The Orenda Joseph Boyden (26 page)

Gosling laughs lightly again, again as if she’s talking with more than just me, as if we’re with others. “What’s beautiful,” she says, “is there are certain of us who can see what comes.” My eyes adjusted now, I can make out the broad outline of my raven, the wispy feathers, the curve of beak. “Certain of us know what comes because we can see through the darkness that’s the future as if we have a little fire. You,”
she says. “You have something special. You might just have the gift of the medicine woman. But it’s something you need to learn to nurture as one nurtures the three sisters. And once it grows, then you’ll need to learn how to control it.” We lie on our backs beside each other, the raven above. Finally she says, “You can speak now.”

I feel the muscles in my body relax, the fear, just a little, draining from me. My jaw, clenched since she woke me up, suddenly releases. “I don’t want power,” I manage to say.

“You don’t want that boy who hurt you today to want you?”

The question stops me. Eventually I say, “He doesn’t deserve me.”

“That’s a fine answer,” Gosling says. “But it doesn’t stop you from wanting him.”

She lifts her finger in the light that’s just starting to sift in from the smoke hole above. She slowly turns it in a circle, and the raven, as if a wind has entered, begins to follow her movement. “That’s not so hard to do, you know, once you learn how.”

Gosling raises her other hand, and with both in the air above her, she joins her thumbs together and begins to open and close her hands like a child mimicking the flight of a bird. Above us, the raven makes me open my mouth in surprise and fear as it opens and then closes its wings over and over again. Gosling quickens her pace, and the raven soon lifts up and rights itself to fly above us in circles, tethered by the length of rope attached to its feet.

“He has such lovely eyes,” Gosling says. “Did you make them?”

I shake my head.

She continues to work her hands, steering the raven around and around, the wind from its wings causing the tears that come out of me to slide down my cheeks. It’s so scary, so beautiful. I know, right now, that I want this power, too.

ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN

They force Gabriel, Isaac, and me to work the fields with the women, something considered a great insult. Poor Isaac who’s already suffered so long and so hard in this cruel world, now recently concussed and making little sense when he speaks. We toil in the heat with the women who avoid us, our backs bent and the sun beating against our black robes until we swoon from thirst. For hours every day we pull at weeds, the only things that seem to grow in these desolate fields. They spring up overnight and choke the meagre crops if the pulling goes unattended for even a few days. The three of us have taken to kneeling a number of times through the mornings and afternoons to pray for rain that refuses to come, the cornstalks now shrivelled and dying like starving children. Every day, the dirt pushes farther under our nails so that our fingers swell with pain each night as the nails separate from them.

When we kneel, the women stop their own toiling to watch, not with curiosity but with something close to hatred. I feel the heat of their anger, Lord, and I ask that You soften their hearts so they can understand we wish for rain for their sake more than for our own. I’ve accepted that I will die a brutal death in this heathen and hostile land, and I accept this with humiliation and with joy, for I’ll die for You in my attempts to harvest even a few souls.

Isaac, too, senses that our time here probably grows short. With so few fingers left, he’s useless at working the weeds. Often, he just
sits and speaks mindlessly. “That boy with the club hit me because he wants me dead,” Isaac often says. “They all want me dead. They’ll kill the three of us this summer because they believe we’ve cursed this land. Have we cursed this place, Père Christophe?”

Hot-tempered Gabriel grows short with him, and many times I have to calm Gabriel, his eyes blazing with something that frightens even me. I must calm Isaac and Gabriel both, soothe them with reminders that we’re not here for ourselves but for our sauvages, yet just one more burden for my back that only grows stronger with each challenge. I’ve found something in recent years that nourishes me not just spiritually but physically. I’ve grown stronger with each new punishment. Even the Huron comment positively when we travel and I pick up the early-morning paddle, not putting it down until the end of the day with the others, lifting my fair share of the load as we portage long distances up rocky slopes. I thank You for this, Lord, for this flush of power that courses through my body. I bend down to pluck weeds in the field and consider this not an insult but a great blessing.

