Song of Batoche Read online

  SONG OF BATOCHE

  SONG of

  BATOCHE

  Maia Caron

  RONSDALE PRESS

  SONG OF BATOCHE

  Copyright © 2017 Maia Caron

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher, or, in Canada, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency).

  RONSDALE PRESS

  3350 West 21st Avenue

  Vancouver, B.C. Canada V6S 1G7

  www.ronsdalepress.com

  Typesetting: Julie Cochrane, in Granjon 11.5 pt on 15

  Cover Design: Marijke Friesen

  Paper: 55 lb. Enviro Book Antique Natural (FSC), 100% post-consumer waste, totally chlorine-free and acid-free.

  Ronsdale Press wishes to thank the following for their support of its publishing program: the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada, the British Columbia Arts Council, and the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Book Publishing Tax Credit program.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Caron, Maia, 1960–, author

  Song of Batoche / Maia Caron.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-55380-499-4 (softcover)

  ISBN 978-1-55380-500-7 (ebook) / ISBN 978-1-55380-501-4 (pdf)

  1. Riel Rebellion, 1885 — Fiction. 2. Métis — Fiction. 3. Saskatchewan — Fiction. 4. Historical fiction. I. Title.

  PS8605.A763S66 2017C813’.6C2017-903928-8C2017-903929-6

  At Ronsdale Press we are committed to protecting the environment. To this end we are working with Canopy and printers to phase out our use of paper produced from ancient forests. This book is one step towards that goal.

  Printed in Canada by Marquis Printing, Quebec

  For my father Allan Caron

  and for C.M.

  “Medea, you struggle in vain:

  some god, I do not know which, opposes you.

  I wonder if this, or something, like this,

  is what people indeed call love?”

  — Ovid, Metamorphoses

  Table of Contents

  Part I

  a small one

  scorn, or something worse

  he has come

  a tender creature

  the enemy

  they are all going to hell

  david

  le maudit anglais

  he saves that for you

  an indulgence

  she is so

  mistahi-maskwa

  take genesis

  bestow on me the grace

  a sovereign state

  the spirit is not good with him

  god has told me

  hunted like an elk

  supplication

  i will have that one

  the making of a country

  beyond comfort in this life

  a viper poisons the nest

  a dire blessing

  bathsheba

  Part II

  their blood is water

  the world will know

  feast of the novena

  pauvres misérables

  the catholic apostolic and living church of the new world

  god’s ear

  the law of love

  parley

  the red tide

  rababou

  the confessor

  city of god

  river of blood

  tourond’s coulee

  and the people stood beholding

  we whipped them

  consumption

  an embarrassing but novel position

  i will raise up evil

  the blood of christ

  discovery

  he hears god

  god of war

  may god so keep me

  that dark one

  the worst possible place

  smoke and mirrors

  ravages

  goliath

  the visit

  nikâwiy

  more to eat yet

  a gathering of souls

  death may come today

  divide and conquer

  pompous old fool

  a child

  god is not here

  running away like rabbits

  an attack of resolute whites, properly led

  spoils of war

  those who are eaten

  i will not fall into their hands

  she spoke his name

  epilogue

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  I

  a small one

  It was a bad sign to almost lose her son the night before Riel arrived. He was miles away yet, but Josette could feel him, a spider at the outer edge of its web and her a fly in the centre, waiting. She laid a hand to her son’s forehead and stared at him a long while in the light of a candle that flashed shadows up the walls. Only hours ago she had boiled water to bathe his lifeless body, yet here he breathed, black lashes upon his cheek mocking existence. The priest would say it pleased God to raise him up again.

  Air in the backroom was stale, humid. When she blew out the candle, the bundled shapes of her four sleeping children faded into darkness. Even the whippoorwills were silent in the trees behind the house, just a yard of luminous moon glancing off the sod roof and sweated heat rising in the eaves.

  Out on the porch, she lifted her dress around her thighs and let the front door swing wide to clear the smell of vomit and fever. She closed her eyes, whispering prayers to the Cree spirits for rain. A full moon rose in a sky pricked with stars—Thunder Moon her people called it—the colour of ripe wheat, lurid and immense. Mosquitoes buzzed at her neck; she could feel the strange touch upon her skin, flickering wings and then some low dull sound near the barn that made her turn and drop her skirts. But it was no more than night wind stirring the trees. Norbert’s four sled dogs had disappeared, only a skunk scent that rose from the parched fields, the sunburnt pigweed, and her grandfather’s voice in her head.

  Drought smell’s not far off from death.

  Wahsis cried out, but he had settled by the time she reached the backroom door. She wanted to wring a fresh cloth with river water for his brow but when she went to the pail, found that her eldest daughter had forgotten to fill it before dark. The scar ached between her legs, a tear the midwife had sewn closed with a beading needle less than three years ago. Josette touched herself there, not in desire—she had put that away from her—but in memory of how Wahsis had been yanked from her womb. The blood had rushed out like a river at spring melt. To save her life, the midwife pushed her hand in and worked it to the place the baby had come only moments before.

