Bride of New France (31 page)

“I was captured by the Algonquins in my thirteenth summer. I can’t imagine staying with them for the rest of my life. I want to leave in the spring.”

“Where will you go?”

“Back where I belong. To the Haudenosaunee.”

“The Iroquois?”

Laure remembers Mathurin’s words on their wedding day. How he had said that Deskaheh was actually an Iroquois captured by the Algonquins. She thought Mathurin had just been making that up to keep his new wife from talking to the Savage.

Deskaheh doesn’t look any different from the other Savages that hang around Ville-Marie, the ones that are allied with the French. She expected the Iroquois to look more frightening, to have their heads shaven and their faces painted, and for them to think only of butchering the French and eating their ears and fingers and hearts.

“If you go back and live with the Iroquois, you’ll be the enemy of the people of Ville-Marie.”

“No, I’ll still be a friend of the Christians. I know enough people here that I will still be able to trade. Besides, there are other Iroquois here, the French Iroquois. The ones who left the longhouse to come live like beggars with the French.”

Laure wishes she could go back to the place where she wants to live her life. But there is more than a forest and some Savage tribes between her and Paris. Besides, there is nothing for her to go back to. The hospital is probably filled with new women, the lacemaking workshop taken over by younger girls with smaller fingers.

As if reading her mind, Deskaheh says: “Your husband will be back soon. We have almost reached the beginning of the bright month, and soon after, the snow will become water and flow back into the river. When this happens, your husband will return.”

After a while, Deskaheh stands up. Laure feels like a child. There is so much she wants to say, but she can only think of simple things like crying, gratitude. She almost tells him not to go, but it’s too late because he’s standing and saying
demain
, for her to eat the leftover soup in the pot tomorrow. She stumbles to her feet and hands him his coat. She promises him she will eat the rest of it. She wants to give him something, but she knows that she has nothing to offer.

The following morning Laure opens the door to the cabin. She gasps to see that the fresh snow is stained red with blood. There is a deer carcass at her door. She drags the frozen animal into the cabin. Was it there all along while they sat and talked last night? Or did Deskaheh kill the animal after he left her?

She takes Mathurin’s knife from the shelf and sits for a moment considering how to skin the animal. She lifts the head and shoulders onto her lap and digs the blade into the chest. It doesn’t penetrate the frozen skin. She drags the deer over to
the fire and puts two fresh logs onto it. After half an hour or so, the flesh begins to soften a little. She lifts the deer’s head and stabs the knife into the chest. She saws the flesh open and is rewarded when heavy drops of blood spill onto the dirt floor. She reaches inside the animal and pulls at the guts that have started to thaw. Mathurin the pig has risen onto shaky legs and is whining. Laure tosses some of the innards into the pen.

When Laure’s hand reaches the deer’s heart, she tightens her fingers around it. She closes her eyes, expecting to feel a warm pulse. She waits for the animal to tell her something about where it came from, about the man who killed it. She wants the deer heart to release its secret into her waiting hand. Around her, in the cabin, there is nothing but the animal sound of hunger.

Weeks of the winter pass, and the scent of the corn soup fades from the cabin walls. A few stringy pieces of deer meat, more rotted than dried, hang beside the fire. Laure chews on these to calm the hunger that has become a screaming rage in her gut. She has received only one other guest since Deskaheh left that night, and it was a colony official, dressed also like a bear. He and several others had traversed the paths with sleds and snowshoes to bring Laure and the other women of Pointe-aux-Trembles a package of supplies—some cabbage, a little pork, a wool blanket, and a few candlesticks. In exchange Laure had given him the sewing and knitting she had done for the colony’s bachelors.

Bolstered by the soup she made from the pork and cabbage and encouraged by the French man’s promise of spring, Laure
borrowed an axe from the Tardifs and stumbled through the snow to chop some more wood for the fire. She had returned to the cabin from this venture with little more than a few sticks and fingers and toes that burned.

Amidst all of this, there is still no sign of Mathurin. Instead, it is Deskaheh who returns to see Laure late one night. She hears him first at the window and opens the shutter to see him there. She can see that Deskaheh’s face is a scowling shadow and she has an idea what he has returned for before she opens the door. By now Laure can recognize that look on a man. A sick wave builds in her chest. She wouldn’t call the feeling fear, although it emanates from the same place in her body.

She slides the board away from the door and steps back to let Deskaheh in.

“Your husband is still gone?” he asks.

