Bride of New France (40 page)

Someone is smacking Laure’s face and a new voice is crying in the room. Laure’s stomach has turned to liquid, her body has
been returned to her, a river without its banks. She is unable to move even a finger and cries without making a sound, or releasing another drop of water.

For the first time in months, Laure feels cold and thinks they must have moved her outside, the woman who hits her must have dropped her in the snow. Laure cannot sleep or stay awake. She prays to go back to the heavenly stream. Only there is a new animal life in the cabin. The midwife is putting the baby, a girl, to her breast. The creature that was so enormous and powerful inside her belly now seems so small.

Once the baby begins to suckle on Laure, Madame Rouillard busies herself preparing some food, from supplies she must have carried with her. “Some soup for the new mother,” she says. “Giving birth is hard work.”

Laure is hungry and eats first one bowl and then another of the soup filled with chunks of meat and root vegetables. Then Madame Rouillard says that she must leave. She has to rest after the long night, to travel the trails, to prepare for another birth. She promises to return in two days and advises Laure to stay in bed except to tend to the fire and to get more soup. “Keep the baby on your breast and against your skin so she stays warm, and get as much rest as you can to keep from bleeding too much.

“A fortunate birth,” she says to Laure.

Laure spends the first day of her daughter’s life in the cabin lying in bed, nursing the new creature. The baby is either sucking greedily or asleep. Laure strokes the fine tuft of black hair on the tiny head and marvels at the smooth pout of the baby’s lips and the dark stains of colour on her cheeks. How could such a clandestine, impossible union have created this remarkable being so hungry for the next hours of her doomed life?

Laure is neither asleep nor completely awake in the hours following her daughter’s birth. Instead she lets herself be carried on the soft waves of these new and tentative breaths. She feels she must remain awake, vigilant, so she can urge her baby forward, raising her with a mother’s will, ever deeper out of the water, away from slumber and into the wakefulness of the world.

Laure tries to forget that they will soon be parted. In a few more days, she will be left alone, wounded and shapeless. What is the use of holding the baby to her breast and singing? Laure will soon belong to a time in her baby’s life when being drowned was the same as being alive, a time before she knew the earth, this forest, the snow, her father and his people.

Later that day, Madame Tardif comes knocking on Laure’s door. Laure considers not getting out of bed when she hears the loud, familiar voice outside. But she knows this will only elicit suspicion and might lead to a worse invasion later. Rising out of bed, Laure takes her baby and wraps her tightly in the blanket, covering the dark hair and face and nestling her against her breast. Then she stumbles, bent over and in pain, to open the door to the unwelcome guest.

Madame Tardif barely seems to notice the infant and Laure’s weakened state as she pushes into the cabin. “Good, now that the baby has arrived, I need to talk to you.”

Laure walks back to the bed. She needs to sit down. Madame Rouillard removed the wood cover of the
lit-cabane
to make it easier for Laure after the birth. She rests on the edge of the bed, holding her baby’s head tightly against her chest.

“I wanted to tell you sooner but it was the midwife who asked me to wait. I don’t think it should have been a secret at all.” Madame Tardif crosses her arms over her chest.

What news can she possibly have for Laure? Whatever it is, it can’t be good. Laure detects a note of smugness in the
Canadienne
. She is too tired to tell Madame Tardif that she doesn’t want to know, that she has no desire to hear any bad news. That if Madame Rouillard, her trusted midwife, thought it could wait, then surely it can.

But the words are out of Madame Tardif’s mouth before Laure can utter her protest.

“Your husband is dead.”

For a brief moment, Laure is unsure who Madame Tardif is talking about. In a flash, she imagines that Deskaheh and Mathurin were engaged in a battle and that one of them has died. But which one? Mathurin has known all along about her relations with Deskaheh and now it has come to this. Perhaps they have both been killed and now Laure’s secret is out. This baby, whom she already desires more than either of the men, will be wrenched from her chest.

“Mathurin fell through the ice and drowned on his way hurrying back to you and the child,” Madame Tardif says. There is a note of accusation in her voice.

Laure feels relief even though her heart has already risen to her throat and is racing fast. Her secret is still safe. Mathurin, her pink pig fool of a husband, simply lost his footing and slid beneath the water, a greedy fur trader consumed by the cruel indifference of the landscape. But what face must Laure show to this woman, her shrewd neighbour? What new lie needs to be told? Surely Laure should appear sad, shocked, grieving. Mathurin is dead. But Laure is not really surprised. She has known all along that he would be swallowed whole by the force of her disdain.

“Our men are so brave,” Madame Tardif says. “We are fortunate that they take such good care of us. We are safe here
at the settlement while they risk their lives in the woods among Savage nations. Your husband had gone to winter with the Cheveux-Relevés along the Outaouais with some other men from here. They travelled further west than usual and had a good year acquiring plenty of pelts. But your husband left early, to get back to you of course. He travelled with some Savages, probably paid them in goods to take him across the dangerous terrain. But the ice was already beginning to thaw. You are now a widow.” Madame Tardif utters the last word like it is bitter on her tongue.

All of Laure’s past losses come flooding back to her. Gone are the protective arms of her father, the kindness and instruction of Madame d’Aulnay and Madame du Clos, Madeleine’s friendship and prayers. How much more abandonment will she know? Only madwomen know the freedom that loneliness brings, what it means to let your life flow into and become one with the sea. Madame Tardif, with her husband returned from the fur country and her solid cabin filled with children, thinks she will escape her own drowning.

