River City (53 page)
No one was noticing her. No one had acknowledged her entry. Ignored, frightened, Anik stole inside the old mayor’s bedroom.
She wished he was in a hospital—a place where she’d not be admitted. She wanted him to comfort her, to tell her a story, to make this stop.
He gurgled in his sleep, waking himself. Camillien Houde opened his eyes and tried to focus on the young girl in his room.
“Anik,” he murmured. He tried to smile. “Am I in heaven?”
She rubbed a forearm that was covered in goose bumps, and felt herself trembling.
This man’s dying! He might die this second!
And she was struck by a thought both self-conscious and self-aware. She knew that she was both terrified and curious.
“Where’s my spiritual advisor?” he murmured. He was managing to keep one eye partially open, while the other one, quivering, closed.
The room smelled really bad. The stink came from the bed, and she knew what it was.
Sounds in the hall made her jerk around, and a second later the nurses arrived with a pan and sheets and water and shooed the girl away. Nuns came next, and one caught Anik by the shoulders and gave her a moderate shake. “Don’t be here! Who are you? You can’t be here.”
Father François stepped to her rescue. “I didn’t know you were here, Anik.”
“Is he going to die, Father?” she whispered.
The priest whispered in return. “We don’t like to say those words within earshot of those who are ailing.”
She spoke more quietly, although the old mayor couldn’t hear her anyway. “Is he going to?”
“We’ve spoken of this day many times.” He held her shoulders as the nun had done, but with infinite tenderness. “We must prepare ourselves.”
Nodding, she wiped away a few tears. But more tears flowed.
“When the women are done, I’m going to speak to Camillien. It’s time for his last rites, his last confession. If you wait in the living room, we’ll leave together, Anik. I’ll take you home.”
She managed another nod and moved towards the door.
The oldest nun went to the curtains, pulling them shut.
The mayor’s great bulk proved difficult for the nurses and the nun, and they beseeched the only male in the room to lend his brawn. They rolled the big man one way, pulled at the sheets and, with eight women heaving, heaving, they rolled him the other way. One set of sheets was opened and another
condemned to a heap, all a stinking mess the priest endeavoured to ignore. In the end the dying man was made comfortable again, and the priest was left alone with him.
“Father,” Houde whispered.
“Do you wish to say your confession, my son? It’s time.”
“First,” the old mayor whispered.
The priest had to lean in closely to catch the softly spoken words.
“Yes?” he asked.
“Tell me. The dagger.”
The priest gazed upon him solemnly, staring into the one eye that battled to remain open. He knew now that this was why the Machiavellian had asked him to be his priest, to conduct a final transaction, a political job. “You did the right thing, Camillien. That young man you admire, the son of your old acquaintance, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, has taken possession. De Bernonville has his grubby hands on his money. Your own estate has been enhanced. The relic will remain here. In Quebec. In Montreal, where you know it belongs.”
The priest noted the frail nod of comprehension.
“Now, my son, it is time for your confession.”
Father François admired the manner in which the old sinner rallied his strength and spoke, quietly, with a true spirit of contrition. He did not need to coax him. The man had lined up his sins and knew the order in which they ought to be related. When he was done, he could see that the man had emptied his spirit, and now his life had dissipated as well.
The man’s hand trembled, trying to reach for his own. Father François took it. He had experienced the remarkable strength of newborn babes and felt a similar pressure on his fingers. The priest bent low to the old man’s lips.
He ended his confession as he had begun. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”
Then winked.
Father François gave him absolution. He offered the forgiveness of his Lord, although he knew that his own heart lacked that purity, that love. He administered the last rites, and the man’s eyelids quivered, first one, then the other, as though each moment required a fight.
The priest touched the old mayor before he left, surprised by the love within him that sprang for a political foe. Not a great and all-encompassing love, perhaps, yet love, mysterious and corroded, nonetheless. That final wink had conveyed great spirit. He left Houde in peace.
Momentarily, a nurse looked in on him, and fluffed his pillow and adjusted his pyjamas. Then she left the room as well, to allow him to sleep, perhaps to die.
