Bride of New France (36 page)

Laure and Deskaheh have already, in the few words they exchanged earlier on at the table, said all there is to say about their situation. Laure has married a pig and must spend the rest of her life in his forest cabin. Deskaheh will be staying in the tribe of the Algonquins with his new wife and the baby she is expecting. They have both abandoned their childish dreams for lives they cannot escape. What, then, can they hope to gain by this clandestine meeting?

Deskaheh grabs Laure by the arm as soon as he sees her as if she is a prisoner being taken by the police. He leads her to a street known as rue d’Enfer, Hell Street. It is the centre of the fur traders’ nighttime revelry. French men sit with pistols guarding the pelts of moose, deer, fox, and otters, but also richer ones of wild cat, marten, sable, and bear. The objects of their trade with the Savages, kettles, pans, clothing, china, necklaces, litter the streets, abandoned by Savage men more enthralled by alcohol and firearms.

Deskaheh takes Laure into one of the buildings. She lowers her face, pulling the shawl over her forehead. She recognizes some of the men from Mathurin’s trading party. Several candles burn in the room, and some men are singing
voyageurs
songs. There are other French women and a number of Savage girls
as well. They seem to be as drunk as the men. The noise is a tremendous blend of songs and the pounding of feet and hands on the wooden floor and tables. Stories of adventure, exaggerated by drink, are interspersed with raucous laughter. This could be any tavern in Old France except that here there are also Savage men and women who eat flesh, driven out of their minds by brandy. The room is hot and the candlelight has turned everything red.

Although it is dark enough, Deskaheh knows better than to stay in the main area with Laure. He takes her through a door to the back of the building where curtains of animal hide divide the space into private rooms. Deskaheh has brought Laure where prostitutes gather to entertain men for money. All sorts of colony men mix here like in the bawdy houses of Paris. By day they have other lives, wives and children, business to tend to, contracts to sign, fortunes to chase after. But tonight they are drowning those worlds in one cupful after another of brandy, wine, and spruce beer. The new country will be made—trees chopped, stubborn land ploughed, crops tended, furs traded— tomorrow, in the fall, some time later. The bitter weather will come, but for now the air is warm, stifling even. Bowls are filled and refilled with meaty soups. Blood flows easily.

At this court, Laure can easily be a queen. But the silk screens of the prostitutes’ quarters that Laure had imagined back in Paris are made of rotting animal flesh in Canada. The princes and dukes are bearded fur traders and Savage men. The enchanting women sing lyrics about forest romance in hoarse, drunken voices. Laure cannot even understand the serpentine movements of their Savage tongues.

There can be no mistaking why Deskaheh has brought her here, to this cubicle enclosed in hides. What must he think of
her, a prostitute who gives herself away for free? Laure cannot determine if her pounding heart is filled with bliss or terror.

Deskaheh smells of soil, herbs. The Jesuit priests warned the women newly arrived from France all the way up the river and as they slept on its banks.
These men eat the flesh of their captives. They roast them alive and eat the morsels bit by bit. This, I have seen with my own eyes
. Laure feels sick with guilt. One of the priests who spoke to them was missing an ear. The Jesuits have all gone mad over the crimes they have witnessed, the desecration of their God by the Savages. Is this not Laure’s God too?

But Deskaheh is gentle when he removes her dress, more skilful, more patient than her husband. Laure probably smells like sour milk, like Mathurin, like the diseased and crowded quarters of the Paris hospital. They both carry the story of their lives like ointment on their skin.

Laure is being dragged under the waves and it is so easy to let herself sink, to become one with the sea. The prayers she learned at the hospital are a distant litany, a thing of the past.

Questions fill Laure’s mind as she lets Deskaheh consume her body, limb by limb.
Is this what torture feels like? Am I also on fire and being eaten alive? How does it feel to burn for all eternity? Will I become a hungry forest ghost? Am I sea water consumed by flame? What will remain when I have gone?

For days, Laure stays in this way, enclosed by furs, waiting for Deskaheh to return to her. She wears the same dress and is starting to smell like the hides around her. He returns at all hours to see her, but she does not know the difference between
night and day in this place that is always filled with drinking and song and lovemaking. Deskaheh lies to the pregnant woman and to the others in his village so he can come and meet her. Laure is his dark and ugly secret. He devours her the way the other Savages consume the illicit firewater. Only she isn’t sure which of them is being destroyed, who will emerge victorious when the trading is complete.

