The High Missouri (5 page)

Chapter Five

They sang as they worked. Well, mostly Dru sang, and Dylan grunted. He told himself he didn’t feel like singing—he’d just lost his lifelong dream, what he’d quit his job for, what he’d lost his family over. Why should he sing?

“Quand on part de chantier,

Mes chers amis, tous le coeur gai,

Pour aller voir tous nos parents,

Mes chers amis, le coeur content.”

(chorus)

“Envoyons de l’avant, nos gens!

Envoyons de l’avant!

Envoyons de l’avant, nos gens!

Envoyons de l’avant!”

It was a song of the French-Canadian boatmen, the
voyageurs
who went deep into the wilderness among the Indians. A song with a vigorous beat the canoe men used to time their paddling. It spoke of going home, so it added power to every stroke.

“Pour aller voir tous nos parents,

Mes chers amis, le coeur content….

Envoyons de l’avant, nos gens!

Envoyons de l’avant!”…

“Let’s go forward, fellows!” cried the Chorus. “Let’s go! You have to get wet to go to Canada.”

“Ah! mais que ça soit tout mouillé

Vous allez voir que ça va marcher!”…

The men sing that they’re eager to see their friends, to throw a party and laugh and sing.

“Dimanche au soir, à la veillée,

Nous irons voir nos compagnees,”…

“Et au milieu de la veillée

Elles vont parler de leurs cavaliers.”…

The girls will talk about their other beaux until it’s time to go home. Then they’ll say to us, do you have other lovers? Do you?

“Elles vont nous dire, mais en partant

As-tu fréquenté les amantes?”…

Unspoken: They’re thinking of dark lovers, of course, Indian girls. And we do have dark lovers, don’t we?

“Envoyons de l’avant, nos gens!

Envoyons de l’avant!”…

A song to make the men work with a will: “Let’s go home!”

Dylan and Dru were waist deep in the soft, wet, spring soil—shoveling. This was St. Anthony’s at Coteau St. Louis, the new cemetery. Dru sang lustily and repeated the song over and over, apparently without getting bored with it. “You do this all day when you paddle, laddo,” he’d said. On the hour he stopped and loaded his white clay pipe and had a smoke and a rest. He claimed this was the fixed custom of the canoe men.

I’ve lost everything, thought Dylan. Why am I digging a grave with the Druid?

Having no pipe, Dylan could not indulge. He didn’t want to smoke anyway—he wanted to quit digging these sodding graves, to sit on a pile of fresh dirt like the sexton and breathe the young breezes and… daydream about delicious female flesh. Yes, now that you’re not going to be a priest, Dylan Elfed Davis Campbell, you can daydream of carnality.

The reality was, he needed the Halifax pound. The sexton, whose name Dylan kept forgetting, had offered them a pound to dig the graves, and the Druid had sweet-talked him up a few shillings. Life of a Montreal sexton in April, Dru said—digging graves for the corpses that have spent the winter in the dead house. But this sexton was a fat fellow, past digging graves, Dylan would have thought, and from the look of his nose, a tippler. He did nothing but lie about and produce one chocolate treat after another from his garments, look at them avariciously, and consume them bite by slow, savory bite.

I’ve lost everything.

Dru and the sexton also kept mentioning some “extra reward,” and smiling at each other.

It was nasty labor, for a fact. Dylan’s hands were blistered, some of the blisters had burst, and his hands were wet with blood and juice. His back ached right between the shoulder blades. And his lower back pained him. His calves hurt in the lower center. It irked him that a man as old as the Druid, at least as old as his father, could shovel for a couple of hours comfortably while he, young and presumably more fit, suffered from manual labor.

“Being used to it,” said Dru, reading Dylan’s thoughts. “I’m used to paddling all day—
Envoyons de l’avant, nos gens!

“That’s worse, paddling, because you can barely change the way you’re sitting.”

He looked Dylan merrily in the eye and lifted a shovel of dirt halfway. “Except when you go through rapids. Then you may sit in the river!” He made a mock motion to throw the dirt into Dylan’s face and pitched it over his head onto the grass. Dust sifted on Dylan’s head and neck. He climbed out of the grave and brushed off.

“Who’s this grave for, Sexton?” asked Dylan. “You said twins.”

