Song of Batoche

by Caron, Maia;

  Riel flinched at a sudden, earth-shaking blast, as the two cannon went off to the south. The men barely registered the sound and looked up at him with dispassionate eyes, many of them coughing, their faces streaked with dirt. Riel urged them to confess to each other, but they were more anxious to tell him that soldiers had been reinforcing the Anglais encampment all morning and making vain attempts to recapture ground they had held yesterday.

  “Middleton is building a fortress,” Riel said. “He knows his army will be here a long time—long enough for Poundmaker to come. We will be victorious.”

  “We killed one of his soldiers when they charged,” said Elzéar Gervais. “The whole company was called back.”

  “Who did it?” Riel asked, meaning to praise the man.

  “Me,” a familiar voice said from two pits over.

  Riel looked up to find Norbert Lavoie gazing at him with a peculiar, unsettling expression. He took a step back. Norbert. In Batoche. With no sign of having received a beating. Obviously, the men had not heard of his crime, and Norbert did not realize that the priests meant to excommunicate him. But God knew.

  Riel turned blindly and went off the trail through the small aspen undergrowth in search of Gabriel. Norbert had to be brought in before he defiled the sacred cause. Through the trees, he could now see up to the crest of the small hill, where the cannon were positioned, their barrels still smoking. Middleton was up there stalking about and then disappeared over the rise. No soldiers on the plateau. Riel found Gabriel in a pit behind the rectory, huddled with Édouard Dumont and Daniel Larance, discussing strategy. Édouard had seen Riel and stood with respect, but Larance remained in a squat, his eyes to the ground, listening to his war chief.

  “Get up to where that officer has his men to the east,” Gabriel told Larance. “Hold them off with sparse fire.” When he was about to leave the pit, he added, “Whistle three times if they try to rush you.”

  Gabriel glanced up at his brother, Édouard. “Go down to the cemetery pits. Tell them no shooting wild. We need every bullet.”

  When they were finally alone, Riel said, “I do not like the look I got from Daniel Larance.”

  Gabriel stared straight ahead, his face drawn. “He came to me yesterday—said the priests told his wife you’d been in a crazy house.”

  Riel felt his stomach cramp, as if from a blow. “I suspected that Nolin told Father André.”

  “We should not have imprisoned them.”

  Riel knew he was right. The priests had done more damage inside the rectory than out and would continue to use every means at their disposal to discredit him. “Norbert Lavoie is here,” he said. “Have him brought to the village. I will banish him—”

  “Three more men deserted in the night.” Without warning, Gabriel leaped from the pit. “And he is one of our best shots.”

  Riel climbed out after him. He wanted to say that he would not allow a sinner here opposed to the Holy Spirit of truth, only because Gabriel valued his marksmanship. But his war general was already out of earshot, running along the west trail.

  A plan began to form in Riel’s head: move the prisoners from Garnot’s saloon to Baptiste Boyer’s root cellar. Wedge a pole between ceiling and trap door to free up the two guards, then Gabriel could no longer object to Norbert leaving the fight. He headed back to the village and was about to enter Garnot’s, when Damase Carrière and Élie Nault rode in from the northeast.

  “Has there been news?” Riel asked.

  The men reined in their horses. “Riders are coming south on the trail,” said Carrière, “from Prince Albert.”

  Riel raised his hands, smiling. Thank you, Lord. “Poundmaker already,” he said and when he saw the looks on their faces, “… or Métis coming to join us.”

  “Non,” said Carrière. “Fifty Anglais scouts—hard men that look like they know how to use their guns.”

  “Reinforcements?” Riel could hear the cold terror in his voice.

  Carrière turned his horse. “I must tell Gabriel,” he said, following Nault in a gallop toward the church pits.

  A woman’s guttural scream issued from the direction of Emmanuel Champagne’s house. Horrified, Riel turned to find Josette coming down the trail. “Virginie Tourond is in labour,” she said. “Would you have her remain silent?”

