Song of Batoche Read online

  Madeleine frowned. “Best look glad to see your saviour.” It had been eight summers since she’d first seen Josette and Norbert standing up near the old house abandoned by the Pilons. A girl herself still, heavy with child, a bibi in arms and another one at her skirts—the husband good looking and a skilled marksman. But after Norbert’s fall from a horse on one of the last buffalo hunts, there had been changes.

  Josette was rubbing dirt off the carrots, lost in her thoughts. Madeleine would like to wipe the look from her face. What was it? Scorn, or something worse. She could not put that to nights up with a sick boy. She said, “I’d pay to look on the face of that dog Macdonald when he hears Riel is back with his people.”

  “Macdonald?” Josette said in a quiet and even voice. “He is the one who drove Riel out of the country.”

  Madeleine hesitated. She knew nothing of politics, only that Riel’s five-year exile to the States had somehow become fifteen. “Macdonald will listen,” she said, to appease herself.

  “He will punish us for Riel’s sins in Red River.”

  Madeleine turned to pat another round of bannock for the pan. Sometime after they had become friends, Josette had told her that Riel was to blame for her father’s death and made her promise: do not say this to Gabriel or the women. Why would she? If they knew Josette spoke the great man’s name in vain, she would be driven from the country, shunned, banished. Or stoned like Shelomith’s son for blaspheming the name of the Lord.

  Years ago, Josette made enemies of the godly women of Batoche who gathered at the river to smoke their pipes and wash clothes. Once, a young girl had been in the water, lifting her skirts, and her mother told her stop, that she was too much like Eve. Josette—bent to soap one of Norbert’s shirts—had laughed, said that Eve seemed the smart one. The women were silent as she scrubbed, telling how she’d behave if she were in the Garden of Eden at the beginning of creation, eating all the fruit she could stomach. And then the thing that damned her: “What strange God made man and woman in His image yet punished them for wanting to become more like Him?”

  From then on, she was called La Vieille, a mocking nickname used behind the back of a quarrelsome mother-in-law, or for a young woman with too high an opinion of herself.

  “If you watered your garden instead of your fields,” Madeleine said, “you would not look so hard for carrots in mine.” Josette remained quiet, which galled her. What had she provided for Riel’s feast? A small pot of rabbit stewed in a watery broth. Something her Cree relations would serve up. And she defiantly wore a faded blue house dress, when only her Sunday best would do.

  Madeleine went to the doorway, but the wagon train had yet to appear on the plain by the river. This withered land and the sky bright and hard against it. Even on the trap lines all these years, she’d gone out with her husband. Tonight, in the hushed dark of their bed, he’d hold her and make her cry out the way only he could do. Would he notice in his time gone that her breasts were smaller and had lost their shape? She flapped her skirts to bring some air to her legs. Her good Sunday dress had served for years, and it was not lack of food that made it too big. In her youth, she’d kept a healthful frame, too much so the women might say, and would have welcomed a slighter one. Now, in her fortieth year, she’d lost some of the fullness and would soon be the size of Josette, who, despite bearing five children, had a form slim as a woman unmarried. Madeleine’s wasting was for another reason, but she would not think on it, this of all days.

  Josette chopped at the carrots, which were stunted, uneven, and she struggled with the knife.

  “Remember not to speak of Riel’s time in exile,” Madeleine warned.

  “I will not speak to him at all.”

  Madeleine crossed herself. She would not abide such talk of the great Riel. “You’ll be here. What will Norbert think?”

  Josette stared out the window, where the first carts of women were leaving the trail and coming through the back fields. “I don’t care what he thinks.”

  She wanted to laugh. Of course, Josette cared what he thought. She cared too much. Madeleine reached for the knife and the girl let her have it, her fingers thin and resigned. Who could blame Norbert for losing his patience? Josette was too sensitive. A woman with wits about her would choose a man with a head hard enough to survive a fall from a horse, or one not weak enough to go down in the first place.

