As proof of how lucky the Ouellet Quints were.
Gamache and the others knew what they’d just witnessed. The birth of a myth. And they’d seen something broken. Shattered. Hurt beyond repair.
* * *
“How’d you know about that?” Thérèse asked. “It never came out in the trial.”
“I found references to something happening between the two men. Something near lethal.”
“You really want to know?” she asked, examining him.
“I need to know,” he said.
“This goes no further.” She received a look caught between amusement and annoyance.
“I promise not to put it into my blog.”
Thérèse didn’t laugh. Didn’t even smile. And Jérôme Brunel, not for the first time, wondered if he really wanted to hear this.
“Sit,” she said, and he followed her to the comfortable sofa. They faced the door, watching the backs of the other guests.
“Pierre Arnot made his mark in the Sûreté detachment in the north of Québec,” she confided. “On a Cree reserve on James Bay. Lots of alcohol. Sniff. The government-issue homes were a disgrace. The sewage and water systems overflowed into each other. There was terrible disease and violence. A cesspool.”
“In the middle of paradise,” said Jérôme.
Thérèse nodded. That, of course, heightened the tragedy.
The James Bay area was spectacularly beautiful and unspoiled. At the time. Ten thousand square miles of wildlife, of clear, fresh lakes, of fish and game and old-growth forests. This was where the Cree lived. This was where their gods lived.
But a hundred years ago they’d met the devil and made a deal.
In exchange for everything they could ever need—food, medical care, housing, education, the marvels of modern life—all they had to do was sign over the rights to their ancestral land.
But not all of it. They’d be given a nice plot on which to hunt and fish.
And if they didn’t sign?
The government would take the land anyway.
A hundred years before Agent Pierre Arnot stepped off the floatplane onto the reserve, the Grand Chief and the head of Indian Affairs for Canada met.
The deed was signed.
The deed was done.
The Cree had everything they could want. Except their freedom.
They did not thrive.
“By the time Arnot arrived the reserve was a ghetto of open sewers and disease, addiction and despair,” said Thérèse. “And lives so empty they raped and beat each other for distraction. Still, the Cree had held on to their dignity longer than anyone could have expected. It had taken several generations until finally there was no dignity, no self-respect, no hope left. The Cree thought their life couldn’t get worse. But it was about to.”
“What happened?” asked Jérôme.
“Pierre Arnot arrived.”
* * *
“Here the girls are asking their father for his blessing,” the Movietone newsreel narrator said, as though announcing the bombing of London. “Like obedient children. It’s a ritual still practiced in the hinterlands of Quebec.”
He pronounced it Kwee-bek, and his voice was hushed, documenting a rare species caught in its natural habitat.
Gamache sat forward. The girls were now eight or nine years of age. They weren’t in their fairy-tale cottage. This was back at the family farmhouse. Through the windows he could see it was winter.
Their coats and hats and skates were neatly hung on pegs by the door. Hockey sticks formed a teepee in the corner. He recognized the woodstove and braided rag rug and furnishings from the very first film, when the girls had been born. Almost nothing had changed. Like a museum.
The girls were kneeling, hands clasped in front of them, heads bowed, wearing identical dresses, identical shoes, identical bows. He wondered how anyone could tell them apart, and he wondered if they even bothered. As long as there were five of them, the details didn’t seem to matter.
Marie-Harriette knelt behind her daughters.
It was the first time the newsreels had captured the Quints’ mother. Gamache put his elbows on his knees and leaned further forward, trying to get a good look at this epic mother.
With surprise, Gamache realized this wasn’t, in fact, the first time he’d seen her. It had been Marie-Harriette who’d pushed her daughters out that door. Then closed it on them.
Over and over. Until they got it right.
He’d presumed it was some NFB producer, or even a nurse or teacher. But it was their own mother.
