Kanata (17 page)

Riel took a spoonful of the mush in the bowl and tasted mould.

I
n the morning there was a meeting with Dr. François-Elzéar Roy. Riel sat on the wooden chair in Roy's office, a large space that seemed cramped by all the specimens he had
collected. Brains in jars, pickled and shrunken. A skeleton of a man. Charts with measurements and diagrams.

Roy stared outside, beyond the stone walls. “I cannot satisfy myself, Mr. Riel, as to whether you are mad or acting the part of a man who is mad.”

“We are all acting parts, Dr. Roy.”

“Were you acting a part when you murdered Thomas Scott?”

“As you well know, I didn't murder Scott. He was tried for treason under the government I set up in a land that had none. A legitimate government. I was not on the jury, nor was I judge. I wasn't on the firing squad. I didn't give the order or pull the trigger.”

“Still, Scott is dead.”

“Deservedly so, doctor. He had no delusions of grandeur. He believed he was sane, a delusion of another sort. Delusions of normalcy. He was a rabid dog and died like one. Scott was politics, Doctor, not medicine.”

Roy pondered this. “Your father's death had a great effect on you, didn't it.”

“That is hardly an indication of insanity, Doctor. Mourning your father.”

“No, but I wonder how it contributed to your condition.”

“A father's death changes the life of the son.” Riel shrugged. It was common sense.

The sun was coming in the window of Roy's office, a pleasant place. “If you are looking for madness within me, Doctor, you won't find it today. Perhaps you should travel to Upper Canada and look within the Orangemen. You'll have better luck there.”

“The Orangemen don't have visions, they don't roar about God.”

“They have a vision of taking the Metis' land.” Riel stared at a brain shrivelled in its alcohol, the grey wormlike channels. “I have had visions, it is true. Hallucinations, even. I laugh at them myself. They come not from madness but from persecution. The Orangemen are Protestant fanatics. The Metis are a poor tragic people, the Indians even more so. My blood, my people, are starving. When I think of them, my own blood boils, my head is on fire. If I am mad, then I have reason.”

“What is the cure for this, do you suppose, Mr. Riel?”

“There is no cure. But if I think of other things, the symptoms abate.”

“Yes.”

“You know that I was elected to office. A man who cannot go to Ottawa, who has a price on his head, who is considered mad and sits in a lunatic asylum eating mouldy bread. He is the choice of the people. That tells you something of our times, Doctor. If I am mad, then perhaps the country is mad as well.”

T
here were other episodes at Beauport. Riel smashed the window of the chapel door, fought with three guards, insulted the sour Sister Superior. But his lucidity finally overshadowed his occasional mania, and he was released on January 21, 1878. As he stood waiting to be escorted through the gate, he noted how like a prison it looked, with its massive stone walls. Inside was a city, governed by the reason of science and administered by the healing intolerance of the cloth, the grey nuns checking the state of every damaged soul. They cherished the sinners, who needed punishing. Riel pondered his options, which were few. There
was a still a price on his head; he couldn't stay in Canada. He decided on the American West and made his slow way to Montana.

In Montana, he became an American citizen, a member of the Republican party, and married Marguerite Monet, a Metis girl. He taught school and lobbied for Metis rights. The air in Montana was bright in the spring, and the old religion stirred. He could feel it moving through him, lurching through his veins, singing to him. He spoke in parables to the Metis, and announced that he was a prophet. He intended to reform the church, and made Saturday the Lord's Day.

Riel's short-lived Metis rebellion in Manitoba had failed, but he was planning his return to Canada to do God's will, to mount an epic battle, to stage Armageddon on the plains and ride through the Red River Valley with John A. Macdonald's head on a stick.

He would need the Indians to join him. The Metis would follow Riel, but he needed the Plains Cree and the mighty Blackfoot nation to join his battle. They had been fighting one another for millennia, but they were at peace now, and through fate (and divine intervention) both were in Montana. The Cree chief, Big Bear, and the Blackfoot chief, Crowfoot, had led their people south to find the last of the buffalo. Was this not God at work? The chiefs of the Metis, Cree, and Blackfoot, all together. It was providence. If Big Bear (who loved war, it was said, loved it like a son) and Crowfoot aligned with him, they would be powerful. The Queen's servants, those obedient men in red coats, those scarlet targets, how many were there? Twelve thousand. The combined Indians and Metis nation could field an army of fifty thousand warriors who had watched their children
starve and whose anger would leave the prairie wet with blood.

Riel rode to a meeting with Big Bear. The Cree camp had maybe fifteen hundred people, spread along the valley in tents in the lee of the mountains. He was surprised to find a small, bowlegged man, his face pinched into a dark circle, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. Big Bear was sitting near the fire, reading a newspaper, his chiefs and advisers on either side of him. Riel sat down and he and Big Bear smoked.

“The men from the Great Mother are on the prairie right now, measuring it, drawing lines across it, and giving it to strangers,” Riel said. “You know this.”

Big Bear sat without expression.

“The buffalo are gone. The Cree are starving. The Blackfoot are starving. The Metis farmers have had their land taken from them. They are selling us whisky to kill us off.”

Big Bear waited for the proposal he knew would come.

“I am asking you to join me. The Metis will follow me. They did before and they will once more. If the Cree join us, we will have an army that can defeat the whites.”

“My people are dying,” Big Bear said. “Crowfoot's people are dying. Our army would be one of dying warriors.”

“What better army? Dying warriors have no fear of death. Who can defeat death? Only one man has done it.”

