Scattered Bones (20 page)

Since most of the neighbouring Indians were Protestants, Étienne did not enjoy the respect that Oblates working in predominately Catholic dioceses usually did. He was required to pay for every little service – even his own parishioners held their hands out. And since St. Joseph was a poor mission to begin with, he ended up doing everything himself. Chopping wood, fetching water, hunting geese for his dinner, these tasks were no problem – his childhood on a farm hewn from the forests of Quebec had hardened him for such labour. Travelling was tougher, but in no time he taught himself to manipulate a canoe, even over rough rapids, and to handle a dogsled, mushing behind the team of big Huskies for miles in the coldest weather, his bedding, his trunk full of religious paraphernalia, his grub box, lashed onto the birch toboggan. The physical exertion, he felt, was good for his body, good for his soul. What almost broke him was the solitude.

He had been ordered by his superiors to have nothing to do with the Hudson’s Bay Company employees. It was thought that the Indians had become debauched through alcohol handed out by fur traders, and, as well, HBC employees were almost to a man Protestant. Étienne followed this rule until he realized how ridiculous it was. It meant years of being cut off from the friendship he yearned for, from those who could have helped him improve his English, an important consideration since most Indians where he served weren’t the least interested in learning French.

It was also drummed into him that to form personal attachments with his parishioners,
les sauvages
, was unseemly and inappropriate, and for some time he obeyed this order. But it had crippled him. To this day, bouts of
ennui
descend, so severe his mind topples into a black hole. He can’t pray, he can’t think, his body seizes up. The smallest thing brings it on – aspen whispering like conspirators in the autumn breeze, dogwood bushes turning yellow in late summer signalling the unbearable cold that would soon come, whooping cranes high overhead, garbling that they, at least, were escaping to the south.

~•~

Étienne hears twigs crackling.
Someone puffing. He jumps up. The Indians, both his parishioners and the Anglicans, understand that his sanctuary is out of bounds so the intruder must be some dolt from the white community.

“So sorry to intrude,” Florence Smith calls out. “I didn’t realize you were at prayer.”

“Actually, I’m not. Just thinking.” Étienne is glad to see Florence. He likes this homely, warm woman so much. It’s not that she’s jolly, which she is, but that she is the only nonnative he knows that truly appreciates the Cree way of life. He pats the spot beside him and she plops herself down.

“So what are you doing up here, Mrs. Smith?” he asks.

“For heavens sakes, I’ve told you a hundred times, call me Flo like everyone else. I’m just bumbling about trying to get the lay of the land.”

“Surely you know this territory inside out by now?”

“These days I feel like I don’t know Pelican Narrows at all. Something weird is going on, Father. Something untoward. Last night the wolves were howling and there wasn’t even a full moon. And that mysterious, anguished chanting that went on all night. You must have heard that.”

Étienne shakes his head no. “I’ve become so hard of hearing, soon I’ll be as deaf as a post. But please tell me what you think it’s all about.”

Florence is tempted to tell the priest what she witnessed that night – Arthur Jan and Bibiane Ratt ogling Indian relics they had dug up in the graveyard. But no. She’s going to handle that nasty business herself. She gets up to leave. “Well, Father, something is going on that you and I can’t fathom. If you do happen to discover what precisely is tormenting the elders of this village, please let me know.”

Étienne has no idea what Florence Smith is talking about. But he has no doubt there’s something to what she says. She has a deeper understanding of Cree culture than he does, or any white person he knows. And he hears the confessions of his Indian parishioners every week. Not for the first time he feels hopelessly inadequate and so utterly, utterly alone. He’s felt this way for so many years.

~•~

His brother had been
his one comfort. Ovide, too, had taken his vows as an Oblate of Mary Immaculate and was serving at St. Peter’s Mission on South Reindeer Lake, a posting even more remote than Cumberland House. The two brothers spent hours writing to each other, giving advice, offering comfort. Sometimes as many as twenty of Ovide’s letters would come in the same packet, arriving either by dog sled or canoe depending on the season. Étienne lived for those days.

