Joseph stands, the Captain of the Day still firmly in his hands. “This charcoal,” he says, pointing to me, “has magic. They all do. They can command this thing to speak.” He raises the clock above his head so everyone might see it. “They’d ask it to talk and it talked. It would tell us when to come to eat and when to go home to bed.”
“But don’t the sun and moon tell us the same thing?” someone shouts, and people laugh.
“It spoke like this,” Joseph says, and he O’s his mouth and makes a gong gong gong sound. The men are amused, but he sees they don’t believe him, so he walks up to me on my bloodied beaver robe and demands I make the clock speak. It has wound down to silence. I reach out to take it, to wind it up, but then I remember I have no fingers. I drop my mangled hands in my lap. Joseph stares down at me as if I’d just cut him to the bone. He drops the clock, and it hits the robe with a muted chime.
When dark arrives, they help me stand and tie me to the post once more. Tekakwitha has asked Joseph to tell the seething crowd a story. And so he does.
“The charcoal,” he says, “tell a story that when you are born, you must have water poured upon your head to protect you.”
Men behind him pick up the kettle from the fire with a pole and carry it forward. Joseph steps aside while they lift it above me and slowly pour the boiling water over my head and body. I can feel the thin skin of my pate bubble then tear away. I shut my eyes tight so I might at least be able to see into death. The water courses down my body and spares nothing from its rage. I pray to You for help, Lord, as my skin begins to melt. It’s as if I can feel the nerves of my body deaden, and I begin to hum my hymn once more.
“And they tell another story,” Joseph says, “that to speak to their great voice, you must wear a bright rope about your neck.” He points at my crucifix, the one given to me by my dear mother, that Tekakwitha now wears.
Other warriors dig the chain of white-hot hatchet heads from the coals. Two of them carry the necklace on pokers and lift it over my head, draping it around my neck, the metal searing into my shoulders and chest. I hear the sizzle of my flesh and smell the stink of burnt meat, and the weight of this fire sends me slipping down the pole to my knees. I open my eyes and try to stand again but can’t. The Iroquois all around me cheer and shout encouragement, but I no longer have the physical strength. I remain kneeling.
“Are there other stories worth telling?” Tekakwitha asks.
“There are many,” Joseph replies, “but the ones I’ve told seem to me the best.”
I droop now, my Lord, at the base of this pole. Thinking I can see You, a shining light beginning to brighten the eastern horizon, I call to you by humming my hymn.
As if in a dream, I watch as my donnés and soldiers who have survived are dragged, tied together, before their new master. They cry and beg or stare as if they’re already dead. Tekakwitha declares in his language that they’ll be kept alive and traded to the Iron People for Iroquois prisoners. My men are shuffled away, many of them sobbing, as they look down on me. I try my best to smile at them so they know I don’t suffer too badly.
Now, Lord, I am sure I see Your light glowing above me where the roof of the chapel once hung.
Tekakwitha speaks to the warriors gathered around us, praising my strength and my fortitude, for no one would have believed I’d make it this far without begging for mercy. “But I myself,” he says, “will give it one more try.” The warriors lift me to standing and tie me to the pole so my arms are above my head.
He takes a burning poker from the fire and slips it into my ear. The crackling I hear is a forest fire rushing up. He then pushes the poker into my eye so the flames leap and turn that one eye’s vision red then black. I hum my hymn once more. Hail, true body, born of the Virgin Mary, who having truly suffered, was sacrificed on the cross for mankind, whose pierced side flowed with water and blood.
With my good eye, I see Joseph come to me, holding a knife. He looks me in the eye, and then cuts deep into my sternum. I can feel his hand enter my chest.
May it be for us a foretaste of the heavenly banquet in the trial of death.
I can feel my life slowly pulsing in his hand.
O sweet Jesus, O pious Jesus, O Jesus, son of Mary, have mercy on me. Amen.
I watch from above now as Joseph smiles, lifting the red weight of it to me so that, as my sight fades, I may glimpse what he holds in his hand. He bites into it, and I can see myself again, a small boy reaching for a branch, grasping then biting into the stolen fruit.
