A lone armed guard had been posted in the Ridge house. He could summon the aid of the leader’s thirty African slaves, should some fool or pair of fools take it upon themselves to revolt. The night was calm, the last cows had been slaughtered that afternoon to feed the convoy dispatched by West Point and expected any day. The Indians had been given over eight years to leave of their own free will. Now the army was preparing to remove them. Word was getting around. There was talk of a long forced march, in February or the month after. In New Echota, the meeting of the Cherokee General Council had grown heated, bitterness and rancour boiled over, clans formed but the dissension was ultimately quelled. One chief may have raised his voice and shouted over the others, but he’d apologized. In the end everyone had swallowed their anger and gone home. Appearances had to be kept up, to show the Americans the Cherokee could get along. Out here, on the massive farm abandoned by Ridge months earlier, not much was left: some animals, a few dozen guns. A handful of farmhand’s shacks had been cobbled together in the fields. Their occupants ran stills and had built fences to keep the coyotes out; you could see their tiny lights, flickering in the night.
Three years earlier a prospector had unearthed a gold nugget, on the mountainside or in a riverbed. He brought it to town to be assayed and bought a round at the bar, and then another, and made it known that the time had come for the Redskins to clear out, the White Man was coming. There was gold in these Appalachian hills. Pans and shovels sold out the very next day.
In one of Albert’s notebooks, between two lists of scribbled dates that correspond with the phases of the moon, but are at odds with each other, we learn that Aimé was probably the final link in a complex chain of operators that stretched from the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, somewhere around Saint-Jean, all the way down to Georgia and Alabama. More or less all he knew, and he knew scarcely more than we do, was that Aimé had been hired by one Arthur Pothier, M.D., Esq. He knew his job was to deliver the guns to a Jesuit somewhere outside Chattanooga; the rest was none of his concern. He’d never met Pothier, they’d been put in contact through secret missives, back when Aimé was living around Boston, looking for kicks. Intuition told him the weapons would help lay the ground for the imminent uprising in Lower Canada, but he’d never met a man willing to admit to membership in the company of the Sons of Freedom. We believe his name was known in certain circles. He was trustworthy, fearless, an experienced man who didn’t ask questions. According to available sources, which will never be entirely adequate, Aimé was little more than a link, perhaps the last, or maybe the first, in a long chain of influence and contacts working to arm the rebels by any and all possible means. While Louis-Joseph Papineau was trying to convince president Van Buren to back the Patriotes if talks with the Crown soured, other networks were taking shape. Aimé’s name was getting around. He was a young man you could count on, a man of honour, available for hire. He knew the States well, had travelled the length and breadth of the Appalachians, was acquainted with persons of interest, and it was said he wasn’t scared of anything.
That at least is a version of Aimé’s story, one of many that have come down to us. Take it with a grain of salt. The oral and written sources that diverge and converge in the records tell us he was there, hidden under a larch tree, waiting for the right moment to steal the Indians’ confiscated guns and deliver them to a Jesuit whose name has not come down to us. The Jesuit transported them across the country and finally to the border, via the same underground byways used twenty years later by runaway slaves on their way to the abolitionist states up North. As far as we know no one ever asked where the guns came from, or revealed the answer to this unasked question, even under torture.
Emerging from his hiding spot under the tree, Aimé snuck onto the grounds, unnoticed, his path lit from behind by the flickering, milky moonlight. Surveillance was more or less non-existent. Clouds floated around in the sky, masking some stars before others and accentuating the curve of the horizon, as if the earth were round. Aimé quickly crossed the mowed grass, then took a dirt path between two small hills. The house appeared in his field of vision. Aimé had a knife strapped to his thigh, ready to use if need be. He touched it with his fingers as he approached the windows of the grand Virginian veranda that ran around Major Ridge’s house. He peered through a ground-floor window into a sort of boudoir, fully furnished, dimly lit, where a young soldier in a dirty uniform slept outstretched on a récamier. The gleam from the candles on a nearby table flickered in time with his breathing. Aimé walked around the house to check if he was alone, and to verify the accuracy of the information he’d received. In the distance, to the east of the elegant two-storey home, were the slaves’ quarters. There was no light over there but Aimé knew where they were, just as he knew that all comings and goings ceased after nightfall. He reached the front door and crept inside, without a sound or moment’s hesitation. The screen door didn’t creak, his movements were smooth and precise. It was as if he’d been doing this a long time, and did it often, under different circumstances that always required a heightened level of control over his limbs and his entire body.
