The High Missouri (11 page)

Dylan looked at him sidelong.

“Don’t worry,” said Dru, “English is still too much for her.”

Dylan trod the path thoughtfully. Should he tell Dru? He felt shaky. “How do you spell her name?”

Dru shrugged. “Her language isn’t written. You can spell it the way you want. F-o-u-r, F-o-r, F-o-r-e, whatever. I think she’s named for her grandmother, and I don’t know what tribe the grandmother was from, so I can’t even say what language her name is. Just Fore.”

Dru was just warming up. “Now, you could associate it with something. Like forelock, but she doesn’t have one. Or forest, which makes her mystical and mysterious. Forthright, which she is, about whatever she wants. Even forward. Forethought—there’s none of that in her, nor forlorn.

“Knowing you, it makes you think of foreskin. If you forge your tool in her hot oven, you can abandon hope of forgiveness. But maybe fornication will be your good fortune. It’s better than your prudery.”

They took a few steps in blessed silence.

Dylan changed the subject. “Where’d she get that scar, do you know?”

Dru bobbed his head. “She did it herself. Took a piece of obsidian—sharp as a woman’s wit, that stuff—and…” He made a quick cutting motion across his own cheek.

“Why?”

Dru shrugged. “Passion, rage, self-dislike.” He thought for a couple of steps. “The young man she wanted chose another. A woman more pliable.” Dru chuckled. “When she lost him, she…” The cutting motion again.

“A year later, last summer, her rival died in childbirth. The young man came hanging about again. Her sister would have been glad to get rid of her. Fore wouldn’t even speak to him.”

“Her sister?”

“Her older sister, much older, is the sits-beside-him wife of the Crane. Fore is the third wife, the youngest. That’s their way, to marry the husbands of their sisters. She’s unruly, ungovernable, and will never be content without being a sits-beside-him wife.” Dru shrugged. “Her sister would like to get her another husband.”

“What ways,” Dylan muttered.

“Your disgust will not serve you here. Nor your sense of superiority.”

Dylan jerked his head to look at the Druid.

Dru put a kindly hand on Dylan’s shoulder. “So why are you acting so spooky?”

Dylan struggled with himself to speak. “I had a nightmare last night. A whole goddamn bagpipe regiment of nightmares.” He smiled sardonically. “Thousands of human demons in hell, fornicating wildly.”

“I used to dream about sex a lot,” said Dru with a warm smile. “Still do occasionally.”

“I saw her in the dream,” snapped Dylan, nodding forward at Fore. “She was the one I was… In my dream her name was Fornicating Woman.”

“Perfect,” said Dru. “Fornicating Woman.”

Dylan kept his tone serious. It still gave him the willies. “She even had that scar,” he said. “In fact, twin scars on both sides, and matching streaks of white in her hair.”

Dru shrugged. “So you’ve seen Fore around and you have imagination.”

Dylan insisted, “I’m just human, trying to become spiritual.”

“No,” said the Druid mildly, “I don’t think so. I think you’re a spiritual being trying to become human.” He grinned. “Would you like to become a pagan Piegan?” “Piegan” and “pagan” he pronounced the same way.

That afternoon, Dylan learned that his fingers were too clumsy to braid strips of bark of the red willow, that he couldn’t figure out where to set a snare, that he couldn’t set it ingeniously enough, that he couldn’t catch small game, and generally that left alone in the
pays d’en haut
, he would starve.

So he’d never make a pagan Piegan.

“Anastasie,” Dylan said, “what’s a sits-beside-him wife?”

They were in the wigwam after supper. She smiled a friendly, sisterly smile at him. He loved Anastasie’s broad, strong, plain face. He was beginning to think everyone here but her had secret designs on him.

She was making him two more pairs of moccasins from deer hide. Plain moccasins in the puckered-toe style, no beadwork, no quillwork, no nothing, she had commented teasingly.

“I too-too make you deerskin shirt. One only. That’s all time. Anastasie not your mother.” His cotton clothes tore up fast in the wilderness—he’d be naked if he didn’t get more clothes somehow.

