The Orenda by Joseph Boyden
“It’s maddening,” Gabriel says, leaning over to me, “how even after all this time they still frighten like deer.”
“I told you long ago, dear Gabriel,” I say, “to prepare yourself for the greatest test of your life. Our patience is paying off, is it not? How many have we baptized?”
“Thirty-eight,” Isaac says, looking up to me and smiling. When the Iroquois tortured him, I fear something in his mind broke. But he’s a good young man still. I take note that I should soon cut what’s left of his long, matted hair. He looks like a madman.
“Yes,” Gabriel says, “but the majority were on their deathbeds.”
“This isn’t what’s important,” I say sternly. “What’s important is how many accept Christ before their eyes close for eternity. And it’s also important to report this news so the Church understands we don’t toil in utter darkness.”
Gabriel’s glance suggests to me that he thinks we do. With Champlain’s death so shortly after we left New France, our small mission, I fear, has been forgotten.
“Well, then,” I say, clapping my hands together. “Shall we get started once more?”
Like a classroom full of children, the ones in front chatter and laugh, not paying attention for my call to sit. Now that the warmth of spring has come, most of them don’t wear much. The handful of men in the longhouse wear deer leggings up to their thighs, breechclouts covering their lower extremities, deer or beaver robes slung over one shoulder so that sometimes I’m struck by how they resemble Greek senators from ancient times, regally standing and smoking their long pipes as they talk with one another. The women before me, even Delilah, think nothing of allowing me to peer up their loosely worn robes at their bare legs. Sometimes, as if they test me, I see much more.
“Do you accept my wampum?” I ask now that they begin to settle.
“Perhaps,” young, argumentative Aaron responds. “But we do not believe your claim that okis exist only in humans. All of us have seen them in other beings at different times.”
“Let me explain more clearly, then,” I respond. “There are indeed okis everywhere. But the only one to be trusted is the Great Oki, the Great Voice.”
“But now you contradict yourself,” the old man speaks up. “You yourself said on this very day that only humans have okis, and now you say that there are okis everywhere.”
I realize the complexity of my argument cannot be boiled down any more simply. “We humans have okis in us,” I explain. “And these okis are given to us by the Great Voice. It is up to us whether or not we allow our okis to grow strong and straight like a beautiful oak, or bent and gnarled like a thorn bush. The Great Voice wants us to be as the oak tree. But there is an enemy to the Great Voice, far stronger even than your hated Iroquois.” I pause. They listen intently. I’ve found a track that they might follow.
“In my tongue, this great enemy’s name is Satan.” I speak the name slowly. “Satan is the worst of the okis. I fear for you that when you pray to what you think is the oki of an animal, you are praying to Satan.”
“But how can I tell if the oki I ask for aid is not corrupt, will not enter me to harm me?” the old man asks, seeming suddenly deflated. “Did I ask the wrong one, the oki that caused the sickness to enter me?”
“There’s only one oki powerful enough to protect you, and that oki is the Great Voice,” I answer. “If you are to ever ask an oki for anything again, know this. If you ask the Great Voice for help, He will never bring harm to you.”
“But I tried that!” Delilah says, excited. “I asked your Great Voice to allow my husband to live through the illness. But he died anyway.” She makes a low wail in her throat and wrings her shaking hands. She is such the actor. She looks up. “And so I see no need for your great oki.”
I hear Gabriel grumbling beside me. I know that he wants to ask her, “Then why are you here?” He’s done this before, and it caused great mirth in the longhouse when Delilah answered, “Because I was bored.”
“The Great Voice,” I say, “often makes decisions that we can’t understand. But the Great Voice always has a purpose in doing so. And the Great Voice has told me,” I say, looking straight into Delilah’s eyes, “that you will see your husband again in the afterlife if you accept my wampum as he did on his deathbed.”
“And if she doesn’t?” The voice comes from right below me. I look down and see Gosling sitting behind a smiling Isaac, his eyes closed in bliss as she strokes his hair, untangling the knots. I look at Gabriel, whose face mirrors my own shocked expression. “Did you see her arrive?” I ask him quickly in French. He shakes his head.
“And if she doesn’t?” Gosling asks again.
“How did you get in here?” I ask her.
“Why, through the door, like everyone else,” she says. The ones on the ground around her laugh.
“But you weren’t here a moment ago,” I tell her.
“I’m quite small,” Gosling says demurely. “I often go unnoticed.”
“You are a sorcerer,” I say, trying to find my balance again. “She,” I say to the crowd, pointing my finger at her, “is what I speak about when I tell you that the world contains bad okis.”
“Don’t be so cruel,” she says, feigning hurt.
Others begin to speak up, old men and women who’ve never said a single word these past months.
“But Gosling has only ever helped us!”
“She saw the enemy coming in dreams and warned our warriors.”
“She can cure many illnesses.”
“There are those,” Gosling says, “who believe you and these other Black Gowns are the malevolent okis and have brought the famine and the disease and the drought to us.”
