River City (30 page)
“So you took apart his apparatus—”
“We isolated him. Demoralized him. Retirement looked good to the man. That meant we never had to take him on directly.”
“I may have to,” Touton revealed.
The pair carried on in silence, and when they had completed the circle back to their starting point, the director spoke his last words of caution.
“You’re a popular figure yourself, Armand. What they call a folk hero. But Houde, he’s a god. If you take him on, be convincing. Otherwise, don’t. If he feels under attack, he’ll make the populace feel that they are under attack, and he’ll use that impetus to march right back into power and chase us all out. Everything we’ve accomplished will be blunted. The crooks, the whorehouses, the gambling dens—the works—all will be back in business before the sun rises on his victory.”
“You fear him that much?”
“We haven’t proven ourselves yet. We’re hanging on by a thread, and we’ve got Duplessis plotting to get rid of us.”
“I wondered why you didn’t touch him. That nagged at me. Now I know.”
“Good night, Armand.”
“Sir. Please, pardon the intrusion. My best to your wife.”
Driving back to the office, Touton felt apprehensive. The appearance of hunting down Houde would stir up the city. People would characterize even the slightest insinuation as a witch hunt, and he’d be mocked as a lackey in the service of his political superiors, doing their dirty work to rout the opposition and to kick a great man when he was down. He preferred to operate the way he had been trained as a commando: attack quickly, with devastating fury. This action, it seemed, required the opposite approach, and he wasn’t sure how to be effective that way.
As he cleared the rise on the eastern slope of the mountain and continued along Park Avenue down to the city’s centre, he heard the summer sounds of
the city, the radio music and shouts, cars squealing their tires, and he could see the dance of bright lights. He made a mental note to himself, he didn’t know why, to check out this Father François Legault, Carole Clément’s friend. And then he was idly wondering where the men in the black Cadillac might be hanging out tonight, what they were thinking about, how they were managing to beat the heat.
T
HEY NAMED THEIR FORT PERILOUS.
The first summer passed in peace. Although chosen for their combat experience, brave men, in meadows that, decades earlier, had been Iroquois cornfields, admired the dulcet tones of warblers and wrote poetic letters home. They thanked God for bequeathing such a warm, tranquil garden for their endeavours. The Iroquois had not yet discovered their presence, although accounts from other districts concerning the atrocities of war reached their ears, gumming the hearts of even the most valiant. Outside their stockade composed of flimsy palings, wandering Huron and Algonquin encamped. The French fed them, and spoke of their Lord, and Jeanne Mance tended to the sick or injured among them. Whenever the men applied the paint of battle and went off, she and the other women at Fort Perilous cared for the Indian children and guarded the women the warriors left behind.
To the south, the Dutch had established Fort Orange, where they urged the Iroquois to assail the Indians of the northern woodlands and confiscate their harvests of furs.
Guns, the Dutch offered. More guns for more furs.
“We need guns, our brothers!” the embattled Huron decreed to the French.
The Algonquin pressed the same position. “We bring beaver pelts to trade for harquebusiers.”
At Fort Perilous, no one was suffering from an interest in pelts. They were a religious sect. The colony existed through the generosity of the pious in France, and it survived through a fledging effort to grow food, hunt animals
and fish. Their sole devotion remained to convert the Indian soul. Not money, nor fur.
“Will you save the souls from the bones of our dead brothers,” inquired a Huron chief, “after the Iroquois kill us? We need guns, our brothers.”
As their first winter befell them at Perilous, a crisis ensued.
They had constructed their fortification at the apex of the mighty St. Lawrence and tawdry St. Pierre rivers. A December thaw and an ice dam caused the waters to rise. The moat at the foot of the palisades had filled, and the powder magazine was now in jeopardy. Food supplies would be imperilled next. Should the waters continue to rise unabated, the settlement would be swept away in the deluge, and those who escaped abandoned to the desperate cold soon to return. Those frail few would be left without protection, food or weapons, without contact and bereft of hope. Each man, woman and child would die—huddled, stiffened lumps upon a frozen earth. If the most resilient among them miraculously survived, in their misery depleted, they’d have their scalps razed come spring, upon being discovered by the Iroquois.
