Song of Batoche

by Caron, Maia;

  “He won’t split his force and come up the west bank?”

  “Not after Tourond’s Coulee.” Gabriel stood back and regarded the snake line of river. It was their strength and their weakness. When he’d first seen the Hudson’s Bay boat, he thought it would follow Middleton as a supply ship. Scouts had shadowed the army on its march north from Tourond’s Coulee. Soldiers were sent to loot and burn Métis houses. When Gabriel asked about his farm, the scouts were reluctant to share that soldiers had hauled the pool table from his saloon and dragged everything, including the kitchen table and mattresses, out of his house before torching it. He had still not told Madeleine they had lost everything. He had been more concerned to hear that his barn had been torn down and the boards nailed along the railings of the ship. Middleton had armed the Northcote for war.

  “While the old man comes up from the south,” he said to Riel, “he’ll send the damn Hudson’s Bay boat to attack us from the river. If they surround us, it’s all over.”

  A frank look of astonishment spread across Riel’s features. “The riverbank camp won’t be safe. We’ll put the women and children in the village.”

  “The only place for the boat to moor is at the crossing. Middleton means to take the village. Our families will be safest on the bank.” He made an X at Fisher’s Crossing. “I’ll have most of my men hidden in the bush here.” With a decisive stroke, he drew a line across the river. “We’ll move the ferry cables south—stop it dead as it sails in to dock. Kill the helmsman, capture the supplies, and take more prisoners.”

  “If Middleton sets up his guns on the hill, he’ll overwhelm the few you have here,” Riel said, indicating the pits Gabriel had drawn in the bush along the ridge. “And get to the village.”

  This worried Gabriel, too, but capturing the Northcote was his priority. Seize it and they might have a chance. “We’ll come up after we’ve taken the boat.” He turned the paper and dotted the bush and trees surrounding the ridge. “Fend off Middleton from here.”

  Riel surveyed him with a dubious look. “What of the priests and nuns?”

  “You said yourself Middleton is a gentleman. He will see the cross and steeple.” Gabriel did not have many strategies in his pocket, but he was counting on the priests and nuns remaining in the rectory. If Riel wanted his prophecy, he would not rob him of this advantage.

  “Non,” Riel said finally. “I won’t endanger them.”

  “Middleton will not shoot. They are safe.”

  Riel glanced up at him and must have decided not to test him further, for he closed his eyes briefly, muttering a prayer. In a moment, he said, “How do you know Middleton won’t come from the east? Attack the village?”

  Gabriel was anxious to get away but grudgingly drew a wide circle to show the Jolie Prairie. “My scouts will watch them advance. An army that size can’t move without us knowing.” He pencilled in a few crude arcs to represent a line of bush separating the Jolie Prairie from the village, his frustrated strokes almost tearing through the paper. “We’ve dug pits all along here.”

  “Our cattle and horses,” Riel said. “We can’t lose them.”

  “We’ve already moved them farther north.” Gabriel’s patience was at its limit. “In Pierre Parenteau’s back fields. Posted guards.” He threw down the pencil. “If I don’t get out there and organize the men, this will mean nothing.” When he turned at the door, Riel had lowered himself into a chair. In the guttering flame of the candle, his face was that of an old man, his hair uncombed, a far-off look in his eyes, as though he were receiving another missive from the Spirit that guided him.

  Gabriel faltered. Over the past year, Riel had more than once shaken his confidence, had been too reliant on God. But this man, on the eve of the attack, had shown he was willing to fight to the death for their lands.

  “You should not be here alone.”

  Riel looked up, as though surprised to still find him there. “I wish to write in my diary and pray.”

  “What will you do if we can’t hold off the English—if Poundmaker doesn’t come?”

  Riel’s eyes were now fixed on the candle. When he did not answer, Gabriel went out, closing the door behind him. He would fight forever. But he feared what Riel might do if God abandoned him.

  may god so

  keep me

  Josette ran through the small aspen behind the church, retracing her steps in a kind of madness, through the tents in the south meadow camp, through the village. It was still dark, but people were up, women starting fires to boil tea, men saddling horses or cleaning their guns.