A RAVEN’S EYE
Word spreads to the last of the Wendat, to all our nations, all the survivors chased from their longhouses and living in the forest like frightened hares, that we come together in the Sweet Water Sea. But as word spreads to our own people, the Haudenosaunee picks up our scent, and our most worthy enemy follows us to that island. I’m forced to bury my daughter in a rush in those early weeks of panic.
Maybe it’s because summer’s arrived, and their own families call them home. Or maybe it’s because, after the great letting, they finally take pity upon those of us on the island. The Wendat who suffer the most are those who don’t surrender to them and who travel to the mainland to try and hunt or find missing kin. Roving bands of the enemy wait like wolves for those who wander and tear them to pieces. And so we stay on this island, welcoming any Wendat family who manages to make it across the water in leaking canoes.
Gosling tells me, now that her stomach’s large, that the island we try to scratch out an existence from is haunted. “This is why the Haudenosaunee won’t come onto it,” she tells me.
The women plant the seeds of the three sisters they’d so carefully wrapped in deerskin and carried with them. But the soil of this island is too sandy, and the summer sun beats down upon us, scaring off the rain. We’re left to dig for roots or try to catch fish in what nets we can make, or hunt the few deer and smaller animals that make this place their home. For the first summer in living memory, we begin to go hungry.
Gabriel Crow seems lost now without his Father, Christophe, just as I feel lost without my daughter and Fox and all the others who were close to me. Rumour has it the Crow was caressed for three days and never uttered a sound except for his strange singing. I find this hard to believe, but that man surprised me in a hundred different ways. I never thought I’d say this, but I miss Christophe Crow as well.
I give Gabriel his due, though, for throwing his back into the labour of building shelter and some semblance of palisades without complaint. It’s as if he, too, works for his absent friend. On this island that takes two days to walk around, we’ve built fifteen longhouses, and the families cram in. We’ve strained the resources of this place that protects us, and we’re forced to scavenge on the other islands. I took Gabriel with me to the two smaller ones nearby in search of mussels and crayfish, and he announced he’d call our new home Charity, and these Faith and Hope. I don’t have the heart to tell him our island already has a name. Gahoendoe.
As summer wanes, we prepare for what we know will be a nervous autumn and a brutal winter. The waters separating us from the mainland, now a liquid palisades to keep the Haudenosaunee away, will freeze into a pathway of ice for them. And just as bad, there are no crops to feed us through the long dark nights of snow and howling winds. But we’ll make it. We always somehow find a way.
—
IN THE EVENINGS now that autumn approaches, the scent of hardwood fires hangs longer than usual in the air. When I wake I can feel the ghost of frost beginning to wake, too. Though Snow Falls’ baby decided to come early, as if she couldn’t wait to get out in the world, now it’s as if Gosling’s and my baby has decided to take some extra time to luxuriate in his mother’s womb. I’ve grown anxious, taking walks along the beach, staring out at the bright skies and looking for signs of enemy smoke on the mainland, then lighting my pipe before walking back again.
Gosling forces herself to rest, and to wrestle the boredom she cures and cuts birchbar
k, sewing together small boxes she decorates with porcupine quills from her bundle. Instead of keeping them, she gives them away to the children who come to spy on her. Today, as I walk up from the beach, a young girl walks out of our longhouse with one in her hand. “The woman in there gave me this,” she says, holding it up for me to examine.
I smile.
“She gave it to me, but she’s making strange noises like she hurts,” the girl says.
I hurry in to where Gosling squats on her mat, water puddling at her feet. She looks up at me. “Leave me now and get the women.”
I run to fetch them.
For a long time I pace outside, stopping myself from peeking in whenever she cries out. I begin to worry when it goes quiet for a long time, but then I hear the cry, the cry so similar to that day not so long ago when my daughter gave birth. I rush inside.
The women around Gosling are busy with their hands, wiping the baby gently and wrapping it in a fur. One lifts it to me. “Meet your new daughter,” she says.