  When the bleeding finally slowed, the midwife met her eyes, fist still in her body and said, “The next one will kill you.”

  Josette picked up the pail and went down the porch steps, the earth nearly as bright with moon as it was that day with sun. The handle abraded her palm. Her long black skirts trailed in the dust of the yard, now in dead grass, almost soundless. Once her husband had admitted that he craved the sweet mystery of her, that he lived there. He said it was something like hunger. She was captured, like one of the animals in his traps, the wild escaped from it, leaving only what it showed to the world.

  Near the bluff, she passed a hallowed place, pickets stark against the sky, and small wooden crosses darkening over bones, now powdered and mute. She imagined taking out her knife, drawing it down the blue veins of her wrists. The blood would drip from her arms and sink into the dirt as Eve’s had in the first days of creation. Blood in
shame for her sin, blood for the mortal stain left on woman.

  Heat issued from the earth, a smell of wolf willow and sweet grass on the sloping trail to the river. A high-pitched snarl came from below; most likely a pack of dogs, some Norbert’s, were hunting down the bank. Stars flared in an arc above her head, the path of light on the river sure as his hands had been, pressing her in a more urgent manner than before, and her rising from the body with helpless judgement. At the river’s edge, she stood in the reeds, the hem of her skirt and her moccasins wet and cool in the lapping damp. The current seemed languid. Last week, a Hudson’s Bay steamer on its way to Prince Albert had its hull ripped out by rocks and lay stranded not far upstream from here.

  When she waded in, the river pulled at her knees. One version of her kept walking until it caught her skirts and carried her under, but she thought of her children lying up in the house. She lowered the pail, let it fill, and brought it up the trail. Yards from the barn, four spectres gleamed and hovered, staring sightless to the night sky, blunt vertiginous snouts that had once snuffed prairie grass. Their empty eyes sought stars. As she grew closer they revealed themselves: buffalo skulls on each fence post of her garden, the bones bleached white as a stone from years in the sun. The fence was purposeless. No rabbit would bother with carrots and potatoes reduced to the earth by weather.

  She put her hand to the paddock gate and looked south. Smoke still coiled from the Dumonts’ summer kitchen chimney, the front meadow awash in moonlight. Louis Riel would stand there tomorrow before the feast tables. How could she face him? She wouldn’t. It was men he had come to see, and he’d take no mind of her or any other woman. The Old Crows would stand there too, urging him to taste their boulettes and bannock, close to peeing themselves that the great Métis hero was finally among them. The Old Crows, who did not fear for their lives when their husbands came to bed.

  She set the pail by the door and dipped a cloth to lay on Wahsis’ brow, her wet skirt cool against her legs. She let herself down next to him, hot, tired, ready to sleep, but no sleep would come. Ôyêhâ, she whispered in Cree, to the one no longer there. A light had gone out in her when she’d found her daughter, still and cold, taken in the night. She had carried that wasting body out of the house, arms heavy with more than the weight of her. So many died they were expected not to mourn.

  Through the thin straw mattress, a loose set of planks that served as a floor, and the hard-packed dirt below, the sound of a horse came long before it galloped into the yard. On the other side of the room, Cleophile’s eyes flicked open.

  “Go back to sleep,” Josette whispered. Her daughter turned to face the wall. Josette lay stiff on her side, listening. She counted the moments, Norbert leading his mount to the barn. Now removing its saddle and bridle. Rubbing it down. Of late, her husband had sat on the porch staring out at the dry fields, ignoring her when she dared speak, then taking off on his stallion, coming back with the horse foaming and close to death. He would not feed the dogs for days until they were half-starved and looked at the children as prey. He might be on the edge of one of his headaches that would keep him in bed for days.

  He might be on the edge of something else.

  When he looked at her in a certain way, she knew what was coming, sometimes even sparked his anger to control one small thing.

  His great shadow appeared at the door. “Cleophile,” he said, his voice slurred. “Unsaddle the horse.”

  The girl roused herself quickly. She slipped her bare feet into moccasins and walked past Josette, her eyes down.

  When Cleophile had closed the front door, Norbert said, “Come out.”

  “Wahsis is still sick,” Josette said, her back rigid.

  “He’s asleep. Come out.”

  When she did, Norbert had struck a match to a candle and was sitting at the table, his face bloated with drink. Her eyes lighted a moment on a blooded cut at his lip. Two dead rabbits lay in front of him, their necks twisted from the snares.

  Norbert saw her looking at them and said, “I do not neglect my duty.”

  She had watered the backfields by hand while he drank himself stupid in Batoche, and he expected her to praise him. This man she’d once loved, tall and thickly built. A jutting chin and dark hair that twisted at the scalp and fell across his eyes prompted the women to call him fine-looking, when they didn’t think she was near enough to hear. Then their voices would hush. “Tant pis—that one’s not right in the head.”

