The sound of the knife slicing through the strands of hair makes Laure shiver. But she continues to cut, until it is all around her feet and a few shorn tresses cling to her shoulders. She has severed her hair from her scalp the way the male settlers chop at the trees to clear forests for their crude cabins. She gathers the mass into her arms and smoothes it out, tying around it the yellow ribbon given to her by Madame du Clos. Onto her head Laure fastens the bonnet she received at Marguerite Bourgeoys’ congregation but has so far refused to wear. It is the badge of a peasant housewife.
When she goes back downstairs, Deskaheh is still sitting at the table. He must have picked up all the beads because they are no longer there.
Laure’s hair covers her outstretched arms as if she is carrying an offering to an altar. “When I was still in France, I was warned that the Savages in the New World stole the hair of French women.” She places the plaits of her hair over Deskaheh’s arms.
His face fills with revulsion to see what she has done. Laure is satisfied, glad even, to see disgust in his eyes. It is what she has expected all along. She has wanted to prove to him that she is ugly. That they are both ugly and deserve to be alone in separate worlds.
In the alleyways of Ville-Marie, men meet to trade stories and occasionally to spill each other’s blood. The French have given the streets Savage names like Michilimackinac and Outaouaise. Even during the day, women are cautioned against walking outside in Ville-Marie. At night it is unheard of to do so. The fur traders, both the voyageurs and the illicit coureurs de bois, as well as the colony’s soldiers, emerge from the taverns with eyes turned glossy and red. There are even more men out drinking and causing trouble during the annual fur-trade fair.
Through the open window of her room at the inn, Laure can hear their voices, loud and slurred, echoing between the stone walls of the streets. It is against the law for innkeepers to serve spirits to any of the Savage men. But very few actually heed this rule, especially at this time. For the fur-trade fair, there are almost as many taverns as homes in Ville-Marie. There are enough establishments so that each Savage nation that has travelled to Ville-Marie can frequent its own tavern to avoid fights between rivals.
When the girls from France first arrived, they were warned by the sisters of the congregation about the dangers of the town. The religious orders blame the French for providing the brandy, the beer, and the cider that make the Savages do awful things like smash canoes, set fires, and destroy cabins. So long as they commit crimes under the influence of brandy, the Savages feel that they should be immune from punishment for their actions. The French men complain that no laws are enforced to punish the Savages for their violent acts because the furs they bring to be traded are so valuable to the authorities.
There is no question that New France is a lawless place compared to the rigid discipline Laure was accustomed to at the Salpêtrière in Paris. The King’s arm cannot reach with the same authority across the sea and into the woods of Canada, although none would dare to say so in public. How else could Laure be staying by herself in a room above a tavern in a town filled with revelling drunkards? She was probably safer in the Parisian dormitory with the diseased and mad women, but how much more exciting that there is nobody to watch over her here.
After she offered him her shorn hair, Deskaheh asked Laure to meet him later behind the inn. She agreed to see him even though she was frightened by the idea of going out alone at night in Ville-Marie. Laure lies upstairs in her hot enclosed room waiting for the hours to pass. All the while she attempts to determine Deskaheh’s intentions in asking her to meet him again. He seemed angry with Laure for cutting her hair and giving him the crude offering, so she is surprised that he still wants to see her. She is wearing the yellow dress from Paris, the one he saw her in last summer. She has covered her head in the shawl she wore to the funerals of Madame d’Aulnay and Mireille.
Laure invokes the memory of Madeleine. How she wishes her friend were here beside her so she could recount the events of the past day to her. Of course Laure knows that Madeleine would have little to say about Deskaheh. She would surely tell Laure not to meet him tonight. There is nothing to be gained for her soul in meeting a Savage on the sinful streets of this fur-trading town.