“The Talon twins,” said the sexton. “A sad case, both dead within ten days of birth. The mother is still languishing, they say.” He added piously, “This world is a vale of tears.”

“Ah, laddo,” said the Druid, “you mustn’t ask who a fresh grave is for.” He threw his shovel onto the grass at Dylan’s feet and, with bravado, lay down full length in the grave. “A man digging a grave should have sober thoughts of his own mortality—seen truly, it is always for him.” Dru folded his hands across his chest and closed his eyes. He began to snore.

Suddenly he jumped up, mimicked the creaky movements of a skeleton, and grabbed Dylan by the ankle. He wailed, “I drag ’ee to thy end, Dylan Elfed Davies, thy woeful end.” He tried to pull Dylan into the grave by one leg.

Dylan stood firm and glowered at him.

Dru let go and said in a relaxed way, “Better get in here, laddo, and lift your share of the load. Or whose shillings will ye eat on tonight?”

Dylan jumped into the grave and jammed his shovel into the soft dirt with his foot.

He hit something hard. He turned up the rock, but it wasn’t a rock. A—

“Jawbone,” said Dru. “The talking piece of a human being.”

He reached for it. Laid it on an open palm. Studied it curiously.

Then the Druid gave a look of antic glee. He made his two hands into a mouth hinged at the wrists. The jawbone with its gapped teeth lay on the bottom hand. He made his hands flap.

“Quack-quack!” he said.

He danced around like a fool. “Who was buried here, Sir Sexton?” cried Dru. He flashed a wicked grin at Dylan and brought the flapping hands to his mouth. “I am Samuel de Champlain,” he said in an orotund voice, “author of
The Travels of Sieur de Champlain
and governor of New France and in my person a highfalutin boiled shirt.”

He waggled his ass and turned the flapping hands into his face. “And tell us, Sieur de Champlain,” he said to the hands, “of what consists the greatness of New France?”

He reversed the hands. “It’s a place you can send Jesuits far, far into the interior. If the Indians don’t eat ’em, the cold kills ’em. Or they confuse a New Testament with a compass and get lost. Either way, the world is rid of the dolts.”

He talked to the hands. “And what should be our policy toward the benighted natives, Sieur de Champlain?”

The jawbone talked. “Why, we must save their souls by day,” it pronounced, “and frig their wives by night.”

Dru asked, “And what do we want with New France, anyway, Sieur de Champlain?”

The jawbone answered loudly: “What do you want with any virgin? Lust, me buckos, lust!” He thrust his pelvis suggestively, and laughed at his own act until he fell down.

“Let me see that,” asked Dylan, his hand out.

Dru gave him the jawbone.

Dylan looked at it, turned it over, studied it. “This was a real person,” he said softly.

“Aye, laddo.”

“Spoke using this. Bit and chewed.” He thought. “Kissed—here,” pointing above the gapped front teeth.

“Doubly aye, laddo.” He took the jawbone from Dylan and held it up. Mockingly, he quoted, “Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio.” He spoke quickly, seeming to snatch words out of the air. “Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment?”

He looked sideways at Dylan, saw puzzlement, and rolled his eyes. “The bard again, laddo.”

He proceeded airily, a sprite now. “What if it was a fair maid died young? Kisses in vain. What if it was a great preacher, a Jonathan Edwards? Where are his perorations now? What if a diva of operas? Where her sweet arias? A father? Where his paternal advice? A son? A mother? A daughter? What difference now?”

He held the jawbone over his head and knelt in the dirt. “What if a man of power, who made lesser beings tremble with his commands?” He looked up at Dylan. “Who is afraid of what may clack out of this fragment of bone now?”

He jumped up and threw the jawbone into the soft dirt. Slowly he spaded up a shovelful of dirt, looked Dylan in the eyes, and dumped the dirt on the bone.

Suddenly the Druid spoke in a new tone, soft, intimate. “Your mam was the last good woman. Do you know she’s buried here?”

“My father would never talk about her,” said Dylan.

“Do you want to see her grave?”

Dylan nodded somberly.

Dru hopped agilely out of the grave and reached a hand to Dylan. Dylan climbed out on his own.

“Hey!” exclaimed the sexton.

“We’ll be back soon enough,” said Dru, marching away. Dylan followed. “We mean to get paid.” He didn’t look back. He called over one shoulder, “And there’s plenty of time before the angelus.”