Anik waited for several minutes before she crawled out from the closet, where she had crouched down during the commotion with the sheets. She looked at the old mayor dying. His breath gurgling. Then she got to her feet, opened the door, and walked past everyone and departed the house. A block away, well past the reporters who were calling to her, she began to run.
Tears flew off her cheeks like rain. Then they were gone, and she ran with fury only.
One hundred thousand people turned out for Camillien Houde’s funeral procession. Anik Clément declined to attend. Unable to comprehend the child’s insistence on remaining home, her mother assumed that her grief was too confusing, perhaps reminiscent of her father’s death. In some ways, she supposed, Anik was losing a second dad. Carole attended on her own, and was admitted to the funeral service itself. On the streets, it seemed that the entire city had turned out, sixteen people deep as the coffin drove by, the dignitaries in their finery, the working people in their scuffed shoes and proud, shabby jackets, all the men in hats, the women with their dark bonnets on and so many in black dresses as though they themselves had lost a spouse. The people believed that Montreal had lost a measure of its soul, and a sadness hung upon the city. An era was passing. Goodbye to the all-night clubs, to the dancing ladies, to the girls in fancy lace, and goodbye to the gambling dens where a man might dream of riches and taste the bitterness of further demise. Goodbye to the music palaces and the comedians and the farcical courts of law, where substitute madams paid paltry fines to judges they’d be seeing later in their chambers.
Goodbye to the good times, goodbye to the wars and famines, goodbye to the old, weary days, and goodbye to Camillien Houde, the rascal. Goodbye to his comic voice and his broad smile, for he had been a man who could lift a people’s spirits even as he confounded them with his logic. He could make a man laugh while picking his pocket. He was a wise old cuss. One of the boys. A grand man and a straw man. Goodbye to all that. The city mourned.
Four days after the funeral a gentleman showed up at Carole Clément’s house carrying a terrier puppy. A last gift from the old mayor. Anik took the animal into her arms and had her face licked, but she did not smile, did not laugh. She hugged the little critter, though, and dashed him through to her room.
Odd behaviour, her mother thought. Yet these were confusing, sad times in a young girl’s life.
H
ERE THE RIVER FLARED, RAN DEEP. NO MAN HAD FOUND ITS
depth. Some believed no fish had, either. Perch were plentiful. In spontaneous leaps, cavorting large walleye burst the surface, splashing back into a silty, ale-coloured water neither sweet nor clear, yet deer were drawn down from the hills in the evenings to sip, and in the winter, timber wolves traversed the river’s ice.
A good place to camp.
For any weary, wandering people, a good place to make a new home.
From her second-storey bedroom window, Sarah Hanson noticed corn quiver.
A mission existed, inhabited sporadically by assiduous Sulpicians and displaced Indians from various tribes. At intervals along a switchback trail ascending the hillside, priests constructed tall, shallow huts fronted by broad barn doors. In the company of natives, they’d walk through the woods and pull back the doors of each hut to reveal a tapestry, or an artwork, or an example of statuary illustrating the Gospels. Natives were often impressed, and equally dismayed, that anyone would build a house in which only a painting dwelled.
Mohawks were the first to arrive with the intention of settling, long before the men they called the crows. After the signing of the Great Peace, prospects for great wars diminished. Sadly aware that their people had been depleted, bands of roaming native warriors devised a surprising alternative tack. They established themselves as affable neighbours to their habitual enemies, staking
a claim along the banks of the Ottawa—
rivière des Outaouais,
in the French tongue, closer to the Indian word—at the place called Oka, a short, energetic canoe trip west from Montreal.
Sarah Hanson had never seen the cornfields quiver this way before, as though the stalks were being born as men and women, learning to stagger forth, to walk. She was drawn to the window and she hobbled across the room, a boot half-on, halfoff, to investigate the mystery. Only a slight breeze grazed the curtains.