The leader of the French, Paul de Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve, a soldier of considerable battle experience, had but one last defence to save Fort Perilous.
He fell upon his knees in prayer.
Between his clasped palms he clenched the Cartier Dagger, its blade pointed to the earth, the diamond-and-gold grip upright to the pale winter sun. In the intensity of his prayer, Maisonneuve felt his hands fuse with the knife, his life’s blood radiate with its history. Cartier, Champlain, Brulé … these remarkable, if impious, men stirred his blood with their own.
“If the waters recede,” Maisonneuve vowed, “as God is my witness, I will carry a cross to the top of the mountain and erect it there, to forever stand as testament to our Lord’s majesty and grace.”
On Christmas Day, the waters receded. The colony was saved.
The cross Maisonneuve constructed was large and heavy, and through the forest, over rocks and ice, through the snows of winter, to the brink of exhaustion, he carried it upon his back. Upon a crest of the mountain, he erected it to stand as testament above the island of Montreal forevermore. To the cross,
under guard, the women and men would go to pray for long hours. No matter what other labours might compel them, or that Iroquois might await in ambush to kill them, they would put aside such material matters to renew their spiritual zeal.
Winter found its slow way to spring, spring raced quickly to summer, and they endured, that first year, before they were discovered.
A year after their arrival, the colonists were betrayed.
A Huron war party led Iroquois to the settlement.
Five Frenchmen bowed their backs in fields outside the walls of Fort Perilous, fighting back the ravages of weeds among their patches of paltry vegetables. They were attuned to a choir of birdsong when unseen Iroquois emitted war cries from both sides of the clearing. They looked up. Then they stood. They neglected to run. Indians bounded upon them, leaping high through the grass, stamping through the lettuce and carrots, tomahawks raised, knives glinting in the sunlight, and the three French who finally ran were quickly snared, their throats slit, the tops of their heads sheared off. A man who remained frozen in his fright was scalped while he remained upright, and he was still on his feet as they pulled him away. The one man who attempted to reach his weapon was snapped up from the ground a foot from his destination, and he was also scalped alive. Like the other, he survived, and was hauled into the dark woods within earshot of the fort, where he and his companion were lashed upright to stakes.
The Iroquois feasted with their Huron brothers that night. They told stories and danced in the pale light of the moon in the smoke of twin fires that burned the feet and blackened the calves of the two French. They tossed sticks upon the fire to keep it smouldering, but not too hot, and as the French cried out in their agony and dismay, the Indians, content in their victory, slept.
In the dark of night, while the moon descended below cloud, as the French mewed in their anguish upon hot coals, only Iroquois warriors awoke, to butcher their Huron informants in their sleep, leaving only one Huron child alive.
Then they ripped the skins from the chests of the French, severed their penises and tore off their testicles, and stoked the fires to make them truly
blaze. While they heard the final screams of their captives, they sang and danced in the chorus of their spree and washed themselves in the blood of their eviscerated Huron enemies. The bodies of the white men slid down the stakes as they were consumed by flame, and as their heads fell into the coals and the nostrils, ears and mouths burned orange and blue, fire licked through the sockets of the eyes, staring out upon the festivities.
They roasted the Huron child captured alive, and at the rising of the sun, they ate him.
Inside Fort Perilous, men and women held their children as their bodies shook. Maisonneuve fell again upon his knees. Jeanne Mance, his loyal aid, had already been upon her own knees for hours, and remained there until the distant screaming, and the dancing and the singing, ceased. She arose as the sun achieved its zenith, to deal with the burial of the dead, Huron and French alike.
As one, the people grieved.
Maisonneuve brought out a carpenter and soldier from France, Louis d’Ailleboust, who undertook to rebuild the fortifications. Fort Perilous was bolstered to become seemingly impenetrable, using earth-filled bastions. The Iroquois had attempted a full-scale attack on a fort at the mouth of the Richelieu River, and there three hundred warriors had been forced to retreat, so they had learned the power of the French fort and returned to a tactic where they waited for white people to wander outside the safety of their walls.
