The High Missouri

This tale of a father and son is dedicated to the memory of my father, W. E. Blevins, Sr.

Aho, mitakuye oyasin

Part One: THE CALL

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Part Two: JUMPING-OFF PLACE

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Part Three: THE BELLY OF THE WHALE

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Part Four: THE ROAD OF TRIALS

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Part Five: AT ONE

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Part Six: A BOON

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Acknowledgments

About the Author

What I want is to get what I write published, get enough to eat, stay out of jail, and get a little love.

—attributed to C
ARL
S
ANDBURG

Part One

THE CALL

Chapter One

Dylan Elfed Davis Campbell looked at the lists of figures on the piece of paper. They squiggled. They dashed around like little black ants, racing here and there and everywhere. One thing they didn’t do was sit still. The other was add up. If he had to look at them any longer, he would scream.

He told himself to take a deep breath.

If he did, he would choke—he was sure of that. Choke on air, on life itself. He clenched his fists and his teeth so hard he thought his entire body must be shaking.

Don’t worry, he raged at himself, you can’t die. You’re already dead. Just past your twenty-second birthday in the first month of spring, you’re dead. Call the embalmer.

It was Friday afternoon at the Bank of Montreal, and Dylan was proving that the amount in the cash drawers at the start of the day plus the amount deposited today added up to the amount of cash now in the cash drawers less the amount taken out in cash, or whatever the devil the formula was. He did this every day in the late afternoon. The figures never added up—they were too busy anting around. And when they didn’t add up, he had to stay late, without pay, and make them do it.

“Mr. Campbell,” called the nasal voice of the bastard MacDonald. They called him that jokingly, half with malice, because Dugald MacDonald was his rich father’s son via a French mistress. Mr. MacDonald now said it in his snotty way, “Mr. Campbell,
will
you complete that posting,
please
?”

Naturally, he called across the entire bank from the door of his own office, so everyone would know the poor dumb Welshman was late again. One of Mr. MacDonald’s office jokes was that the bloody Welsh were always bloody late, being by nature bloody poets and no men of business. Which irked Dylan, because he had as much Scots blood as Mr. MacDonald: half.

Dylan stood up. He gasped for breath. It came, and something changed—a door closed, or opened, or a breeze moved him as it moves the first leaves in a tree. It was as though he heard music inside his head, and the music was revelation. For a moment he was giddy.

Go, he ordered himself.

He stepped away from his desk, leaving the long columns of ants racing wherever they wanted. He crossed the room toward Mr. MacDonald, who stood there, transfixed, or stupefied—was the Welshman actually approaching the boss without the figures? Dylan enjoyed watching him stand there, dumbstruck.

Abruptly, Dylan stopped halfway to Mr. MacDonald. No need to get in his face, he thought, where his gross pores and long nasal hairs would be offensive. I may as well call across the whole bloody room, as he does.

He called, “Mr. MacDonald, take this job and stuff it up your arse.”

Dylan could see everything as he would remember it from eternity, fixed in its tiny place, mouths open, eyes gaping, nostrils flared in astonishment. Everything was rigid, all eyes fixed immovably on ledgers they weren’t seeing.

Mr. MacDonald just stood there. Struck speechless, Dylan thought with satisfaction.

Dylan had had no idea he was going to say that. Delicious. Sublime. Heavenly. He wanted to dance.

He stepped back to his desk, moving through a room fixed forever motionless, as behind a glass display case. He gathered his few things, put on his coat, and went out into the late afternoon of a wintry spring day in Montreal, 1820.

Let someone else catch the ants.

Oh Daddy Ni, ain’t it grand?

In front of the great plate of glass bearing the distinguished firm’s name, his bottom began to twitch. He wiggled it. His knees wobbled. He let them do it. His hands went akimbo. He danced a jig.

He knew immediately where, in his heart of hearts, he wanted to go. Not to his lodgings, and not to his father’s house, no, somewhere else. But he didn’t want to go there immediately. He wanted to walk, vigorously.

