Blood Relation Read online

  Father de Varennes wept with joy, for he had counted me as dead. Together we praised God and the tender mercies of the Blessed Virgin for my safe return from the perils of the wilderness and the incivility of the Savages. We said a Mass for Father de Céligny, our most recent blessed martyr to the barbarous cruelty of the Savages.

  As we said that Mass, Askuwheteau’s face rose up in my mind like an unquiet, reproachful ghost. I added a silent prayer for his forgiveness for all the lies I was about to tell.

  I told Father de Varennes that the Indians had left me near the site of St. Barthélemy. I told him that I had made my way to the mission and had found it burned to the ground.

  I told him I had a sense that a rival tribe, perhaps even the Hiroquois, had slaughtered everyone in the village and left the carrion for the wild animals. I told him that I had found bodies and that I had buried them. I told him I had not found the body of Father de Céligny. I told him that I had thrown myself at the mercy of the Savages who found me, and that I had paid them with gold I had found buried beneath the remains of the Jesuit house.

  Even as I told those lies, I realized that the winter snow and ice would have obliterated any possible evidentiary challenge to my account, even if it were doubted, which it was not. Who would doubt the word of a priest, especially one who had survived such an ordeal?

  I covered myself in shame by blaming the Savages for the massacre of the settlement of St. Barthélemy when I knew that what happened to all of those poor people was something that we, the French had brought into their midst, something that corrupted and afflicted them, and eventually killed them.

  More than anything, I told the lies to prevent anyone from ever returning to the site of the Mission of St. Barthélemy and discovering the secret that I buried in those caves eighteen years ago.

  I am dying now, Your Reverence. I have asked for Father Vimont, who comes shortly to collect this document for your perusal, but also to give me Last Rites and absolve me for my sins, which have been many.

  My body burns with fever from the pox. I fear that the very effort of writing to you this last Relation has hastened my inevitable commendation of my soul to Christ. This Relation is my confession of the things I did, but it is also as I said my true Testament of the things I saw with my own eyes, and I swear to it on peril of my Immortal Soul.

  I know that some who read it will think it the ravings of a madman in the last deliria of fever. I pray that Your Reverence will not number among them, and that you will be able to see into my heart and know that I speak the truth in this Relation.

  Reverend Father, I have lived as a Jesuit, and I die a faithful one. Our way is not the way of ignorance and superstition, but rather of wisdom and learning. And yet, I realize now how much I had yet to learn, and how dangerous was the arrogance I had brought with me from France to this New World. I do not doubt the glory of our work among the Savages, and yet in these final hours of my life, I am plagued by questions and doubts. I realize it is not my place to question.

  But I ponder, Reverend Father, and I pray for wisdom. And I pray for your forgiveness, and for God’s, for the burden of these doubts.

  I have watched these poor people shrivel and die from mysterious illnesses they have blamed on what they call our sorcery. They claim we brought the pox to them. They claim that it did not exist in their world before we arrived. We have wrapped them in our blankets to comfort them, and watched them die, praying for a conversion before death claimed them, a baptism before they breathed their last. We have given them Christian names, and we have buried them under those names. We teach them to reject their customs and beliefs. We teach them to believe they are ignorant and lost for believing in their world of spirits and oracle, while we hold the belief that the Devil has them in his thrall.

  And yet, Reverend Father, may God forgive me, I believe I have seen the Devil walking in the forests of New France. But—O, blasphemy of blasphemies! He wore the same robe I wear, and his mission and legacy was a most wicked one. While I pray that I was somehow, through my sad efforts, able to halt the spread of that ungodly contagion, I am haunted by the words of the drunkard Dumont, words I have heard in my nightmares for eighteen years.

  Dumont said: There are worse things now walking in the forests at night than the Savages.

  In light of what I have witnessed, I have searched my poor ignorant soul to know, beyond a doubt, that we do God’s work here. Yea, and that we have brought these people Light and not more darkness. But my soul is silent. Around me, the Indians die, either at our hand, or at least beyond our ability to save them.

  If I have committed blasphemy here, I beg for God’s mercy and forgiveness, and for Your Reverence’s prayers after I am gone. But the account contained in this Relation is true, and I die as I have lived, as Christ’s most humble servant, and Your Reverence’s.

  Ad majorem Dei gloriam.

  Fr. Alphonse Nyon of the Society of Jesus

  Montréal, Québec, 1650

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Michael Rowe was born in Ottawa in 1962 and has lived in Beirut, Havana, Geneva, and Paris. An award-winning journalist, essayist, and editor, he is the author of several books, including Writing Below the Belt, a critically acclaimed study of censorship, pornography, and popular culture, and the essay collections Looking For Brothers and Other Men’s Sons, which won the 2008 Randy Shilts Award for Non-fiction. He has also won the Lambda Literary Award, the Queer Horror Award, and the Spectrum Award, and has been a finalist for the International Horror Guild Award and the National Magazine Award. He was, for 17 years, the first-tier Canadian correspondent for Fangoria. In 2002, Clive Barker credited him with “forever changing the shape of horror fiction” with his original anthologies, Queer Fear and Queer Fear 2. He is married and lives in Toronto. This is his first novel. Visit him at www.michaelrowefiction.com.