Dylan followed. Why am I wasting this day?

Why not? All is lost.

“You take after her, laddo.” He looked Dylan in the eye. “She wanted you. She gave you life, and gave her life for you, and willingly. You are what she wanted above all things.”

He sat down beside the gravestone. Carved on it was,
GWYNETH DAVIS CAMPBELL, 1774–1798, REQUIESCAT IN PACE
. Only those few bare and lonely words to tell him about his mother. Until now he hadn’t even known how old she was when she died. His father had been too grieved, too angry at fate, too enraged to tell him even the essentials, or to bring him to St. Anthony’s to see his mother’s resting place.

“I have only this left of her,” said Dylan. He slipped off the slender chain he always wore around his neck and handed Dru a gold ring with a stone. Dru fingered it. “A fire opal,” Dylan said. “When she knew how sick she was, she asked that it be mine.”

“It’s beautiful, lad.” He put it back in Dylan’s hand. Dylan looked into the strange glow of its depths. “What was she like?” he asked.

“Comely, graceful, and full of verve. She had an effect on me like no other woman I ever met. I was a ruffian in those days, living it up. I would come around to her father’s house and she would fix us tea and we would talk. That was all our courtship ever came to, a score of cups of tea.”

He looked sideways at Dylan and smiled ruefully. “In those days I was not yet a
hivernant
, I didn’t stay the winter in the wilds, but just went to the depot in spring and came back with the furs in fall.

“The winter of ’ninety-seven I spent here in town, like always, and I met her down at the river. They swept a spot for skating. My mates and I were skidding about on the ice on our boots and falling all over ourselves and acting the fool and having a grand time. Your mother and a few others were skating. Your mother skated alone, with great poise and very beautifully. Serene, something from another world. The way she skated—I imagined ballet would look like that.” He chuckled. “She was a swan among ugly ducklings, there is a memory there is.

“My mates and I laughed about the silk stocking that thought she was better than the rest of us. I didn’t know much about living, those days. Over thirty years old and had learned naught.

“Well, I couldn’t admit to them that I was enchanted with her. So I begged off somehow and waited for her and approached her on the street. A right ragamuffin I must have looked, my clothes all patched and me looking like I slept in a barn, because I did, same as now. But your mother was a grand-hearted woman, an original, and she let me walk her home, and brought me inside and introduced me to her mother, God rest her soul, and fixed us a cup of tea.

“I discovered right off, that first afternoon, what moored me to her. To my mates I would say any old thing, and make a joke of it—certainly not admit to any elevated thoughts. But when I looked in Gwyneth Davis’s eyes, I told the truth. Couldn’t help myself. When she asked me what I wanted to do with my life, I spoke from the heart. Asked about my family, spoke from the heart. Asked about my feelings about things, spoke from the heart. Thus did she teach this pilgrim about himself.

“She wanted to know about Wales, and that was easier. She’d left the homeland as a schoolchild, never to go back. I told her the old stories, Owain Glendower, and Merddyn, whom you know as Merlin, and Arthur the King, and far older ones—the druid tales my granfer raised me on.

“Perhaps that was me hold on her. Certainly I wasn’t much in myself, a good-for-nothing
voyageur
. But the old stories, they cast a spell.

“We saw each other regular that winter. She skated most days, and I walked her home and had tea. I was mad for her. Up to then I’d thought of little but adventuring.” He looked up at Dylan. “Adventuring into the wilds, and into Indian girls. Your mam raised me from lust to love, a feeling a young man scoffs at. One he thinks he’ll never have. Made me yearn to have a wife, a home, children. To find out what’s next in life. That’s what she wanted too, a home, children.”

He looked up at Dylan. “You.”

He chuckled, remembering. “I’d go away from her and wonder what was wrong with me. I thought I must be crazy. I’d find my mates and go to the taverns and the whores. Wake up in a barn, hung over, smelling of
putain
, and tell myself that was the life. That afternoon I’d be back at the river, looking for your mother. Looking with a yearning I’ve hardly ever felt since. And go home with her and drink tea instead of ale.

“Come spring, right about this time, I was supposed to go back to the depot.
Voyageur
me, braving the wilds. I thought maybe your mother wanted me to stay. I thought maybe there was a different kind of life for me here. She didn’t say, except maybe with her eyes.”