Madame Tardif casts her eye around the room. The expression on her face clearly shows that she thinks Laure is responsible for the squalor. If only she had been an industrious, practical wife, like Madame Tardif, Laure might also have some good pieces of wooden furniture by now, some iron pots and utensils in the kitchen, food supplies on the shelf, a warmer hearth. Of course Laure’s husband would be alive as well.

“Well, you really don’t have very much here. But whatever belongings you have, we will bring them to our place when you come with the baby.” Madame Tardif is peering into each of the dark corners of the room, searching for anything of value. She runs her hand over the gun on the shelf and kneels before a pile of mangy pelts.

But when she goes to raise the lid on the chest from the Salpêtrière, Laure cries out with such force that Madame Tardif withdraws her hand as if burned. For inside the wooden box is all that Laure has preserved of herself. These things she will offer her daughter. The chest contains the physical reminders of Laure’s life that will take the place of her mothering arms: Madeleine’s prayer book, Mireille’s yellow dress, and the letters Laure wrote to the ghost of her friend. Of course there may not be anyone among the Algonquins to teach the child to read, and the dress might be cut and refashioned into Savage garments, the letters used to start a fire, but these things are all that Laure can think to give.

“That belongs to me, from before I met Mathurin.”

Madame Tardif raises an eyebrow. “We will bring this with the other things to my place tomorrow.”

When Laure finds her voice it is lower, a growl. For has she not already become a beast, a demon? What is there in this life to make her human? She curses the home of the cruel, insipid woman standing before her. “I would rather be put in prison than to live with you.”

Madame Tardif crosses her arms over her chest. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she says, but she takes a step back, away from Laure and the baby. “You will feel differently tomorrow.”

But Laure knows that once she has given away her baby, she will have no use for this woman.

As promised, Madame Rouillard returns to see Laure two days later. It is night. Laure just about throws herself into the midwife’s arms when she enters the cabin.

“What is the matter?” she asks. “Is the baby thriving?”

“Yes, we are both fine, but Madame Tardif is trying to get us to move to her place.”

Madame Rouillard nods. “Yes, I figured that would happen. I am sorry that I couldn’t stay with you to keep her away, but it seems that every pregnant woman west of the sea has decided to have her baby this week. That is the way it is at certain times.”

Madame Rouillard sometimes speaks of the particular beliefs and skills of her trade when she is with Laure. She was trained at the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris, the very place where Mireille died, under the tutelage of the famous midwife Louise Bourgeoys. There they studied drawings of the internal anatomy of a pregnant woman’s body and learned the ways to quicken labour, to slow it, to deliver breech babies, to remove babies from their mother’s wombs without severing limbs or causing hemorrhaging.

But today Madame Rouillard tells Laure how she also learned from priests how to administer the sacrament of baptism. That is what she has come to do today. Midwives are the only women Laure knows who are capable of officiating at a Catholic sacrament. Of course a midwife is only to baptize a child if it is expected to die. Laure’s baby is not about to die. She is large, hungry, and has bright, alert eyes. When she entered the world, her cry travelled beyond the walls of the tiny cabin. Still, Madame Rouillard wants to perform the ceremony.

“A soul is an important thing to save. I have even on occasion baptized babies whose bodies were dead, impossible to save.”

Although only living babies are meant to be baptized, it is known that parents and priests implore the saints and especially the Virgin Mary to return life to a dead child for a brief moment
so that the sacrament can be administered. For many believe that an unbaptized child is a wandering ghost caught between the golden gates of heaven and the eternal fires of hell. Laure is relieved that Madame Rouillard wishes to administer the sacrament on her child.

First the midwife covers the table in a white cloth that looks like it belongs on a church altar. Then she removes from her bag a candle, which she lights, a wooden cross, and two vials, one which contains holy water, which she says comes from Venice, and the other oil. Madame Rouillard then fills a pewter bowl with some of the water she obtained from Madame Tardif on the night of the birth. She sprinkles a few drops of the holy water into the bowl as well.

Laure wraps the baby in white linen. She is relieved to be able to do this one thing for the child whose future is so uncertain. She will be raised in the forest by Savages. Who will teach her to be a Christian, to pray to Jesus and Mary and the angels and saints? Perhaps this one ritual, the blessing of the women who brought her into the world safe and healthy and strong, will be enough to make up for a lifetime of absence. Perhaps because of this one brief ceremony, the Holy Spirit, who is said to enter the souls of babies on their baptism day, will protect her daughter for the rest of her days. The unfortunate creature has no godparents to protect her on earth.

“What name have you chosen for her?” Madame Rouillard, who is so many things, has now taken on the voice of a priest.

“I would like to call her Luce.” The name came to Laure as she lay last night between sleep and wakefulness in the darkness of the cabin. The name is Latin for light. The darkness that had threatened to envelop Laure so many times had been somewhat brightened when she held the tiny child against her chest these
past nights. The soft form of her baby gave off a glow as strong and constant as the presence of the moon or the stars in the night sky. Besides, Madeleine had loved Sainte Luce. She had been a girl tortured to death in Syracuse during Roman times for refusing to give up her vow of perpetual virginity in the face of an eager suitor. It is fitting that on the feast day of Sainte Luce in December, the winter days begin to grow light again.