The Orenda Joseph Boyden (16 page)

His words stop the conversation. I search for more phrases, wanting to tell him what time is appropriate, what he should expect, what he should bring, and how he should act, but the language escapes me. I’ve learned much these last months, but I still have so far to go.

—

AT THE RESIDENCE
, I find a new robe that nearly fits and heat water for a bath. I’m shocked to see my reflection in the mirror for the first time in almost a year. My face is so drawn it gives the appearance that I am a skull, and when I remove all my clothes and pour water over
my body, I resemble a cadaver. In the short time I have here in New France, I must replenish my physical body as well as my soul. Due to the lack of proper nutrition, I imagine, my hairline has receded almost entirely, and the ring of hair that I do have left is long and matted. I look freakish, I now see, and understand why the soldiers stared at me so. If I were vain, I’d be ashamed, but I’ve learned there is no room for physical vanity in this wilderness. I leave that to the sauvages. Finding a pair of scissors, I cut the hair from my head and as close to the scalp as I can. I then trim my scraggly beard into a sharp V on my chin. I stare at myself hard in the mirror, and my eyes, Lord, they burn with Your intensity still. With a fresh cotton shirt beneath my cassock, I already feel human, a Christian man once again.

Xavier’s impressed that I am to have dinner with Champlain. “He’s warming to us Jesuits,” he says. The two of us sit in the chapel, having just finished taking the other’s confession. “He understands that our role in this country is vital to his own interests.”

“But aren’t our interests the same?” I ask.

Xavier tries to speak but falls into a coughing fit. I place my hand on his thin back and feel the strain of his heated body. When he can catch his breath, he says, “Don’t be so naïve. Champlain’s sole interest is the conquest of this land, damn the Dutch and the English.”

Xavier is wrong. The illness has affected his brain. “And ours,” I say, “is the conquest of souls. Sometimes the brutality of man needs to show itself so that we may understand the stakes.”

“Spoken like a true believer,” Xavier says.

I want to tell him that what I’ve seen in this last year has taught me life is simply a preparation for the afterlife. I look over at him and understand he isn’t long for this world and stop myself from speaking.

“Go on your way now,” Xavier says. “Don’t keep a man like Champlain waiting.”

—

I’VE NEVER SEEN
such a table of guests. Champlain sits at the head, his hair long and carefully coiffed, his shoulders, despite the heat, covered in his finest robe, his golden medallions of conquest around his neck. He looks like a king. Despite his regal appearance and despite my not wanting to admit it, he’s pale, frail looking, and puffy. It isn’t the sickness of consumption that afflicts the others, I can see. It’s another one, the one that comes when a man doesn’t want to admit he’ll soon die yet knows this is what pursues him, baying like a hound. Champlain will pass on to you, Lord, before the year is out. And then what will happen to this desperate mission in the wilderness without its noble head?

Still, though, he puts on a good face, greeting those who come to sit around him in a big voice. His confessor, Father Lalemant, sits on his left, and behind them stand a coterie of guards in leather breast-plates, most holding pikes, but two with muskets at their sides, no doubt to awe and restrain the Huron guests from behaving rashly. But having seen these sauvages fight, I know the guards would have no chance to even cock their guns before their throats were slit or their heads bashed in.

The worn wooden table, long enough to sit a dozen guests, is full, most of them Bird’s party. A second table, shorter though, had to be added to ours. It sits four others. Our governor knows these people and their habits, after all, and he knows the greatest offence is to invite them to a feast and then turn away part of their party. For the Huron, he is as close to a chief as a European can be. For short stretches he lived with them as a younger man, and he’s fought and killed Iroquois alongside them. He champions the Huron, for he knows they are adept businessmen. He’s even learned some of their language.

I sit to his left, four seats down, a place of minor importance but still within range of his direct questions. Bird sits to his immediate right. Bird, like the others, has come in full regalia. His face, like the rest, is painted in strips of sharp colour. Some of the men have chosen yellow and some red or black. Some have chosen more than one colour, and
others have added ochre to their lips or beneath their eyes, the effect at once frightening and beautiful. The black hair of these warriors, cut and styled so intricately, shines in the early-evening sun that pours through the windows. Champlain, when I glance at him, seems happy and at home.