D’Ailleboust became not only the builder of the fort, but the community’s architect. He constructed the hospital outside the walls of Fort Perilous, and included strong fortifications in his plans. Attacked, his ramparts withstood the first test, as Lambert Closse, with his sixteen men, held off two hundred Iroquois. Arrows rained from the sky, tomahawks turned end over end through the air and harquebusiers fired from the woods, yet with each return volley only Iroquois lay fallen. Jeanne Mance, within her hospital throughout the battle, ministered to those French who were ill with fevers, and to a Huron brought to her after being mauled by a bear, but no wounded.
As safe as the forts proved to be, life continued outside the walls. Crops were planted, worked and harvested. Trees were felled, the wood cut. Rabbit and deer and quail were hunted, the carcasses trimmed and dragged back to the fort. Fish were caught in nets and drawn from the river, and hung to dry in the hot summer sun. Pilgrimages to the cross remained another necessity. Nothing was accomplished without great hazard.
Jean Bédard and his wife, Catherine Mercier, created the largest of the new farms. A good soaking rain was followed by a bright sunny day, and they were happily tending their precious field as Iroquois descended. The man was struck down in combat, the woman carried off and scalped alive. An Iroquois, hideous in his war paint, bared his teeth at her and she cried and turned her head away. He laughed at her fright, then lunged and cut off her nose. Another warrior sliced off her ears. A third chopped off her breasts, and under the light of the moon, while she still breathed and screamed, they burned her alive as her flesh blackened and her screams sang in their ears until her blood boiled and burst from her skin.
“Maisonneuve!” men cried out in their rage. Lambert Closse, the hero of the battle against the attack on the hospital, was unrelenting in pressing his opinion. “Maisonneuve! Sir! Listen to us! Our knees are bleeding! We cannot crawl on them another inch!”
“What would you have me do, Lambert? Kill us all?”
“Sir! We cannot be cowards! The Iroquois will kill us all, one by one, if we don’t fight back!”
Initially, Maisonneuve was adamant. “The forest is their home. We have no ability in the woods, where they outnumber us. Inside the fort, we are safe. Alive, we can persevere. Dead, we are good to no one. Reduce our numbers much further and we won’t be able to defend the fort. Do you want to die and leave the women and children to the mercy of our enemies?”
His arguments could not sustain his people for long. The men wanted to attack. They challenged his courage and derided the choices he made. Men murmured amongst themselves, and even the women discussed the possibility that Maisonneuve lacked courage, until finally he relented. He was a solider. He would demonstrate that he was a soldier, for otherwise his leadership would end.
He led a war party outside the walls.
In the woods close to the fort, the fight was swift and furious. Six French were promptly dead with arrows through their gullets and eyes and tomahawks splitting their skulls, the wounds from harquebusiers the Dutch had sold to the Iroquois evident on their bloody chests. A fallback was called. Maisonneuve covered the retreat himself and suffered a fierce stabbing, yet fought on. The Iroquois chief sought him out and attacked, howling like a wolf as he bore down upon him. Maisonneuve fired one pistol, which did not discharge, and the chief’s tomahawk was raised to crush his skull when the second pistol fired and the warrior, surprised by death, gasped and fell still. The French executed their retreat, firing behind them as they fled, and as the Iroquois came upon their dead chief they lost interest in the pursuit.
Inside the walls of Fort Perilous, the French lost interest in further forays.
“Paul, in their own way,” Jeanne Mance attested, “the people are right.”
They were speaking in Maisonneuve’s small hut as cooler air and the evening light entered through a series of windows that had been cut tall and narrow in case, one day, he had to fire a harquebusier from inside the stockade. Exhaustion seeped through the soldier’s veins, for he had spent the day clearing more land and hauling timber back to the fort. The attrition caused by the Iroquois wars required that each man at Fort Perilous perform a variety of tasks, and the leader’s position did not make him exempt. On the contrary, he felt it necessary to outwork everyone else, and did so despite not being fully recovered from his chest wound and the subsequent loss of blood.
