Comanche Dawn (30 page)

“I once suffered from the falling sickness,” Goupil said. “I would have fits. Minime witnessed my suffering more than once on our previous voyages with the Sieur de La Salle. He mocks me, though I am cured now. A surgeon in Paris opened my skull and removed part of my brain. I haven't had a fit since, but Minime continues to torment me. He calls me ‘Sieur Hole-in-the-Head.'”

During the voyage from Petit-Goave, Jean had seen the Sieur de La Salle beat his valet for such displays, but afterward Minime would only laugh, then hop about crying, “Ouch! Oh, mercy! Ouch, ouch!” in the most convincing manner, as if still enduring the beating, though the Sieur de La Salle had already gone away. Then he would laugh again and go on with his mocking.

Once, Jean saw Minime strut up to Goupil, shouting, “Sieur Hole-in-the-Head, I have completed my inventory of the storehouse!” This at the very top of his lungs.

“Don't scream,” said Goupil, maintaining his composure in the face of the fool.

“I won't!” screamed Minime. “I will not!” His voice became maniacal. “I will not scream!”

Goupil's dignity in the face of such mockery made Jean admire him. He was a good man, a hard worker. The mapmaker schooled Jean in reading and writing, and tried to ease the suffering of others in the fort. Aside from Father Membre, Jean admired Goupil more than any other personage in the colony.

But it was still Father Membre who had earned Jean's highest admiration for solitary devotion to duty after the death of Father Desmanville. As the fever continued to consume the bodies of the afflicted, Father Membre stayed with them day and night, bathing them, feeding the few who could eat, praying over them, comforting in any way he could. They were friends: Goupil, the mapmaker; Membre, the priest; and Jean L'Archeveque, the young adventurer. The two older men served as the youth's mentors in the terrible surrounds of Fort St. Louis. Their influence stayed with Jean even now, almost twenty years later.

Despite the efforts of Goupil and Membre, the cemetery outside the log palisades of the fort began to grow. Daily, friends and relatives of the departed would go to the graveyard to wail and mourn. Their piteous cries served only to depress Jean all the more. He did not understand the convulsing when it began, but Goupil explained it to him.

“It started with Fleury,” Goupil said. “Fleury had the fever. He threw himself on the grave of Father Desmanville, hoping for a miracle. Strange to say, he rose and began to improve. In a few days, he had recovered. Hearing this, others began to fall on the grave to rub themselves in the dirt. They grovel in the dirt daily, and their writhings become more and more extreme. Minime mocks them, vicious scoundrel that he is!”

Goupil termed them “convulsionaries.” Every evening, Jean would watch them squirm in the dirt of the cemetery as Minime mimicked their antics. Then, one day, as Minime mocked and chided the convulsionaries, a seizure struck him. At first, Jean thought the buffoon was only tormenting Goupil again, as the mapmaker also looked on from the fort palisades. But the twitching and choking went on longer than any of Minime's former travesties. The dumbstruck convulsionaries gathered around as Minime's contortions continued in the dirt of the cemetery. His whole body would arch so violently that he would lift completely from the ground. Those gathered around him began to kneel and pray. Some began to convulse with Minime, so desperate were they for miracles.

After almost an hour, Minime's convulsions stopped. Recovering, he seemed strangely subdued and frightened. The incident only swelled the ranks of the convulsionaries, for many colonists considered Minime's fit an act of God. Minime emerged as a leader among the convulsionaries, and their ceremonies became more violent. They began whipping and beating each other, to “triumph with Christ through suffering,” they chanted.

During the height of this convulsionary fervor, the Sieur de La Salle returned with only nineteen of the fifty men who had sailed with him on the ill-fated
La Belle.
Eleven had died of disease. Several had drowned in the bay. One had been eaten by an alligator while crossing a river. The others had become lost, or had deserted, or had been murdered by savages.

After sleeping a whole day, La Salle awoke and took charge of the fort. Once he had witnessed their antics, he banned the convulsionaries from further assembly and had a fence built around the graveyard to keep them out. Then he put the colonists to work cutting and hauling timbers to be used in building a new storehouse.

