The Orenda Joseph Boyden (18 page)

When the sun has sunk low enough to cross the palisades and throw its shadow spears on us, I watch as the Crow pushes his way through the crowd and reaches for the man with the leather who no
longer works with much desire. This causes the tired witnesses to reawaken and some even shout out what sounds like approval. Our warriors wake up too, lifting their heads high to see what will happen. The man with the leather looks confused and my Crow calls out to his chief and I want to know the words he says but can’t hear them over the restless crowd. Even the chief finally looks like he wakes from where he has gone.

The Crow lifts his arms and shouts out more words. I don’t know what they mean. I look to their chief and see he holds himself tall. The Crow keeps calling out and then points to Bird’s warriors. The French look at us and begin talking. When the Crow finally stops his shouting, their chief raises his hand and a group of war-bearers cut the straps from the bear’s hands and drop him onto the ground. He looks dead. I don’t feel sad.

Only then do I realize Bird stands beside me. “That was rather brutal, wasn’t it?” he says. He snorts and spits on the ground like he wants to rid himself of what he’s just seen. “Did you watch how the Crow tells them they behave worse than us?” Bird looks down to me, and I see something like kindness in his eyes, something like a look you’d give me when you hoped for me to understand, Father. I want Bird to take my hand and lead me away from here, from this place that frightens me. Instead, he walks away.

—

TODAY BIRD LOOKS SCARED
, although he tries to hide it. He holds the shining wood in both hands and peers down its length, a French war-bearer beside him. The war-bearer tells Bird to squeeze. A boom like thunder despite the high blue sky of summer and gulls scream and take wing and Bird stumbles back, his face disappearing in smoke. The French laugh at Bird’s warriors who watch wide-eyed with hands over their ears. I watch as well from the tree line, holding my aching hand. The French warrior slaps Bird on the back, and Bird
stares down at the carved wood in his hands, at the smoke pouring from its mouth. I saw it, how it breathes flame. I’ve now seen the shining branch from across the water where the others live. This is the weapon they say can kill two or even three men at a time with just its roar. Bird possesses it.

Again and again, the French war-bearer teaches Bird how to make the shining wood boom. And now he stands away from Bird, having shown him how to pour black sand and a shining rock down its throat. I wait and watch for Bird to make the thing bark. I watch how all the warriors wait, too, their hands close to their faces for the coming noise. Bird looks determined now as he hugs the wood to his cheek. I try to keep my eyes open so I may witness it.

Just as Bird is about to do it, the greatest thunder I’ve ever heard splits the sky so loud that the leaves in the trees around me shake and flutter to the trembling ground. The men, all the war-bearers from all the places they come, dive to the ground and cover their heads and I do the same for fear my ears won’t ever work again.

When I dare, I lift my head from the earth and look up at the wide river, to the sight of it. A monster floats before us, so big that the men on its back look tiny. They shout and wave and smoke pours from a hole in the side of the beast. Rather than running away, the French jump to their feet and begin hollering at it, waving their hands in joy. Our warriors are tensed to run but see how the French are so excited. Our people, they stand up straight and watch.

Up in their great village, men begin to shout, too, and it isn’t long before what must be all of them are running down and lining the bank of the big river, waving and howling. A gang of them run to their heavy canoes and pile in, some almost falling out as they push hard against the current, sitting backward and pulling on their paddles so I realize that these people must really be backward and maybe don’t want to look forward.

My eyes turn again to the monster on the river. No one will notice me. I sneak through the legs of men shouting and pointing and
laughing. Some of them cry. This thing brings something important. I’ll find out what it is. All I can see now as I stand on the bank, close enough to Bird that I won’t be pushed down or grabbed by one of the French, are the few straight trees growing up from the back of the beast with great white robes flapping from them in the breeze that men wrestle to secure.

Bird calls to Fox, and seeing me beside him, smiles and lowers his wounded hand to mine. Without wanting to, I reach up and take it, and together we walk to Fox who holds the canoe steady as we climb in. I sit in the middle as we glide out fast into the river, cutting across the current, easily passing the big, clumsy canoes of the French. I stare as the monster grows larger and larger the closer we get to it, am amazed that the water of the wide river can support its weight and I wonder how this can be, wonder if the hairy ones really are sorcerers. As we pull up to it now, the men above us on its back go silent and stare down, their eyes wide. I suddenly recognize that they’re as scared of us as I am of them. They’re thin faced and hairy, some with yellow-tinged skin. I can smell them from here and want to hold my nose but force myself from doing it.