The fiercest of the Iroquois nations, the Mohawks were a curiosity. Why? Why return to lands they’d inexplicably abandoned after Cartier’s arrival two hundred years earlier? Why choose to dwell in proximity to those they’d warred against so intensely, while putting distance between themselves and their usual allies, the English of Boston and New York? For the inhabitants of Ville-Marie, answers to such matters were veiled in mystery, were cloaked also in a familiar, foreboding fear. Citizens murmured amongst themselves. Citing rumours, they repeated the most terrible tales from their history. Men and women fretted that their old foes were lying in wait for them, anticipating a day when the French would sleep unguarded. Zealous Mohawks in their war paint and delirium would then descend, yowling under a full moon to harvest their ripened scalps. Survivors would experience the dreaded slow fires consuming their toes, ankles and shins and rising higher.
As though in fright, songbirds and red-winged blackbirds cried out. Crows cawed in a panic, flitting out of the fields into the trees. Sarah waited, expectant. She anticipated the moment corn would walk.
Fur traders and other woodsmen who dared to make contact with the Iroquois slowly discerned their situation, and over time they gleaned answers to the queries that so vexed the French. To the south, the English were ever-expanding. Shiploads from across the sea arrived daily throughout the summer months. By and large, the French were content to build their nation through the action of their loins, a process familiar to the Iroquois and one that threatened them less.
As well, their habitual enemies, the French, explored the continent west across the Great Plains to the Rockies, and south down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, activity that offered both remuneration for skilful guides and an opportunity to live traditional lives. Among the French, the Iroquois might remain
sauvage,
in the true meaning of the word—dwellers of the woods. The English, supposedly their old friends and allies, were squeezing them out and moving them on and compressing them throughout their ancient lands.
A sweet morning. Freshened cool air. The horses strangely agitated in their summer stalls. Sarah tried to distinguish the whinny of her own beast.
Having huddled close to their perpetual foes, the Indians tripped over an unexpected benefit. Effective rogue bands were free to raid English settlements to the south. Carting back bounty to the land of the French kept them beyond the reach of English law. To further their economic advantage, they had learned that the capture of rich white girls from New England could grow into a lucrative enterprise. If they treated them fairly, permitting their precious purity to remain unaffected by the ordeal, they could wait for the girls’ fathers to journey north to locate them and barter for their freedom. Kidnapping began a fresh venture then, for if the English were tempted to send an army to end the practice, they could not do so into French territory without instigating war. The Iroquois learned to appreciate their new French neighbours, or at least to find them useful.
Aquiver, the corn trembled more violently. Yet it did so only in select places, and now no wind stirred the trees.
In the region known as Massachusetts, on the banks of the Charles River, near the town called Dover, in the year 1728, an Oka raiding party waited amid the corn for first light. The farm formed a small quadrant of a rich man’s property, and servants arose to milk cows and peruse the chicken coop for eggs before the man of property had blinked an eye awake. As a rooster crowed and the birds commenced their usual racket, other calls emanated from the fields.
Then she heard a war whoop. As if her body had turned inside itself, she wore her skin twisted and clamped close to her heart.
Sarah Hanson, the rich man’s daughter, had been up, struggling as she did every morning to pull on her riding boots. Suddenly, half-naked russet-skinned men bounded from the cornfield outside and ran across the yard. A flaming torch flew up before her and landed on the roof of her dormer window.
“Daddy!” she cried out, running terrified to his room, one foot clopping with a boot still half-on. “Daddy!”
She startled him awake, yet her father did not exhibit a moment’s anger, for already he was hearing the manic Iroquois yells. Two decades had passed since that sound had last coursed through him as lightning roaring down his spine. “My God,” he murmured, and reached for his bedside rifle. His wife was now whooping beside him, making noises remarkably similar to those of the Indians. With his hand on his weapon, Jeremy Hanson wondered where on earth he had stored his ammunition. Over the kitchen counter? Outside, in the shed? Fending off Indians had not been part of his life since boyhood. In his momentary bewilderment, he scratched his beard ruefully. Three weeks ago, he’d hunted grouse. Had he stored his ammunition in the cellar? He fought off an inclination to shout for the maid.