Mackinac and Lake Stories

by Mary Hartwell Catherwood

The annual festivities of the Cross Village were at their height. Yells and the tumultuous patter of racing hoofs fell on Moses' ear. A trial of horse speed was now in progress; and later in the day would come a trial of agility and endurance in the Ottawa and Chippewa dances. The race-course was the mile-long street, beginning at the old chapel and ending at the monastery. Young Indians, vividly clad in red calico shirts and fringed leggings, leaned over their horses' necks, whipping and shouting. Dust rose behind the flying cavalcade, and spectators were obliged to keep close to the small carved houses or risk being run down. Young braves denied the war-path were obliged to give themselves unbridled range of some sort.

The monastery brethren had closed their whitewashed gates, not because they objected to the yearly fête, nor because custom made the monastery the goal in horse-racing, but because there was in the festivities an abandoned spirit to be dealt with only by the parish priest. On ordinary days the brethren were glad to show those beneficial death's heads with which their departed prior had ornamented the inner walls of his tomb before he came to use it. The village knew it had been that good prior's habit to sit in a coffin meditating, while he painted skulls and cross-bones in that roofed enclosure which was to be his body's last resting-place. Young squaws and braves often peeped at the completed grave and its surrounding symbols of mortality. It was as good as a Chippewa ghost-story.

The priest let himself be seen all the morning. Without speaking a word, he was a check upon the riotous. Ottawa and Chippewa had a right to commemorate some observances of their forefathers. He always winked at their dances. And this day the one silent Indian on the fence troubled him more than all the barbaric horsemen.

Moses' wife had been to him. Lucy was very indignant at her cousin Catharine. Moses neither ate nor slept, and he groaned in the night as if he had toothache. He would not talk to her. The good father might not believe it, but Catharine was putting a spell on Moses, in revenge for Frank Chibam. Catharine blamed Moses for everything—the shipwreck, the drowning, perhaps even for the storm. She hounded him out of the house and then she hounded him in again, by standing and looking at him with fixed gaze. It was more than flesh could bear. The father must see that Moses and Lucy would have to leave Cross Village and go to the Cheneaux or Mackinac, taking the grandmother with them. It would be hard for Moses to live without a boat. But then, Lucy demanded triumphantly, what would Catharine do without a man or any relation left in the house?

The priest looked from Catharine, motionless as a rock in the sun by the church gable, to Moses on the fence with his back towards her. The grandmother, oblivious to both, felt her way along the ground with a stick, and Lucy watched, nearer the grove. These four had occupied one of the small unpainted wooden houses as a united family. It was a sorrow to the priest that they might now be divided, one of them bearing an unconfessed trouble on his mind. For if Moses Nazagebic was as innocent as his wife Lucy believed him to be of the catastrophe which he said had happened on Lake Superior, he would not fly from poor Catharine as from an avenger.

There were fences of silver flattened out on the water; farther from shore flitted changeable bars of green and rose and pale-blue, converging until they swept the surface like some colossal peacock's tail. The grandmother stumping with her stick came quite near the cliff edge and stopped there. She was not blind or deaf, but her mind had long been turned inward and backward. She saw daily happenings as symbols of what had been. She knew more tribal lore than any other Indian of Cross Village; and repeated, as she had repeated a hundred times before when scanning the log dock with its fleet of courtesying boats, the steep road, and the strip of sand below:

“Down there was the first cross set up, many years ago, by a man who came here in a large boat moved by wings like the wings of a gull. The man had a white face and long hair the color of the sun. When he first landed he fell on his knees and then began to count a string of beads. Then he sang a song and called the other men, some of whom were Indians, from the boat. They cut down trees, and he made them set up a large cross at the foot of the bluff. Since then that strip of sand has been sacred, though the cross is gone and a new one is set here by our priest.”

The old squaw indicated with her stick the silver-colored relic behind Moses Nazagebic. Her guttural chant affected none of her hearers, except that Catharine frowned at a sight which could divert Moses. The Ottawas and Chippewas are a hard-featured people. Catharine was, perhaps, the handsomest product of an ill-favored village. Haggard pallor now encroached on the vermilion of her cheek. She wore an old hat of plaited bark pulled down to her eyes, and her strong black hair hung in two neglected braids. The patience of aboriginal womanhood was not stamped on her as it was on Lucy. A panther could look no fiercer than this lithe young Indian girl, whose bridal finery was hid in the house and whose banns had been published in the mission church.

Trying to grapple with the trouble of Moses Nazagebic and Catharine, the priest also stood gazing at the dock, where children usually played, tumbling in to swim or be drawn out, only more roseate for the bath. The children were now gathered in the grove or along the race-course. Nothing moved below except lapping water. It was seldom that these lake-going people left their landing-place so deserted. Gliding down from the north where the cliff had screened it from view, came a small schooner. The priest, shaded by his broad hat, watched the passing craft with barely conscious recognition of it as an object until handkerchiefs fluttered from the deck and startled him.

The tall silver-white cross was so conspicuous that any one standing near it must be observed. The priest shook his handkerchief in reply. He had many friends along the coast and among the islands. But his long sight caught some familiar guise which made him directly signal and entreat with wide peremptory sweeps of the arm.