He raises his crystal glass, and the light glitters on it, around it, through it like a lit jewel. He must have chosen the seating, the angle of the sun. I watch how Bird is literally struck by the green and yellow and red bands of colour that project through the crystal. The brightness makes Bird squint. His face lights up with the hues, the refraction of it dancing across his features. A few of his warriors gasp. When Champlain smiles and twists his chalice, I see that it’s empty.

After a time, Champlain stands, asking Father Lalemant to pray for our souls. I stand with them, and in the long, awkward silence that follows, the sauvages look to one another before the scraping of chairs and jostle of cutlery and porcelain settles to silence. As Father Lalemant murmurs in Latin, I glance up to see the Indians watching him. When I look at Bird, I see he watches me. I drop my head and close my eyes.

When Father finishes, we bless ourselves. Only a few of the younger warriors attempt to mimic. As I’m about to sit, Bird lifts his arms to Champlain and calls out like a falcon, high and haunting. It’s loud enough that the soldiers begin to lift their weapons, shocked. Champlain smiles broadly, happy for the attention.

“You come to us,” Bird says in his tongue, lifting his head high and speaking directly to Champlain. “You come to us and so we come to you. We come to you with gifts and we come to you with furs from our animals, and all of this is in our desire to become a great family with you.” He pauses for a moment and watches as Father Lalemant leans to Champlain and translates what the governor doesn’t fully understand. “I come to you,” Bird continues, opening his arms wide, “we come to you with a message from our elders. Our elders wish you to become family, to aid us in our troubles with the Haudenosaunee, to accept
our furs in exchange for your weapons.” He pauses, looking at the men around him. “We want you to be our brothers, we want you to join us and become one great village with us, a village that is strong enough to sustain the coming attacks from our common enemy. This day, I beg of you to acknowledge, this day approaches faster than you might believe.”

Again, Bird pauses, allowing Lalemant to translate his words for us. A good heat washes over me when I realize I understand even more than the crux.

Now Champlain stands, adjusting his long fur robe, his forehead beaded with sweat. Bird sits to listen. “I hear you, my brother,” he says, lifting his arms to Bird and his party. “We are brothers, yes?” He waits for Lalemant to translate to the warriors. They agree with a loud “Ah-ho!”

“We have friends in common,” Champlain continues, “and we have common troubles. The Dutch to the south care nothing for you, and the English would be happy to see you wiped from this world.” Champlain pauses for the translation. I listen carefully to Lalemant’s words and am impressed at how good he is. One day, I will be so sure of mouth, too. “But we French have proved ourselves strongest. The evidence is that we are still here, despite the British doing everything they could to dislodge us from this place and you people that we love.” Again he pauses so that the father may capture and translate all his words. He sits so that Bird may speak.

“The English and the Dutch give our common enemy their weapons, and their weapons put a great fear into our bodies,” Bird says. “If our nation of the Wendat is one body, then the weapons the Haudenosaunee have been given by their friends from over the sea put fear into the centre of our great body, into our heart.” Bird pauses for what we all suddenly know comes next. “You are our brothers, and so we ask you to gift us those.” He points to a musket being held by a soldier behind Champlain. “The only way to battle our common enemy and win is to be allowed to fight that enemy on common ground.”

Lalemant leans to Champlain to translate but Champlain brushes him away with his hand. It’s Champlain’s turn to stand, and as he does, he takes the musket from the soldier. The soldier looks shocked. Then, holding the gun in both hands, Champlain walks to Bird. “You are a great warrior,” he says, handing the musket over. “I can see that you have suffered in battle.” He points to Bird’s missing finger. “And great warriors need great weapons. So I give you this as a sign of my friendship and as your brother. Tomorrow I will have my greatest warrior show you how to use it.” Champlain returns to his chair and sits. Bird remains standing, the long gun in his hands. He stares down at it, then looks up, then down again. The other Huron whisper amongst themselves, and I overhear the one I’ve named David asking Fox when they’ll receive theirs as well.

“Now let us eat!” Champlain announces, clapping his hands. Servants arrive carrying platters of lamb and beef and whole roasted chickens, goose and duck and a large kettle of fish stew. Steaming loaves of bread arrive, alongside heaps of fresh vegetables. Champlain has planned this well, and he spends greatly from his storehouse. He understands the importance of this alliance, the importance of reju-venating it with a feast, of sowing seeds that will certainly blossom, this food something the sauvages in their simplicity understand fully. The servants, I can see, are frightened to the point their hands shake as they dole out mounds of food to the hungry warriors.

