River City (56 page)

“Tell my little brother that I shot the deer,” she said.

“Is that true?” her father asked.

“I don’t lie,” she said. “Of course it’s true.”

He didn’t know her anymore.

Following the Great Peace among Indians, natives roamed the streets of Montreal at night. Peace ruined many lives, but Indians were not the only instigators of the brawls. Men of the woods, whose injuries or frailties kept them from paddling the rivers, consumed great quantities of spirits. Destitute farmers who had lost their wives and children as well as their lands, and former soldiers with addled minds, and men who, for no sensible reason, took to drink, all fell to scrapping. A Jesuit priest, now defrocked for having unrepentantly seized Indian women to carry to his bed, often several at once, was the mightiest of the brawlers. Together, the men beat one another over
their heads with hammers and sliced off one another’s ears and gouged each other’s eyes out and bit off the tongues of their attackers. In the worst of the tempests, the victorious relieved the maniacal of their testicles with a sharp, fierce twist and tug, and the caterwauling of the injured awoke Sulpicians in their beds at night. The priests sat bolt upright and prayed desperately, blocking their ears and weeping for the misery upon the streets and for their own gentle fright.

By day, priests discussed what they might do, where they might go.

Talk had centred on the gentle slopes arising from the Ottawa River, west of the rapids where the river tumbled into the St. Lawrence. Iroquois had made camp there at a place called Oka. They were a disciplined tribe, it seemed, not the reckless, inebriated madmen of Montreal streets by night. The Sulpicians longed to be out of the city, in a place where they might commune peaceably with God and pray for the whole of the world, and not just for the eyeless bleeding in the puddles of mud outside their gates.

They paid a visit to a young woman who lived by the Ottawa River, in a cabin on the south bank, her home facing a contingent of Mohawk raiders who dwelled on the opposite shore. She had built a cabin there with her new husband, Jean-Baptiste Sabourin, a wood cutter by trade, and her house was becoming a way station for those travelling the waterways. As the priests arrived, twenty-five strong, Sarah Hanson Sabourin was not surprised to see them steer their four canoes ashore. Once they had arrived, though, she was quickly astonished to learn that they had come specifically to speak to her.

“I’d ask you to come inside, but all of you won’t fit,” she told them.

The eminent friars laughed, and one alone stepped forward and spoke softly. “You and me, then, just us two. I’m prepared to speak for the rest.”

The others nodded, giving their consent to this arrangement, and Sarah Hanson Sabourin and Father Bernard entered her most humble abode.

An irrepressible hostess, Sarah fixed tea and scones for her guest and for the fathers outside.

“Next time,” Father Bernard promised, “I’ll remember to travel in a smaller group. But each one of us wanted to meet you.”

The entire event felt alarming.

“Have I done something wrong, Father?” Although a Protestant, she had married into the Catholic Church and converted to the faith. What more was required to appease these gentlemen?

“Not at all, my child. Forgive us for causing you any unease. We believe that you may be able to help us with a matter of some delicacy, shall we say, and a certain urgency, also. We have sought you out only to plead for your assistance.”

The visit was turning increasingly odd. “I don’t understand, Father.”

The cabin was dark, the windows small to help thwart the cold in winter, and they were shaded by the forest around them. “We want to become your neighbours, Sarah. We covet—I think that’s a fair expression—we covet the lands on the opposite shore, east of where the Mohawks now live. We have interceded with the king of France, and he has granted us title. We want to build a monastery there. We would like to have our own farms, establish orchards, raise animals for their produce, not specifically for slaughter—chickens for their eggs, cows and goats for milk and cheese. We’ve thought this through carefully, and we’ve come to the conclusion that this is the right place for us.”

“I think it’s a grand idea,” Sarah informed him as she sipped her tea. She did not add that she especially liked the part about them living on the side of the river opposite to her, not on the same side, and farther east.

“Yes. Yes. Thank you. We think so. Ville-Marie—Montreal, people seem to call it now—has grown. After the signing of the Great Peace, it’s lost all discipline. The wildest of men aren’t killing each other in the woods anymore. They fight in the streets instead. It’s become too rambunctious for poor friars.”