The commander's return seemed to give new purpose to the colony at first. A few days after his return, however, Goupil said to Jean, “My young friend, I am afraid for us all. The Sieur de La Salle has changed. I feared this before, but since his return I am sure. His mind is touched. One day he is the leader I followed down the great Messipe on the last voyage. The next day he is mad.”

“I haven't seen him in two days,” Jean answered. “He keeps himself in his quarters. I was afraid he had taken the fever.”

“It is not the fever. It is the madness. Do you know what he does in there, Jean? While all around him is death and decay, while the sick moan, plagued by boils and lice? While our clothes fall away from us in tatters? While savages howl about us in the night? Do you know what he does?”

“No,” Jean said.

“He is writing a play. A
play!
”

Jean thought perhaps it was Goupil who had gone mad, until the next day, when the Sieur de La Salle emerged from his quarters and announced that the new storehouse would be a playhouse instead.

Rehearsals began. La Salle assigned roles in the play he had authored to members of the colony. The Sieur de La Sablonniere, being the only member of the colony with theatrical experience, took the lead roll of Jason. There was a witch in the play, to be portrayed by La Salle's valet, Minime. Minime was made to wear a woman's dress for this role and would prance about effeminately behind La Salle's back, disrupting rehearsals.

One day, Jean was watching as the playwright caught his valet in this foolishness and began to beat him with a length of cane such as the troupe was using to construct the backdrop of the stage. As he flogged Minime mercilessly, the valet began to shout, “More! More! Yes! Harder! Good!” in the manner of the banned convulsionaries. La Salle was so enraged that he thrashed Minime until the cane was bloody.

On another day, Jean went to the smokehouse to add green wood to the fire and heard strange noises when he entered. Peering around a rack hung with buffalo carcasses curing for the winter, he saw a bald man named Henri Casaubon chastising a young woman named Madeleine with blows from a whip. Jean knew the man as a convulsionary, but never Madeleine, whom Jean considered a follower of Father Membre. Now her breasts and buttocks were bare, and she asked for more abuse as the man pinched the nipples of her breasts and whipped her buttocks. Then, as Jean watched from hiding, the bald man dropped his trousers and mounted the woman as if they both were dogs.

Bursting out of the smokehouse, he ran headlong into the dark, out beyond the protective palisades of the fort, though he knew painted savages might very well be waiting to capture or kill him there. He hid himself in a shadow, so confused and afraid of what he had seen that he could not think of telling it to anyone, not even Goupil nor Father Membre.

He could still hear the moans of the dying from where he hid. Then suddenly, the howl of natives arose from the woods, in their way of mimicking wolves and owls, and Jean knew he must remain hidden until dawn, or be captured. He could smell the rank air of the shallow graves in the cemetery. He was lost, never to know civilization again. The boats were all sunk. His commander had gone mad. The colonists—all of them as far as he knew—were secretly engaging in perverse mockeries of the Christian faith. The horror of the place called Fort St. Louis fell in on young Jean that night. But the worst was yet to come.

On New Year's Day, 1687, La Salle's troupe of actors performed his play. After all these years, Jean could not remember the title of the play, nor the plot, if indeed it had possessed one. He remembered only two characters: Jason, played by the Sieur de La Sablonniere, and the witch, played by Minime. The morning of the play, the Sieur de La Sablonniere awoke very ill with a high fever. La Salle insisted that he must perform anyway, though the man could barely stand.

Only one scene from the play remained in Jean's mind through all his trials since that day. In it, the witch, played by Minime, was to cut the throat of Jason, played by the ailing Sieur de La Sablonniere. Then, the witch was to bring Jason back to life by pouring a magical potion on his wound. This murder of Jason was to be performed with the backs of the actors to the audience. Otherwise, the spectators would notice the lack of blood from the neck wound, diminishing the dramatic effect.

When the witch appeared, many of the audience members around Jean gasped, or drew back in fear, so successful was Minime in his portrayal. Few of the colonists had ever seen a play, other than the kind performed by rank street actors. Jean noticed that in contrast to Minime's spirited performance, the Sieur de La Sablonniere was so weak from the fever that his lines could barely be heard.

