by Michael Rowe
“Who,” I demanded. “Father de Céligny?”
“Yes, him.” Dumont crossed himself. The reverent gesture, so earnestly performed, seemed so incongruous in that setting, and from that man, that I fear I laughed.
“Of course they fear him,” I scoffed. “The Indians blame us for everything. These countries, and these poor, ignorant people, are in Lucifer’s thrall. They blame us when there is an outbreak of the pox. They blame us when there is a famine. They blame us when there is a drought. They call the Rite of Baptism water-sorcery. They accuse us of performing witchcraft in our chapels. They call us demons in black robes.”
“No,” Dumont whispered. “They fear de Céligny himself.” He looked all around as though to make sure no one was listening. “They call him Weetigo. An eater of human flesh and a drinker of blood. Human in form, but mji-manidoo, a demon.”
“The Savages do not understand the Rite of Communion,” I explained as patiently as I could, trying not to show my irritation. “They confuse it with their own barbarism, or the barbarism of the Hiroquois.”
“No,” Dumont insisted. “It is more than that. The Savages of which I speak have no quarrel with the Black Robes. But they give the mission of St. Barthélemy in Sault de Gaston a wide berth.”
“Then perhaps those are the Savages who have killed Father de Céligny,” I said in outrage. “If you have information about his fate, Dumont, you will come with me now to Father de Varennes, and you will tell him what you know, or what you have heard from the Savages.”
“I know nothing,” Dumont said. “I have heard nothing. And I will tell Father de Varennes nothing.”
“If you know nothing, my son, then what is your purpose here? Why did you seek me out today?” I asked him in bafflement. “Do you have something to confess? Do you not wish to be granted absolution? I can absolve you, but before I do, you must confess to me.”
Dumont again grew pale. Again, he crossed himself. This time, I did not laugh, for a mask of such dread and tragedy contorted his face that Melpomene herself would have recoiled from it. He seemed suddenly in the throes of a deep and profound spiritual terror. Were he not so clearly a man of a dissolute and profane reputation, I would have even said that he feared that his very soul was in peril from something he had done, or seen. So awful was Dumont’s expression that I had but one thought: that he had, himself, witnessed the awful martyrdom of Father de Céligny at the hands of the Savages and that it had been a most fearsome and terrible death. In his eyes, I found every nightmare that had tormented me, as a young priest in Chartres, about the terrible and agonizing fate that might await me here in New France.
“I need no absolution, Father,” Dumont said. “But perhaps God will grant you the strength and knowledge to conquer what awaits you in St. Barthélemy. We have brought terrible things to New France. There are worse things now walking in the forests at night than the Savages.” He knelt and took my crucifix in his filthy hands, and kissed it. “I will pray for you, Father. Pray for me, also.”
With that, Dumont rose to his feet. He looked around him, and then quickly took his leave from my company by a trail that I knew led to the other side of the post where some of the hivernants kept their canoes. He did not turn or look back as he hurried along his way before disappearing from view behind the trees.
The cold I felt in the wake of Dumont’s leave-taking was due only in part to the sinking of the sun in the sky, or the freezing egress of the coming night. I looked all around me and saw anew the cruel beauty of this wild country of white rivers and black lakes and forests. I saw afresh the savagery here; in nature as in man. Truly, I thought, this is the Devil’s own dominion. Even poor, mad Dumont, in all of his fear and confusion, knew it. There are worse things now walking in the forests at night than the Savages, Father, he’d said. I realized again that we soldiers of God were little more than pinpricks of His light in the vast darkness of this terrible place, and the only beacons by which the Indians might be guided, with Christ’s help, away from Satan and into God’s glorious light. I puzzled over his statement that we, meaning the French, had brought those things here, for surely the light we brought with us has been not only the light of God, but also the light of civilization and knowledge. But ultimately I ascribed the words to his confusion. Perhaps, ultimately, Dumont, after so many godless years among them, had become Savage himself. I swore to pray for him.