As with most everything in Canada, it is the weather that decides Laure’s fate. It is late August, and the first wind of fall blows through the town on the last day of the fur-trade fair, when the inns are closing up and the fur racks are being dismantled. Laure stands on the street, feeling the breeze on her skin, as the men make their way to the canoes. She feels frail like an old woman facing the bright sun and fresh air. Deskaheh has already left for his village. There was no need to say goodbye. Every encounter with him was filled with parting. She makes her way back to Madame Rouillard, to the Tardif couple.

    20    

I
t is October of her second year in the colony, and Laure is gathering the last of the garden’s yield: some beets and onions that she tears with difficulty from the frozen soil. Her arms ache from struggling against the ferocious tenacity of the weeds and keeping them from overtaking the garden throughout the summer. There were the vermin, digging and chewing through the best of the crops at night, and then the worms burrowing their way into the corn when the stalks finally grew tall enough to offer up the cobs. Still, Laure managed to extract some sustenance from this beleaguered cultivation. The earliest crops had been the lettuce and cucumbers, then the beans, which seemed to grow better than the other vegetables and which she picked for weeks until her hands were raw and the beans themselves came to be filled with big purple seeds.

Fall signals the end of the fresh food supply in Canada, and it comes early. By October the earth has already turned hard and dry, ready to be shrouded in snow until spring. The trees have shed their leaves, and the brisk gusts of wind from the north offer an ominous sign of the winter ahead. The thick stalks of the final deep-rooted vegetables tear the palms of
Laure’s roughened hands. But she is desperate to gather all the food she can, as if stores of dried vegetables and jars of preserves can protect her from the dark desolation of a second winter in the cabin.

Laure is surprised to see Mathurin walking up the path one late-October day as she tends to the garden. He has been away for more than half of their first year of marriage, and she hadn’t really expected him to come back at all until the following spring. Tardif, upon seeing Mathurin come along the trail, greets him as if he has been here all along. The other men and even their wives only speak to Laure to ask if she needs anything. As a resident of their burgeoning settlement, they want to make sure she survives, but beyond the basic formalities they have no interest in befriending her. The men are afraid of Laure, and the wives don’t want their husbands speaking to her. She is from Paris, knows how to make lace, and refused for so long to cover her wild dark hair in the work bonnets all the other women wear. In fact it wasn’t until Laure came back from the fur-trade fair, shorn like a prisoner, that she started to wear her bonnet and a rude dress to match it. Also, unlike the other women, Laure is childless and without any family in the settlement or in all of New France.

Mathurin’s musket bounces on his belly as he walks up the trail to the cabin. He looks even more pink and fatter than when he left. Still like a baby pig well fed on grain. But unlike when he saw her last spring, this time Laure has also put on a little weight. The summer harvest throughout the colony and even in Pointe-aux-Trembles has been good. It would be easy to
prepare for Mathurin a homecoming feast, except Laure knows what he has been up to and what she has done in his absence. There is very little to celebrate.

“Welcome back, my husband,” she says. She stands up in the garden, wiping her torn hands on her apron.

“Look at this place. It’s becoming a real village.” He unslings his musket and sits it up against the house.

There is warmth to the settlement, a feeling of ease that was missing last year. The impression that this stretch of forest is a ransacked military encampment has somewhat dissipated. There are more curtains in the windows, greater food stores for the winter, fewer cracks in the cabin walls, the odd piece of furniture brought in from Ville-Marie, plans to build a church, and the foundations laid for a grand seigneurial home made of stone.

Laure is better prepared for this second winter. She has dried fruits and vegetables in the sun, purchased an extra barrel of smoked meat, and sealed up some of the biggest holes in the cabin. While inside, her stomach is satiated, her gut warmed by all the sunshine of summer and its foods, on the outside, her hands are cracked and her face and arms have been darkened by the sun. Laure’s choices were either to remain a
citadine
and starve in this forest colony or to roll up her sleeves and yank from the earth whatever sustenance it had to offer.

In the cabin she prepares a soup of salted pork and cabbage while Mathurin grunts his pleasure at the sight of the curtains and the quilt she has made. He sets about making a fire from the light sticks Laure gathered over the past few weeks. She is glad Mathurin has returned, however temporarily, so he can cut a wood supply of heavy logs, larger than last year’s, to fill the cabin wall. She learned last winter that it is the cabin’s fire that will take her through to spring.