  “Make a fire,” he said.

  “The house is hot,” she said in a quiet voice. “Wahsis burns with fever.”

  “A small one.”

  She turned, fingernails digging at her palm. He needed to see her move through the room and then blame her for stirring his desire. She lighted a few sticks of kindling in the stove to keep the flames low. Cleophile came in and went to the backroom without looking at either of them. She closed the door behind her.

  Josette gathered the collar of her dress close around her throat and turned to face Norbert. Then she was kneeling, struggling with the ceinture fléchée that held up his pants, praying he was too drunk to care how he arrived at his relief, but he pushed her hand away. She got up and faced the table, offering her backside. He wrestled with her skirts, his frustration mixed with mounting excitement. If she closed her eyes, she could will a kind of want that would make it tolerable, a desire she once had for him. Finally, he exposed her and spit into his hand.

  She did not make a sound as he stabbed at her, tearing the small scabbed gashes. He pulled away and put a knee to her ribs, turning her as he would a calf for branding. She was winded, her chest bruised, and could feel the limp bodies of the rabbits beneath her. His face went slack with desire as he looked down between her legs, as a man would after months on the trail, spurring his horse upon seeing home.

  “Michel Dumas says his wife lets him have it when he wants.”

  Norbert entered the place she’d kept from him, and she bit down on her tongue, felt the midwife’s stitched scar splitting open like wood to the axe. He held her shoulder with one hand, was drunk, had killed to prove his worth and would not be turned. If she fought him, the children would hear. She turned her face to the candle, a lone flame guttering in a sudden draft, its small heat making the air shudder.

  “Spill outside of me,” she whispered, but he buried himself deeper, his back rounded and hard. She thought she would not stand another moment when he finished with a whimpering cry.

  Josette got off the table and lowered her dress around her ankles, resisting the urge to clean the mess between her legs. At her back throbbed a dull, hammering ache made worse by the sight of the rabbits, their legs shamefully distorted by death, glassed eyes staring.

  He pulled up his pants, spoke of riding out at dawn to meet Riel on the trail, and wanted something to eat from what she had cooked for the feast. She looked at the floor, wooden slats that he had found discarded in someone’s midden heap and laid so poorly they shifted, revealing crude gaps of beaten earth. Norbert was tying his ceinture fléchée, and its long fringe flicked the back of her wrist. The feel of it, like a lash, or something that would finally bury her.

  “I have made nothing.”

  Norbert snatched at the rabbits once, twice, finally getting his hands on them and swept them off the table. She closed her eyes as the broken bodies fell at her feet.

  “You will cook for him,” he said. “And be there when we bring him in.”

  scorn, or

  something worse

  Madeleine dumont came out on her porch, squinting and wiping her hands on a cloth. The armpits of her black dress were ringed with sweat, but despite the heat, she’d pinned a new lace collar at her neck. By God, she thought, when would it rain?

  The Saskatchewan wound like a great snake below the bluff, green-blue water dim in the shallows where it eddied in a gentle motion. To the south, slanting banks levelled to a grassy terrace at the crossing where the Humboldt Trail exited a thick stand of cottonw
oods. Riel’s wagon train approached, and she marked its progress by a cloud of dust sifting over the trees. She took hold of the rosary at her neck and turned her eyes to Josette Lavoie, who was on her knees in the garden, apron tented in one hand. Josette, who God had blessed with a fertile womb while striking hers barren.

  Over the past six weeks, Madeleine had watered her garden from the river, awaiting her husband Gabriel, who had gone south across the boundary line. Even in the days of the buffalo hunts, he would not have ridden three hundred miles into the Montana Territory but for Louis Riel. Since word had come that Riel had agreed to help them, her neighbour Josette had been difficult, apt to strange silences. There might be good reason, but what kind of mother did not look up when a shout came from her four children playing at the bluff? Josette’s two daughters minded the young boys, calling out when they braved the edge. By the look of Wahsis, it did not seem he’d been near death these last few days. In the way of children, he’d thrown off his sickness and run, chasing his older brother as if he’d never been ill.

  Josette got up from her crouch in the garden and looked north with an ireful gaze. The Old Crows were on their way down from Batoche in Red River carts as they had in the buffalo hunts. Their wagon train and Riel’s would converge in the front pasture before the sun moved another pace across the sky.

  “Pull the small ones, too,” Madeleine called to her before going back in the house.

  “They’re all small ones,” Josette said and shaded her eyes to look south, as if a storm were coming.

  Madeleine went to the stove and flipped a round of bannock in a fry pan with practised fingers that were immune to scalding heat. She would not normally have a fire going in the house on a hot day, but the stove in her summer kitchen out back was covered with pots of stew and boulettes she had made for the feast.

  Josette came into the kitchen and tipped an apron-full of sad carrots and potatoes onto the table. She said, “You would think God was coming.”