And pray I did, that night, though not only for Dumont, or Father de Céligny. Sleep was reluctant to claim me, but eventually it did. It seemed I had barely closed my eyes before Askuwheteau was shaking me awake with the utmost force and impatience to begin the journey upriver to the Mission of St. Barthélemy among the Ojibwa in Sault de Gaston.
We departed in two canoes into a dark grey dawn wreathed in heavy fog and a lowering sky threatening rain. The rains of that first autumn of mine in Trois-Rivières were unlike any I had known as a boy coming to maturity in Beauce. It was of a particular, piercing cold, as though the angels themselves were hurling frozen nails from a celestial height to pierce and humble the proud and unaccustomed. The rivers here also bore no resemblance to any of the three branches of the gentle Eure, near my family’s home near Chartres. Instead, they were wild and serpentine, wending through the rocks and the forests to, it seemed, the very edge of the world.
The Indians are impermeable to hardship in a way that we Europeans cannot fathom. I had of course been made aware of the stoical inurement particular to these people before I left France, but hearing it described by returning priests was entirely different to seeing it in the flesh. The Savage women, too, paddle the canoes alongside their men, as well as carry their own heavy packs along the trails. Their hands are hard and calloused and would be unrecognizable, in France, as belonging to any but the hardest-working peasant.
I sat close behind Askuwheteau in the canoe and tried to match the force of his paddle-stroke. He bent his body to the task as though it were a Sisyphean machine, his back leaning into each stroke. Each time his paddle cut the black water, a perfect white-crested whirlpool spun away in its wake. Try as I might to imitate his movements, my own poor attempts were clumsy and ineffectual. In truth, I felt unmanned, and yet I set myself arduously to my own portion of the labour, remembering well the admonitions of Father de Varennes with regard to the Savages’ measure of me. My life depended in no small part on their protection and goodwill.
Indeed, my position relative to theirs became more and more obvious. While I might be their intellectual and spiritual superior through the agency of my education and my role as Christ’s humble representative in their world of godless ignorance, they were, in every practical sense, my superiors. I saw—and felt—this reality with every stroke of the paddle that took me farther and farther into the wilderness.
We camped that first night by the shore of a nameless lake— nameless to me, though I do not doubt the Savages had a name for it, as they have a name for everything in earthly nature, as well as names for their pantheon of pagan gods and spirits that, I had been told, dwelt not only in the heavens above, but shared the earth with them.
My hands were raw and bleeding from the repetitive friction of wet skin against wood after that first long day’s paddle. Sitting about the campfire that night with the Indians, one of the older women, Hausisse, noticed my pain. From one of her packs, she withdrew a greasy poultice. She started to apply it to my wounds. When I pulled back and uttered some instinctive protest, she grasped my wrist as firmly as if I were an unruly child and rebuked me in Algonquian. Then she applied the poultice even more vigorously upon my wounds. In truth, the sting in my hands from the paddle began almost immediately to subside, a cooling sensation spreading across my palms, and indeed everywhere the poultice touched my skin.
“Meegwetch,” I said in awe, thanking Hausisse in my own crude Algonquian. I looked down at my hands in wonderment, for the pain had almost completely vanished, as though it had never been there.
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nbsp; She spoke again in Algonquian, calling me “stupid” or “foolish,” but in no way unkindly. She smiled and put the poultice back inside her buckskin pack, then shuffled off to join her putative “husband” by the fire.
The Indians regarded me with amusement as I continued to stare at my hands, but then made room for me when I went myself to sit closer to the flames. I found the smell of them comforting—that curious mixture of buckskin, sweat, dried lake water and smoke from the fire. In truth, their very presence was a bulwark against the terrors of the unknown and the unknowable. The darkness surrounding the fire was of an opacity the likes of which I had never known in France, or perhaps it seemed darker because, in France, I knew reasonably well what it might conceal. Here, in this savage Devil’s-land, God only knew what lay beneath night’s cloak, hidden and in wait.
