Bride of New France (29 page)

The priest walks over to the
lit-cabane
and says the following to Laure and Mathurin: “Remember that your nuptial bed will one day be your deathbed, from which place your souls will be raised and presented to the Tribunal of God. You will receive the terrible punishment of Sarah’s seven husbands if you become like they were, slaves to their flesh and their passions.” Laure wishes she could reassure this priest that he need not worry about any such passion between them.

The sisters of the congregation have imparted on Laure what a wife in Canada needs to do. First she must accept the man her husband is. Mère Bourgeoys told Laure that very few men in the colony could match her sharp thoughts and her high expectations. But that did not mean that they were not good and worthy men.

Since for the time being Laure cannot accept with any joy the man that Mathurin is, she considers the other duties the nuns spoke to her about. She has brought with her cloth from the congregation, and she has needles and thread in her coffer from the Salpêtrière, which she will use to make curtains and blankets. At least her efforts will bring some colour to the grey shadows of the hut. As for cooking, Laure cannot provide much. The girls from the countryside already know how to make bread, to salt fish and meats, and to prepare fruit preserves. Laure’s only experience in a kitchen was during the short years she spent in the house of Madame d’Aulnay. But the fine delicacies of the old woman’s apartment, the stone oven,
carved tables, and silverware will never appear in the cabins of these settlers. Laure will have to satisfy Mathurin on the open hearth by cooking whatever his hands bring to her. She must rely on him to provide for her the way she once relied on the officers to ladle out the dormitory’s rations.

And of course Laure must bear many children to please the King and the colony officials who need a large French population to defeat the Iroquois Savages who are still threatening the colony. At the congregation, Laure was given a prayer book so that when the children come, she can teach them about God. It might be the only schooling they receive, along with whatever lessons she can impart to her daughter about caring for a family in the forest. Mathurin will teach their sons to hunt and fish and how to trade with the Savages that dominate this new country.

The
lit-cabane
is a terrifying thing. Laure remembers the words of the priest as Mathurin closes the door around her like a coffin on their first night together: This is the bed where she will die. The enclosed space does serve the purpose of keeping them warm. But Laure has a hard time breathing in the darkness that is so complete that she feels only short puffs of breath coming from her nose. Her eyes are wide and seek some way out. Beside her, Mathurin is already reaching his hand under her skirt. Laure remains still, hoping he will find the tangle of her skirt and legs and the fur cover too much to contend with tonight. But she is surprised at how quickly he moves. He is concentrating hard and it sounds like he is skinning an animal.

Laure clenches her teeth and bites the salty hide on his shoulder to keep from telling him to stop. But Mathurin takes
this gesture as a sign of her enjoyment and thrusts into her. She gasps and digs her nails into his shoulders. Something must be wrong, Laure thinks, to feel this much pain. But Mathurin doesn’t notice. She closes her eyes tight and turns her head, seeking air. After a few moments, it becomes a little less painful. When Mathurin finishes, he mumbles a few words into her chest and rolls onto his side. Laure stays on her back, her thighs trembling. She wonders when the baby will be born.

    17    

L
aure can open the door to Mathurin’s hut just wide enough to peer outside. Snow has been falling almost every day for weeks. The cabins of Pointe-aux-Trembles are so covered by it that they are nothing more than white hills, if they can be seen at all. For the moment, the snow has abated, but the air on Laure’s nose and cheek is sharp and freezing. She opens the door and sees that outside the cabin the snow is higher than her waist. Should she try to dig her way through it? There really isn’t any point as Laure has no intention of venturing far beyond the doorstep. She has only a general idea where the trails through the settlement are buried. On sunny days, the landscape is bright white all around, as uniform as the sea had been on the journey over. Today there is no way to distinguish among the grey landscape between the rooftops of the
seigneurie
, the river they face, the mountains beyond, and the forest behind. It is only in her memory that Laure has some idea of where these places once were.

Since Mathurin left, Laure has been marking the wall beside the door with a knife. There is one scratch in the wood for each day he has been gone, fifty-seven in all. Some mornings, there
are icicles hanging over the markings. Mathurin left Pointe-aux-Trembles late last fall, several weeks after they were married. A few other men of the
seigneurie
, dressed in heavy furs and carrying some trading provisions, headed west around the same time. The men planned to travel first to Ville-Marie and then on to the
pays sauvages
beyond. They say that the thickest furs, which sell for the highest prices, can be obtained by wintering with the Savage tribes. Each year since the men arrived in the colony as soldiers, they have spent the winter with the Algonquins or the Montagnais, or whichever group lets them travel with them in search of game. It is illegal for the men of Pointe-aux-Trembles to seek out furs, as the officials expect them to stay with their families to build the new settlements. These illegal fur traders, including Mathurin, are called
coureurs de bois
. The authorities mostly leave them alone so long as they stay away from the trapping lines of the
voyageurs
, the fur traders authorized by the King. Mathurin promised Laure that when he returned they would have enough currency to purchase an iron stove and some more livestock and growing seeds for spring.

