The Orenda Joseph Boyden (20 page)

I lift my hand for silence. “I agree that there are dark powers in our world,” I say. “And these dark powers are masterful at presenting themselves as something they’re not. An animal or a tree or a rock cannot possess an oki—”

“How do you know?” Delilah asks.

“Because a tree or a deer or a stone cannot pass from this life to the other. To the world after death that exists high above us.”

She shakes her head. “Again,” she asks, “how do you know?”

“Because the Great Voice, the most powerful voice, says so,” I answer. “His voice is in this.” I nod to Isaac, who struggles to pick up my Bible with the stumps of his hands. I hold it up in front of me, my brain humming as it once did when I played chess so many years ago, plotting a number of moves ahead. I open the tattered book, and when I find the passage, begin to read from Genesis in my own tongue. “‘And He said,’” I speak loudly, “‘Let us make man to our image and likeness: and let him have dominion over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and the beasts, and the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth.’” I hand the Bible back to Isaac.

“What did you say?” Aaron asks.

“This wampum that I run my eyes across,” I say, nodding at the Bible, “is the one true wampum, so you must listen to me carefully if I am to share it with you.” I pause, noting they grow restless for me to share more. “No. You are not ready yet.” They groan in unison.

“Tell us what you said,” Delilah demands, reaching her arm up to me.

“Yes,” the old man echoes, “you must tell us.”

“But I don’t think you are ready to hear what this wampum says,” I tell them again.

“Baah,” Delilah says, some of the others laughing quietly at how agitated she and the old man are. “Stop treating us like children. If you wish for us to wander away, that’s the surest way to do so.” She makes as if she is going to get up and leave, struggling to stand so that Aaron must rise to help her.

“I do not wish to treat you like children,” I answer, raising my hand to her, palm out. “But the Great Voice says that you must give up praying to your okis, for they are false. They will lead only to harm. I cannot share my wampum until you are able to promise me that you will listen only to the Great Voice.” I’m rarely so direct with them,
so demanding. In the past it has proven useless, pushing them away rather than bringing them closer. But I admit, dear Lord, that even I sometimes grow frustrated.

The congregation begins to stir, growing more restless, and I again realize that I’m losing them, but I’ve been talking for hours and we all need a break. From experience, I know they won’t go anywhere until I hand out their meal. But my practice of keeping them with me in the longhouse all of Sunday won’t last much longer, either. This spring is the first in three years with enough rain for the crops to begin taking root. The summer, it appears, will be the first plentiful one in the several years that Gabriel and Isaac have been here. With the good harvest, I fear my flock will scatter back to their clans.

“It’s maddening,” Gabriel says, leaning over to me, “how even after all this time they still frighten like deer.”

“I told you long ago, dear Gabriel,” I say, “to prepare yourself for the greatest test of your life. Our patience is paying off, is it not? How many have we baptized?”

“Thirty-eight,” Isaac says, looking up to me and smiling. When the Iroquois tortured him, I fear something in his mind broke. But he’s a good young man still. I take note that I should soon cut what’s left of his long, matted hair. He looks like a madman.

“Yes,” Gabriel says, “but the majority were on their deathbeds.”

“This isn’t what’s important,” I say sternly. “What’s important is how many accept Christ before their eyes close for eternity. And it’s also important to report this news so the Church understands we don’t toil in utter darkness.”

Gabriel’s glance suggests to me that he thinks we do. With Champlain’s death so shortly after we left New France, our small mission, I fear, has been forgotten.

“Well, then,” I say, clapping my hands together. “Shall we get started once more?”

Like a classroom full of children, the ones in front chatter and laugh, not paying attention for my call to sit. Now that the warmth of
spring has come, most of them don’t wear much. The handful of men in the longhouse wear deer leggings up to their thighs, breechclouts covering their lower extremities, deer or beaver robes slung over one shoulder so that sometimes I’m struck by how they resemble Greek senators from ancient times, regally standing and smoking their long pipes as they talk with one another. The women before me, even Delilah, think nothing of allowing me to peer up their loosely worn robes at their bare legs. Sometimes, as if they test me, I see much more.

“Do you accept my wampum?” I ask now that they begin to settle.