  When Josette lifted a pot to the stove she winced, and Madeleine gave her an appraising look. While in childbed with Wahsis three years ago, she had almost bled to death. The midwife declared that another pregnancy would kill her. Josette had suffered two miscarriages since then, but the Old Crows continued to watch her womb with a morbid fascination.

  Fearing the answer, Madeleine asked, “You’re not pregnant?”

  “Norbert’s horse knocked me against the barn stall.”

  “He should feed his own horse. That one is too strong for you.”

  A volley of rifle shots issued from the south, and they went to the porch in time to see the first few riders and wagons emerge from the trees at the crossing. Riel’s wagon train was half a mile away yet, but she could not mistake Gabriel at its head, astride his chestnut roan. A plug felt hat was set low over his brow, the deep-set eyes missing nothing. And there was Riel, she was sure of it, on the high seat of the first wagon, spine straight despite the three-hundred-mile journey he had made from the Montana Territory. Beside him on the buckboard, a woman with a small child in her lap, and one between them on the seat.

  “I wager Riel’s put on a stomach,” said Josette. “Or his hair has turned white.” She followed Madeleine back into the kitchen and fidgeted with a cloth used for drying dishes. In a small voice, she said, “Norbert was at me last night.”

  Madeleine coughed into a handkerchief and tucked it into the pocket of her dress before Josette could see that it was specked with blood. “At you? How will you live with the sin of refusing him?”

  Josette went to the stove. Madeleine could not bear the sight of her standing there, staring at the pots, arms at her sides like a child. Deep in the melancholy she was prone to suffer. The Old Crows judged her for continuing to grieve over a daughter who had died from the lung disease. Madeleine had also been overly fond of P’tite Marie, a sweet child, but most women had lost les bibis. It was sinful to question God’s will in taking them.

  Madeleine returned to the porch where the first women’s carts were arriving, children spilling out—running for the bluff and a first view of Riel’s wagon train. She should not be so hard on Josette when she herself suffered and could not control the black moods that seemed to come upon her more often now, losing her temper at the slightest irritation. She had blamed it on Gabriel’s absence, missing him too much, but she could not discount that consumption was eating away at more than her lungs.

  Amid jokes and laughter from the women, ancient Grandmother Pétchèse, in her long black dress, was handed down from a cart. Henriette Parenteau, a big-bosomed matriarch, climbed the porch steps with a crockery bowl in her gnarled hands.

  “I saw La Vieille just now. Where is she to help?”

  Madeleine turned to find the kitchen empty and made for the back door. Josette had untied her horse near the barn and swung up on its back, skirts lifted to the moccasins lashed beneath her knees. She turned her head and laughed, but her jaw was set at an angle that Madeleine knew was far from a matter of joy.

  “Eh, what do you expect,” said Henriette, who had come to the back door as Josette took up the reins and forced her mare into a gallop, shawl flying out behind her. “Like her grandfather two times over.”

  Cleophile had run to the pasture gate, the young ones coming up behind her. She stood, short of breath and glaring after her mother. Josette often said Cleophile resembled her grandmother, Little Feather, who lived in Big Bear’s camp—dark complexioned and slight, with weighted eyes.

  Madeleine looked sharp at Alexandre, who had followed. She thought he’d ridden south to meet Riel.
Although Alex had come to them only last year from the Fagnant family, learning to trap and help Gabriel with the saloon, he was dear as a son to her.

  “You two bring the milk. Vite, vite.”

  The Old Crows had taken over Madeleine’s kitchen. They ruled their husbands and had broods of children, still pregnant into their late forties. She was in constant awe of them. If a woman could survive the birth of more than ten bibis, nothing could kill her.

  Louise Boucher was at the window. “Where goes La Vieille in a hurry?”

  “She does not like us,” said Henriette, and the women laughed.

  “Or she is off to dig up her roots,” said Pélagie Gervais.

  Domatilde Ledoux made the sign of the cross. Métis women learned the value of herbs and roots from their mothers—which tree bark was good for coughs and toothache, and what spit-chewed flower would break a fever. But Josette’s Cree mother and grandmother had taught her a medicine woman’s herb lore. The girl knew the use of every weed that grew on the prairie and in the bush along the river. Although the Old Crows considered it a sin to meddle too much with God’s will, they were at Josette’s door when a child was gravely ill with the strangling cough, or a husband returned from his winter trap lines with snow blindness.