  Women had come out of Fisher’s store to hear what was going on but seemed more concerned with watching him than her. Riel turned to avoid their accusing stares. If Larance’s wife knew that he had spent two years in an insane asylum, they all knew.

  Another scream from Virginie jarred Riel’s memory of the Beauport asylum. At night—every hour—the night-watchers would walk the floors to ensure the suicidal had not killed themselves. They had keys for their rooms, charged with protecting the poor souls, but sodomized them instead, and he had been forced to listen to their cries, powerless to help.

  The women’s stares, memories of other screams. Riel felt his thoughts unravelling. Marguerite appeared, and he settled at the touch of her hand. He turned to give the guards orders to move the prisoners to Boyer’s cellar and some of the older boys to find a lomg pole for the trap door. Within minutes, the prisoners filed out of Garnot’s. The white store owners and surveyors from Duck Lake, Middleton’s scout, and Honoré Jaxon being helped to walk. His pants were stained with urine. Riel could smell him from yards away. He watched his old friend with morose fascination. How close he had been to him, this Methodist who had so keenly dedicated himself to helping the Métis.

  Josette ran to Honoré, but he did not seem to recognize her. “He’s dying,” she said to Riel, who now regretted that he had not moved the prisoners at night.

  Honoré had finally got him in his sights. “Louis,” he cried, his voice gruff from disuse. “Have you gathered enough souls to your isolation and despair?”

  “Get them to Boyer’s,” Riel cried. And to himself: “Oh God, I beg You through Jesus, Mary, Joseph and Saint John the Baptist, have the charity to send me Your providential help. Please make it arrive soon.”

  Josette was now at his elbow. “He’s harmless—let him go.”

  “Would you keep him with your children?” he said, startled to find her suddenly close. “In the night, he would go to the other side.”

  “He would be safer there.”

  “I am ordering your husband in,” he said, “for excommunication.”

  He thought she would welcome the news, but she stared him down. “Good,” she said, “bring him in. Release him from your God. Then I will kill him.”

  Virginie’s screams were coming closer together, and Josette ran back up the trail.

  Riel watched her go. Would God forgive a woman who had aborted her child, and yet helped birth them into the world? The Lord had allowed fifty scouts to come to the side of evil, of tyranny. And the Métis, the children of Israel, were deserting the cause or threatening mutiny. Riel would fast until he had effaced their sins. He would confess, but the woman he had chosen as his confessor had broken a covenant with God.

  “Lord,” he whispered in a prayer, “speed the Indians to us as if on wings.”

  death may

  come today

  Josette went down the riverbank with a pail. Alone, only the sound of a whippoorwill in the trees. The water looked unnaturally dark with sediment or spring run-off—too dark, even in the predawn light. She reached to dip the pail and recoiled at the odd metallic smell. The water was sticky, viscous, the colour of blood. When she peered closer, she saw that it was blood, seeping from cuts on her body, streaming down into the river, turning it red. She tried to staunch its course from her veins, but it only flowed faster, the river rising on the bank until she felt it lap at her feet.

  She awoke with a start. It was still night, and for a moment she panicked, unsure of where she was. Reaching to touch a shadowed object not inches in front of her face, she remembered that she lay on the floor behind the stove in Xavier Letendre’s house, the children in blankets beside her. On
e of the wounded men groaned in the corner, and she pulled Wahsis to her. His small body curled against hers in sleep, and she lay there awhile longer to orient herself, moonlight glancing through the window above her head.

  Riel’s prophecy had come true. It was the third day of the Anglais assault on Batoche. She could hear a hoarse cough from a room on the floor above, where the Riel family slept. Weeks camped on the riverbank had worsened Marguerite’s condition—one that Josette recognized well enough. Louis Riel’s wife would be dead within a year.

  Josette’s dream was receding, but she could not ignore its dire message. Last night, she had anticipated the excommunication and banishment of her husband that Riel had promised, but a council meeting was hastily called and his plans forgotten. Gabriel had asked her if she could wait. It had seemed that she could, but now, the thought of Norbert so near … and the ancestors had warned her in the dream—kill him or pay with your own life’s blood.