  A light flickered in the bush ringing the Jolie Prairie and she moved toward it, hand on the skinning knife in her pocket. The cool night wind on her face, tears there too. Norbert would be in that pit, his back turned, and she would leap down on him, thrust her knife in him again and again, not stopping until they dragged her away.

  It seemed like a lifetime had passed since she had come across her husband and daughter in Boyer’s room. The unbearable image. She had stopped dead in the doorway, hardly noticing when Cleophile sprang to her feet and rushed past her down the hall. Norbert had been unable to move, and then rose from the bed, fumbling with his pants. He looked at her with a horrified expression, and she launched herself at him, almost flying across the room.

  “I’ll kill you—kill you.”

  He let her beat him on the chest for a moment then threw her off and strode out, swearing. Josette had sunk to her knees on the floor, in the same place Cleophile had just been. Staring at the wall, she had pulled her hair out of the knot at the back of her head until it fell around her face, and she knelt there, hardly breathing. She knew that her daughter would seek the church, but Moulin had refused to let her up the stairs. Refused.

  Josette approached the light on the prairie to find three men in the pit, their labour aided only by the dim radiance of a coal oil lamp and the distant rising sun. Slowly she edged the knife from her pocket, but he was not among them.

  “Where is my husband?” she said into the dark, unable to speak his name.

  Philippe Vandal leaned on his shovel to look up at her. “He just rode out—took the trail south.”

  Her mind worked desperately. Find a horse, go after him. But she had missed her chance. He was most likely on his way to Red River, where he still had relations. A place to hide and wait her out.

  She stumbled out onto the Jolie Prairie, and Vandal called after her, “Josette—have you heard God speak to Riel?”

  Hands over her ears, hair blowing around her shoulders. The men dug rifle pits for Riel’s war with questions on their lips, in their hearts. The sun, still hidden, had tinged the clouds pink, a shelf of sky above it, grey as river ice. She took longer and longer strides toward it, running far enough to drop on her knees, her mouth open in a silent scream.

  She coiled her fingers in the bent and broken stalks of last year’s grass, the damp rot under her nails. Each warning from the past year rose before her, signs she should have recognized but ignored: Cleophile running from the summer kitchen last summer, after Norbert had gone in there. Cleophile on the bank of the river the night before the Duck Lake battle, afire with her poisonous secret.

  You are going to save him? And perhaps the most damning: Why don’t you just let him die?

  The sun was rising and spilling light over the prairie grass, like a vast sea falling off the horizon. Only the far-off sound of digging and the rasping call of a burrowing owl, his body small and dark, as he swept down over the prairie, and the death cry of a mouse when he found his mark.

  She closed her eyes. Riel’s face swam into her mind, how he had looked yesterday in the outdoor chapel, offering the women Christ’s body and His blood. The women and Vandal just now, believing him a prophet sent by God. If Spinoza were here in Batoche, he would not follow Riel. Father Dubois had told her that Spinoza believed God was like the Great Spirit and did not require a prophet or priest for explanation. She thought of her beloved book, h
idden for so long in the birch grove above the river and now under some clothes in their dugout on the riverbank. There had been tears in Father Dubois’ eyes when he gave it to her.

  “I cannot take Spinoza’s Ethics where I am going,” he had said. “They will think I am a heretic.” He had recovered himself and smiled as he liked to do, teasing, but his gaze hard, with a glint of threat that had always confused her. “You are a heretic aren’t you, Josette? A natural-born unbeliever.” He took up his pen and opened the book, reaching out as he did and drawing her tight to his side. “I like to think I have put you back in God’s grace.” He had inscribed this in the book, his fingers on her arm narrowing with each word that went on the page.

  It began to rain, and she stared at the drops that freckled her apron and the back of her hands. Her anger had ebbed to a terrible vacant impassiveness, like the dimming of light.