He hurried along the old wall of the city on Place Viger Station. He walked all the way to the hill called the Citadel. Montreal boasted that it was one of the oldest settlements in North America, founded by French in 1642. Though the English had taken over sixty years ago, the city was divided. The commercial and professional people were Britons and Scots, the working people French. It was built on the St. Lawrence River, at the confluence of great rivers that led into the heart of the continent. Yet the huge ships of the sea sailed all the way to these wharves and dispersed to the far corners of the earth.

He turned toward the river. It wasn’t yet clear of ice. Soon the spring day when the rivers were clear, usually late in April, would become a key day in his life. He would be traveling the waterways as his predecessors had, using the powerful currents of the earth to carry him forth on God’s mission.

He felt light, gay,
free
. He hummed a little tune, and then, feeling foolish, began to sing it.

“C’est le vent, c’est le vent frivolant,

C’est le vent, c’est le vent frivolant.”

So went the chorus: “It’s the wind, it’s the frivolous wind.” It was a song of the
voyageurs
, the canoemen, about the frivolous wind bringing a sad and unjust death to a white duck. He’d never known why he liked such a sentimental lamentation, and he didn’t care. He was feeling absurd and wonderful.

He looked around and chuckled to himself. It was not a day to feel grand, not a bit of a fine spring day, but cold and drizzly, as Montreal often was, the light fading, the western clouds mottled gray and purple and mustard-color, like bruises. And a wind, a gusty wind. Only a romantic would call it frivolous. Today Dylan was a romantic.

He hurried around the seminary and rectory to the face of his one true home in Montreal, his soul’s home, the church Notre Dame at Place d’Armes.

He passed out of the blustery day and into its haven, a passage that always seemed to him from one world to another, from the physical to the spiritual, from the mundane to the ethereal.

He stood at the back of the nave, taking it all in, the arcade where worshipers sat, above them the ceiling divided into conical sections by gilt moldings. In the center of the ceiling arched a circular painting of the Ascension itself, in heroic-sized figures. Beyond this end of the nave, the transept, its cruciform arms reaching north and south, and in its center, the area called the crossing, the region of the approach to the altar, where communicants crossed from the earthly to the heavenly and at the altar partook of wonder and mystery, the body and the blood of Jesus Christ.

Above the altar, like a canopy, was an open crown, supported by gilt pillars. Behind the crown, a full-sized statue of the Virgin Mary cut in white marble. On either side of the altar, paintings on scriptural subjects. For Dylan the center of all was the rich ornaments on the altar, whence came divine communion, the miracle of the divine service, the locus where ordinary life entered its spiritual dimension.

He slipped into a back pew and knelt.

Dylan had always been impatient of ordinary life. He didn’t see the point of the business his father spent his life on—trading furs. It honored the temporal, not the eternal. He knew that business itself was a low undertaking. In the end, that was why he had quit his job today, not the affronts given by Mr. MacDonald. He could not bear the ignobility of commerce.

So he came here this afternoon to dedicate himself to his heart’s adventure, his soul’s quest. Now he would give his life to the Church.

He let his eyes roam the great structure, the side chapels, the statuary, the ten stations of the Cross, the piers lifting to heaven. This was his home. It had always been his home.

Today, now, here, he began his great enterprise.

He felt given this enterprise personally, in a laying on of hands. His godfather was his father’s best friend, Father Quesnel, a priest here. There lay a story. Auguste Quesnel had had great ambitions for God and the Church. In his heart burned an intense desire, a holy calling. He wanted to revive one of the greatest churchly traditions in Canada. He wanted to take the Gospel to the benighted of this vast continent, the Indians.

Starting two centuries ago, that had been the particular calling of the Jesuits of North America. They had walked boldly into the darkness, bearing the light. It had been a terrible responsibility, and many had paid with their mortal lives. But surely they had burnished their souls to a holy brightness, and had brought heathen souls to salvation.