“Perhaps,” young, argumentative Aaron responds. “But we do not believe your claim that okis exist only in humans. All of us have seen them in other beings at different times.”

“Let me explain more clearly, then,” I respond. “There are indeed okis everywhere. But the only one to be trusted is the Great Oki, the Great Voice.”

“But now you contradict yourself,” the old man speaks up. “You yourself said on this very day that only humans have okis, and now you say that there are okis everywhere.”

I realize the complexity of my argument cannot be boiled down any more simply. “We humans have okis in us,” I explain. “And these okis are given to us by the Great Voice. It is up to us whether or not we allow our okis to grow strong and straight like a beautiful oak, or bent and gnarled like a thorn bush. The Great Voice wants us to be as the oak tree. But there is an enemy to the Great Voice, far stronger even than your hated Iroquois.” I pause. They listen intently. I’ve found a track that they might follow.

“In my tongue, this great enemy’s name is Satan.” I speak the name slowly. “Satan is the worst of the okis. I fear for you that when you pray to what you think is the oki of an animal, you are praying to Satan.”

“But how can I tell if the oki I ask for aid is not corrupt, will not enter me to harm me?” the old man asks, seeming suddenly deflated. “Did I ask the wrong one, the oki that caused the sickness to enter me?”

“There’s only one oki powerful enough to protect you, and that oki is the Great Voice,” I answer. “If you are to ever ask an oki for anything again, know this. If you ask the Great Voice for help, He will never bring harm to you.”

“But I tried that!” Delilah says, excited. “I asked your Great Voice to allow my husband to live through the illness. But he died anyway.” She makes a low wail in her throat and wrings her shaking hands. She is such the actor. She looks up. “And so I see no need for your great oki.”

I hear Gabriel grumbling beside me. I know that he wants to ask her, “Then why are you here?” He’s done this before, and it caused great mirth in the longhouse when Delilah answered, “Because I was bored.”

“The Great Voice,” I say, “often makes decisions that we can’t understand. But the Great Voice always has a purpose in doing so. And the Great Voice has told me,” I say, looking straight into Delilah’s eyes, “that you will see your husband again in the afterlife if you accept my wampum as he did on his deathbed.”

“And if she doesn’t?” The voice comes from right below me. I look down and see Gosling sitting behind a smiling Isaac, his eyes closed in bliss as she strokes his hair, untangling the knots. I look at Gabriel, whose face mirrors my own shocked expression. “Did you see her arrive?” I ask him quickly in French. He shakes his head.

“And if she doesn’t?” Gosling asks again.

“How did you get in here?” I ask her.

“Why, through the door, like everyone else,” she says. The ones on the ground around her laugh.

“But you weren’t here a moment ago,” I tell her.

“I’m quite small,” Gosling says demurely. “I often go unnoticed.”

“You are a sorcerer,” I say, trying to find my balance again. “She,” I say to the crowd, pointing my finger at her, “is what I speak about when I tell you that the world contains bad okis.”

“Don’t be so cruel,” she says, feigning hurt.

Others begin to speak up, old men and women who’ve never said a single word these past months.

“But Gosling has only ever helped us!”

“She saw the enemy coming in dreams and warned our warriors.”

“She can cure many illnesses.”

“There are those,” Gosling says, “who believe you and these other Black Gowns are the malevolent okis and have brought the famine and the disease and the drought to us.”

“We come only with goodness in our hearts and with the words of the Great Voice on our tongues,” I say. “You are not welcome here.”

Isaac, as if in a trance while Gosling continues to stroke his hair, shakes his head and whispers, “I’d like her to stay.”

“If she isn’t welcome here,” the old man says, beginning to stand, “then we do not wish to be here.”

“Do you,” I say, looking at Gosling, “believe that we are responsible for the troubles that have fallen over the land these last years?”

“You expect a simple answer, a simple yes,” Gosling says, “for this will vindicate you, as you clearly believe you’re not the cause. Rather, you see your arrival so long ago as an unfortunate coincidence.” She smiles and begins twisting Isaac’s long wisps of hair into a braid. “Myself, I think that where we find ourselves is more important, more grave, than any simple question or answer.”

The others in the longhouse listen intently. Gosling licks her fingers and brings the tip of Isaac’s braid to a point. I feel that same feeling in my lower stomach as she gazes into my eyes, smiling.