Then Bird stands up in the bow of the canoe and reaches his arms out wide. He tells these men above him that he’s honoured they’ve travelled such a great distance to visit, that he hopes their stay in this land will be a good one but not very long. Fox laughs. Their faces tell me that these men don’t understand any of the words. But Bird’s gesture of open arms tells them everything that needs to be said.

One lowers a rope so that Bird can take a hold and Fox may stop paddling. More and more French are staring down at us, and for the first time I see what we must look like to them. Broad-shouldered Bird with his hair carefully shaved on one side, his cheekbones taut, the muscles of his shoulders and arms and chest enough to make a man think twice about arguing with him, and Fox behind, small and powerful, his ropy arms laced with veins and his eyes sharp and black
as a raven’s. We are the people birthed from this land. For the first time I can see something I’ve not fully understood before, not until now as these pale creatures from somewhere far away stare down at us in wonder, trying to make sense of what they see. We are this place. This place is us.

IT WILL NOT PREPARE YOU

For the first time in over a year, dear Lord, I am able to celebrate Mass with my peers and for Your greater good, speaking it in Latin with no fear that my words will be misunderstood. The new arrivals beseeched me to perform this Mass and I do it with a warmth in my heart I’ve not felt since leaving Brittany. I can tell the new arrivals near burst to hear of my adventures and of this new world. But I will be coy in my sharing. I can tell them of what this dark world of sauvages is like until the breath leaves my chest for good. The only true way for them to understand, though, is to experience it for themselves. I plan to request of Champlain that I stay behind here in New France for the next year in order to complete my relations and send them back home while the new entourage travels out to the land of the Huron to gain experience. I need the rest, Lord, as I need to regain my physical and especially my spiritual strength. The idea of heading back into that wilderness makes me want to weep. You understand, don’t You?

—

I’M QUITE TAKEN
by the zeal of these new arrivals. Two brother Jesuits have come, as well as four laymen to help assist them in their travels, teaching, and eventual conversions. All of them are so young, though. Still, I’m impressed and a little envious, as I was never offered such
support. Clearly, some word of the importance of this mission is getting through to those who hold the purse strings back in France. But I must admit that in these last days, I wake before dawn and wrestle with the grave worry that our work is being exploited by those who wish not for the souls of the sauvages but for the riches of the land, and that they are using us as the tip of the spear for their earthly gains. I have found some solace, though, in recognizing that we Jesuits are indeed the sharpened spear tip. We are Your soldiers, Lord. We are the soldiers of Christ. And the folly of those who wish to make profit not from souls but from the furs of animals will certainly meet with Your anger. I trust, Lord, that Your divine plan has long been engraved in something far denser than stone.

—

THIS MORNING AFTER MASS
, I take the two new Jesuits, Gabriel and Isaac, up to the ramparts to look down upon them. Again this morning, even before first light, I awoke with a start. I realize it will be unfair to send these brave men out with no knowledge of those who will try to devour them.

We peer out to the shore of the wide river below us, to the encampment of Huron who laze by smoking fires that keep the hordes of insects at bay, even from this distance the bright smiles of the men flashing in the sun as they talk and laugh.

“It’s a rather idyllic scene, no?” Isaac says. “They’re not so different from the accounts I’ve read of them.” Isaac smiles his very white smile. He’s a handsome young man, but I already see that his blond hair is beginning to thin. Give him his year in hell and, like me, there won’t be much of it left.

“Are the heathens always so relaxed?” Gabriel asks. He appears a little older than Isaac, and unlike Isaac, he’s not ready with his smiles. The unruly black hair of his head and on his face only helps to magnify his intensity. His eyes flash with it whenever he looks at me.

“They are amazingly lazy,” I say, “for the most part. But when it comes time to canoe or to hunt or to plant corn, they work with an intensity I’ve never witnessed before. You’ll soon see this yourselves when you paddle out to their land with them.”