He would also need mukluks from thick moose hide or buffalo hide for the winter, she said, but she didn’t have time to make them now. Maybe he could trade some woman something for them, if he ever earned anything. Or maybe he would get a wife, at his age, instead of begging from his “Indun” older sister. A-a-ch. That’s the way Anastasie talked.

Now she took a needle out of her mouth and stuck it in the hide so she could converse. She drew around his feet on the hide. Her awl, needles, and sinew lay nearby. The Frenchmen tried to trade her Frenchman thread, she had said—she called all whites Frenchmen—but it was weak stuff compared to sinew. Your moccasins would fall apart with Frenchman thread, she said scornfully.

“Most
Induns
,” she said with a roll of the eyes, “understand good you have two or three wives, many as can afford.” She liked to say “Indun” with a little fillip because she thought it was funny that the Frenchmen would call all the people of Turtle Island by one name when they were so various. The whites, on the other hand, according to her, were all the same.

“Morgan tells that you Frenchmen too-too had many wives before you got this civilization. Now you come here and want us be too-too foolish like you. Lots of times women, their men be killed, so how would they live if they couldn’t be second wife, or third? Must die too-too, starve?

“Older man, his wife die, he take younger woman, make children. Woman can not do when she older.

“So. Man who can afford, have several wives. Then he must be good hunter and trapper, bring in lots and lots meat, feed his big family. Lots of skins for clothing, too-too, all such. Not many men can do.”

Dylan began, “But—”

“Yah,” Anastasie interrupted. “I know your mind. Dirty mind. You make fuss why have…?” Boldly she made a circle with the thumb and forefinger of one hand and slid the forefinger of the other hand in and out. She shrugged helplessly. “Frenchmen. Peoples grown up, they do such, yah. Is good. All two-leggeds, four-leggeds, wingeds do that. Is right. If I die, you think Morgan not do that more? Hah. He call it in English ‘twat,’ in French
‘chatte,’
is good either way.”

Dylan was scandalized.

She’d finished drawing. She pushed him off the skin and began to cut. Dylan saw that she had real scissors.

“You Frenchmen half crazy. You make things good. Rifle, needles, pot, beads, such like too-too. But you understand nothing.” She pronounced it
know-think
. “What you think good, hah? Civilization, that good. Make you smarter dan us savage.” She picked up her awl and began to jab holes through the skin with a vigor that scared Dylan. “You speak two language—I speak four. You no know where is small animal. I feed family on dem. You got pretty weave cloth”—she held up his worn shirt—“I got skins of deers, last longer. You got compass but get lost. I go here Moose Factory back, no trouble, just my eyes.” She tapped her temple.

“You go on plains, die from thirst widdout I show you water holes. You not watch deer, moose, buffalo, know how dey do. People of Turtle Island, we watch. You starve, we eat.

“Morgan say you got good, black book.” She was the only person who called Dru by his given name. An assertion of rights, or an intimacy. “Blackrobe come here sometimes. I stuff ears with mud. Frenchmen only peoples I know kill dere own kind. People of Turtle Island not do that.”

Dylan had had about all he could take. This attack on civilization and the Bible—it was too much. Civilization, which had built the great cathedrals, created art and music and literature, discovered the secrets of the stars…

Whoa, he told himself. She has no light to see by. That’s why she doesn’t see.

“Sits-beside-him wife,” he prompted her.

“Why you want know?”

“Dru said Fore isn’t a sits-beside-him wife, she’s the third wife.”

“Yah, but she like you, think maybe she be your wife.”

“I’m not interested.”

“She know how make interested.” Anastasie smiled and did the circled thumb and forefinger trick again.

“Sits-beside-him wife,” he said.

“Yah, I not forget. So. One wife always first wife, first mother. When two wifes, second maybe little sister, help first wife, do what first wife say. Same any number. First wife say we cook this, we cook that, you set snares, you gather wild rice, all such. First wife have first place, sits beside him. In wigwam by fire only wife sits next to man. S’all.”

“Is there never jealousy?”

“’Course jealousy.’ Course all bad things. Wives people, good and bad like people. Try live better. This way all women get be mother.”

Dylan thought about it for a long moment. It was ugly in the sight of God. But he cared for his friends too much to say so.