But Riel could see that Big Bear wasn't going to join with him. He wasn't young, had seen dozens of battles and had no taste for another. He no longer loved war. Riel subtly turned his speech toward the younger chiefs around Big Bear, where he could see there was some interest. They understood the romance of war, its possibilities, not its sorrows.

“The Great Mother has enough children to care for,” he told them. “She will not weep if there are a few less to feed in the North West. The meat they sent you isn't enough. This is not an error, but a military plan. They appear to be helping, but they are killing you. They starve you because they fear you. But they don't fear the Cree—they fear the Other. The Metis, the Gros Ventres, the Blackfoot, the Peigan. They fear alliance and they fear a battle that will chase away those who come to raise cattle and grow wheat. We must deliver that fear. When the children of Israel asked the Lord who would fight the Canaanites, the Lord said, Judah shall go up, and behold, I have given the land into his hand. And Judah said to Simeon his brother, Come up with me that we may fight the Canaanites and they defeated ten thousand of them at Bezek. And they took Jerusalem and set the city on fire.”

Riel paused to assess his audience. Big Bear would counsel peace, Riel could see it in his dark, unchanging face. But the young chiefs would go to war. He would meet with them again.

He rode back to camp, plotting his return to Canaan.

5

J
OHN
A. M
ACDONALD,
1885

Riel was a threat, Macdonald thought, but perhaps a useful one. He had wandered the desert for seven years and was returning as a prophet. If Riel managed to enlist the Indians to his cause, the North West could become a battlefield, blood spilled over a land Macdonald hadn't wanted in the first place. In truth, the Canadian government's claim to the North West was tenuous. Still. Macdonald had wandered his own desert after his government was forced to resign in disgrace. He had been caught taking money for his campaign to build the railway, a scandal, but even a fool had to know the money must come from somewhere. And that the railway was a necessity. It was the iron band that binds the barrel staves. Without it, the staves would fall uselessly in separate directions, without
purpose or strength. Yet there was still opposition to the railway. (More than a million words had been spent on the issue in Parliament, more than the Old and New Testaments combined, as one blockhead calculated.)

His political undoing had been that one telegram to Hugh Allan, the shipping magnate who supported Macdonald's campaign in order to get a piece of the railroad. Macdonald had received $35,000 from him and then wired Allan that he needed another $10,000. The Liberals had gotten hold of the telegram by bribing a clerk (for $5,000, a princely sum) and they used it with the sense of triumph that the corrupt save for the corrupt. Macdonald's government was ousted, replaced by the Liberal Alexander Mackenzie, a man of such excruciating dullness that Macdonald took his election as a personal affront. As a former stonemason Mackenzie possessed the virtues of honesty, hard work, and a bottomless lack of imagination. One brick followed another. He would turn the entire country to stone with his plodding speeches, a modern Medusa. But the country woke up when Mackenzie began to talk annexation. The Americans, those wonderfully dangerous friends, could still stir the country's fears. And so Macdonald was prime minister once more, he and Riel both back from the desert.

Riel was dangerous, possibly delusional, and as such, useful. A wild man on the plains, rallying the Indians, plotting war. How to keep the settlers safe? How to get troops out there? They couldn't march; it would take too long, and the settlers would already lie bleeding on the prairie, tortured inventively. Parliament might not pay for a railway, but it would pay to put down an Indian and half-breed rebellion. Carefully managed, Riel would help build Macdonald's railway. That was his prophecy.

Through his study window, Macdonald saw the nurse approaching, pushing the wheelchair that contained his daughter, Mary. Agnes had piled Mary's hair on top of her head, making her hydrocephalic head appear even larger. Mary's withered body was confined by a black satin dress that fit snugly over her upper body, making it look fragile and almost birdlike, the skirts billowing down over her bottom half and covering her feet. The wheelchair seemed to be part of her body, some growth to compensate for her ailment. Macdonald believed she would recover from her hydrocephaly, that she would rise up and assume the graceful carriage of her mother. The nurse wheeled her through the house and up to Macdonald, and he observed her hopeful smile with his usual heartbreak.

Mary was one of the disappointments that Agnes had to bear. Another was the house, which had faulty drainage and smelled faintly of shit. How appropriate for a politician, Macdonald thought as he poured another glass of port. But the miserable state of the house plagued Agnes, who had imagined something much grander. He could ill afford better quarters, though. He had finally mustered the courage to inquire at the bank the full extent of his debt; a surprising $79,000. Repayment seemed impossible. He was drinking port with renewed appetite, beginning most mornings. Mary was wheeled into his study and he stared into her doomed child's face, though she was no longer a child.

“My love,” he said. “You are the only flower in my garden today.”

6

L
OUIS
R
IEL,
1885

I have seen the giant, Louis Riel thought. He is Goliath.

But Riel was David. He was the future king. The visions came like flashes of lightning, each one briefly illuminating an Old Testament landscape littered with the corpses of his enemies. But in 1885, Armageddon came to this: 135 Metis facing 800 government troops at Batoche. Big Bear hadn't joined him. Nor had Crowfoot. His only ally was God. The settlers had finally fallen away. The newspapers, which had sided with him initially, were now crying for his blood, their editorialists quietly bribed by the government. And the clergy had abandoned him, having no taste for the mixture of politics and religion, a mixture embraced at their convenience. They already had a Messiah. In response Riel renamed the days of
the week and denounced Rome. Everyone would be a priest in the New Order, and Batoche would be the City of God.