And so the audience sat in transfixion as Minime's witch stalked up behind the protagonist, grabbed him, and brandished the knife. One colonist bolted from his seat in fear that the whole thing was real, that Sablonniere would be sacrificed since he was probably dying anyway. Now Minime turned Sablonniere away from the audience and feigned the stroke of the knife across Jason's throat with such a convincing flourish that women screamed and men gasped. Sablonniere found his task of collapsing on stage so natural in his weakened state that he appeared truly dead. Minime tossed the knife aside and reached for his next prop, a bowl of the magical elixir. This he poured across the hidden wound of Jason and performed sundry witchlike incantations over the corpse.

When Sablonniere stirred, Jean L'Archeveque heard commotion and felt nervous movement all around him. The poor sickened actor was so weak from fever that his resurrection seemed most convincing. He drew himself laboriously to his feet, and staggered with his head bowed forward. One superstitious woman ran from the playhouse at this moment, another began to sob in fear. About half the members of the audience rose from the seats and seemed on the verge of bolting.

La Salle, who had been sitting in the front row with his script, prompting the amateur thespians, turned his back on the stage to admonish those in the crowd who would interrupt the performance with their silly superstitious outbursts. It was at this moment, with months of fear and despair poised to fall off the shoulders of the beleaguered colonists, that the treacherous Minime strayed from La Salle's script. He shrieked—utterly screaming his lungs out—and began to twitch on stage. All through the audience, screams and convulsionary antics erupted with the suddenness of a lightning bolt. The bald man, Henri Casaubon, whom Jean had seen mount Madeleine in the smokehouse, leapt from the audience to the stage, and people were jostled against one another.

Feeling a sudden instinctive dread, Jean tried to escape the playhouse, but everyone was moving at once. Someone convulsing on the floor grabbed Jean's leg as he tried to step over. He caught glimpses as the room seemed to spin around him: Minime twisting profanely on stage, his mouth frothing; the Sieur de La Sablonniere pulling Minime's knife from a wound in his stomach where it had been plunged by Henri Casaubon; La Salle falling forward as someone struck him on the back of the head with a playhouse stool.

Then Jean saw Goupil. Poor Goupil, the kind mapmaker, whose right arm was curling strangely around on itself, whose mouth was gobbling at something nonexistent, whose neck was twisting piteously, whose eyes were rolling back as he fell across the prone body of a convulsionary. Poor Goupil, who had thought himself cured of the terrible falling sickness now awakened by this horrid spectacle in this strange land of death and misery.

Jean kicked himself free. He saw Father Membre trying to help Goupil, but someone knocked the priest down with a pole. Jean fought his way through the madness—women baring their breasts, lifting their skirts, begging for whippings; men grinning as they used pieces of cane from the backdrop to flog those who convulsed at their feet; stools and theatrical props flying everywhere across the playhouse. Jean struck the crazed convulsionaries aside and reached Father Membre, pulling him to his feet.

“We must help Goupil,” the father said, his face all bloody. “He swallows his tongue in the clutches of his fits.”

Together, they reached Goupil and dragged him aside. Membre knew how to help the mapmaker, prying his jaws apart with a stick and forcing his hand in Goupil's mouth to keep the tongue from blocking Goupil's windpipe. Jean stood guard with a leg broken from a stool as Membre tended the fallen mapmaker.

Six colonists deserted the fort that day, preferring to trust their luck to the mercies of savages. The Sieur de La Sablonniere died a few days later, of his wound, or the fever, or both. Somehow, La Salle escaped assassination in the playhouse. Oddly, he made no mention of the thwarted theatrical production after the disaster, made no attempt to punish any malefactor's behavior. Instead, he announced his intention to make a new overland trek. He would take half of the surviving fifty colonists, leaving the weakest members at the fort. He would strike out to the northeast. His destination: Canada.

Canada! The very idea made Jean L'Archeveque's head ache. La Salle had not even been able to find the Messipe to the northeast, much less follow it for league after league through hundreds of nations of savages to the far-off and fabled outposts of Canada! Yet, when Jean was ordered to join the overland expedition, he secretly rejoiced. He would prefer even death in the wilderness to life in this twisted aberration of civilized society called Fort St. Louis, on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, in the land the Spanish called
Tejas,
after one of the nations of savages who lived there.