Martyrs

Here's the first chapter, about fifteen pages long.



March, 1649, New France


Four weeks west of Montreal, in Huron territory, Father John de Brebeuf is in his sixth year of service in the mission near the sentimentally named St. Mary’s on the Wye near Georgian Bay. Such a poetic name, he thought when he first heard it, for a river flowing through a wilderness of granite and tall pine, colder than ice even in June. A lanky six-footer, he towers over the Hurons and his fellow Jesuit, Father Gabriel Lallement. John was thirty-two when he first came to North America, a convalescent. It is a miracle he’s made it to his fifty-sixth year.
He had helped build this cabin and he’d enjoyed the carpentry, not a skill he’d been taught but a joyful discovery late in life. Using an axe he’d brought with him, part of a chest of tools including a drill and hammers and a saw, all eventually to be traded away, he’d felled trees, trimmed the branches and joined corners. With a knife they eventually paid two teen-aged boys for their help, they put a cedar bough roof over their heads. The axe had bought him an audience with a chief, Hard as Bone, which was how he and Lallement had won permission to build their cabin - chapel.
To be chosen to go to New France, then go into the wilderness to establish a mission, is the highest honor for a Jesuit; it comes with a serious threat of torture by the savages, and a way to earn their respect; there is also the possibility of death and martyrdom and the opportunity for greater rewards in heaven. Some priests survive and return, most of them maimed – if only missing fingers at the hands of the Huron’s enemies, the Iroquois.
‘Snowing again,’ John writes in his diary one February night, working a stub of pencil in the winter when ink freezes, his knuckles thick and aching with arthritis. ‘Two feet on the ground. Wind numbs my gloved hands in the time it takes to free a piece of firewood from the pile. The mud between the logs is cracked and some has yielded to the winter gales. Hard to keep a candle lit. My breath freezes.’ Food usually ran short in February. He’d starved most winters, happy as the Indians when the ice broke. More than anything he has learned to see past his failures in making true Christians of the savages. There have been many sudden conversions on the eve of battle, the superstitious wanting to marshal all the spiritual power they can, all of them backsliders when the danger is past. I am not a reaper but a sower, a planter of seeds, which another following in my steps will reap.

A few converts come to the cabin for mass fairly regularly; fear and plain hatred had been and still is the more common response to the ministry. Brebeuf now puts his energies towards those who will follow him, other Soldiers of Jesus. He has published a Huron catechism and a French-Huron dictionary. Now he tries to convert hymns into Huron, keeping the tune with his wooden flute and a metronome given him by his mother, a farewell reminder of France and of her love. He keeps it with him, cherry with silver inlays, a reminder to him of home and to keep the faith.
When they have a service Brebeuf tries to teach the new souls a song and a few elementary lessons, like tutoring small children back in Montreal. Dove’s Egg, a Huron girl of about thirteen, dressed in fur-trimmed buckskin, is a lovely creature who often forces him to confess a sin of intent to Gabriel. She first came knocking on their mission door to hear John’s flute, the notes of which carried through the camp, pleasing some, making others scowl.
“What are the three parts of the Holy Trinity?” he asks her.

“Father-Son-and-Ghost?” she answers rhythmically.

He smiles and nods.

“Who is the ghost? The father’s or the son’s?” she asks.

Thinking, I’ve never been asked that, Brebeuf pulls gently on his beard as he says, “the ghost is not a ghost, not as you are thinking of a ghost.” Sighing in frustration, he looks up as he tries to conjure a better answer.

“When do you take a wife?” she asks, smiling flirtatiously.

“I am married to the church,” he answers, trying again to deny her allure.

Her face reflects her suspicion. “You are married to him?” she points to Lallement’s bunk.

Blushing, shaking his head, “no, not to Father Lallement. How do I say this? I am married to the spirit.”

First ghosts that are not ghosts, now this? “Spirits cannot love.”

“Not like a man and wife,” he concedes. “I love the church like my mother and father.”

“So who do you,” she makes a circle of her thumb and forefinger, then mimes penetration with her other forefinger.

“I don’t,” he says.

Her eyebrows rise in dismay. “If I am a Christian do I also not,” she uses her fingers.

“Oui,” he assures her. “I mean, you may. Though not for pleasure. Only to create life, to make a baby.”

She looks at him with the same baffled look with which she stares at the communion wafer each Sunday, certain the piece of bread still chews and tastes the same whatever the Black Robe says about the body of Christ.

