lost, adrift, spiritually empty, wracked by the death of Father Marquette. His sorrow wells up; he tries to hold back his tears, afraid that such weakness will be discovered by the others. But now for the first time his grief at losing his friend unleashes and he sobs uncontrollably. How can he return to Québec without him, their ministry a catastrophe? What price will he pay for that? With the church? And before God? He tries to collect himself. Through the dense foliage he notices the last trace of evening in the deep lavender of the evening sky. He kneels, then just as he bows his head to pray, he sees a flicker of movement in the dark. Not ten feet away stands a figure. How could this be? A white girl, young, innocent, in a communion dress stands, watching him.
LeCharon gasps. She turns to go. “No, wait,” he pleads. He stands but in his haste he trips on his long robe. When he looks up again she is gone.
“Hello, hello. Are you there?”
He takes several steps yet deeper into the forest in pursuit of her. Then he hears a long, deep sigh. He’s sure of it. He listens, frozen in his steps. He looks up again, the last trace of light now drained from the sky. Black surrounds him. And he feels it — nightfall. Its latches snap tight around him, sealed until morning. Suddenly, he feels nakedly alone and a spasm of fear clutches his heart. He hears laughter from the camp and sees the firelight flickering through the trees. Confused and afraid, he quickly retraces his steps back to camp. Going too quickly in the dark, he catches his robe on the low branches, trips on roots and rocks underfoot. He just wants to get back to the others and away from whatever lurks behind him. He stumbles into the clearing of the camp. The others still gathered around the fire, ignore him. But he notices Brulé sitting alone on an outcrop of rock overlooking the lake. LeCharon needs someone, anyone, even this man he hates. He hurries over towards him and without asking sits down next to Brulé, who glances over at him, then looks more closely. “You look like you have seen a ghost.”
Despite himself, LeCharon stammers, “I … I saw a girl…. a white girl. Just now…in the woods.”
“You saw Tawiscaron. He is clever that one. He shows you what you fear most.”
“I heard someone…breathing.” He feels self-conscious, foolish uttering these words, but can’t help himself. His fear and confusion have finally broken through his
veneer of piety; he feels naked and vulnerable. For the first time Brulé sees the man, not the priest, now desperate for some kind of answer, some explanation as to what has clearly shaken him to his core.
“You must listen, Charon, to what is around you. Behind the songs of the birds and the wind, behind the sound of your own thoughts, you can hear her — a living, breathing spirit.”
Terrified with the direction the conversation is going, feeling his vulnerability, LeCharon marshals and thrusts forward with his Christian certainty, “Spirit lies only in our Lord, Brulé.”
“You have lived close to her for a year. Perhaps more has seeped in than you realize.”
A rising panic grips LeCharon at the thought of his Christian anchor loosening its hold still further. Mentally he lunges desperately for something unassailable, a familiar thread he can grasp on to. “This spirit of which you speak is the devil and will lead you right to hell.” He feels better, reassured for having found something forceful to speak out in his confusion.
“No, Charon. Spirit breaths here. And she speaks…if you listen.”
LeCharon shivers, “What a savage, God-forsaken land.”
Okatwan, the shaman, stares at the coals of his fire. Thunder rolls overhead. He steps outside and looks up at the heavy, dark clouds. A single drop, blood red, splashes at his feet, staining the rock. A second red drop falls, and then a third. He holds out his hand and another drop falls and rolls, leaving a red streak across his palm. Then another and another until his entire hand is stained red. A crack of thunder and he looks up at the sky again. Raindrops now fall on his upturned face and wash the red stain from his hand. Another crack of thunder and the rain comes down more heavily. Then it pours.
The wall of petroglyphs shines black in the downpour. They look dark and sinister now.