  Madeleine’s chest tightened with a familiar, niggling pain and she slipped a hand into her pocket by habit. Henriette looked her way, and with effort, Madeleine choked back the cough. One day it would be impossible to hide, but until then she would not give them the satisfaction.

  “God saved Josette from death in childbed,” said Domatilde, shaking her head. “Only to take her daughter with the lung disease.”

  Madeleine went out on the porch. Riel’s welcoming party had finally appeared over the bluff from the river. The wagons rolled up to the house, men whooping and shooting their guns in the air. Gabriel was already off his horse and helping Madame Riel from the buckboard, a little girl clinging to her neck. Louis Riel had climbed down with his son and stood, taller than Madeleine had expected, the sun like a star behind him. When Gabriel introduced them, she looked up at him with a dazzled grin.

  Josette, he has not put on a stomach, he has not gone grey.

  A photograph of him hung in her kitchen, one from his days in Red River, a serious young man with a frank and confident air. But now in his eyes there was a flash of distrust or wariness, a certain apprehension. Despite ten days on the trail, Riel was dressed in a suit, a tie knotted at his throat, hair brushed back from his wide forehead. He introduced his wife Marguerite and his two children and turned to the men who now surrounded him, eager to shake his hand.

  Gabriel stepped back to make way for Riel, treating him with deference. Oui, it was there in the way he looked at him. Like a dog that showed its belly to another dog it took for the stronger. But her husband was a Métis chief; men made way for him. He would not bring the great man if there would be trouble, yet Josette’s words came at her like a threat.

  Macdonald will punish us for Riel’s sins in Red River.

  She took his youngest from Marguerite’s hip, but as she showed her to the house, a gang of Métis men arrived on horseback. It was plain to see they’d followed Riel’s train, drinking.

  One of them brought his horse almost to the porch, and shouted, “Where is my wife?”

  Madeleine turned to find Norbert staring her down. “She’s in the summer kitchen,” she said to relieve her guilt at speaking harshly to Josette earlier. “In the root cellar …”

  But Patrice, Josette’s six-year-old son, was already pointing in the direction she’d disappeared.

  Cleophile and Alexandre were coming from the root cellar with pails of milk. Norbert pulled the reins of his horse. It reared, hooves pawing the air. The stallion sprang into a dead gallop, and Cleophile drew back, as if he’d raised a hand to strike her.

  Norbert was at me last night. What had the girl heard of this business?

  Gabriel was distracted, but he glanced in the direction of Norbert’s receding figure. “Where has Josette gone?”

  It was hot, too hot. Louis Riel stood in Madeleine’s front pasture, and she held his youngest child in her arms. She had promised Josette not to tell even Gabriel, and yet her husband would know if she lied.

  She leaned to him and whispered, “Away from Riel.”

  he has come

  At the river’s edge, a few miles north, Josette left her horse in a cluster of willow. She went up the cut-bank, her body tilted forward by gravity, an ache in the bones of her chest. At the top of the bluff, she skirted a mound of snowberry bush and ran her fingers along a crevice in the rock. There was the old tea tin that contained the Spinoza. Josette lifted it out and removed a stub of pencil that marked her place. She opened the book and flipped quickly past the dedication, written in a man’s hand.

  My dear Josette—I like to think I have put you back in God’s grace.

  She shut her eyes. What if Norbert had done his man business well? He tried to heed the midwife’s warning that another bibi would kill her. But whenever he took her in frustration, she feared the worst and had been forced to end two pregnancies with the aid of yarrow and devil’s club roots. The midwife’s death sentence and the state of Josette Lavoie’s womb preoccupied Norbert’s female relations and the Old Crows, who had come around each time she was bed-ridden, curious as to why she had not been seen in the village. They would suspect something if she lost another bibi. Josette only attended church to please them. The Old Crows expected a Métis mother to lead her children by example and love the true faith. She did not care about being excommunicated from their church, but if she was caught aborting a child, she risked losing her four others.