He is almost grateful when her mother comes to get her, scowling at the Jesuit as she pulls her daughter by the wrist.

The priests farm a small plot, corn and beans and squash, alongside the Huron women, joining in their festivals as much as permitted, mostly singing and dancing. The Huron find the Jesuits comical as their black robes whirl, and their native tongue is amusing and pleasant to the ear. They especially find John’s height and balding pate cause for amusement. And they love to hear him sing, especially the Kyrie in Latin, another mysterious tongue.

Hard as Bone, the chief, is the eldest convert. Lallement won his soul for God by pulling an abscessed tooth after the shaman three days away, famed for his skill with toothache, failed. Hard as Bone brings to the service his daughter, Eagle’s Scream, but his son, Stone Breaker, is tougher.

A week after relieving Hard as Bone’s pain, Lallement was in his convert’s bark lodge teaching from Brebeuf’s Huron catechism. “If your enemy smites you you must turn the other cheek,” Lallement read to the chief. Hard as Bone puzzled on this advice, chewing a piece of jerky. “What do you think?” Lallement asked Hard as Bone’s son at the other end of the lodge.
Stone Breaker, black hair shaved on top and braided stiff with grease on the sides, scowled at the priest. “And let my enemy cut my throat? Is this really the word of your God? How many of you can be left after following such stupid advice?” He showed Lallement a long purple scar from inside his right elbow to his right wrist. Smiling proudly he flexed his arm. “See that? Iroquois sliced my arm while I was scalping his kinsman. I did not turn the other cheek, I cut his throat. I have both of their scalps now.” Cutting a strip of rawhide as he worked on his battle-axe, Stone Breaker watched his handiwork as he spoke to Lallement. “You have eased my father’s pain and if my sister wants to sit in your cabin and sing your silly songs it hurts no one. But if you come to me again with this stupidity I may cut your ears off and trade them.” He looked up from his work at Lallement like his pale skin was a pelt. “I wonder what the traders will give me for your ears?”

“Not much,” said Lallement evenly.

John wakes with the rising sun in his eyes, light breaching several broad cracks in the mud in a crisp March dawn, his breath frosting Perhaps today we should try to thaw some mud and plug the gaps? Gabriel is rising as well, slower, bothered with rheumatism. Bending over the fire pit, John stirs with a stick and the banked coals glow red. Feeding it woodchips, John blows gently until flames appear, feeds it kindling and soon the fire throws heat. Setting on a three stone perch in the flames a blackened kettle full of snow just scooped from outside, he begins his morning prayers. “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” Is there tea? He searches the tiny larder and, to his disappointment, finds none; they are nearly out of everything. Humming more prayers, when the kettle boils he settles for sipping hot water with a small piece of maple sugar to sweeten it. Breakfast? There is still a wooden bowl of parched corn, a winter staple, and some dried venison, a tithe from Hard as Bone. He chews a few frigid kernels and the cold food sets his left upper molars throbbing; exploring with his tongue he knows he’s losing another tooth. Thanks be to God he still has teeth to chew with on the right side. He works the dried corn gently, taking sips of the hot water and eases the growling in his belly. He will need to soften the jerky in the hot water before chewing it. He wants a third handful of corn but Gabriel deserves a meal as well. The Huron, like other tribes, collect roots, berries and other forage each autumn to get through the winter, but the priests are unschooled and beholding to the tithes of their converts, so they are the first to feel hunger pangs.

“Glory to God in the highest,” he prays, breakfast finished, kneeling in front of the wood and ivory cross hung from the wall over his pillow. “Watch over your children and keep us safe from harm.” They have baptized their few converts, a rite of which the Indians are terrified. The Jesuit’s only leverage is the promise of heaven. The Hurons ask, “Will my mother be in heaven when I get there?” to which their response is always, “if they were not baptized they will not be there.” The Hurons still consult shamans, they pray to both gods.

His prayers finished, he hears bird-calls, several bird-calls. His ears catch the sound, as one’s attention is held by the growl of a dog. A scream – he turns towards the chapel door. Now he hears whooping – not of birds, but of warriors.

“John,” Lallement calls from the chapel door, where he crouches, peeking out a crack, “Iroquois.” He hisses the word, a frightening one for this village, and John’s throat tightens.
The Huron are losing a war with the Iroquois and only a hard winter has kept them safe from attack. “The ice must be melting, they must have been able to canoe here,” Lallement says. “Dear God. I count at least thirty warriors.”