They had so much in common, their family in Quebec, daily activities at their missions, the state of their own health, and the strength of their faith. But in the eighth year of their correspondence, Étienne noticed a change in his brother. Was it in tone, or temper, or sentiment? He’s still not sure, but he remembers the first letter that worried him. It was a response to one that Étienne had sent to Ovide earlier.

“I cried a great deal over your letter, brother dear,” Ovide wrote. “You will find my tears in the Sacred Heart where I have carefully deposited
them. The Sacred Heart renders my tears sweet and delicious. To weep for Jesus is the greatest earthly happiness.”

In a note written a month later, Étienne offhandedly joked that his parishioners sometimes got on his nerves. The return letter from Ovide was startling. “To be a missionary among these ingrate Indians is death to refinement, death to sensitivity, death to one’s soul.”

Such outspoken, and, to Étienne, distasteful sentiments continued to pour from Ovide’s pen. One particularly distressful missive arrived in the spring that followed the ferocious winter of 1905.

I want to become a martyr. Brother, you’ll say that’s no small ambition and you’ll ask me, ‘Who will be my executioners?’ This is very simple: they will be the mosquitoes and black flies; they will be the heavy packs I must carry on my back when I travel; they will be the children of my catechism class who do not listen; they will be their parents who fall asleep at each and every mass. And they will also be my faults, my temptations, my pains, my privations.

I do not seek a little martyrdom lasting just a few hours, but a life-long martyrdom. Surely God will be as pleased with this as he would the short-lived suffering of the saints. I now realize I am being burned at the stake, a slow fire that allows me to live perpetually in agony.

Not long after, Ovide was celebrating mass for a dozen faithful when he suddenly cried, “Oh my Lord, why have you forsaken me?” Grabbing a metal poker sitting atop the wood stove, he swung it wildly, almost hitting the head of an eight-year-old boy, the most troublesome student in his catechism class. The slender priest was easily subdued by a burly Chipewyan so that none of the parishioners were hurt. Ovide’s hands were singed, but only slightly. His mind, however, was reduced to ashes.

He was shipped, comatose, to the Oblates’ St. Christopher mission house. It took years for him to regain his speech and take hold of any sense of reality. When Étienne visited him, he was saddened to see that his brother’s life had become entirely circumscribed. The outside world didn’t exist for him, people were of no interest. What engaged him were the minutiae of daily existence – whether the tomatoes were ripening, whether the sacramental wine decanter was filled to the correct level, whether the laundry should be hung pending a snow storm. He now saw his life’s mission as insuring that everything, and everyone, was well scrubbed and in their proper places.

A year ago, the St. Christopher Mission underwent a ‘reorganization’, and, as a cost-cutting measure, Ovide was handed over to the care of his brother. Étienne often feels that now it is
he
who is being martyred.

The priest stands to stretch. These days his legs are often stiff and sore, probably the joints wearing out. To the northeast, he can just make out a bustle of activity. Men are running from Arthur Jan’s store to canoes at the water’s edge. He tries to spot Joe. The boy has been hired to help build the wooden containers that will be shipped as part of the expedition accompanying the American writer.

“The funny thing is,” Joe had told Étienne the previous evening. “I didn’t see any piles of pelts or rock samples waiting to be packed, so I don’t know what’s being carted.”

Whatever it is, the priest thinks, Arthur’s pockets will soon bulge with dollar bills.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Étienne begins his trek
down the hill.
It’s growing hotter by the minute and under his heavy cassock sweat is building between his shoulder blades. Many of the younger missionaries are rebelling against this type of apparel, at least when they’re in the bush, insisting the clerical collar is sign enough of their service to God, but Guillaume Charlebois, the bishop of the diocese, is as old-fashioned and pig-headed as they come – Étienne can’t abide the man – and he insists that full religious garb be worn at all times. Étienne doesn’t really mind. He’s been encased in this armour for so many years he wouldn’t be comfortable wearing anything else.