“Leave him alone!” I say as forcefully as I can.

“No,” Isaac answers.

“She has him in a spell,” Gabriel says.

“You are trying to convince them,” Gosling says, “that what they know so surely is in fact wrong.”

“I simply bring them a better way, a chance to live differently.”

“You’re upsetting a balance generations in the making,” she says. “What you seek to do will split this village, will weaken all of the
Wendat. And when this happens, the Haudenosaunee will take note and take action.”

“You give me too much credit,” I answer. “I do not have the power to divide a nation.”

“Your wampum speaks quite the opposite of our beliefs,” Gosling says, as if she hadn’t heard me.

“What do you mean?”

“Your wampum declares that everything in the world was put here for man’s benefit. Your wampum says that man is the master and that all the animals are born to serve him.”

“Is this not true?” I ask.

She smiles, shaking her head. “Our world is different from yours. The animals of the forest will give themselves to us only if they deem it worthy to do so.”

“So you claim that animals have reason, then? A consciousness?”

“I say that humans are the only ones in this world that need everything within it.” She stops stroking Isaac’s braid. “But there is nothing in this world that needs us for its survival. We aren’t the masters of the earth. We’re the servants.”

“And I am here to be a servant to them.” I raise my arms to those in front of me. There will be no winning this debate with her, I see. It will take cunning and time to beat the devil. “Let us all say a prayer before our meal.”

I DON’T WANT IT

So many longhouses left abandoned, so many fires that will never burn again.

When Bird brought me back here once again three summers ago, the illness struck and it struck brutally. Hundreds dead that winter. Every family was visited. Not enough healers, not enough orenda, not enough strength to save the dying, never mind to bury the dead. Many unhappy okis haunt this place now. Too many. They keep me up at night.

When I returned that summer so long ago, I was still a child. And for the third time that year, I watched Bird and his men kill my family. That’s when something inside me broke. That’s when I made the decision that I couldn’t return home again. Bird had won. He’d won me. Now, when strangers come to trade in our village, I tell them I am Bird’s daughter. But this doesn’t mean that a daughter can’t hate her father, does it? I think you can still hear me, my real parents. I can accept him as a substitute, but this doesn’t mean I won’t one day end his life, as he did yours.

—

THE OLD WOMEN
have been screeching like seagulls, telling me it’s time to prepare for womanhood. The old women assume my moons have begun coming to me, and though they haven’t I lie and say they have,
and so I’m taken out past the palisades to where the thickest moss grows in the dark ravines, swarms of tiny, biting flies enveloping us in black robes as we walk along the river that runs into the great bay. I’m shown how to choose the freshest of the moss. The sweet scent of new life growing from rot fills my nose. But this isn’t all. This is just one small part of what all those old birds want me to learn. We wander near the river’s bank, spread out from one another with downcast eyes to look for baby ferns, still curled tight so that I run my finger along the stem up to where I pinch free the head, my finger tracing around and around and around to where the tip nestles into itself. We lean and pick with one hand, our deer robes pulled up to our thighs and acting as baskets. I want to complain that I’m unhappy. But I’m not. The sun is warm on my back.

Back on the river again, this time with knives, we walk through the new shoots of tamarack, cutting off the tops that we will boil as tea. I’m shown once again how to create a rock weir to lure the spawning pike along the shore, the channel running narrower and narrower until it’s thin enough for us to straddle it with sharpened maple spears, patiently waiting for the long flash of scales before we strike fast as snakes, wrestling the large fish to the land before they can shake themselves off and dart upriver, their gouged bodies leaving blood ribbons in the stream.

The old women take me to the fields to help prepare them for the coming of the three sisters. We tie our robes high to let the air cool us as we build up dirt mounds and dig holes in them, scatter a handful of corn kernels into each one, the kernels gorged from their soaking in water in the hopes the earth we pat back on top will accept them. These new fields are still small, and the smell of burning tree stumps comes sharp on the air as the men work hard now to make up for lost time, to make up for sickness and the death of so many, the fields each day growing a few feet bigger as forest succumbs to rows of squash and beans and mother corn. This is the first spring in three or four where the people of the village come out in full numbers. I’m worried to see
how many have been swept away to the other world. But still, these people smile for the work.