“Anastasie, do you and Dru have children?”

She shook her head no. “Long time, two husbands, I have only one child. Died at birth. I maybe cannot again.” She didn’t raise her eyes to his. From his oblique angle he thought he saw grief flick across her face.

“Does Dru have children?”

“Could be. Has been in every village on Turtle Island. Never he knew of any children. Didn’t stay long enough to know.” Now she raised her eyes to him. “Except you.”

Chapter Ten

Dylan went stumbling toward him. Dru was working on Dylan’s powder horn with a scribe. Saga was eating
sagamité
again. Dylan glared at Dru. “I talk to you,” he snapped.

Dru looked at Dylan, at Saga, back at Dylan wonderingly.

Dylan walked away from the fire into the evening shadows. He didn’t know what the hell he felt. He was dust in a whirlwind. Whatever it was, there was outrage in it. And confusion.

You run away from home and…

When Dru came up, Dylan blurted, “Are you my father?”

Dru looked into his eyes softly, not knowing what to answer.

“Are you my father?”
The words were getting sharp. Dru felt his eyes flutter nervously across the distance to Saga, and back to Dylan.

“Anastasie says you’re my father.”

“She believes it,” Dru said sadly.

“You aren’t?”

“No, I don’t think so,” he said.

“Whaddya mean you don’t
think
so?”

Dru stepped farther away from the fire, found a bright spot in the last glow of the twilight, sat, and patted the ground next to him for Dylan to sit. When Dylan did, the Druid spoke gently. “I might have been your father. I might. Nearly was. The last time I saw your mam, she gave me… more than one of those cups of tea.” He looked past Dylan into the shadows, across his own years to his young self and a young woman. There one life was cast down, and another taken up.

“I loved her,” Dru said. He paused a while. “Regrets are insights that come too late.

“I don’t know what that act, on a blanket in a grove on a spring afternoon next to a picnic basket… I don’t know what it was for her. For me, it was committed in a kind of fury, a wave of self-dislike that came crashing down on us both. She was the first woman I ever made love to that I loved.” He met Dylan’s eyes and held them. “I’m sorry to say that it came out as anger. I couldn’t bear those feelings in me, and I lashed them into her.

“She held me tenderly after, and when I raised my face, I saw hers was wet with tears.

“I know now they were tears of good-bye. She couldn’t give me what I couldn’t give myself. I don’t know what you call it.

“I didn’t like myself well enough to do right by me or her or us. Stupid youth I was, and already thirty, too far along in years to be so… whatever. Callow.

“I told myself, lying like a scoundrel, that I’d got what I wanted, I conquered. The next day I waved back at her from a canoe, all sashed up fancy as a
voyageur
, and set out for this country. Conquer some more up here, I told myself. And again when I get back to Montreal, and everywhere in between. Lusty laddo, I told myself, Tommy Twat, Charles de Chatte.” He smiled wryly and shook his head. “The lies, the lies.

“When I got back to town, as I said before, she was married to your father. He was hell for respectable, which is not quite the same as self-respect, but close enough for city folks. She wouldn’t see me, of course, and soon it was time for her confinement. And your father got wind of me nosing about and came and told me to make meself scarce. Quite properly.

“I done that. Probably was glad your mam had relieved me of the responsibility of acting like a man.

“Next I heard, she was dead.” He flashed the aquamarine eye at Dylan. “I can’t tell you how awful that was. Just like meself, I stayed drunk for a week. Thought most gravely about throwing meself in the river. Which I deserved.” He held Dylan’s eyes. “What pulled me out of it was you, laddo. The thought that you were alive. The thought that you might be my son, and you were alive. That pierced through everything and touched me. That was the beginning of something for me… don’t know what.

“Burning curious I was, so I went to the church to have a look at the date of your christening. Might possibly have been me as was your father, probably not. She married Ian Campbell about a month after I went strutting up-river. You might have come along three weeks late, more likely a bit early.

“But I needed to think you were mine. Never let on about it, just believed it meself. Kept my tongue about it for a long time. Would check on you now and then, quiet inquiries, watch you in the schoolyard, suchlike. Looked through the windows of your house sometimes. Got into the habit, winters, of coming back to Montreal, mainly to see you. Thought you looked like me, more so then than now.