  “Josette.”

  She turned her head, beyond caring who had found her in such a state. Sitting on their horses on the Carlton Trail were Gabriel and Pierre Gariépy. Pierre rode off toward the village, and Josette held Gabriel’s eyes for a moment then looked away across the Jolie Prairie, seeing nothing.

  He got off his horse and came toward her. “What is it?”

  In halting words, she told him what Norbert had done. “I should have killed him at New Year’s,” Gabriel said. “We must go. Middleton’s men are on the march.”

  When she didn’t move, he leaned down to look into her face. “Norbert is gone,” he said. “You and the children are safe.”

  that dark one

  As dawn broke, Marguerite Riel emerged from a dugout on the riverbank with her daughter on one hip and Jean at her skirts. Her son had kept her up with a cough in his chest, and she shivered, exhausted, drawing a blanket around her and Angélique’s frail body. Marguerite was troubled by the progression of her own cough. Lying on the ground the last ten days had made it worse, with damp coming up through the buffalo hide she had been given by the other women to keep it out.

  Several fires would normally be burning at this time of day for cooking and warmth, but Gabriel had forbidden it. Most of the men had already left camp and were hidden in the bush along both banks, waiting for the Hudson’s Bay steamship. Scouts had ridden in before first light to report that Middleton and his troops were only miles from the village. The camp was in a panic, the women muttering anxiously at the thought of their men out there with an army coming. And complaining that they did not want to go up the trail when Gabriel had insisted they remain in the riverbank camp. But Riel had just asked every woman and child to meet him on Mission Ridge to hear a message from the Spirit of God.

  Marguerite followed them on the trail to the bluff, their shoulders draped in blankets against the chill morning air. She carried Angélique and held Jean’s hand to hurry him along, praying that he would not beg for her to pick him up. She was pregnant, three months by her calculations. Louis had not guessed and she would tell him only when all of this was over. Jean stopped dead on the trail, snivelling. As she pulled her sleeve over her wrist to wipe his runny nose, she could hear other women coming up behind her. The trail turned at that point and they had not seen her yet.

  She recognized Henriette Parenteau’s voice, alive with indignation. “Why go up there just to come back down again? My knees.”

  Charlotte Gervais answered her. “You heard what Père Moulin said—he is fou, crazy.”

  Another woman joined in. “Why must we do what a crazy man says?”

  They were excited now, speaking over each other.

  “Your husband and son are in the fight. Who knows what Riel will do if we don’t obey.”

  “I knew all along he was crazy. But two years in an insane asylum? He should be ashamed to hide it from us!”

  “You would not tell someone you were in a crazy house.”

  “I would not be put in one!”

  Marguerite shifted Angélique on her hip and urged her son forward with a frantic whisper, “Vite vite,” but he pulled at her apron, demanding to be carried, too. She looked up in defeat as the women rounded the corner. They slowed at the sight of her, mortified expressions on their faces.

  When she had met him four years ago, Louis admitted that he had suffered from brain fever after the Red River troubles, and had explained that his friends and family insisted he go to a sanatorium. She had not asked about it further, presuming it simply to be a place where he had recovered his health. Why hadn’t he told her it was an insane asylum? For the same reason he had not told women like Henriette Parenteau, who filed past her on the trail with a look of fearful apprehension.

  Thankfully, Gabriel’s sister Isabelle Ouellette came along with her girls, and La Rose scooped up Jean in her arms. Marguerite followed along behind, her head down. Insanity. She should have felt outrage, but her heart was numb with shock and unexpected relief. Finally she had an explanation for her husband’s melancholy and tortured intensity.

  When she arrived at the top of the bluff, Louis was standing on the ridge with his arms out. As the women and children gathered around, he said, “The Dominion army rides against us today. They will fail, for God is on our side—the side of right. They do not know that reinforcements ride to us from the north and will arrive within the hour. God will use our ferry cable to overturn Middleton’s steamboat. We will gain possession of all the weapons and ammunition.”

