River City (45 page)

“You wanted me to.”

“We have a custom.”

“What custom?” He had often negotiated with Kondiaronk, and had learned long ago that he was unlikely to win any advantage over him. He considered himself fortunate if he managed to keep his uniform on.

“You shot my prisoner. You have to give me one back in exchange.”

“But you wanted me to deal with him, Kondiaronk. Not only that, you brought me the other prisoners in the first place! They were your prisoners!”

The Rat shrugged. “I’m a poor Indian. I could not afford to feed them. But now you must give me one back.”

“Why must I?”

“It’s the custom. It’s the price you pay for shooting prisoners.”

The commandant remained frustrated. He sensed that Kondiaronk was up to something, but he could not comprehend what. “How will you feed him now if you couldn’t feed him before?”

“I won’t. I’ll just send him home.”

“What’s the good of that?”

“It’s the custom.” The chief shrugged.

“Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph. What are you up to, Kondiaronk? They don’t call you The Rat for nothing!”

“They call me The Rat because I draw a rat to sign my name. But they don’t call you a wise commandant for nothing, either.”

The officer thought a moment, trying to imagine how this might hurt him in any unforeseen way. Soon defeated by the train of thought, he nodded. “Go ahead. Take whatever prisoner you want. Just don’t—”

Kondiaronk waited politely, then asked his question. “Don’t what?”

“Don’t burn him alive. Or slice his scalp off. Or eat him, or anything vile.”

Enjoying a good laugh, The Rat tapped the Frenchman on the shoulder. “I will send him home. That’s all. You will see.”

“Yes, yes, I know. It’s the custom.”

“It’s the custom.”

Kondiaronk did send him home. He spoke to the man first, who was trembling, wishing that he had been left in the custody of the French and not in the hands of the only Huron the Iroquois feared.

“What did you see here today?” The Rat asked him.

“You returned.”

“What else?”

“The French. They shot an Iroquois.”

“One of your brothers. Go home. Tell your people this. Tell them what your eyes have seen. That the French shoot Iroquois while they talk of peace.”

He made it sound as though he was trying to frighten the prisoner, as if his message would send fear through the Iroquois confederacy. The Indian who was freed mocked him for this when he told his brothers the sad tale of the Iroquois warrior shot by the French. His brothers raised their knives and
whooped, and in the firelight each man could see the warring spirit in his brothers’ eyes. The French and the Huron would discover that the Iroquois would not be intimidated. And the first lesson would be inflicted upon those who had talked of peace: the French.

August 5, 1689.

Rain had fallen with hard fury through the night, a racket in the leaves, as noisy as a waterfall when it turned to hail and beat upon the settlers’ wooden roofs. Thunder boomed low over the hills and rumbled across the plateau, and the farming people at Lachine, on the island of Montreal, slept fitfully as lightning lit up the skies. Soldiers in the three forts by Lachine were driven inside, and they would not budge to go out in such a torrent. Their commanding officers were not around to tell them otherwise, having gone into Montreal to visit Governor Denonville, who was down from Quebec. Under the cover of darkness, as the lightning moved on, under the fury of rain, under the bedlam of brisk wind that chased all sound away from the forts, Iroquois landed by the riverside and beached their canoes.

They laboured diligently and in silence.

Fifteen hundred warriors split up and surrounded each settler’s home.

They waited in the rain.

At dawn, upon a signal, they sounded a fierce, calamitous war whoop.

Soldiers remained asleep, or kept watch from their turrets, hearing nothing but the storming wind and rain.

The attack was perfectly executed. The Iroquois burst into homes and bludgeoned the skulls of the settlers in their sleep. In cabins that had been barricaded, the French fought back, only to have the dwellings set ablaze. They ran out from the fires to be slaughtered. Each home had to pitch its own battle. No farmer could come to the aid of another. In a short time, the community was overrun, with all citizens either dead or captive.