“Then I got hooked up with Anastasie, and no children came, for whatever reason. Bothered me, it did. She’d had one before, and now didn’t make any more. Her brother yelled at me about it once, and I told a whopper. I said I had a son, Dylan as was called Campbell but was truly Bleddyn. Yes, I did.”

Dru looked long at Dylan. “And the story spread, got all around, got hard to put a stop to. Lots of folks believed it, and I never denied it.

“Until last summer. I wanted to bring you out here. As I have done.” He let this sit. “Told Anastasie you aren’t mine. Just wanted to set things right.”

He chuckled without humor. “She doesn’t believe me. Thinks I’m trying to make it less important than it is, you being here. No one else believes it either. Not Saga, for sure. Though I’ve told him.

“It’s lovely, laddo. Tell a lie, and you have to live with it.”

Dru regarded Dylan gravely. Dylan wanted to reach out and touch him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I wanted you to be mine. I did. You saved my life.”

Dylan put a hand on Dru’s arm. “Thank you,” he said. “I wish you were my father, not Ian Campbell. Thank you.”

Dru smiled at him. “I it is what needs to thank you.” He covered Dylan’s hand with his own. “You saved me first, just a kid as you were. Then you changed me. You helped me grow up. I wanted to be good enough to be your da.”

His eyes twinkled. “So there you are, father of the grown-up Morgan Griffiths Morgan Bleddyn, itinerant and druid, who otherwise would still be a callow youth.”

They went down to the river for a smoke. A smoke seemed a good reason for Dru to go anywhere.

Dylan blurted it out. “Are you Saga’s father?”

“No, laddo, grown when I met him.”

“Do I need to be careful of Saga?”

Dru chuckled. “He would like that, but no, you don’t need to. He’s very jealous of you, thinking you are my blood.”

Dru looked at the powder horn in his hand. He began to cut it with the scribe again. Looking down, he said, “I suppose he thinks you’ll get whatever I couldn’t give him.”

“I can trust him, then?”

“Completely. He would never allow my son to come to harm. Which frustrates him.”

As Dylan thought. The bastard wasn’t trustworthy. “Why?”

“He’s all lusty for Fore. Has been since last year this time.”

Dylan waited for an explanation. Dru was scribing away.

“Every July we have a grand ball to celebrate. Big affair, partners out from Montreal, wintering partners,
voyageurs
,
hommes du nord
, Indians, Metis, everybody. Dancing—good orchestra, flutes and fifes, fiddles, bagpipes. Lots to drink. Wild dances—reels from Scotland, jigs from Quebec, Indian steps. Celebrate our one time a year together.

“Let’s just say that on the night of the dance, many a virgin at sundown isn’t a virgin at sunup. And every Indian lady has her husband’s forgiveness in advance for whatever she does on that night.

“Last year what Fore did was Saga.

“But she’s uninterested in him,” Dru went on, “completely uninterested.”

Not so completely, thought Dylan.

Dru looked at him directly. “She’s interested in you.”

Dylan shrugged. Why did these people have this bent for rutting? At that moment the warmth in his loins told him why. “Why would she want me?”

“Most Indian women do. Want a white-man husband. The little reason is, to them white men are rich in beads and cloth and hatchets, bells, needles, all such foofaraw. Seems like a wonderful power to them. The big reason is, white men are important in every tribe, the source of lots of good things for the people. White man equals big man.

“Here,” said Dru, handing him the powder horn.

The inscription was fancy, in cursive lettering, the capital letters elaborately cross-hatched and curlicued. It said,

I, POWDER, with my Brother BALL,

Hero-like, do CONQUER all.

“What does it mean?” asked Dylan.

“It means we’d better practice shooting.”

“Young Mr. Davies.”

It was Duncan Campbell Stewart, long and tall and wearing a skull’s smile.

Dylan blew the smoke away from the muzzle of his fine J. Henry gun before he said good afternoon. He wondered whether Stewart had seen him shooting at and missing the wood chips set on a stump.

“Is he a marksman, Morgan ap Bleddyn?”