“How may I help, Father? I’ll do what I can. I don’t imagine that that can be much. There are so many of you—my husband is fond of saying that there are more priests in Ville-Marie than trees. He and I, we’re very busy through the summer, just to make ends meet and feed the horses.”

The priest would fold his hands in the lap of his cassock between his spread knees and shake them as he spoke, as though physically coaxing his words out. Grey-haired, physically robust, he was well suited to being an emissary as well as an eminence, as he exuded a natural kindliness while conveying a trusting and a trustworthy disposition.

“You are so very young. Not yet twenty. That I come to you with this proposition may strike others as unusual, except that you are so highly regarded by all you’ve met. We would be encouraged by any welcome that you might provide us, Miss Hanson.”

“It’s Madame Sabourin now,” she corrected him.

“Of course. My age—an oversight. Madame Sabourin, we are anxious to have good relations with all our potential neighbours.”

She nodded, beginning to understand. “The Mohawks worry you.”

“Don’t misunderstand me. As long as we may live together in peace and harmony, we would only delight in having them as our neighbours. But will they delight in us? That’s the question.”

“And you want me to find that out?”

Father Bernard nodded. “We have heard of your famous connection to them. The story’s been told that they helped build this cabin. If you would intercede on our behalf, Madame, we would be most grateful.”

Sarah took a walk around her room to consider the situation, and returned to sit opposite the priest.

“Understand, Father, the Iroquois are accustomed to being crowded out of their lands. It’s their greatest fear, the greatest agitation in their lives.”

“I see,” Father Bernard replied, downcast. Prospects appeared gloomy.

“The Sulpicians have had a mission at Oka for some time now. You are the seigneurs for this land … it’s your right to do with it as you see fit. And yet, obviously, the appearance of a large monastery might trouble the Iroquois. It’s true that their worries ought to concern you. A large monastery surrounded by farmland is not as easily defended as a mission within a fort.”

“That is our dilemma. Hearing you speak of it in such plain terms, perhaps our plans are for naught.”

“There is a way,” she said.

The vicar perked up. “Yes?”

“If you were to make it plain to the Mohawk that you pose less of a threat than, say, the settlement of the riverside by new farmers, if you point out to them that you are only men, with no women, that you are therefore unlikely—if you will forgive me, Father—to breed, which would require expansion … that you
represent, in fact, a safe barrier between the Iroquois and further development of the French settlements, then your project might find favour, and you might indeed be received by amiable neighbours.”

Father Bernard sat still longer than he might have realized, staring at the girl. She was not twenty, yet she possessed an intelligent and finely attuned wisdom capable of determining affairs of state. To come to her had been good advice, and the proper choice for the friars to have acted upon. He shook himself from his state of abject admiration, and nodded. “Yes, yes. Of course. We can do that, with your assistance, Madame Sabourin.”

“Please, call me Sarah.”

He was happy to do so, for it was difficult to think of this child as a married woman. Only a few years ago, she’d been attending school as the daughter of a wealthy man, a society marriage in elegant surrounds in her future. Now she lived in the wilderness, alone on the south shore of the river for scores of miles in either direction, and deftly negotiated deals between the French and Iroquois.

“When we go to see their chief,” she advised the priest, “it’s best that you not arrive as a flock of crows. Which is what they call you—crows. Better that you come alone, with me, Father. You have one advantage of which you might be unaware, other than your lack of children.”

“What would that be, Sarah?” He was helping her clear the dishes from their tea, for priests were unaccustomed to the domestic attention of women except in marginal ways.

“You’re Sulpicians. You’ve had many encounters with the Iroquois, to be sure, but not as many as the Jesuits. A few Iroquois have difficulty looking a Jesuit in the eye these days—they’re embarrassed that they tortured so many. They would not want Jesuits moving in beside them, for it would only provoke their shame.”