  Marguerite pushed forward to see him better. What reinforcements? He had been up late praying for the Indians to come. He began to name the men and their families who had deserted in the night. “As the Anglais army comes to the City of God, they abandon you!” he said. “I beg you to consider your own blood here. You do not want your husband to end up like Charles Nolin, chained to the wall of a police dungeon in Prince Albert. That is the fate of those who desert the sacred cause.”

  Louis’ eyes were dark with passion, but when he looked her way she could see his shoulders relax. The mere sight of her appeased him. She thought of the women in Sun River. They would be surprised to see that the girl they had judged as too plain for the great Riel, the small dark Marguerite, had grown into the only one who kept him from going insane. It was not Josette in his bed, holding him close when he awoke with the night terrors. Evelina Barnabé did not stand where he could see her and draw strength. His pampered French fiancée would never have survived sleepless nights in a tent on a riverbank, coughing blood into the sleeve of her dress.

  The last of the women had come up and Louis raised his voice. “Here we are,” he said. “Squarely arrived at the time God has marked in the order of things to come with all the signs that are to accompany it, just as we are told in the scriptures.”

  A child began to cry, and his mother bent to hush him. Late last night, Louis had not returned from a council meeting, and Marguerite had gone to find him at Letendre’s kitchen table, furiously writing in his diary by the light of a candle. Thinking her still illiterate, ignorant, he made no effort to hide the entry from her, nor the pressed flower that he used to keep his place—the dried bit of lilac that Evelina had sent him to remember her by. Marguerite caught one phrase before he closed the diary.

  Do not let England get the better of me.

  Now, as the English army advanced, Louis sought her out over all the other women, who stood silently and seemed to gaze at him with reluctant admiration. Most or all of them had learned that he had been in an insane asylum, yet they were hypnotized by Louis’ power, his vision.

  “I am protected by God,” her husband said. “But if I should be killed, know that I will be resurrected on the third day.” He gestured in her direction. “My wife will be the one who will deliver the news of my resurrection to you, as Mary Magdalene did for Christ.”

  She hugged Angélique to her and managed a grateful smile, but the dried lilac came back to her, the way he had closed his diary on it to mark the page. Why do you need this token from another woman? She wanted to shout at him. Why did you not tell
me?

  Gabriel appeared on his horse over the bluff near the cemetery. “The English are on the trail,” he yelled. “They’re firing the houses along the river.”

  Blood drained from Louis’ face. “How far?”

  “Three miles.”

  Gabriel waved his arm. “The government boat is coming. Get to the dugouts.”

  Louis took Jean from La Rose’s arms and headed for the trail. Marguerite ran to keep up, their daughter still on her hip. She watched her dear husband’s back and then the top of his head disappear below the rise. He was no Christ. She was no Mary, but soon he would be finished with his mission here and she would have him back to herself. Soon.

  the worst

  possible place

  Sun broke through the clouds, its first rays warming the riverbank. Madeleine huddled in their dugout, a handkerchief to her face in fear of a coughing fit. The boat had not yet appeared around the bend in the river, and the women were still quieting their children behind the tent canvases or upturned carts.

  The camp felt very exposed. Gabriel had assured her that it was the only safe place for them, that the fight for the boat would be at the crossing. Yet it had just occurred to her that soldiers might—as the ship passed by—decide Métis fighters were hiding there instead of women and children. Riel had promised that God would not allow the English into Batoche, but Madeleine trusted more in her husband’s efforts than she did in the Saviour’s.

  “Get back,” she said to Alexandre who had rested his elbow on the cart outside their hole. He watched the river, opening and closing his fingers, as if they itched for a gun. Madeleine would not let him sneak away to join Gabriel again, as he had at Tourond’s Coulee. She glanced around at Riel and his family in another hole nearby, and Josette in Isabelle Ouellette’s dugout, arms around her three children. Madeleine’s sharp eyes noticed that one was missing.