As we lay down and prepared to sleep, I looked about me uneasily, for, unbidden, Dumont’s words had come back to me: There are worse things now walking in the forests at night than the Savages. I said a prayer for our safety and put myself in God’s hands as we slept. This time, I slept soundly and without dreams, surrounded by my Indian protectors.
The next morning, upon waking, I washed in the lake before my morning prayers. The poultice on my hands that had dried and crusted while I slept was rinsed off in the lake water. Miraculously, my hands had almost completely healed while I was asleep. Examining them in the pink light of the early dawn, I saw that the wounds were dry and had already scabbed.
I went to find Hausisse, the old woman who had acted as my surgeon, to show her this miracle, but when I did, she seemed uninterested. Hausisse looked away, muttering words under her breath in Algonquian I could not understand. After taking our morning meal, we packed up our rudimentary camp, loaded the two canoes, and again we set out across the water in the direction of Sault de Gaston.
The first few weeks passed without incident. They evolved into a backbreaking cycle of repetitive days that began at dawn and ended at sunset. The air had grown decidedly colder as the days shortened in anticipation of the coming winter. The hills and mountains surrounding the lakes and rivers were dappled in scarlet and saffron yellow, breathtakingly beautiful in the wildness of their colour. One morning, we woke to a light dusting of snow around the camp, but it melted with the sun, almost before we were underway again. The men shot wild fowl that the women would then prepare as part of our supper, and they fished the dark water with a dexterity at which I marvelled.
Though the work of paddling and camping became no easier, and in fact the land grew more rugged and forbidding the closer we came to our destination, making the portaging of the canoes and packs more difficult, a camaraderie of sorts seemed to have grown between us. I am under no illusion that the Indians saw me as one of them, and indeed they often mocked my seeming inability to master the most rudimentary of their skills, from paddling to portaging, yet we had settled into a peaceable accord.
My proficiency with the bow and arrow, however, surprised them, especially the men. Unbeknownst to them, of course, my father had hunted often on our family’s estate in Beauce, and he had drilled me throughout my boyhood in this one martial skill. Askuwheteau in particular took delight in my ability to shoot. On such occasions as we had time for recreation, which where precious few, he allowed me to practise with his own bow and arrow. While Askuwheteau was my unchallenged superior, I flatter myself that I won a measure of his respect in time.
I spoke my crude Algonquian with the other paddlers. With Askuwheteau, I spoke a mixture of Algonquian and French by which we both seemed to understand one another. We were not friends—the very idea seemed preposterous, especially then—but perhaps my utter dependence on him, coupled with my willingness to share a full portion of the work of our voyage and match the Indians effort for effort, had roused an answering kindness in him that made him more than merely my guide.
I came to find comfort in the sound of their voices, especially at night in the forest around the campfire. The sound had become a sort of lodestar of safety in the midst of the wilderness.
Blessedly there had been no sign of Hiroquois hunters along our route—in itself a miracle, for their appearance would have very likely signalled our doom. I realized that the Algonquians had been paid to protect me, and, as much as I might doubt their commitment to my safety, still I sensed that this group wished me no ill will, and indeed would safeguard me to the best of their ability and deliver me to the site of St. Barthélemy as promised, and wait there to return me to TroisRivières—either tragically alone, or in the company of Father de Céligny.
In the fourth week of our journey, we stopped in an Ojibwa village a week’s paddle or more from Sault de Gaston. It was apparently a village where Askuwheteau was known and respected, for the chief received him. The Chief and some of the Savages took my measure gravely, and with what appeared to be suspicion. Askuwheteau turned his back to me and spoke to them in a low voice. Over his shoulder, the Chief and the men with him continued to regard me with something I took to be either anger or fear, or indeed some mixture of both. Anger I had seen before, during my year in New France, but their fear was something with which I was unfamiliar.
Clearly, at Trois-Rivières the Indians were used to us, and even farther afield than the settlement there, we Fathers were more likely to be met with contempt than fear. And yet there it was in the eyes of the chief and his men: fear, or so it appeared to me.