The Indians took their time, relishing the victory. Stakes were implanted in the earth, and men and women strapped to them. Small fires were stoked
at their feet. Spits over bonfires were created and children roasted. Pregnant women were brought forth to have the fetuses ripped from their wombs. Their dying eyes watched their unborn children being cooked and consumed. The storm continued unabated, suffocating their screams, their outcry before God.

Once word of the attack reached him, Denonville ordered the Marquis de Vaudreuil, who was in charge of the Montreal garrison, to take no chances in quelling the enemy. The integrity of the garrison was more important than revenge. The marquis failed to apply his men to the task of driving off the Iroquois. Soldiers remained hunkered down in their forts while the invaders continued to maraud the island for two more months, pillaging, murdering and taking prisoners. They harvested the crops for themselves and burned seed and winter stores, and as they departed in October they released ninety fierce yells to proclaim that they were taking ninety prisoners home with them, to put to work, then mutilate at their leisure.

They paddled past the forts. Their chief shouted out before each one, “You deceived us! Now we have deceived you!”

In Ville-Marie, the citizens fell to another winter of despair.

In Michigan, the chief who had been named The Rat preached on Sunday mornings, for through his admiration for the Jesuits, and in particular Dulhut, he had come to embrace Christianity. When he spoke in church, his words were received with gravity and thoughtfulness. Learning of the massacre, he grieved for the lives lost, yet also welcomed the safety this would mean for his own community. If the French wanted peace as he wanted peace, he deliberated during the winter months, they would have to learn how to make that peace. Clearly, they did not know how to do it on their own. He, Kondiaronk, the chief of the Huron at Michilimackinac, who signed his name by drawing a rat—he would be the one to teach them.

For there could not be a peace, he preached, if one tribe was left vulnerable to destruction. The peace that was required must exist in a way that all tribes, and the French, and the English in New York and Boston, might prosper. He, Kondiaronk, The Rat, contemplated these things and talked of what he dared to imagine the long winter through, and in the spring he hoed the soil he believed might assist the seed of his vision to finally take root.

On the feast day of Our Lady of the Snows, August 5, 1695, François Dollier de Casson, a mountain of a man and the superior of the Sulpicians in Montreal, concluded the vespers’ chants in his parish church. With magisterial élan, he departed down the centre aisle. Clergy fell in behind him. Ville-Marie’s administrative officials stepped in behind them, followed by the great spiritual women of the colony, led by Marguerite Bourgeoys and a gathering of nuns from the Congregation of Notre Dame. Representatives of the military came next, marching, then citizens prominent in the fur trade and other mercantile affairs, and finally settlers noted for their devotions. The procession moved outside into the warm night and continued to grow as ordinary folk also traipsed down the centre of Notre Dame Street, bound for the home of the fur baron Jacques Le Ber.

Upon arriving, Dollier de Casson knocked upon the door.

His knock was severe, hard, final, like a judge’s gavel. He stood back from the door and waited with an expression that was formally grave. He was a unique man among the Sulpicians, one the Indians especially admired for his exceptional size and strength. He had entered the priesthood after a distinguished career in the military, and loved to tell the story of spotting an enemy igniting the wick of a cannon at short range. The cannonball had been aimed precisely at his head, yet, bound by a French officer’s code, he was forbidden to duck. As the wick burned down, Dollier took out his handkerchief and let it drop. As the cannon roared, he was bending over to pick it up. He heard the ball whoosh above him. Then he straightened himself up and carried on the fight.

Such stories were accepted due to the native integrity of the man, as well as to the manner in which he had equipped himself, since his arrival in France, in battle against the Iroquois. A story was told of him at prayer one evening, deep in his beloved forests, which he much preferred to the seminary. A young Indian youth tormented him with obscene gestures. The youth grew too bold, coming too close, and Dollier, still on his knees, dropped him with a single
stupendous punch. While the young man moaned and tried to regain his senses, stopping up the blood from his nose, the priest carried on praying.

He was a man who had built the first modest church of Notre Dame, and the Sulpician Seminary, and he had half-dug the Lachine Canal before his superiors in Paris, mindful of the cost, ordered the project halted. For all his physical might and energy, he was a devout man and a careful chronicler of the history of the community, recording stories from out of the mouths of Jeanne Mance and others among the first settlers.