Once the final raucous cheers have faded downstairs and the last man has left the inn for the night, Laure gets out of bed and steps out into the hallway. She creeps past the closed doors of the other rooms and downstairs to the tavern. Madame Rouillard is still awake. She is behind the counter cleaning the glasses and dishes left over from the evening’s debauchery. Madame Rouillard doesn’t look surprised to see Laure standing on the stairs wearing a dress from Old France that is several ranks above her station. There must be very little that surprises a woman who is a midwife and runs an inn in a French colony.
The old woman takes a towel and wipes her hands. Although fleshy, Madame Rouillard’s features are firm and unreadable. Only her eyes gleam with emotion. “You want me to open the door for you?” she asks, putting down the towel and crossing her arms over her bosom.
Laure cannot think of a lie and wouldn’t dare utter one to this woman. She nods.
“You know that a girl out alone at night in this fur-crazed town is no safer than a fox or a rabbit.” Madame Rouillard’s eyes widen as they move down the length of Laure’s dress. “Especially a young one like you. When you get to be my age, you know that trouble will find you soon enough. You don’t have to go out looking for it.”
Laure’s face burns. What a fool she must seem in the eyes of this old innkeeper and midwife. She considers fleeing back upstairs to her room.
“Don’t worry. I’ve kept plenty of secrets in my day. The lives of the women who live along the banks of this river are filled with them. I could recount stories of sin and heartbreak that would have a priest recanting his vows.” Madame Rouillard laughs. “There’s no doubt that some of these girls are enjoying their new freedom. Of course, the price we pay for freedom is that we have to live here.” She laughs again. “Although I must say, and it does indeed surprise me, not many of the French women go for the Savage men. You see plenty of the other way around. But that’s not to say it doesn’t happen.” Madame Rouillard comes out from behind the counter, her ample hips making short strides toward the door of the inn. “Some people insist on making life more complicated than it needs to be.”
Laure follows behind her. “Thank you,” she says as Madame Rouillard opens the door onto the street.
“Don’t thank me. Sometimes when God gives us what we pray for, it’s actually a curse. Wait until morning before you come back here. That way I can get some sleep and the ones who are staying upstairs will think you just stepped out to get some bread.”
Laure nods again.
“I know that one you’re going to meet. He’s actually a decent character compared to most of them.”
The night is deep, and the blackness is lessened only by a single torch at the end of the alley. Laure uses her hands to guide herself around to the back of the wooden building. Deskaheh is already there, waiting for her. When he sees her, his expression is similar to that of Madame Rouillard. It is as if the Savage and the old midwife had known all along that Laure was capable of wanton behaviour, that it was only a matter of time before she became an adulterous woman.
The Salpêtrière teems with these women, their poverty and sins imprisoning them for perpetuity. Abortion is the only crime worse than adultery that a woman can commit in New France. Because women are still so much fewer than men in the colony, the laws about adultery are more lenient than in France. Some husbands decide to take their wife back, or to send her to a nunnery, so long as her dowry can cover the price, rather than to punish her according to the law. Abortion, however, is punishable by death, with the law enforced more strictly than in Paris, where there is an abundance of children filling the hospitals and workhouses at royal expense.
Laure wonders what Mathurin would do if he knew she had come
to the fur-trade fair and parted ways with the Tardifs so she could meet the Iroquois Savage Deskaheh alone in an alley behind an inn. Would he free her from her prison sentence and bear the shame of her actions?
Laure and Deskaheh have already, in the few words they exchanged earlier on at the table, said all there is to say about their situation. Laure has married a pig and must spend the rest of her life in his forest cabin. Deskaheh will be staying in the tribe of the Algonquins with his new wife and the baby she is expecting. They have both abandoned their childish dreams for lives they cannot escape. What, then, can they hope to gain by this clandestine meeting?
Deskaheh grabs Laure by the arm as soon as he sees her as if she is a prisoner being taken by the police. He leads her to a street known as rue d’Enfer, Hell Street. It is the centre of the fur traders’ nighttime revelry. French men sit with pistols guarding the pelts of moose, deer, fox, and otters, but also richer ones of wild cat, marten, sable, and bear. The objects of their trade with the Savages, kettles, pans, clothing, china, necklaces, litter the streets, abandoned by Savage men more enthralled by alcohol and firearms.