“He will come back any day.” Laure wants to ask Deskaheh why he has returned, why he has fixated on her in this way after she told him to stay away from her last fall. It isn’t convenient, sneaking through the winter forest to meet her like this. Surely there is a woman in his village that Deskaheh can marry. As for Laure’s situation, there isn’t much to be done about Mathurin. But Deskaheh here now with that resolute look in his eyes isn’t going to help that matter either. She shouldn’t have let him in.

He removes his coat and seems like a frozen bird spreading giant wings of fur. He looks around the cabin, at Laure’s sewing lying out on the table where they ate the soup a few weeks earlier, at the fire emitting its weak heat, at the near-empty cupboard, over to the corner at the
lit-cabane
where she has been sleeping alone. Then his eyes turn to look at Laure.
She is wearing a wool shawl over her arms and shoulders and a heavy winter dress.

“You are thin, like the dogs in my village.” His voice is concerned and soft, a sort of sad whisper. Laure thinks she must look as though she is dying. Maybe she has misinterpreted his intentions with her. Perhaps he has come like the official to bring her provisions. What a pathetic creature she is, buried in this winter tomb of a cabin, abandoned by the man who promised several months ago to protect her for a lifetime.

“Let me make you something to eat.” Deskaheh starts to move toward the cupboard and the fire.

“I don’t need food,” Laure says, blocking his way. He steps back, a surprised look on his face.

For once, she has frightened him. She is angry that the man who is supposed to be helping her to survive the winter is not here and that in his place she is being offered scraps by a colony official and this Savage who should have disappeared from her life months ago. It is darker tonight than when he visited last, and she has a hard time reading his face. “Someone might think you’re here to kill me.”

He doesn’t respond.

“Why do you come to see me?” She waits a moment, thinking he hasn’t understood. She repeats the question, looking at his coat, at his clothing made of pelts, at the long hair, up at his scarred face. These are just the external things that make Deskaheh Savage. How can she possibly comprehend his mind, let alone his heart? Laure recalls her baptism at sea by the strange creature they called Bonhomme Terre-Neuve. How much she has been warned about the dangers of the Savages of Canada.

Deskaheh steps toward her without making a sound and twists her hair around his hand. Laure’s head jerks back and she looks up to see his eyes glazed. She doesn’t understand all the words, isn’t even sure that he is talking to her, but she hears something like this:
I didn’t choose to seek you out in the woods, where it is dangerous. You appear in my dreams. When dreams push you toward someone, toward a place you’ve never been, there is no use in fighting it. It will eventually find you and the dream will be realized
.

She can smell his musky skin. It is the scent of rotting leaves, of damp earth. She inhales the warm stench of his breath. It isn’t sour like Mathurin’s milky tongue, but is bitter from the herb teas the Savages drink. Deskaheh lifts Laure from the ground. She can feel how light she has become, more starved even than she was in the Salpêtrière. She lets him carry her. He places her through the door into the bed and kneels on the dirt floor in front of her. Laure closes her eyes and waits as he runs his hands over her ribs and stomach. He is still speaking as if to himself in his Savage tongue as he works to undo the strings of her dress.

Deskaheh lets out a short cry, and she feels the wet warmth of her blood spilling from her breast before she feels any pain. Deskaheh lowers his head to the wound. He begins to suck as if trying to remove the venom of a snakebite. After a time, when the blood slows, the awful pain of the cut creates an intensity that mirrors the cold of the cabin, the brutality of living amongst trees. He is an expert at this mutilation, Laure thinks, and knows that there will be no more pain.

Laure expects there will be something more now, something to take away the pain he has inflicted. But Deskaheh is pushing Laure away and covering her back up. She burns with humiliation.

Everything with Deskaheh is a ritual. At least it is better to think that way. That he at least knows where they are going. That there is some place for this sort of thing in the universe. That there is a god that watches with pleasure waiting to see them intertwined, becoming liquid together.

Laure thinks of Mathurin who is her actual destiny. The cabin he built with his thick hands in preparation for her or for some other, tougher country woman from across the sea. When Laure would awaken screaming, haunted by the sounds of the woods passing through their feeble home, Mathurin would say that he doesn’t dream.

Deskaheh stumbles away from her, and she reaches on the bed for the knife he cut her with. It is some traded item being used against her. Maybe Mathurin gave it to him. The handle is carved into a Savage animal, a bird of some sort. Deskaheh no longer has any fire in his look. He is reaching for his coat. Laure stays on the bed in the corner of the room holding the knife in her hand. She considers throwing it at him, but doesn’t want to hurt him. She is weak with adoration for him. What woman would feel this way? Why can’t I feel limp, consumed like this when Mathurin touches me? The door closes without making a sound and he disappears into the cold.

She wonders how it would have felt if Deskaheh had cut her deeper, if the blood had continued to flow out of her.

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