He went down a hallway to the room where the guns were stored, along a rug that was unrolled for several yards in front of him. The hallway was narrow, with whitewashed walls and ornamental woodwork on the ceiling joists. There was no trace of Cherokee culture in the candleholders, or the bowls of fresh water set out along the shelf built into the wall. As he looked in on the boudoir, through the door on the left, Aimé saw a deer’s head on the back wall. He couldn’t have seen the bear’s head directly across from it, looking the deer square in the eye. The soldier was sleeping. It was nearly four in the morning. On his way out Aimé would help himself to the sleeper’s gun, and maybe keep it for himself.
The weapons that had been confiscated from the men of the Cherokee Nation were stockpiled in a back room, a sort of redoubt more crudely finished than the rest of the house. Long guns leaned against a rough plank wall, pistols lay on the floor. The darkness was near total, he used his hands to find his way, slowly but confidently. You could have sworn he’d been here before. His hands made contact with the walls, like rhythmic, confident pulses. His load would soon grow heavy, but he’d promised to deliver an exact number of weapons, and didn’t have far to carry them. Above all, the leather strap that held them must not break. Aimé figured he wouldn’t think twice about slitting the young soldier’s throat if he snuck up on him, or raised the alarm, or cried out for help. He’d never killed a man before. It was something outside his ken, an unfamiliar feeling. It was possible to live as long as he had and never kill another person. He’d never killed a living soul, but knew he would do so without giving it a second thought: it would be just one move amid so many others, a decisive act in the middle of a long series of such acts, a new and unfamiliar one perhaps, but one he carried deep inside him, on his person, strapped to his thigh, somewhere in the hunting knife in its upside-down leather sheath.
He worked quickly, undisturbed by fear, and didn’t stop when the house gently creaked, confident he could differentiate the sound of a man waking up, somehow pick up on a deliberate, human languor in the vibrations. His bag full, he pulled the rope to draw it tight and slung it over his shoulder. It weighed over fifty pounds and Aimé slumped a little under its weight, could feel a piece of metal poking him in the back, between two vertebrae. He came out of the cold, dark room and headed for the front door, then turned around and furtively crossed the hallway in the opposite direction to go up to the next floor. The door to the master bedroom was slightly ajar, it hadn’t been fully closed since the Ridge family left. In the as yet uncivilized night, faraway lights shone through the large window. An animal skin lay on the floor in front of the bed. The room was redolent of human presence, as if emptied of its inhabitants not five minutes earlier. The canopy on the four-poster bed swayed in the door’s gentle draft. Aimé had an eerie feeling that lasted a few seconds, as if a f
luorescent ghost were slipping out through the closed window, not breaking the pane but passing right through it. He opened the big mahogany chest of drawers and helped himself to the valuables, a few bibelots and jewels, a dreamcatcher he could sell in town.
He walked by the young soldier one more time, not feeling contemptuous because he was asleep and had failed to resist. As planned, he stole the pistol. Aimé felt no contempt. He realized that, in fact, he had a lot in common with this man. They shared certain facial features and a way of enjoying a moment of peace before hostilities broke out. He knew that, because of him, this young man would probably lose his posting and his pittance. Superior officers would charge him with dereliction of duty. He’d wash up in some Savannah back alley, a forgotten man in a pool of his own piss, pushed over the edge by one swig too many. Looking at him, Aimé wondered what it meant to be a good soldier. What was the difference between wearing the colours of a nation, or a nation in the making, and acting for yourself, under cover of darkness, unnoticed by one and all? This private one-way conversation between Aimé and the sleeping soldier was over in a fraction of a second.