  She got up quietly and tiptoed to the kitchen, stooping to a wounded Sioux warrior who had been carried in yesterday with a bullet wound in his upper leg. The women had set his shattered bone as best they could. Now the herbs he’d been given were wearing off and he drifted up out of sleep. Josette lifted his head to give him some medicine tea, then picked up a knife from the sideboard, slipping it inside her dress sleeve. It had a shorter blade than her skinning knife, more suited to her purpose. She pulled her shawl close and stole out into the night. Across the face of the waxing moon, wisps of cloud drifted like steam from a boiling kettle. Her foot had just left the bottom porch step, when a voice whispered in the dark.

  “Be careful.”

  Josette turned quickly. While she had been in the kitchen, Marguerite Riel had left the house to wait for her. She could clearly see her round face in the moonlight.

  Marguerite drew closer. “Gabriel Dumont is a dangerous man to love.”

  Josette looked up to meet her eyes. Not that long ago, she had convinced herself of the same truth. And had it dispelled the other night when she had seen him leave the rectory, waited in the trees to confront him. Riel spent two years in an insane asylum and you did not tell me. She had not planned to break down, to be so startled by Gabriel’s touch. She could still feel the path his fingers had taken across her back, the heat of his hand at her waist.

  “The first day I came to Batoche, you asked me if I had read the books that Louis brought,” Marguerite said, watching her.

  “Yes,” she said, remembering. “Women do not read.”

  Marguerite smiled at this. “I once feared that Louis would take you as a second wife.” Her tone was unconcerned, as if this was no longer one of her fears. “I learned to read my husband’s poems. I am not the tender creature, always attentive to her duty.”

  Josette could not believe what she was hearing. Second wife? “Two days ago he chose you as his Mary Magdalene.”

  “I wanted to tell him that he is no Christ, I am no Mary,” she said, muffling a cough. “But he chose the perfect woman. One who will ease his fears—strong enough to survive him and weak enough not to speak against him.”

  “You aren’t weak.”

  Marguerite shrugged. “In any other place, we would have been friends.” She held out her hand and Josette took it for a moment, then Marguerite turned to go.

  “You love him,” Josette said. Riel’s wife had stopped on the stairs but did not look around. “That is all he asks.”

  “Is it?” Marguerite said quietly, then continued up the stairs and into the house, closing the door behind her.

  Josette walked south across the meadow, over the rutted ground, past the damaged tents. Riel’s City of God. A heavy dew was on the grass, the air damp with mist. Dawn was coming, an echo of darkness undoing itself. By the time she arrived at the line of trees everything was cast in blue-grey shadow, birds rousing themselves to wakefulness in the trackless light.

  Her mind was in confusion. Riel wanting a second wife, and Gabriel—a dangerous man to love. The only man who had been a danger was not another woman’s husband, but her own. She found the trail, and it occurred to her that she should not be too quiet. What if one of the men mistook her for the enemy? When she had the rectory pits in her sight, the men’s hats appeared, silhouetted in the growing light. Some still slept, while others stood looking out over the barricades, watching the terrain in front of the church and down into the cemetery. A few had left the pits to do their business.

  One stood a little farther from the rest, and even in the half dark, she recognized Norbert. Most Métis men were tall and broad shouldered, but he had always been taller, his neck thicker than the others. He walked to a bush and undid his pants. In a moment, he was relieving himself. If she were closer, she would have heard the sigh he always gave out when the stream began to flow. She crept near, knowing that he would not hear her approach over the sound of his own piss. As she tried to get the knife out from her sleeve, a round of fire from the Rababou gun ripped through the bushes, accompanied by a screeching shell that exploded only yards from the front line of pits.