“We come only with goodness in our hearts and with the words of the Great Voice on our tongues,” I say. “You are not welcome here.”
Isaac, as if in a trance while Gosling continues to stroke his hair, shakes his head and whispers, “I’d like her to stay.”
“If she isn’t welcome here,” the old man says, beginning to stand, “then we do not wish to be here.”
“Do you,” I say, looking at Gosling, “believe that we are responsible for the troubles that have fallen over the land these last years?”
“You expect a simple answer, a simple yes,” Gosling says, “for this will vindicate you, as you clearly believe you’re not the cause. Rather, you see your arrival so long ago as an unfortunate coincidence.” She smiles and begins twisting Isaac’s long wisps of hair into a braid. “Myself, I think that where we find ourselves is more important, more grave, than any simple question or answer.”
The others in the longhouse listen intently. Gosling licks her fingers and brings the tip of Isaac’s braid to a point. I feel that same feeling in my lower stomach as she gazes into my eyes, smiling.
“Leave him alone!” I say as forcefully as I can.
“No,” Isaac answers.
“She has him in a spell,” Gabriel says.
“You are trying to convince them,” Gosling says, “that what they know so surely is in fact wrong.”
“I simply bring them a better way, a chance to live differently.”
“You’re upsetting a balance generations in the making,” she says. “What you seek to do will split this village, will weaken all of the Wendat. And when this happens, the Haudenosaunee will take note and take action.”
“You give me too much credit,” I answer. “I do not have the power to divide a nation.”
“Your wampum speaks quite the opposite of our beliefs,” Gosling says, as if she hadn’t heard me.
“What do you mean?”
“Your wampum declares that everything in the world was put here for man’s benefit. Your wampum says that man is the master and that all the animals are born to serve him.”
“Is this not true?” I ask.
She smiles, shaking her head. “Our world is different from yours. The animals of the forest will give themselves to us only if they deem it worthy to do
“So you claim that animals have reason, then? A consciousness?”
“I say that humans are the only ones in this world that need everything within it.” She stops stroking Isaac’s braid. “But there is nothing in this world that needs us for its survival. We aren’t the masters of the earth. We’re the servants.”
“And I am here to be a servant to them.” I raise my arms to those in front of me. There will be no winning this debate with her, I see. It will take cunning and time to beat the devil. “Let us all say a prayer before our meal.”
I DON’T WANT IT
So many longhouses left abandoned, so many fires that will never burn again.
When Bird brought me back here once again three summers ago, the illness struck and it struck brutally. Hundreds dead that winter. Every family was visited. Not enough healers, not enough orenda, not enough strength to save the dying, never mind to bury the dead. Many unhappy okis haunt this place now. Too many. They keep me up at night.
When I returned that summer so long ago, I was still a child. And for the third time that year, I watched Bird and his men kill my family. That’s when something inside me broke. That’s when I made the decision that I couldn’t return home again. Bird had won. He’d won me. Now, when strangers come to trade in our village, I tell them I am Bird’s daughter. But this doesn’t mean that a daughter can’t hate her father, does it? I think you can still hear me, my real parents. I can accept him as a substitute, but this doesn’t mean I won’t one day end his life, as he did yours.
—
THE OLD WOMEN have been screeching like seagulls, telling me it’s time to prepare for womanhood. The old women assume my moons have begun coming to me, and though they haven’t I lie and say they have, and so I’m taken out past the palisades to where the thickest moss grows in the dark ravines, swarms of tiny, biting flies enveloping us in black robes as we walk along the river that runs into the great bay. I’m shown how to choose the freshest of the moss. The sweet scent of new life growing from rot fills my nose. But this isn’t all. This is just one small part of what all those old birds want me to learn. We wander near the river’s bank, spread out from one another with downcast eyes to look for baby ferns, still curled tight so that I run my finger along the stem up to where I pinch free the head, my finger tracing around and around and around to where the tip nestles into itself. We lean and pick with one hand, our deer robes pulled up to our thighs and acting as baskets. I want to complain that I’m unhappy. But I’m not. The sun is warm on my back.
Back on the river again, this time with knives, we walk through the new shoots of tamarack, cutting off the tops that we will boil as tea. I’m shown once again how to create a rock weir to lure the spawning pike along the shore, the channel running narrower and narrower until it’s thin enough for us to straddle it with sharpened maple spears, patiently waiting for the long flash of scales before we strike fast as snakes, wrestling the large fish to the land before they can shake themselves off and dart upriver, their gouged bodies leaving blood ribbons in the stream.
The old women take me to the fields to help prepare them for the coming of the three sisters. We tie our robes high to let the air cool us as we build up dirt mounds and dig holes in them, scatter a handful of corn kernels into each one, the kernels gorged from their soaking in water in the hopes the earth we pat back on top will accept them. These new fields are still small, and the smell of burning tree stumps comes sharp on the air as the men work hard now to make up for lost time, to make up for sickness and the death of so many, the fields each day growing a few feet bigger as forest succumbs to rows of squash and beans and mother corn. This is the first spring in three or four where the people of the village come out in full numbers. I’m worried to see how many have been swept away to the other world. But still, these people smile for the work.