Deskaheh takes Laure into one of the buildings. She lowers her face, pulling the shawl over her forehead. She recognizes some of the men from Mathurin’s trading party. Several candles burn in the room, and some men are singing voyageurs songs. There are other French women and a number of Savage girls as well. They seem to be as drunk as the men. The noise is a tremendous blend of songs and the pounding of feet and hands on the wooden floor and tables. Stories of adventure, exaggerated by drink, are interspersed with raucous laughter. This could be any tavern in Old France except that here there are also Savage men and women who eat flesh, driven out of their minds by brandy. The room is hot and the candlelight has turned everything red.
Although it is dark enough, Deskaheh knows better than to stay in the main area with Laure. He takes her through a door to the back of the building where curtains of animal hide divide the space into private rooms. Deskaheh has brought Laure where prostitutes gather to entertain men for money. All sorts of colony men mix here like in the bawdy houses of Paris. By day they have other lives, wives and children, business to tend to, contracts to sign, fortunes to chase after. But tonight they are drowning those worlds in one cupful after another of brandy, wine, and spruce beer. The new country will be made—trees chopped, stubborn land ploughed, crops tended, furs traded— tomorrow, in the fall, some time later. The bitter weather will come, but for now the air is warm, stifling even. Bowls are filled and refilled with meaty soups. Blood flows easily.
At this court, Laure can easily be a queen. But the silk screens of the prostitutes’ quarters that Laure had imagined back in Paris are made of rotting animal flesh in Canada. The princes and dukes are bearded fur traders and Savage men. The enchanting women sing lyrics about forest romance in hoarse, drunken voices. Laure cannot even understand the serpentine movements of their Savage tongues.
There can be no mistaking why Deskaheh has brought her here, to this cubicle enclosed in hides. What must he think of her, a prostitute who gives herself away for free? Laure cannot determine if her pounding heart is filled with bliss or terror.
Deskaheh smells of soil, herbs. The Jesuit priests warned the women newly arrived from France all the way up the river and as they slept on its banks. These men eat the flesh of their captives. They roast them alive and eat the morsels bit by bit. This, I have seen with my own eyes. Laure feels sick with guilt. One of the priests who spoke to them was missing an ear. The Jesuits have all gone mad over the crimes they have witnessed, the desecration of their God by the Savages. Is this not Laure’s God too?
But Deskaheh is gentle when he removes her dress, more skilful, more patient than her husband. Laure probably smells like sour milk, like Mathurin, like the diseased and crowded quarters of the Paris hospital. They both carry the story of their lives like ointment on their skin.
Laure is being dragged under the waves and it is so easy to let herself sink, to become one with the sea. The prayers she learned at the hospital are a distant litany, a thing of the past.
Questions fill Laure’s mind as she lets Deskaheh consume her body, limb by limb. Is this what torture feels like? Am I also on fire and being eaten alive? How does it feel to burn for all eternity? Will I become a hungry forest ghost? Am I sea water consumed by flame? What will remain when I have gone?
For days, Laure stays in this way, enclosed by furs, waiting for Deskaheh to return to her. She wears the same dress and is starting to smell like the hides around her. He returns at all hours to see her, but she does not know the difference between night and day in this place that is always filled with drinking and song and lovemaking. Deskaheh lies to the pregnant woman and to the others in his village so he can come and meet her. Laure is his dark and ugly secret. He devours her the way the other Savages consume the illicit firewater. Only she isn’t sure which of them is being destroyed, who will emerge victorious when the trading is complete.
As with most everything in Canada, it is the weather that decides Laure’s fate. It is late August, and the first wind of fall blows through the town on the last day of the fur-trade fair, when the inns are closing up and the fur racks are being dismantled. Laure stands on the street, feeling the breeze on her skin, as the men make their way to the canoes. She feels frail like an old woman facing the bright sun and fresh air. Deskaheh has already left for his village. There was no need to say goodbye. Every encounter with him was filled with parting. She makes her way back to Madame Rouillard, to the Tardif couple.