Cries fill the air, battle cries and those of warning, though it‘s really too late for that. The Iroquois have complete surprise on their side and they are dispatching Hurons with brutal speed and a violent grace, firing muskets in quick succession, slicing, scalping in fluid motion, pulling down bark houses and using spears on those caught within. John opens the door of the mission, drawn to help but frozen by the savagery and a faint hope that the Hurons might triumph, making his presence unnecessary, even a hindrance. Gabriel tugs him back inside and pushes the door almost closed. “You aren’t a warrior, John,” Gabriel reminds him. “Neither am I. We are Soldiers of Jesus. Use your best weapon, your faith, pray for them.” Lallement looks outside again at the bloodshed. “Don’t leave me alone in this place.”

They watch an Iroquois with a necklace of teeth stop in mid-leap by the powerfully swung hatchet of the wounded Stone Breaker; another attacker from behind drives a knife through the Huron’s torso with one quick, powerful thrust, leaving Stone Breaker to fall off the blade. Another pulls a burning stick from a cooking fire and lights the woven blanket entry of the nearest lodge, howling at the havoc he’s created as men emerge from their sleep to do battle and are shot and speared, their wives and little ones clubbed, then scalped.

Mingling with the normal morning greeting of smoke from the cooking fires they smell blood. “Lord, look upon us, your children, in our hour of need,” Lallement prays, and John joins him, eyes closed tight, raising their voices in prayer to try drowning out the screams and cries. “Look upon us your children in our hour of need!”

In fifteen minutes the bark lodges are flattened, some ablaze, sending gray smoke trails into the brittle March air. The air reeks of burning meat and blood. In a village of fifty, at least a dozen lay dead, including Dove’s Egg, discovered just two days ago to be pregnant, skewered with a spear, two arrows in her young womb as though the Iroquois could smell the fetus. Her mother lies near her, two arrows in her side, dying with blood on her lips, crying out to her daughter even as she is being scalped. Some of the Huron may have escaped into the woods.
The whooping is fading next to the crackling of fires. The captives are assembled, a few warriors wounded, but mostly women and children, among them the four baptized by the Jesuits. The adult captives are beaten to the ground for sport, slashed at by the youngest braves, their moccasins pulled off to bare their feet to the lingering ice and snow. Tied by their wrists with leather thongs, the captives begin their lives as Iroquois slaves.

Almost as an afterthought, three warriors pull open the door adorned with the simple cross, behind which the priests have been hiding. “Francais?”

Under their black robes they tremble. “Oui. Father Lallement.”

“Father Brebeuf. Jesuits.” The priests look at the bloodstained warriors and struggle to keep their dignity when their survival instinct suggests deference, and cross themselves, their lips moving almost absently in prayer for the dying and those in misery.

The youngest Iroquois, sinewy, wearing just a loin-cloth, face painted in black and white, his head mostly shaved but for a long black braid, takes Gabriel by the neck of his habit and raises his axe to behead him. The others, gray haired and dressed more warmly, stop him, one grasping the silver cross Lallement wears on a long cord around his neck to show the young warrior. “Francais.” To Lallement and Brebeuf he says, in French, “we have a treaty with you, Black Robe. Go now, in peace.”

“And them?” Brebeuf asks, indicating the slaves, his congregation.

“Hurons,” the warrior says.

Looking at his friend, seeing the axe intended for their scalps, John says to Gabriel. “We can’t leave them. We are their spiritual leaders.” Brebeuf looks at Hard as Bone and the others. “If they take our converts we have to find another village and start again.”

Lallement, panting from fear, says, “If we go with them, we go to our deaths, John. Are you ready for death? Shouldn’t we go elsewhere to spread God’s word?”

In a calmer voice, John says, “Maybe they won’t kill us. They may just torture us. Take off a finger and trade us back. We are worth a musket or two, no? We must watch over our flock, Gabriel.”

The gray ones speak quickly, so neither priest understands it, then the Jesuits are kicked and prodded to join the others in captivity. The young Iroquois ransacks the mission, bringing out the metronome, handing it to John, demanding a demonstration.

“Like this.” John sets the wand to ticking, back and forth.

The savage watches, then holds the wand to stop it. Letting it go, the wand resumes its rhythmic beat and he drops it in surprise. The others laugh at him, so he screams at the metronome and smashes it with his hatchet.