—
TODAY I’VE BEEN SENT by the old women to wander the village in search of something that I’m told will catch only my eye. No one knows what it is, but when I see it, the old ladies say, I’ll know. When I find it, I’m to take this object to the women’s longhouse out in the fields, and then the ceremony will begin. For the next weeks, I’ll be expected to sit with them as they talk to me about what life can bring. I won’t be allowed to leave their special longhouse, they say, unless it’s to work the fields with them, and I will only be given certain foods to eat, the foods we’ve harvested together that they claim will bring me the strength and the wisdom a woman will need to survive in this world. As I wander aimlessly through the village, I tell myself that it’s mornings like this I wish I were a boy.
The middens at the edge where the women dump the refuse of the longhouses is the first place I head to. I walk around the large piles of fire ash and old, torn birch buckets and bits of rotting hide and smashed pottery hoping that someone might have dropped a few glass trading beads or a special amulet or a wood or stone carving in her haste to finish her chore. Kicking my feet through the dust, I want to uncover something, anything I can bring back to the women so that I might begin this rite and just be done with it. I find nothing but my nostrils filled with the acrid scent of the houses’ many fires.
I wander the perimeter of the village next, dragging my hand along the palisades, noting how many places it would be simple for a Haudenosaunee warrior to slip in. Now that spring is here and we’ve begun the planting, we’ll tend to this as well. These last weeks it’s as if the people here are awaking from a long nightmare. So many died the last winters that some days the wailing seemed to come from every direction. I’ve listened to Bird and Fox talk all night at the fire for a long time now. The first year, their talking was filled with the worry that my people would hear of the sickness and swoop in to destroy the Wendat. The second year’s talk turned to how the Haudenosaunee were just as deeply struck by the illness and this is why they hadn’t come to take us. Over this last year the talk has come down to how whichever of the two enemies heals fastest will decide who wins the trade and, in this way, the war.
I cut down a path, listening for signs of life in this row of long-houses. Most of the community is out in the fields today. As I walk, though, touching my hand to the walls, trying to sense something from them, I hear a baby crying, its mother quietly shushing it. Farther down I hear voices through wood, and as I sneak up, I begin to make out words. You will be mine. A laugh. You will. A moan. Not here. Something in my belly tightens, and I want to sit and listen for a while longer, but the voices of young men walking by on the other side of the long-house make me move.
I circle around and head toward the path where I heard them. Peering around the corner, I recognize them as the ones who speak so loudly of becoming Bird’s next great warriors. These are the same ones who, when asked to collect water or weed the fields or bring firewood, spit and say it’s women’s work. They’re soon to be young men, and they’re disdainful of almost everyone. And lazy. Little do they know that Bird would never tolerate such behaviour on his travels.
There are three of them, their hair shining bright with sunflower oil, the sides of their scalps freshly plucked. All of them wear only breechcloths and moccasins. The middle one’s breechcloth is decorated with porcupine quills, and despite my not liking these boys, the muscles of their backs and legs are very pretty. The middle one with the porcupine quills carries a bow. The one on his left, a club, and the one on his right, a spear. Their faces are painted as if they’re going off to war, I see, as they turn to one another to talk and laugh. These are no warriors, though. They have no idea that I follow them.
A raven sits atop a longhouse in front of us, looking down at the boys with its black eyes, its head turned to them as if it wonders what they might be. It’s a big raven, its feathers shining blue-black in the sun. The boy with the spear points at it. The porcupine-quill boy pulls an arrow from his quiver and strings it, draws back his bow. He takes aim at the raven, his taut arms tense. He releases the arrow, its flight so quick it’s just
They come to an abandoned longhouse and stop by its door, daring each other to enter. The one with the spear makes a move to open the door but then pauses. They don’t want to enflame the dead owners. Instead, he bends and picks at slim green shoots of tobacco that have begun to sprout where, sometime last year, the residents scattered the seeds.
The one with the spear says, “I’ll bet you there’s dried tobacco in the rafters.”
“Well, go in and find out,” the one with the bow says.
“You first,” the one with the club says.
The young man with the bow pushes the door open. He’s hesitant but I can see now he must go through with what he’s started. A plan forms quickly in my head. I sneak the long way around the house I spy from and make it to the other side of the empty longhouse. I can hear that they still hesitate at the front threshold. I know I shouldn’t do it for risk of offending the dead occupants, but I ease this end’s door open and, like a lynx, dart inside and under the closest bed platform.
The dust is so thick that I must pinch my nose hard and hold my breath to keep from sneezing. My eyes take time adjusting to the darkness, but soon I can see the silhouettes of the three boys in the beams of light and dust floating in the air. They stand alert, tensed to run out. I follow their tilted heads to the roof, but the rafters are bare. From what I can see, the place is empty.