Only two of the seven husbands have stayed behind in Pointe-aux-Trembles with their wives and children. These men have been assigned the role of protecting the
seigneurie
against the Iroquois who might decide to attack this winter. Laure thinks how lucky these women are to have married men who stay with their families.

At night, lying shivering in the
lit-cabane
, Laure sometimes thinks she hears the children of Pointe-aux-Trembles. But it is only the wind, entering through the cracks in the walls, wailing like a living thing.

Laure begged Mathurin to take her with him into the woods as he packed one of his muskets and the clothing and trading
goods he would need for the journey. But he had laughed at her pleas and told her that the
pays sauvages
were not places for women. Trapping furs and dealing with the Savages was dangerous work. Laure wishes she had insisted nonetheless. Now that she has felt the cold of the past few months and seen the snow rise halfway up the outside of the cabin, she wonders if Mathurin just wanted somewhere warm to spend the coldest months of the year. Maybe he was afraid of spending his first winter at Pointe-aux-Trembles alone with his new wife from the Salpêtrière. After all, Laure knows even less about the frozen forest than he does. At least the Algonquin Savages must have ways to stay warm and know how to survive on their provisions until spring.

Laure closes the door to outside and goes over to the shelf on the wall where Mathurin keeps his belongings. The gun he left behind is there. She refused to let him teach her how to shoot it last fall.

“Suit yourself,” he had said, “but this isn’t your sewing room in Paris. Even women need to know how to use guns in Canada.”

There are so many things to shoot: animals mostly—deer, porcupines, rabbits, moose, bears, wolves, beavers. Mostly they are killed for their fur and their meat. But sometimes it is necessary to fire at these creatures simply for protection. Unlike in Old France, the forest teems with animals, and it is not only the nobles who are entitled to hunt them.

Maybe Mathurin was right about the gun. It might be Laure’s only way to survive here. Maybe she will die if she doesn’t know how to use it. She touches the wood of the musket’s handle, picks it up. It is heavy and she isn’t sure how to hold it. Mathurin also left her a fishing rod. He explained
to her how to cut a hole in the ice of the river and to stick the line in it to wait for a bite. But walking out onto the river in the winter, he told her, is very dangerous and should only be a last resort if she has exhausted her other provisions. Besides, she has nothing to use as bait for the fish under the frozen ice. Laure hardly even knows where the river is beyond the deep snow.

Laure has neither gone hunting nor fishing since Mathurin left. Instead she has relied on eating the rations given to them at their wedding at Ville-Marie last fall, which included two chickens and a pig. In the first month after Mathurin left, Laure found one of the chickens frozen to death in the pen outside the cabin. Seeing no hope for it, she had killed the second one and eaten well off the two for several weeks afterwards. As for the pig, she decided to bring it into the cabin to prevent it from freezing like the chicken. Against one wall, Laure constructed a makeshift pen out of some fallen tree branches that she gathered outside the cabin. Fortunately, she had done this before the snow had become knee and then waist deep. Ever since, the pig, with its snuffling and snorting, has been a companion of sorts. She named it Mathurin, and sometimes speaks to it throughout the day, saying it is a better husband than the one she had last fall.

Laure cannot imagine that spring will ever come. There is so much snow all around the settlement, and the outside air burns her skin, stinging her nostrils and making her eyes water. Laure returns the gun to the shelf and reaches for Mathurin’s
culotte
. She slides the sheepskin over her legs and ties the strings around her waist. Over the
culotte
, she puts on his moose pants. They are heavy and hang from her hips like the skin of a sick animal. Mathurin has taken his overcoat with him, but she puts
on one of his white shirts over her dress. On her head she puts a red woollen hat. In Paris, only beggars stumbling into the city from the farthest ramparts of the kingdom would wear such an outfit, and no woman would dare. But at least she feels a little warmer with these extra clothes on.

It is only early afternoon, but soon the pale daylight will be gone, leaving only several more hours for her sewing. Laure is saving the stub of the candle given to her by the Mère Bourgeoys as a wedding gift. She keeps it along with the parchment sheet and the pot of ink. To sew, Laure relies only on the dim rays of the sun during the day and the light from the fire at night. She pushes the heavy wooden chest from the hospital across the dirt floor toward the fire at the centre of the room. Most of the heat emitted from the flames in the open hearth is sucked up through the chimney, leaving only the smoke to fill the room, but still Laure feels warmer hearing it crackle.

At night Laure tries not to sleep too deeply in order to remain vigilant over the fire. She fears that she won’t be able to relight it if the flame is extinguished. She often dreams that she has frozen to death in her bed. Only in the dream she is usually in her cot at the Salpêtrière, and freezing to death is a disease that is spreading through the dormitories. Laure usually wakes up then, shivering in the enclosed
lit-cabane
, and gets up to stir the embers of the fire and add another log to it. This winter, she has burned all but a small pile of the wood Mathurin chopped last fall and left at the entrance. She had thought him strange and overzealous as he filled an entire wall of the cabin with wood. Now she wishes she had asked him to cut more, at least another row. The axe he used to cut the wood was borrowed from the Tardifs. Laure would have to wade through hip-deep snow to get to their cabin to borrow it.