About forty years ago Father Quesnel had been ready to enter the Jesuit order. He had gone to the city of Quebec, there to prepare for the calling he had dedicated his life to, carrying the word of God to the Indians of Canada. When he got off the stage in Quebec, he was greeted by his mentor-to-be with dire news. All Jesuits were former Jesuits, said the priest. The pope had abolished the order.

Abolished!

Not only was the order abolished, as it turned out, the missionary effort in Canada dwindled to nothing.

When Father Quesnel told the story in the Campbell parlor decades later, Dylan felt the devastation of that moment. To have a calling, a life, wiped out by the word of one man. Centuries of resentment of Jesuits all over the world had come to a head, said Quesnel, and the pope succumbed to pressure.

Father Quesnel attached himself to the single Catholic church in Montreal and spent his life administering the sacraments, counseling, preaching, doing the church’s business—the ordinary tasks of any priest. He sometimes said he had discovered that such was the heart of the work of the clergy.

A decade ago, when the Canadian Church’s missionary zeal was partly revived, and the St. Boniface mission founded on Red River, wherever in the interior that was, Father Quesnel said he was far too old to set out on a new venture.

So Dylan would pick up his godfather’s torch. He wanted to be a priest; not a mundane servant of the people, but like the priest of St. Boniface, a torch bearer, a missionary to the Indians.

That was the biggest conflict he ever had with his father. Ian Hugh Campbell would not tolerate his youngest son’s taking orders. Together, Campbell and Quesnel prevailed on the youngster to wait until the age of his majority, at least twenty-one, to make such a fateful decision. In the meantime he would learn banking.

Well, hadn’t that come up fine? As shown by this afternoon’s events. Dylan got restless on his knees, shifted his weight about. Now he was twenty-two. Now he was done with banking forever, with commerce forever. Now he would devote his life to his heart’s desire.

He rose, slipped out of the pew and walked toward the altar. When he came to the crossing, he stopped in the light. On each end of the transept, north and south, light streamed in from the huge windows of stained glass. Doubtless the light outside, on this rainy day, was pale, gray, drab. But in this house of God it was transformed by the stained glass. Here it prismed into rich gold, royal blue, glowing rose, vivid scarlet, every glorious color.

Dylan walked to the center of the crossing and stood in that light, like a rainbow, a promise by God. He knelt, facing the altar. To him the crossing was a special place. Father Quesnel said that, literally, it meant where the east-west reach of the nave intersected the north-south line of the transept. But it also meant where the laity crossed to the place of the clergy, where the world crossed to seek spirit. Thus it was a region of miracle.

Dylan knelt in the center of the crossing and faced the altar. He did not need to pray in words. His gesture was prayer, his being was prayer. He murmured a thanksgiving for his liberation, and promised his energy, his zeal, his love, his life to the mission task.

Tomorrow morning he would tell Father Quesnel his decision. It was wonderful. Now he would go to his father, who would rail against it.

Ian Hugh Campbell had lived among the dregs of the earth, the
voyageurs
and
coureurs de bois
, white men who penetrated the wilderness to trade for furs with the Indians. Campbell was fond of saying, “In the early days, the Frenchmen didn’t convert the Indians. The Indians converted them.”

Campbell made sure his son heard the stories. In the wilderness men took on Indian dress, manners, ways, he explained. They drank, stole, rampaged, raped, murdered—as Indians did. The ultimate signs of corruption: they took Indian wives, learned Indian languages, lived as Indians, mere beasts roaming the face of the earth, hunting, scavenging, rutting. Their very children were Indian. They permitted the light in their souls to be put out, and lived in darkness.

So Dylan Elfed Davis Campbell did not know how he would tell his ambition to his father now, to walk into this utter darkness.

The spot in the crossing where he knelt seemed momentarily to glow. He looked at his arms, trunk, legs. He thought the sun was striking him a little. He looked up at the stained-glass window in the south transept. Perhaps it was a little brighter. Perhaps the late afternoon sun was beaming at him through the drizzle. He thought of his father’s cold rages. “If this is a miracle,” he murmured, smiling, “I accept.”