Finally Askuwheteau turned to me and spoke in French. “Black Robe,” he said. “The Chief wants to speak with me alone. Go through the village, to the water’s edge and wait for me.”
I answered him in Algonquian, asking him what was wrong. I had a notion that the Chief might more kindly consider me if I spoke one of their languages.
Again, Askuwheteau spoke to me in French. “Go, Black Robe,” he said gruffly. “Go wait by the water. Do not answer me in Algonquian. Do not speak my name. Do not answer me at all. Go, now.”
Without a word, I turned and walked towards the village, which was not itself dissimilar to others I had seen: huts of birch-pole and tents, the whole place a seething, untidy coil of Savages, their filthy children, and their verminous dogs, all intermingling hither and thither in the mud, or squatting on their haunches, men and women both, in apparently earnest debate or parley. The acrid smoke from the wood cooking fires and the odour of the Savages themselves, combined with the noise of their squalling children and barking dogs, became almost overpowering. I was more eager than not to obey Askuwheteau, and so I went to the edge of the lake and waited for him there.
After a time, Askuwheteau came to where I was sitting. I had not heard him approach until he was standing behind me. I turned and looked up. The sun was behind him, so his face was hidden from my sight.
“Black Robe,” he said. “We may stay here tonight, but only tonight. And we are told we must stand guard over you until the dawn. Also, you may not sleep in the village. You must sleep here, near the water, away from the people.
“Why?” I queried, rousing myself to a standing position. “For what reasons?”
“They fear you,” Askuwheteau replied. He stared at me with no expression. It was as though the fact of the Indians fearing me was so entirely reasonable that it required no elucidation.
“What is there to fear?” I scoffed. “They know of us. They have seen Black Robes before. Surely we have more to fear from them than they have to fear from us.”
“They have seen Black Robes before,” Askuwheteau said, with that maddening, implacable stolidity of the Savages. “They are not afraid of Black Robes. They are afraid of you.”
“Of me? Why?”
“They believe you are Weetigo. They believe you are like the other Black Robe. The one you go to.” Askuwheteau was silent for a long moment. Then, he spoke again. “You will sleep here, Black Robe. I will guard you. I am not afraid of you. I do not believe you are Weetigo. If you go to the village tonight, they will kill you. And to
morrow, we leave.”
“Why do they believe this?” I was again outraged. “This is nonsense. It is blasphemy.”
“They speak of the other Black Robe. They say he eats flesh. They say he drinks blood.”
“Askuwheteau,” I said, trying to calm myself. I spoke slowly, enunciating carefully, in French, which Askuwheteau rudimentarily understood. “We have told you the meaning of the Eucharist. You know of the rituals of the Black Robes—how the bread and the wine become the body and blood of Jesus Christ through the miracle of transubstantiation. We do not eat the flesh of human beings, nor do we drink their blood. The very thought is an affront to God. The people of this village do not understand. You should have explained it to them better. You speak their language. Tell them they are mistaken.”
“Weetigo eats the body and drinks the blood,” he insisted stubbornly. He gestured to the village behind him. “There are many stories of Weetigo here. People have seen the Weetigo in the village where we go to your Black Robe. There are many dead.” He gestured again, this time towards the lake. “Many dead in the water. They fell from the sky.” He gestured overhead. “This Weetigo flies at night, like the owl. He runs like the wolf. He has killed many.”
I was frustrated by Askuwheteau’s dogged insistence that this gruesome Indian legend of a mythical demon (as I then understood it, an evil spirit that enters a human body and possesses it, turning the unlucky vessel into a cannibal monster) was true. I was horrified that it should be so blasphemously entangled with our own holy ritual of Communion. I was reminded again of Dumont’s disquieting raving on the shore at TroisRivières about Father de Céligny being something other than human.
While it had been relatively easy to dismiss Dumont as mad, it was harder to be as sanguine in the face of Askuwheteau’s declaration that he was all that was standing between me and a terrible death at the hands of an entire village of Ojibwa Savages who believed I was in league with a living demon.