So as he knocked upon the door of Jacques Le Ber, he did so with authority, and with deep appreciation of the occasion.

The merchant emerged. He was sixty-one years old, an ancient age for their community. The people called him Abraham, as a tribute to his years but also in deference to this ceremony, for would he not be leading his daughter to become a victim of sacrifice?

Jeanne Le Ber stepped out from the house behind him. Thirty-three years old, she wore a long, grey woollen gown cinched by a black belt. With her father at her side, she joined the procession, taking her place behind only Dollier de Casson, and the great devout tribe walked back through the streets the way they had come, returning to the chapel.

Where they prayed.

Jacques Le Ber was overcome, his anguish too grave for him to endure any more, and he departed the service before its conclusion. An Abraham, then, who could not bring his sword down upon the neck of his only surviving child. He had become one of the wealthiest fur barons, a man who had broken the rules by not waiting for the return of the
coureurs
in Montreal, but by travelling farther and farther west to intercept them, to garner the best pelts. While he was respected as a pious man, his daughter’s passion extended far beyond mere piety and he could not sustain himself through to the ceremony’s conclusion. The words that broke his endurance were spoken by his last remaining child’s spiritual advisor, who declared, “You are dead. You are enshrouded in your solitude as in a tomb. The dead do not speak, nor are they spoken to.”

Following the prayers and dedication, Dollier led Jeanne Le Ber to her new home. According to her precise plans, a cell, composed of three rooms,
one above the other, had been constructed behind the altar at the Convent of Notre Dame. Jeanne Le Ber had financed the project through her own impressive dowry, and had donated a large sum to the convent as well and would continue to pay an annual tribute. She had used her influence to have the dwelling built to her exact specifications, and had managed to replicate the chapel at Loretto in Italy, which legend held to be the actual home of the Virgin Mary, transported there by a company of angels. Here, she would be locked inside for the remainder of her life, speaking to rare visitors only through a grille, addressing the convent sisters through it from time to time as though hers was a voice from the grave. She’d take her meals upon the floor, sleep upon a straw mat that would harden over time to the composition of rock and which she would not allow to be replaced, and she’d emerge only after dusk, once the chapel door had been locked, to prostrate herself before the cross.

When not at prayer or reading religious books, Jeanne Le Ber would busy herself with needlepoint, making sacerdotal vestments for the churches in the vicinity. Her silk embroidery, pleasing in design, the details eminent and lovingly rendered, worked against the circumference of her drab solitude and her denial of earthly comfort, giving expression to her love of God. She still kept her maid. Indeed, her contract with the convent demanded a substitute whenever her own lady-in-waiting was absent. While she had a private garden outside her lower door, she would not use it, and many would whisper that she never glanced out a window again. As her spiritual advisor had informed her, “Even the ascetics of old would permit themselves a walk in the woods, to commune with God.” But not Jeanne Le Ber.

… and then, at my Lord’s bidding, the door is shut, and I am at last more fully alone. No longer in my father’s house, but in my cell, a final seclusion from which there can be no release but death, no expectation of life or variance or possibility. I lie prone upon the floor, alone. Dead, yet not dead. Still abject, for my joy surrounds me and overtakes me, and my aloneness—this, too, is a blessing. My very solitude is a pleasure I must defeat, for I must overcome even the slightest attachment to this world. If I am pleased by my suffering, then my suffering becomes my joy and what is real becomes illusion, and I am defeated. All becomes naught. For I know nothing of the joy of death, only its replication, and I must not be pleased with the artifice. The voyageurs would beat one another before they embarked into the wilderness to prepare themselves for the struggles and the reality of that realm. So must I be dead, but to truly suffer while alive, I must acknowledge that I am not dead, nor can I strain for the glory of death before its time, for I must allow my suffering to linger, yet draw no sweetness from the lingering. I must permit even my glorious solitude intermittently to be broken. For I am dead, but not dead. That is how my life is broken. That is how I will truly suffer for my Lord.