The priest heads towards the low-slung log cabin shared by Joe and his mother, Sally. It’s the neatest place in the neighbourhood, with a picket fence and patches of wild roses – Étienne has seen to that. He knocks quietly and, without waiting for an answer, walks in.

He loves this cozy place, today brightly lit by sunshine pouring through three glass windows. The wood-burning stove stands in the middle of the room, its chimney stack running at an awkward angle up to the ceiling. Étienne smiles. Joe’s laundry, hung up to dry, dangles from it.

In one corner is an iron cooking range/oven on which sits a kettle and various pots. Étienne lifts a lid and sees that a cauldron of vegetable soup is simmering. Probably either Annie, the Wentworths’ housekeeper, or kind Florence Smith brought it. He’s glad of that. It will go down easily, and Sally eats hardly anything since she took sick.

Against the walls are arranged a table covered with yellow oilcloth, and a couple of wooden chairs. How many congenial cups of tea has he enjoyed here? Too many to count, that’s for sure.

There’s a cupboard in which tin plates and pretty porcelain cups are stored, and a long, low commode on which water buckets, cooking utensils and a glass oil lamp have been placed. A bearskin rug is spread on the floor. It’s here that Sally used to sit cross-legged for hours, sewing, preparing vegetables, weaving exquisite birch bark baskets. Several are displayed on the shelves of a carved wooden hatch, by far the most elaborate piece of furniture in the place. Étienne had it shipped from Quebec and presented it to Sally in tribute to her twenty-five years of service as his housekeeper.

Above the door hangs the bronze crucifix which he presented to Joe at the time of his first communion. The boy’s bed is on one side of the room. It’s quite elaborate, the frame made of fancily-wrought iron – discarded by an HBC manager moving on. Sally’s small sofa is on the other side. She lays there, tightly wrapped in blankets despite the heat.

“Sally, my dear,” Étienne whispers, “how are you today?”

He doesn’t expect an answer, and there is none. A month after Ovide arrived she fell into this bed and has been comatose ever since. Nobody has been able to diagnose what’s wrong, not Cree specialists in herbal medicines nor Dr. Happy Mac after he examined her yesterday. Étienne has visited her twice every day since she fell ill.

He sits on the chair beside her bed, and tries to pray. Words soon fail him and his devotions peter out. He can do nothing but whisper to her, and hold her hand.

~•~

She was only fourteen
when she came to him. Her family was part of a heathen tribe that lived in the hills above Cumberland House. He had made it his special project to convert them, with little success. Perhaps in gratitude for his efforts, although there were likely other more plausible reasons of which he hadn’t an inkling, her uncle had shown up at the mission one day with the girl in tow. No man should live alone, he had blurted out. He was willing to give his niece to the priest. Étienne attempted to explain the reason Catholic clergy practised celibacy. The man had looked at him blankly and said he was leaving her there anyway.

As it happened, a new church and rectory had just been built and Étienne had been thinking about finding a housekeeper to clean and cook. So he agreed to take the girl on for a trial period. He thought that she probably would have no useful skills, but she was so willing, and, he had to admit it, so beautiful. Her thick lustrous hair was braided and parted in the centre which emphasized her prominent cheek bones. Her huge, almond-shaped eyes, black as a bear’s, stared curiously at him. Her nose was small and perfectly shaped, and while she seldom smiled, her lips were always parted as though she was about to say something intriguing.

Since she’d likely never met a white person before, never mind a tall, stern-looking man dressed in an ugly black gown, he thought she’d be frightened, but she appeared simply curious.

“Happy to be your keeper of house,” she said in Cree.

Étienne was surprised at how quick she was. Show her how to gently dust the inside of the tabernacle and thereafter she would perform the task perfectly. She cooked Indian style, of course, but quickly adapted to his tastes – no prairie turnip in the rabbit stew. Physically strong, she could chop wood like a man. She seldom began a conversation, but she would sit and listen to him rattle on all evening, although he knew that she understood only half of what he was saying. Just being close to her, all his fears and disappointments evaporated .