20
It is October of her second year in the colony, and Laure is gathering the last of the garden’s yield: some beets and onions that she tears with difficulty from the frozen soil. Her arms ache from struggling against the ferocious tenacity of the weeds and keeping them from overtaking the garden throughout the summer. There were the vermin, digging and chewing through the best of the crops at night, and then the worms burrowing their way into the corn when the stalks finally grew tall enough to offer up the cobs. Still, Laure managed to extract some sustenance from this beleaguered cultivation. The earliest crops had been the lettuce and cucumbers, then the beans, which seemed to grow better than the other vegetables and which she picked for weeks until her hands were raw and the beans themselves came to be filled with big purple seeds.
Fall signals the end of the fresh food supply in Canada, and it comes early. By October the earth has already turned hard and dry, ready to be shrouded in snow until spring. The trees have shed their leaves, and the brisk gusts of wind from the north offer an ominous sign of the winter ahead. The thick stalks of the final deep-rooted vegetables tear the palms of Laure’s roughened hands. But she is desperate to gather all the food she can, as if stores of dried vegetables and jars of preserves can protect her from the dark desolation of a second winter in the cabin.
Laure is surprised to see Mathurin walking up the path one late-October day as she tends to the garden. He has been away for more than half of their first year of marriage, and she hadn’t really expected him to come back at all until the following spring. Tardif, upon seeing Mathurin come along the trail, greets him as if he has been here all along. The other men and even their wives only speak to Laure to ask if she needs anything. As a resident of their burgeoning settlement, they want to make sure she survives, but beyond the basic formalities they have no interest in befriending her. The men are afraid of Laure, and the wives don’t want their husbands speaking to her. She is from Paris, knows how to make lace, and refused for so long to cover her wild dark hair in the work bonnets all the other women wear. In fact it wasn’t until Laure came back from the fur-trade fair, shorn like a prisoner, that she started to wear her bonnet and a rude dress to match it. Also, unlike the other women, Laure is childless and without any family in the settlement or in all of New France.
Mathurin’s musket bounces on his belly as he walks up the trail to the cabin. He looks even more pink and fa
tter than when he left. Still like a baby pig well fed on grain. But unlike when he saw her last spring, this time Laure has also put on a little weight. The summer harvest throughout the colony and even in Pointe-aux-Trembles has been good. It would be easy to prepare for Mathurin a homecoming feast, except Laure knows what he has been up to and what she has done in his absence. There is very little to celebrate.
“Welcome back, my husband,” she says. She stands up in the garden, wiping her torn hands on her apron.
“Look at this place. It’s becoming a real village.” He unslings his musket and sits it up against the house.
There is warmth to the settlement, a feeling of ease that was missing last year. The impression that this stretch of forest is a ransacked military encampment has somewhat dissipated. There are more curtains in the windows, greater food stores for the winter, fewer cracks in the cabin walls, the odd piece of furniture brought in from Ville-Marie, plans to build a church, and the foundations laid for a grand seigneurial home made of stone.
Laure is better prepared for this second winter. She has dried fruits and vegetables in the sun, purchased an extra barrel of smoked meat, and sealed up some of the biggest holes in the cabin. While inside, her stomach is satiated, her gut warmed by all the sunshine of summer and its foods, on the outside, her hands are cracked and her face and arms have been darkened by the sun. Laure’s choices were either to remain a citadine and starve in this forest colony or to roll up her sleeves and yank from the earth whatever sustenance it had to offer.
In the cabin she prepares a soup of salted pork and cabbage while Mathurin grunts his pleasure at the sight of the curtains and the quilt she has made. He sets about making a fire from the light sticks Laure gathered over the past few weeks. She is glad Mathurin has returned, however temporarily, so he can cut a wood supply of heavy logs, larger than last year’s, to fill the cabin wall. She learned last winter that it is the cabin’s fire that will take her through to spring.
Bride of New France Page 21