Father Bernard had an inkling that, in her subtle way, Sarah Hanson was seeing to his own education. She was teaching him that
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with whom he would negotiate a friendly sharing of land and waterways were a complex and evolved people, not to be treated as children. They had a history. He knew as much from his own experiences among Indians as a young man, yet was grateful for the woman’s wise and tactful counsel.

“Sarah, I should tell you also, we have at other missions Iroquois converts, and some Huron and Algonquin. We will seek to relocate them to the north shore of the lake also. They will enhance the Iroquois there now, and also, perhaps, help to show them the way to Christ.”

The young woman mulled this over. “That might be all right, Father. But permit me to say that the Iroquois are weary of being divided amongst themselves by their allies. Who will influence who, that will be for fortune to decide. If you were a different sort of man, I might caution you by saying that any plan to divide the Indians amongst themselves will fail, for that’s an old tactic and they are on to it. Fortunately, I need not issue such a caution to you, Father.”

Yet she had just done so.

Meeting the Iroquois, the priest stressed that the lands the friars sought to inhabit would be substantial for their orchards and crops, but that they would also be fixed. The monastery would contain the dwelling for the priests, and while that dwelling might grow in time, it would never expand to subsequent homes spread across the land. They would not encroach on lands the Iroquois inhabited now, and by being there, the two communities, the Sulpicians and the Mohawks, would successfully dominate that entire shore, preserving it for generations into the future.

The chief of the Mohawk nation of the Iroquois people solemnly nodded.

“We will grant the Iroquois your lands in the white man’s laws.”

The Mohawk stared back at him, without nodding.

“We will bring chickens with us when we come,” Father Bernard said, “which we will not share with you. And cows, which we will not share. And goats.”

“You won’t share your goats?” The chief moved about on his posterior. This seemed a strange negotiation to him, when the man on the floor of his tepee opposite him informed him only of those things that he would not offer.

“We won’t share our goats.”

“That’s too bad,” the chief said.

“But we will share the eggs our chickens lay.”

“Ah,” said the chief.

“And the milk of our cows and goats, and the butter and the cheeses we will produce from the animals’ milk. We will share our apples when our orchards ripen.”

“Apples from trees?” the chief said.

“Yes,” Father Bernard said.

“Where are these trees?”

“We will grow them from seed.”

“Only birds plant trees,” the chief stated, “when they shit.”

“Birds,” Father Bernard revised, “and Sulpicians.”

The chief scratched his knee. “You shit trees?”

Father Bernard, sufficiently comfortable on the blanket on the dirt floor of the tepee, attempted a joke. “Like crows,” he said.

The chief grunted to the humour, then waited. The priest felt perplexed.

Her legs crossed under her, Sarah Hanson suggested, “Father, would that not be interesting? For the crows to plant apple seeds on Indian land also?”

“Then we have apples, too,” the chief said. “We have our own trees from the shit of Sulpician crows.”

“Of course! For sure. If you will clear the land, Chief, we will plant as many apple orchards as you want.”

“This is good,” the chief agreed.

When the agreement appeared to be in order, the chief began to talk about a dagger that had been given to the first white man to come from France to the Iroquois village known as Hochelaga. The dagger had travelled from the hands of kings and voyageurs, eventually into possession of the man who now ruled the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Father Bernard was beginning to sweat. How he was supposed to acquire such a dagger went beyond his devising, although it would probably come down to a significant exchange of money or a tribute of lands, more than even the well-to-do Sulpicians would want to manage.

A year earlier, the chief explained, twin girls had become lost in a forest in Boston, in the land known as Massachusetts.

“Lost?” Father Bernard sought to clarify. “In Boston? In the woods?”

“Lost in the forest in Boston, Massachusetts,” the chief repeated.

“Boston’s a big city,” the priest began to protest, but Sarah interrupted him. “Young girls often wander away from home and become lost,” she reminded him. “It happened to me.”

“I see,” the priest said, and fell silent.

“A Mohawk band from this place found them, and brought them here, so that they would be safe until their father came here to take them back.”

“That was,” Father Bernard began, hesitated, then continued, “that was very good of you, Chief.”