Each evening that we return to our small and simple residence, I must climb onto the roof and remove the arrows that young, angry warriors have fired into the cross atop the entrance, welcoming all who enter. Each evening as I struggle to pull arrows from the wood, I await the one that will pierce my back. Clearly, we’re no longer welcome here. The drought has become so bad we now ignore the weeds and instead march back and forth all day like ants, hauling birchbark buckets and hide skins of water, trying desperately to keep the dying crops alive. From morning till night we struggle across the fields and to the river, a mission that seems akin to trying to put out a tremendous blaze with thimblefuls of water. There’s nothing else we can do.

—

A RUMOUR’S BEEN
circulating that an Iroquois war party has entered our country and is about to attack. A young man from a
neighbouring village was caught loitering near our own and was accused by some of the younger, more volatile warriors of spying for the enemy. He’s since disappeared and is now presumed murdered. This has become a summer of deep and frightening discontent, anarchy lurking behind every tree, horrid violence creeping closer in the late-evening shadows. The sun is at its full height for the year, staying strong till long past last prayers and attempted sleep, and the anxious young men patrol the palisades until dawn comes, stoking large fires and crying out all night in frightening shrieks to show any potential enemy who might huddle in the nearby forest that the Huron remain awake and strong. Everyone in the village is on edge, the women fearful to travel out into the fields alone, the men exhausted and short-tempered. Their mood’s grown so frayed that Gabriel and Isaac and I can no longer show our faces for fear of being killed on the spot. Even the converts avoid us now for fear of being struck down. We huddle in our small house alone, awaiting our fate, praying for the souls of those around us, begging You, Lord, for rain. I’m left with nothing to do but pick up my quill again and scratch out words that might somehow make sense of the madness descending all around.

—

TODAY I AWAKE
to Isaac screaming. Gabriel and I burst out of our blankets to soothe what I imagine is a nightmare, only to find him sitting up in the early-morning light, cradling something and rocking.

“Have you hurt yourself?” I ask. “What is it?”

Gabriel kneels to force Isaac to show him, then scuttles back like a crab. Isaac raises a severed human hand, still dripping blood.

“This is a sign,” Isaac says. “Someone must have slipped in here in the night and left it upon my chest as I slept.”

“It isn’t a sign of anything but the devil’s work,” I say. “A grotesque and simple attempt to intimidate us, that’s all.”

With all the calm nerve I have, I walk to poor Isaac and hold my hand out. He just stares at me. I gesture for him to give it to me. He looks down at the bones and flesh and then back up to me before placing it in my palm.

I take the hand to near where we keep our vestments and chalice and altar. I put it on the ground, then pick up a wooden spade and begin digging a hole. I can feel Gabriel and Isaac watching me. When the hole is deep enough, I sort through my scant possessions and find a length of old cloth, wrap the hand in it, lay it in the hole, then fill the dirt back in.

Standing up, I call Isaac and Gabriel over to me. “Let us pray,” I say, “for this young man who was accused of spying and then disappeared. We can assume this limb belongs to him. And so we shall bury him here in our residence because he died a martyr to the madness closing in all around us. If only we’d had the chance to offer him salvation, to have saved his soul before his grisly death. But we have this small part of him that we can claim for God.” I bow my head, as do the others. “He’s one more victim of Lucifer in this unforgiving land,” I say. “He’s not the first, and he’ll certainly not be the last. But let his death strengthen us and our mission. Allow this attempt to frighten us to only stiffen our spines. Allow his death to help bring eternal life to the sauvages around us.”

—

I URGE GABRIEL
to pick up the quill as well and write for not only himself but also poor Isaac. Regardless of our situation, our promise to our superiors is that we’d keep journals, our recollections which might be shared with those who wish to fund our mission, and for the public in France, whom I’ve heard are fascinated with our exploits in this dark land. Most important, these accounts will remind our superiors of the importance of what they’ve sent us here to do. They are our living journals, our prayers and reflections, our examination and scientific mapping of
these tribes and their customs, a growing dictionary of their language, and, ultimately, my living will and testament. I realize this is all I have to show the outside world of my work, my life. Is it vanity, then, dear Lord, that consumes me like a fever as I stay up writing late into the night, the words pouring from me in an endless stream?

This morning, when I look up from my work and ask if Gabriel will not do the same, he snaps, no doubt driven by his insomnia and the unceasing tension of the village.

“You’re a fool,” he spits, his eyes glaring. “Do you truly believe this drivel you write all night will ever find its way back to France?”