  She walked through the trees, searching for one of her favoured passages in the book. Anything can be the cause of sorrow or joy. Her lips formed each word, blotting the memory of last night, Madeleine’s betrayal, and Cleophile’s face, the look on it when she rode away. The Spinoza was more than a book pressed into service as diary, more than a place she wrote her thoughts in tight script in the margins. It transformed her, lifted her from brood mare to a woman of letters.

  Her body might betray her, but Madeleine … How will you live with the sin of refusing him? She had taken the side of Church and God. Madeleine had drawn her in over the years, making her love her like a little mother. They’d relished goading the Old Crows, but now she was one of them.

  The killing heat even here over the river, in the trees, and clouds bunched on the horizon in the shape of yarrow flowers in full bloom. She had never seen mountains, but imagined them like earth rising before her to the sky. Sun broke through and sent a ray of sudden light to the river’s surface. In a margin of the Spinoza, Josette made a note of the date and wrote,

  He has come. Not He as in Jesus, but close.

  She’d let Norbert, despite not wanting to, and kept some small piece for herself. How was that refusing?

  There was a sharp report of guns in the distance, one after the other, and in a moment, puffs of smoke appeared in the south. By now, Norbert would have discovered her missing, but she had been careful to ride in the river shallows, and he had never tracked her to this place. From a pouch at her hip, she took out a pinch of chopped red willow bark and offered it to the four directions, then earth and sky. Josette would not find herself in childbed again, death song on her lips and blood draining from a body determined yet to live. She prayed to make her womb cold.

  Grandmothers, these words I send to you—if a spirit seeks me, find another more deserving.

  The birch grove high above the river had always been a kind of church to her, but now the trees loomed too close, their pale trunks scarred with black, fading into the canopy of leaves above. She could feel Riel’s presence, even here. The last fifteen years he had remained a distant enemy. It was said that he and his family would stay in St. Laurent and she would not be tempted to make him listen to how the Anglais soldiers, desperate for revenge, had taken it out on her father.<
br />
  Shadows flew across the ground. She looked up as a flock of white pelicans soared in a V pattern toward the river. They swooped down, beating their massive wings against the water to drive fish to the shallows, and, in a wide semi-circle, dipped their large scooped bills, gobbling fish until the circle was so tight the ends of their bright orange bills almost touched.

  There was a sudden crash and snapping of branches on the trail below, and she brushed the willow bark out of her hand. Dropping the Spinoza behind a rock, she forced breath into her lungs. In a moment, Norbert, mounted on his stallion, charged over the rise. He yanked the horse’s reins, the only sound its frantic blowing.

  “Now I must track my own wife.” He dismounted and tipped his chin toward the river. “La Noire drags her reins in the water—if you leave on her again, I will sell her.”

  “She’s my horse.”

  He removed his hat, and she saw that he struggled with himself, desperate to have her trust him again. When he took a step toward her, she edged away, held out her hand to ward him off. His pupils were wide, the first sign. “I won’t take another drink.” He came closer, circling. She put her back against a tree and closed her eyes. But he went to his knees before her, fingers reaching for the hem of her dress.

  She looked down from outside herself, a hand drifting over his bowed head, and flinched as he got hold of her around the legs. His face pressed to her thighs, the heat of his breath through her dress. In a moment, he would lift her skirts, expect to take her here against this tree, and she caught at his hands, agreed to go back.

  He kissed her palms in gratitude, turning them upward.

  a tender creature

  Marguerite riel stood near the window in Gabriel and Madame Dumont’s bedroom. The sun was directly over the house and the air in the small room so close, she swayed on her feet, yet Madame Dumont insisted on pressing her, asking this and that about the journey.

  Oui, Marguerite wanted to shout, it was hot and dusty, oui of course it was difficult. In camp this morning and despite the heat, Louis had insisted she put on a white lace collar over her dress to meet the Métis of the South Branch. But a prickly rash had broken out across her chest, small agonizing blisters also at her groin and in the elbow creases, thankfully hidden by her dress, but aggravated by it, too.