The aroma of a few dying Hurons roasting in the fires make John’s mouth water, the legacy of a starving winter, though his hunger repels him. As the Iroquois put their mission to the torch, he thinks of his hymnal in-progress. Not yet tied to the others, John takes a hesitant step toward the cabin and looks around; unmolested, he dashes into the smoke. Inside, blinded and choking, he finds his way to his bunk and reaches his notebook and tucks it under his robe. Coughing and hoarse when he escapes the flames, his eyes tearing, he is kicked back into line and trussed.
A gust of cold air makes the captives hunch down; Lallement shivers and John coughs as they are marched away.

In the course of the next four days Brebeuf becomes feverish and falls frequently, and usually an Iroquois is on him instantly, clubbing him hard over the head or in the ribs. By the third day John’s ribs, likely broken, give him such sharp stabs of pain with every breath he almost forgets about his rotten tooth. They watch their hands turn purple, the bindings too tight on their wrists, and at night when they sit on the frozen ground they try, with slow success, to move their fingers and restore feeling. They sleep spooned together, waist to waist, knee to knee, shivering nonetheless.

“Father, summon God, kill the Iroquois,” whispers Hard-as-Bone, lying in front of him. Dying slowly from an arrow broken off in his gut, he begs his priest, “use your powers.”

“Pray to God,” says Brebeuf. “Give up your pain as an offering. The Iroquois do not know the word of God. If he can enter their hearts we will be spared.”

Hard-as-Bone begins another hard coughing fit and John feels his body rigid against his own. When he catches his breath he begins chanting softly and rocking and Brebeuf knows he is praying to the gods he’s given up for Jesus, hoping it isn’t too late.

They get a handful of dried corn at dawn and are permitted to scoop a mouthful of water now and then when they cross thawing streams during the march, which begins each sunrise and stops only with sunset. Frigid water makes Brebeuf’s diseased tooth sparkle with pain. Eagle’s Scream, clubbed in the head after witnessing the spearing of her infant girl, struggles to keep walking. She drops to sleep the second night and never rises. John and Gabriel hover over her, saying the last rites, but not quickly enough for the young one in black and white, who hits Gabriel in the face with his war club. Blowing blood and snot, Gabriel finishes his prayers in a rush.

Near sunset, thinking he smells bacon cooking, deciding he is delirious, Brebeuf tries to whistle one of the hymns he’s been translating but his lips are too chapped, his mouth dry.

“Will Eagle’s Scream be in heaven when I get there?” asks Hard-as-Bone, somehow still on his feet.

“She will,” promises Brebeuf.

“And Stone Breaker?”

Brebeuf glances at his feet, bleeding but wonderfully senseless. “Stone Breaker refused baptism,” he reminds Hard-as-Bone. “I cannot promise you will see him in heaven.” Late in the third day Hard-as-Bone falls to his knees, then face forward on the ground in a pine grove.

Shrieking, the black and white warrior clubs him hard in the buttocks. Hard-as-Bone doesn’t move. Clubbing him again in the gut produces no reaction. Brebeuf tries to kneel by him and begin praying the last rites. Another blow to Hard-as-Bone’s head breaks his skull and the Iroquois whoops in victory.

“Why isn’t God answering our prayers?” asks a young woman Brebeuf had nicknamed June Bug because he disliked her given name, Little Skunk. “You have lied to us. My husband and my little son are dead, burned in our home. We would have been stronger if not for you and your lies.” She spits on the priest.

Praying almost every waking moment, the Jesuits ask for intervention for their converts, offering their lives in lieu should the Lord feel so inclined.

By the afternoon of the fourth day they are in St. Ignace, another Huron village captured by the Iroquois. Entering the village, they are beaten with clubs and stones, the women and children taking special pleasure in that. Separated from their converts, the missionaries are dragged into a long house and tied by their wrists to poles, and they promptly sink into sleep. Brebeuf is awakened by the smell of warmth from a nearby fire. He cautiously turns around, head oddly clear despite the fever of the last four days, cracked ribs hurting fiercely, to find Lallement breathing hoarsely through his broken nose, hanging from the nearest pole in a daze, one eye swollen shut.

Accustomed to numbed hands, they are at least not running anymore, though their stomachs ache with hunger. Their captors are eating in front of them, meat cooked over that smoky fire.
John knows their language and what he’s heard on the march reminds him of a story a fur trader told him a few years ago, in the comfort of a cabin near Ottawa, with brandy in their mugs. “You will, following the custom, be tied to posts. They may chew off a finger or two, or cut them off. They will heat knives or tomahawks in the fire, and brand you. They want to know how strong you are. Do you cry? Do you scream? Or do you stay silent, like a warrior? They will slow down the pace to draw out the agony for you if you are a screamer or a crier. Death will be by fire.”