I drop my eyes in the hope that he’ll continue to rant, to empty himself of the poison that fills him.

“When’s the last time we received correspondence from our superiors? What, now, two years? Two years! For all we know, the Church thinks we’re dead. Or worse, we’re still alive but they don’t care. They’ve forgotten us, Père Christophe. We’re dead to them, and soon we’ll truly be dead at the hands of these heathens.” He points at our thin walls. “It won’t be long before the warriors come in here and begin their slow torture.”

Isaac, huddled in a corner, moans. “If they come for us, dear Brothers, promise me that you will kill me quickly,” he says from the shadows. “I have been through their torture once, and I can’t suffer it again. Please, I beg you. Kill me quickly.”

“And do you remember what they promised in their last correspondence,” Gabriel continues, “the one that arrived with those Algonquin traders? More priests, more donnés, our own mission here in Ihonitiria, our own fortress complete with soldiers to protect us, a place where the sauvages come to us prostrated rather than this, this …,” his voice trailing off as he holds his arms up in defeat. “Who is it you think you’re writing to?” he asks me, his voice quieter now. “Who do you think will ever read the words you scribble all night long? Is this not a daily act of madness? Are you not like Nero fiddling as your savage empire around you burns?”

I say nothing for a long while. Isaac weeps quietly on his thin blanket.

“I write for you, dear Brother,” I finally tell him. “I write for Isaac. I write for myself in the belief these words aren’t wasted. I write in the hope we’ve not been forgotten by our Church or by our nation. I write to please God, for I treat these relations as my prayers.”

Gabriel’s hot eyes seem they might cool.

“All we have is hope,” I whisper. “All we have is our ability to communicate in a way the sauvages cannot. It is the simple act of writing that lifts us above these poor devils. That alone is reason enough to do it, is it not?” And as I say this, an idea begins to form in my head. “It is time for us to stop cowering. It’s time for us to truly put our physical lives and, more important, our souls on the line. We must stand up and be soldiers of Christ. It’s time to stop hiding in this stinking house. Let the three of us go out into the light bravely,” I say. “We will perform a Mass, a Mass that will bring rain. Or else it will be a Mass that brings our martyrdom. Either way, it’s better to act than to sit back and be acted upon.”

With these last words, Gabriel kneels before me, rests his head on my lap, and begs my forgiveness.

“Hush,” I say, stroking his head. “We’re but mere mortals and have been sent to a place that would break even our most hallowed saints and warriors. Our time has come, sweet Gabriel, to take up the cross and move forward bravely.”

—

WITH THE FEAR
removed from our hearts, the three of us walk the village again, no longer afraid of the violence that’s hung over our heads this summer. We speak to everyone who will listen, explaining that we’ll offer Mass each day in the hopes rain will follow. Delilah, one of my earliest converts, isn’t afraid to stand in front of her longhouse with us, listening and asking questions.

“Why don’t you just ask your great oki for rain to fall? This won’t only save yourselves but surely will bring many of us over to your way of seeing.” The old woman smiles then, as children poke their heads from the doorway behind her, watching. “There’s no quicker way to make a believer than to offer a person something at the exact time she desperately needs it.”

“The Great Voice works mysteriously,” I tell her. “He listens when we bow our heads and touch our head, our chest, our shoulders with our right hand.” I make the sign of the cross for her. “If you will admit your sins and ask Him to accept you into His heart, if you resolve once and for all to serve Him, we will pray to Him for nine days. And if you truly believe, on the tenth day the rain will come.”

“You realize,” Delilah says, “that if you make us this promise and fail to deliver, you’ll seal your own fate.”

“It’s not up to me, or to you, for that matter,” I say, “to seal our own fates. The Great Voice has already decided how the rest of my life will go, and when I will join Him in the place called Heaven. But you and the ones in your longhouse …” I point to the children behind her, who, like gophers, quickly draw their heads back into the darkness. “It’s up to you and the ones who you are responsible for to accept His word, to follow it, and to give up your evil ways. Only then will you all be saved. Maybe, if the Great Voice sees fit, your physical bodies will be saved by rain. And even if they aren’t, you should rejoice, for the part of you that’s most important, your oki, that part of you we call the soul, will go directly to Him and you will live in paradise forever.”