  Élie Nault emerged from the small aspens to the east, yelling, “Les Anglais are on the Jolie Prairie.”

  divide and

  conquer

  Gabriel left his rifle pit behind the church at a dead run, and shouted for men to follow him, leaving Michel Dumas and a dozen of White Cap’s Sioux to watch for any movement in the south. As he led the way down the east trail, he berated himself for another tactical mistake: he’d been watching Middleton’s troop movements on the small hill over the past two days, and failed to send enough men to watch what forces might ride on their east flank.

  When he arrived at the Jolie Prairie, a barrage of gunfire erupted from the direction of the church, and he closed his eyes. Tricked. He turned to go back, not sure from what direction the assault was coming.

  Michel Dumas came charging through the trees as if someone chased him. “The old man is trying to surround us—he’s got the cemetery … and put his cannon in position to stop our snipers across the river.”

  Gabriel brooded over the strategy used. Middleton had drawn him away from the church pits so that his men could recapture the cemetery. Stupid to think a full attack would come from the Jolie Prairie. The general might soon outflank them, but it wouldn’t be today. He ran back with Dumas, swearing les Anglais would not take the ground around the church and rectory. The Rababou gun had opened up to spray the rifle pits. Gabriel dove into one as the bushes above were cut to pieces. The Métis returned fire and there was a sudden yell from the church. Gabriel looked out of a crack between two logs in the barricade.

  It was light enough now that he could see Father Fourmond on the rectory steps with Riel’s white flag in his hand. “What are the priests up to now?” He whistled to stop the fire and watched as Middleton’s soldiers ran down to speak with Fourmond and then immediately returned to their position on the hill. Presently more of them appeared, flying their own white flag with its red cross stitched upon it. Two men carried a stretcher.

  Those in pits closer to the action passed back the message, “Father Moulin was hit by one of the Anglais bullets—he is crying like a baby.”

  pompous old fool

  Later that night, Father Moulin lay in a tent in Middleton’s camp. The doctor had given him something for pain, and he had dozed in and out as the day passed. When he had been brought in, he clutched at his lower leg, moaning to the surgeon who knelt beside him. “Do you think I will lose it?”

  “The bones are not broken,” the doctor said as he worked to stop the blood flow at the wound’s entry and exit points. “The bullet went clean through the muscle.”

  That morning he had been up in the attic looking for more blankets for the nuns when a vicious firefight had broken out between les Anglais and the half-breeds, his church and rectory in the middle of it. He had gone to the window to see what was going on when he felt a stabbing pain in his leg and had collapsed against a cedar box, shocked to
see a small hole in his soutane. At least his belly was now full of beef, and what they called “hard tack,” a dry biscuit that did not come close to bannock. He drowsed in a medicated haze and was jarred to wakefulness by men who had come back from the fighting. Two of them—officers by the sound of it—passed close to his tent.

  “Three days fighting on the same ground,” a voice said. “Are we managing to kill any of these miserable half-breeds?”

  “Get down to the cemetery at daybreak,” said the other officer. “When you hear cannon and Gatling fire on the prairie, test the rifle pits in the bush along that ridge. If you aren’t challenged, move the men up and capture the church and rectory.”

  “The general can’t try the same feint he did today,” complained the other man. “Riel won’t fall for it twice.”

  “Gabriel Dumont’s afraid of the Gatling. He’ll go wherever it does.” The officer paused. “I’ll personally drag Riel to his death if I catch him, but Dumont—I hope he gets away.”

  The younger officer snorted in displeasure. “I’m getting tired of Middleton fucking around. My men won’t be happy—why not just keep pushing and take the village? The pompous old fool would be surprised if we dashed right on and ended it all at the point of the bayonet.”

  “You’d be court-martialled for going against his orders,” the older officer said. “Advance to the church and rectory. No further.”

  The voices passed the tent and receded. Moulin got up on his elbows, straining to hear the last of their conversation. He fell back and patted the blanket close around him. Asking Middleton to move the priests and nuns out of the rectory was pointless. The general would refuse to do something that might warn the Métis of his battle plans. The rectory would be in the middle of the fight tomorrow, the clergy in danger after serving the Métis for years. How had it come to this?