“Daughter?” I ask. “Are you sure?”
She looks at me strangely, but then Gosling begins moaning out again. “Leave now,” the woman says.
I stand outside, gazing at this red-faced bundle in my hands, fearing Gosling won’t be all right. But then I hear more crying inside, and when I go back in the same woman says, “Now meet your new son.”
—
TODAY, A SHOUT from the sentry goes up. Both Gosling and I have been having restless dreams. My experiences these last seasons have taught me to always expect the worst. I pass my daughter to Gosling and touch my son’s cheek. I look at my woman, but her eyes give me nothing. I hurry out to see what has triggered the sentry’s alarm.
Down on the beach, the sand cold under my bare feet, the sentry points to a lone canoe moving quickly over the rolling water, the waves silver in this dull light.
“Who would dare such a crossing in winds like this?” he asks. “I fear the Haudenosaunee are playing a trick.”
We watch as the warrior slices through the waves, his paddling strong. He has the cut of a scout. “He certainly knows what he’s doing,” I say to the sentry. I recognize his stroke. How many summers has he paddled beside me?
I walk into the water as Fox pulls up to the shore. His canoe’s loaded with hide-wrapped packages. “I come with gifts,” he says.
That evening by the fire, all the others from their longhouses join us. Fox tells of his adventures, how he single-handedly harassed the Haudenosaunee these last months, how the rumour spread he was a vengeful ghost, how he took many unsuspecting enemy by slitting their throats or firing an arrow from his perch into their chest. The people sit by the fire and listen, enthralled. And then Fox pulls out gift after gift. Beaver robes for the mothers. Sturdy bows and knives for the men. He hands out painted gambling stones, even a hairy one’s shiny breastplate. He gives away sewing awls and wampum beads and pretty shell necklaces. He gives until there’s nothing left to give.
When he’s done, he glances at me with a strange look upon his face.
“What is it?” I ask, balancing my daughter on one knee, my boy on the other.
“I just never pictured you doing this again,” he says, smiling.
“I find it suits him well,” Gosling says, laughing. “These are now your relations, too.”
Fox grins. “There’s one more thing I have for you,” he says, then digs into his pouch before cupping something that must be very delicate. When he opens his fingers, a flower blooms.
Gosling gently takes it from him. “I made this for Snow Falls,” she says. “Where did you find it?”
“The night you all paddled away from the crow village, I sneaked back into their holy house,” Fox says. “Beside where your daughter died, Bird, I found this quill box. There’s something inside, but I’m not sure what it is.”
I watch as Gosling opens the box and stares. I lay my children down on their furs.
“Show me,” I say. She passes it to me. An object glints in the bottom of the box. Something deep in me recognizes it as I shake it out into my palm, a shell the size of my nail, delicately shaped and polished, days of work to the one who would have such patience.
“Tell me,” Fox says. “What is that?”
I hold the shell out to him. “It’s the missing eye of Snow Falls’ raven.”
For tonight, we have food and we have warmth and we have the company of one another. We have our family who still lives, and we have the longhouse to recline in. I look about me as people talk and laugh. For the moment, I can see, we aren’t worried about tomorrow. What more could I want right now, my two children sleeping in their furs and my old friend Fox beside me? Gosling watches all of this, too. She knows what will come, and I believe we’re now ready.
I pull two pipes from my pouch and hand Fox back his favourite. I twist a stick in the fire and hold it steady for him as he inhales. I light my own. Once I’ve puffed, I hand it to Gosling, our smoke curling up and into the shadows of our longhouse.
—
TODAY, I TAKE GOSLING and the babies to a secret place, a small lake on the island. It’s the rare day of late autumn that breathes one last summer’s breath and it’s warm enough this afternoon to fool the bullfrogs, who’ve come out to sing. We spear what we need and cook them over a fire as the stars begin to appear above. We eat to our content and lie with one another as Gosling feeds each child in turn.