A younger Huron grabs a leg of duck and begins to eat it before he’s admonished by an older one beside him. The young one places the leg back on his plate, his mouth grease smeared so that he looks like a child caught doing wrong. All of the warriors’ eyes watch Champlain, waiting to see what he will do. He picks up his napkin and tucks it into his collar under his chin. The others try to mimic, some who wear their breastplates finding a purchase for the serviette. But most are shirtless and try to rest the white cloth across their chests, willing it to stay perched there. Champlain then picks up his fork with his left hand and his knife with his right. All the warriors do the same.
Pinning a large piece of beef with the fork, Champlain daintily saws into the meat, cutting a small chunk. A clatter and scrape of forks and knives on porcelain ensues as the sauvages attempt the small feat. Champlain raises the chunk of meat on his fork to his mouth and chews slowly, the look on his face announcing how he relishes it. The others do the same, some struggling to keep the meat on their forks, others with so large a piece that they can’t fit it into their mouths.

This mimicry goes on for minutes, the warriors struggling, dropping food and napkins, growing frustrated in their louder murmurings. But none of them dare eat in their normal fashion, quickly, and with their hands.

After a time, Champlain looks up and smiles. “We are all brothers, yes?” he asks. “Well, then, let us eat properly like brothers!” He places his fork and knife down, takes a large goose leg in his hands, and bites into it with abandon. I can almost hear the warriors gasp with relief and the room erupts with the feed, men devouring flesh and waving for more, the servants sweating to keep up with the doling. I look about me, unable to feel anymore what it was like out there in the wilderness, so far away, and yet just feet away on the other side of the palisades. Will I be able to return there, Lord? I don’t think I can.

I note that only Bird doesn’t feast. He sits, holding the gun’s barrel with the hand that now misses its little finger, the gun’s stock on the floor in front of him. He stares at it, mesmerized. Father Lalemant has noticed, too. He leans to Champlain. “With all due respect, I think you misunderstood what their chief was asking of you,” he says.

Champlain waves to a servant and tells him to bring the wine. “You underestimate me, I think.” Champlain places his meat down and looks to Lalemant. “This one named Bird would certainly like more than one musket, I am sure.” The servant returns and fills Champlain’s goblet. The servant then fills Lalemant’s. He is about to fill mine but I place a hand over my glass. As the servant walks away, Champlain calls him back gruffly. “What of the rest of our guests?” he asks.

Lalemant raises his eyebrows. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” he asks. “These sauvages, they respond poorly to the grape.”

“No more poorly than the peasants who have built Habitation with their own callused hands,” Champlain says. He waves to the servant, who goes about filling the glasses of the warriors. “As for handing out weapons,” he continues, “I’ve handed out just one. Maybe one or two more next year. The British are fools for being so easy with their gifts of destruction. Mark my words. Their allies, the Iroquois, when they are in the position of power to do so, will turn against their friends.” He spits out this last word and looks at Lalemant. Then he looks at me, which catches me by surprise. I’ve felt invisible all night. The focus in Champlain’s eyes forces me to look to my hands on my lap. “For the French to crack this great continent and all of its wealth—and I include the wealth of souls, Fathers—we must crack the Huron Confederacy. They are the ones, clearly, who control the trade in this savage land. And so we must control them.” His eyes burn into me. “That’s where you come in, dear Fathers. It is your job to bring them to Christ. We will then leave it to Christ to bring them to us.” Champlain claps his hands and stands. “Listen carefully, Lalemant, and be prepared to translate it all.”

Champlain lifts his crystal glass of wine and raises it in the air. “This drink,” he says, “is the colour of blood. It is the blood of our God. And these ones here,” he says, lifting his glass to Father Lalemant and then to me, “are our Fathers. And they are the sons of our God. We love our Fathers more than our children or ourselves. Our Fathers are held in great esteem in France. It is neither hunger nor want that brings them to this country. They do not want your land or your furs. If you love the French people, as you say you do, then love these Fathers. Honour them, and they will teach you the way to Heaven.”