“I’m glad you’ll be there to share your knowledge with us along the journey,” Isaac says, smiling wide. Poor Isaac. It won’t be so long till he no longer smiles.

I shake my head. “No, my young one,” I tell him. “I’ve requested of Father Lalemant that I stay back here for a year to recuperate and to finish my reports.”

“No!” Isaac says, his eyes brimming with tears. Gabriel simply flashes his serious dark eyes at me.

“I’m afraid it is so,” I say.

“Well, then,” Gabriel says. “You mustn’t waste any time in telling us everything we need to know for our mission to be a success.”

I hold his gaze before looking down to the lazing sauvages on the beach. “First of all,” I say, stroking my beard to a point, “you should understand fully and completely that there will be no success for a long time. Maybe never.”

Isaac gasps. I can see Gabriel’s hands grip the rail of the rampart till his knuckles turn white. He shakes his head.

“You don’t want to believe me?” I ask. “I speak to you honestly, for I do not want you going into that dark place ruled by Satan with the same naïveté I did.” I pause again. The image of that sorceress, Gosling, flashes through my head, and despite myself I feel a stirring deep below my belly. “You must be prepared to go in as if for battle. Believe me. I can speak all day as to what I’ve witnessed, but it will not prepare you for what you will soon discover for yourselves.”

“Is there nothing else you can share that might enlighten us?” Isaac asks. He looks like he really might cry. Just as he says it, the girl appears on the riverbank, not far from Bird and Fox. She must have been squatting on the shore. She cradles her hand. You speak to me then, Lord, the light of the sky shifting and brightening, the sun coming out from
behind a cloud. As if scales fall from my eyes, I can see so much more clearly now, can see that the hand the girl cradles is infected, that it’s tobacco Bird passes to Fox for the pipe that lies next to them, that a deer stands still on the far shore of the river, so still that not even the sauvages have noticed it.

“This, then,” I say to them, my voice quavering, “will be the key to our mission.” Isaac smiles. Gabriel turns his dark eyes to mine. I look at them both. “Do you see that girl there?” I ask, pointing to her standing on the beach. They squint and then nod. “On a night not so long ago, she ambushed their chieftain and cut off his finger with a rock and a sharpened shell.” Isaac gasps again as I point now to Bird, laughing at something Fox has said to him. “Now she misses a piece of her own finger as well.” I let this information settle with the two young Jesuits.

“As punishment for her crime?” Gabriel asks. “An eye for an eye?”

I smile sadly and shake my head. “No. As she cut off his finger, she slipped and severed hers as well.”

“She’s disturbed in the head?” Isaac asks.

“She’s …” I pause. “Different.” I gather myself. “But she’s also the first to show real interest in the faith. So much so that I know in my heart she will be my first true convert.”

The two young Jesuits nod their approval. They might as well scream for me to tell them more for the way they lean to me.

“Do you know what her punishment was,” I ask, “for disfiguring this man who has become her adoptive father?”

They shake their heads.

“Nothing,” I say. Again I pause to let this sink in. “Absolutely nothing,” I repeat. “Never mind corporal punishment, there was not even so much as a chastisement.” The young men shake their heads some more. “These Indian nations are all the same. They neither punish nor even scold their children.” I hold Gabriel’s stare. “And this is the great conundrum. Their children are the door to their conversion. But without our ability to use the rod, imagine how much trouble this will give us in our plans to bring these young ones to the Lord.”

I look back down to Bird on the shore. The girl sits close beside him now, and he cradles her wounded hand in his, rubs something into it that he’s taken from his hide bag. “They have their potions for every ill,” I tell the two Jesuits. “It’s witchcraft. I’ve even witnessed a sorcerer pretend to suck a sickness from an old man’s belly. The sorcerer leaned to the man and made loud slurping noises, then spat what appeared to be tobacco juice onto the dirt beside him.” Both Isaac and Gabriel listen with wide eyes. “Those watching went into a small frenzy, acted madly enough that the old man was forced to sit up on his own, smiling like an idiot. None of them were wise enough to recognize that this was simply trickery on the part of the sorcerer, who’d obviously hidden tobacco in his mouth before arriving. You’ll be confronted by this type of foolery on a daily basis.”