Once they sleep wrapped tight in their bundles, she points out the star that always leads her people north to their home. I show her where Aataentsic slipped through a hole and fell to earth so long ago.
“I can see how our world will go,” Gosling says.
I wait for her to tell me. I’ve been waiting for this all my life.
“The Wendat have suffered enough these last years,” she says, “but still it will be a difficult winter. The Haudenosaunee, though, will refuse to come onto this haunted ground.”
“Will we live?” I ask. “Will you and I and our children live till next spring?”
She nods. “We were destined to,” she says. Gosling tells me how the others who make it through winter will scatter to the winds. Some will go back with the crow Gabriel to the place he calls Kebec. Others will be adopted into the Anishnaabe of the Nipissing, and the Algonquin, and yes, the Haudenosaunee, too.
“You and me,” she says, “our family.” She touches our children’s heads. I smile. “We will know by next summer that it’s most sensible to head north and be taken in by my people on their side of the Sweet Water Sea.” She tells me I’ll never farm again and neither will my offspring or their offspring. Never again will we eke a living from the earth but instead do what her people, the Anishnaabe, have always done. We’ll go back to the forest, and we’ll live by what it gives us. She laughs when she tells me the nearest I’ll ever come again to farming is teaching my son and daughter to collect wild rice into our canoe. Gosling tells me all this as we lie back beside this lake on an island on a greater lake that itself rests upon Turtle Island. She tells me all this as she traces the patterns of stars with her finger so that in front of my very eyes warriors and deer and mythic beasts come to life and then dissipate again into the black sky.
“I’ll tell you one more thing,” Gosling says, “and that will be all for tonight.”
I nod like a little boy.
“Your family, my family, the family of Bird, we will keep wandering north in pursuit of the animals and to avoid the crows and their followers who’ll continue coming to this land. Eventually we’ll stop near a frozen salt sea because we can’t go any farther.”
I listen as she tells me the story of the Birds who will come after I am gone, how they’ll be great warriors and great hunters and great seers. On this night she makes me see that life goes on despite so much of it around us having so brutally expired. We hold each other beside this lake, the frogs’ singing gone quiet now, the fire warm, the stars turning above us in their slow and dizzying walk.
&
nbsp; Just as I begin to drift off, I tell Gosling I’ve been dreaming about Snow Falls and I fear my quick burial of her was not to her satisfaction.
“Is anyone ever truly satisfied on the day they’re buried?” she asks.
“It’s just that I interred her so quickly,” I say, “and without what she might need.”
“Then you should do it again,” Gosling tells me. With those words, and for the first time since the troubles began, I fall into a dreamless sleep.
—
IN THE MORNING, I head to a copse of maple whose leaves make the trees seem to shimmer in fire, and I bend to the work of taking my girl back out of the earth.
When it’s time to unwrap her from her mat and thin beaver blanket, the only one I owned, the sun breaks through the trees to shine on Snow Falls’ face. I’m stunned. She’s as perfect as she was on the day she left us. I touch her face glowing in the sunlight and see that it’s hardened to a shell. My daughter, I took you from your people when you were still just a child, and you really were a special one. I never doubted it, even on those days when you tested my patience beyond the boundaries anyone should be tested. I touch your face once more with my hand that misses a finger.
I dig your grave deeper and line it with the robe Gosling sewed together from all the scraps of fur I’ve collected these last days, then bundle you up like you’re a child ready for sleep before putting you back in your resting place. Around you I arrange the things you might need, birch baskets and a pair of pretty moccasins, quill barrettes for your hair, sewing needles, a bow for hunting small game, and best of all, the great raven that Carries an Axe once gave you so long ago and Sleeps Long helped you stuff, its one eye sparkling in the autumn sun. I lay this across you, and it’s nearly your length, this strange object Gosling made sure to spirit away with her from that crow village. Finally, I take the small quill box holding the raven’s missing eye and tuck it between you and the animal’s wing. This eye, it’ll allow you to see in the other world, my girl. And this raven, my daughter, it’ll protect you. It will allow you to soar.
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