He left Major Ridge’s house and ran off into the night. The guns rattling around and the clacking of metal and wood made Aimé nervous. He ran in a straight line, and down below in the darkness he could just make out the slaves’ quarters, where the lights had been snuffed out hours ago and would not be lit again until hours later. He crossed the abandoned cotton field and had almost reached the hills slightly further off in the woods when he heard the cracking of a broken branch echoing over the empty, abandoned property. Aimé stopped. A big black man stood before him, just a few steps away. He wore torn dark clothing and carried a saddlebag and a leaky canteen. A nearly invisible presence in the darkness; all Aimé could see, or almost make out, was the pink of the inside of his lips, and the greyish white around his irises. They looked each other up and down in silence. Aimé slowly moved his right hand toward the handle of his hunting knife, and flexed the muscles of his upper body. The other man watched him do it, breathing out of his open mouth, with a neutral expression on his face somewhere between a yawn, repressed suffering, and indifference, like the belaboured beginning of a sneeze that will never arrive. He seemed to be considering what to do next. Slowly, he got out of Aimé’s way, his bare feet dragging on the ground, scraping the dry earth, picking up invisible grains of sand. The moonlight hit him. Aimé took his hand off his knife, lifted his palms in a gesture of good faith, and walked past the black man, who had no shackle on his ankle or neck, but a thick, bumpy scar running down his cheek. No words were exchanged. Why would there be? Aimé had no idea what to say to a slave, not even thank you, it was inconceivable; he wouldn’t have known what to say even if he’d tried. He noticed the swollen scar, it made an indelible mark on his imagination, and set off running again, toward the treetops in front of him, which blocked the view of the stars, and the moon disappearing behind him.
Aimé had left his horse and little cart in a dense patch of forest by the banks of the Oostanaula River. He took care not to leave by the same path. He threw his bag in, grabbed the reins, and jumped on the seat. Chattanooga was just over the state line, a few dozen miles to the north, along the river. He knew the Cherokee Indians would have no difficulty tracking him, he’d left plenty of traces. He also knew no one would ask them to.
A few weeks later, in a field on the edge of the Richelieu River, in the shadow of Mont Saint-Hilaire, a group of four habitants hand-picked for their discretion by Arthur Pothier, M.D., Esq., found a trunk containing eleven Springfield muskets from the War of 1812, twenty-two beat-up Phildelphia Deringer .50 calibre pistols, and a collection of metal jewellery that had belonged to Major Ridge’s mixed-blood wife, Susanna Wickett, who’d left all such accoutrements behind. She wouldn’t need them where she was going, where she could look forward to growing old in peace and prosperity. Here, up North, in preparation for the battle that might take place at Saint-Denis, or maybe elsewhere, they could be melted down for shot.
CHAPTER TEN
MARCH 1776
QUEBEC, QC
That winter, living on his own and begging scraps of food, he noticed that the growing pains that had dogged him since birth were gone. Like a silent partner in his life, he’d grown accustomed to the pain running up and down his legs as he walked, and especially when he stopped, in some borrowed corner to sleep for the night or back alley to stretch his muscles. It had become so normal he didn’t immediately know how to react. Aimé had been in constant pain for years, a nagging but manageable pain that lingered patiently on the threshold of the bearable, yet gave him tics that reared up the moment he sat still too long. He’d tried to quell the pain by massaging himself, as the sisters had when he was small. It only gave him spasms.