He’d wondered then if the story was a test of their resolve, and at the time he’d thought, I would pray for God to show the savages the wrong they were doing.

We will not be traded, he now suspects. Tortured, certainly. Brebeuf manages to pull his rosary from his neck. First the ‘Our Father’ a dozen times, and then his plea to God, that he enlighten the Iroquois, and quickly. The comfort he’s always found in speaking to his God works like a lullaby. He falls into a daze, like Lallement.

A half-grown boy draws his knife, walks in a slow circle around Lallement, shrieks like a hawk and slashes at the priest’s fingers. Lallement cries out and wakes Brebeuf who whispers, “Hold your tongue, Gabriel. They will just hurt you worse.”

The cut is shallow, just the beginning. The boy draws his knife slowly across Lallement’s palm; the priest closes his eyes, clenches his jaw to control its shaking and remains silent.

“Gabriel, I’m sorry,” John whispers. “Maybe we should have tried to run.” And then what? Die in the frozen wilderness? Such hard choices.

Then one of the men from the raiding party stands, wipes his mouth, draws his knife and approaches John.

He forces John’s right hand flat to the pole and holds his knife over the knuckle of the Jesuit’s middle finger, from which his rosary hangs. The knife is sharp chert. With a sudden scream to his Gods, the Iroquois thrusts. The chert pierces John’s knuckle cleanly and half his finger is gone and what is left bleeds down his hand, then down his arm. His rosary falls into the dirt, lost in the splash of blood falling on it.

“Muskets?” John gasps, seeking eye contact with his torturer. “Trade for muskets?” They don’t seem to hear him or care. Abandoning bargaining, a hint of shame for the attempt, he warns them instead; “You will die like animals without hope of heaven unless you accept Christ as your savior.” The warning gives him a measure of comfort. He keeps at it, hoping his stoic behavior might make them listen. “I am praying for your souls. It is not too late to ask forgiveness for your sins.”

Water heated to boiling is brought forth in a large iron kettle. Two young braves beat John to his knees; the elder Iroquois who had offered freedom stands before them and says, “Baptize them.” They pour the boiling water over John and he has a moment’s sweet relief of being warm before his skin parboils. They are all crowding around now. Steaming water dripping from his chin, his drenched robe going from burning to cold again, his skin seared, he gasps for air.

It is hard to stay silent and John questions what his silence gains him. Another slash from another knife through his blistering skin? Should one pray for a little more time spent in agony? Is it not a sin to pray for death? Should he be grateful the brute has a sharp knife? Keep me silent, John prays, I want these savages’ respect, and for that he clamps his jaw and heaves his breath through his nose. When the pain ebbs he begins a last prayer, that if God wishes it, he might have a speedy death. He watches a ramrod taken from a musket, heated over the fire until it smokes. Strong brown hands pushing his head back, forcing his mouth open, they slowly maneuver it down his throat.

John soils himself but holds his silence. And later that night, in the Year of Our Lord, 1649, he and Lallement escape to heaven, by fire.

Writing fictitious activity about historical figures

Writing about historical figures in a fictitous setting is ticklish. You have to be cautious not to upstage your own characters, you want to present the historical figures in some memorable way, and in the end you probably don't want to violate known history. You can write about a black child fathered by George Washington, because the historic setting certainly allowed for that. You can suggest that any Founding Father smoked opium - in Franklin's case it may well be true - so long as your story doesn't veer off and depict them opposite to known history.

In Where the gold is buried, I had to put the reader inside Fort Niagara in July, 1759. There is ample documentation on the French and British officers there, and a fair amount on the Haudenosaunee as well. When I decided to try 'solving' the mystery of the French military chest, I knew I had to learn what I could about Captain Pouchot. Among the first elements of his character clear from his writing was his affection for the natives. Given the widespread mingling between Europeans and natives, it isn't at all a hard stretch to presume Pouchot slept with Haudenosaunee women. Better than that, I decided to give him a wife. And because I grew up near the Tuscarora Reservation, and knew kids from the tribe, I decided to highlight them. So I created Sarah, the Tuscaroran woman who flirts with, seduces, then marries and bears a child to Pouchot. I'm pretty sure Pouchot did not marry in the European sense, but he may well have to the satisfaction of the tribe.