It was most acute in his legs but he felt pretty much the same thing in his arms, around the elbows, coursing through the veins of his forearms to the wrist, and around the joint next to his shoulder blades as well; an internal, untouchable pain that wasn’t exacerbated by applying pressure on his skin with his finger; a fully independent pain flowing into his muscles and cartilage like a fluid, like a strong, steady river. People with the knowing look of experts told him he was growing too fast, his body seemed bent on ageing at an improbable rate. Months after his birth, they said, he already weighed more than twenty pounds and had a stretched-out look, as if evil forces were elongating his legs and neck at the same time, like bread dough first kneaded and then rolled out and handled at length. It looked like he might die young with the wizened body of an old man.
It happened just after Aimé turned sixteen, though he wasn’t aware of it, absorbed as he was with thoughts of day-to-day survival, like the rest of the legion of ghosts you passed on those streets, people no one wanted anything to do with. There was no one left to take him in, it wasn’t anyone’s job to look after him once he’d left the seminary. All around him Quebec was like a massive closed door, and he sought out nooks and crannies, deep and dry, where he might be forgotten and safe for a while. He knew all the passages and the vaults and the back alleys where the stench of curling smoke gave a misleading impression of heat.
It hit him a few days after the pain dissipated without warning, in the middle of a snowstorm. He’d taken refuge under a porch in Golden Dog Lane, with a stolen loaf and a box of matches to warm his fingers from time to time without attracting too much attention. He was starting to feel the frostbite on his calves and shins in a way he never had before. His whole body was contracting against the cold, the rags covering his back were full of holes, like the toes of the boots he had pulled off the feet of a dead American patriot left behind by the nurses. He moved his legs and began running on the spot to warm himself, as it dawned on him that he was totally unfettered, his thighs and the backs of his knees suddenly freed of a formerly unshakable weight. He cracked one or two joints on his right ankle, and silently prayed while moving his lips slightly, to make it last. For the first time since his birth he felt good, despite the harsh cold; he was at one with his body, it seemed to be granting him a second chance.
Two hundred years later he would recall this moment in such an idealized light it was hard to refrain from mentioning it to the people he encountered all over the continent. But he didn’t say a word. It would have been hard for others to understand how it felt, the precise moment when he stopped growing, a moment that would take on an increasing importance throughout his long life, but that he’d never discuss out loud or describe in writing in any volume of memoirs or document of any other kind. Though this moment left no trace it may well be the very heart of his secret, the epicentre of his personal mystery.
The squalls rose off the St. Lawrence and blew hard inland, effortlessly ascending the cliff under their own momentum and then blowing back down the other side, over field and farm, after whirling around the fortifications and observation posts where sentries’ eyes were trained on the south th
at grew more volatile by the day. The Continental Army stationed at Montreal had attacked Quebec in the dying days of the previous summer. It was a disaster. You could still stumble over frozen bodies in the woods around the city walls. The inmates packed into the prison’s oldest wing were loud and unruly; their shouts for freedom rang out over and beyond the Plains of Abraham. Some hurled insults at the redcoats, while others plied the local habitants with conciliatory words. You could hear these prisoners crying out in a dozen different accents, English whose pitch and yaw were unknown in these parts. You could hear them imploring the citizens to set them free, to join them in their revolution — that word that cropped up again and again, full of rage, echoing in the night as if imbued with the power of an incantation.
Aimé devoured his loaf of bread, paying no attention to the cries of prisoners carried by the river wind. The skin on his face was chapping and the patchy beginnings of a beard were sprouting on his cheeks. He kept a low profile. There were more and more soldiers, so they took a hard line with indigents and paupers. It manifested as a suspicion of the masses who lived outside the walls and ventured into the Citadel to buy provisions or sell wilted produce in Place Royale. The red and blue uniforms travelled in packs and in lockstep, suddenly halting their forward march in front of a passerby to ask questions: Where were they from? Where were they going? What were they doing outside at this hour? Often, satisfied with the answers but still not entirely at ease, they’d accompany people toward their homes, even as far as Saint John’s Gate, then watch them head down the dirt road to the village of Saint-Roch by the river.
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