“Not yet, Duncan.” It was a kind answer, considering.

“Why do you call him that?” Dylan said bluntly to Stewart. He was tired of old men keeping secrets from him.

“It’s an old joke between us, lad,” said Dru.

“It means Morgan son of Bleddyn,” answered Stewart with a smile. “Expressed in the Welsh way.”

“Bleddyn being me da,” said Dru.

“Do you know it means ‘wolf’? Though I’d say he’s more coyote, the shapeshifter.”

“Whichever suits me fancy at the time,” said Dru, playing.

“He’s a man of many names,” said Stewart to Dylan.

“Why do people call him the Druid?” Dylan asked.

Stewart nodded gravely. “Because he is a master woodsman, so skilled he surely conjures the help of the forest gods, or is a druid himself.”

“What is it that you do superlatively well, Mr. Stewart?”

“My privilege to ask questions first,” said Stewart. “The prerogative of age.”

Dylan nodded.

“You have not given me a response about the position I hold for you, young Mr. Davies.”

“I’m not ready yet,” said Dylan, adding teasingly, “to sell my soul to the devil.”

“Ah, you’ve already done that, Mr. Davies. Unless I’m much mistaken. I have another question.”

Dylan nodded again.

“Why did you change your name when you came to the
pays d’en haut
?”

Dylan looked sharply at Dru. “You can’t really walk away from anything, laddo,” said Dru.

“No need to be ashamed, young Mr. Davies. Many men here have fled their identities, for many reasons. In your case, however, it’s curious. To give up a fine Highland clan name for a common Welsh appellation. My Campbell ancestors might be offended.”

“I’m not a criminal, Mr. Stewart, so the why concerns none but me.”

“Well enough, young Mr…. Davies. Would you like me to send word to your good father of your safety?”

Again Dylan looked sharply at Dru. He felt snared. He answered with forced equanimity. “It’s kind of you to offer, but no, thank you. Now show us your marksmanship.” He offered the gun.

Stewart raised his left hand as though to push the rifle away, and for the first time Dylan noticed a slender case in the hand, such as might hold a flute.

“Perhaps with other weapons, young Mr. Davies.”

“He’s a knife man,” said Dru. “Like a bloody Scot, enamored of steel.”

Stewart held the case forth and opened it. On a satin lining, knives, glistening like silver.

“You throw them, young Mr. Davies,” said Stewart. “I’ll confess I’m proud of them. Sheffield, of course, and custom-made. Let me show you.”

From the lid of the case he took one of two leather holsters and strapped it on—behind his right shoulder. Then the other. He lifted the knives gingerly and slipped them into the holsters, their hilts coming just above the top of the shoulder. Then he squared himself toward a birch tree ten paces away. He seemed, perhaps, to take a deep breath, or in some way to relax his posture, and his countenance became trancelike.

The arms moved so fast, Dylan was not sure which moved first, right or left.

Whick! Whick!
went the knives, like the sound of a whip cutting the air.

The knives were in the center of the birch tree at chest height.

Dylan had to rehearse it to himself. Stewart cocked the elbow, grasped the hilt behind his back, and threw straight forward from that odd position.

Dylan walked over close to the birch, Stewart following. One knife had penetrated a couple of inches. The other was tight against it, half an inch higher. It stuck clear through the tree, making a long split in the fibers.

Stewart jerked the knives out hard and handed them to Dylan. They were light and flat, like big letter openers, the hilts with only slender handles of ivory, smooth as polished marble. The edges were sharp enough to make his knees weak. Something in the feel of them stirred his blood. He grinned foolishly up at Stewart.

“Will you try them?” asked Stewart.

Dylan demurred, but Stewart insisted.

“Don’t pass it up, laddo,” said Dru.

Stewart showed him how to stand seven paces from the target, how to take a single stride with the opposite foot, how to release at a certain point and follow through. Dylan missed repeatedly, or hit the tree with the hilt, or hit it sideways and watched the knife clatter off into the weeds. Even missing, he liked the motion of his arm, the thrust of his upper body, the logic of the flow of force into the knife. Most of all, he liked the feel of the knives in his hands.

After six or eight throws, he stuck one. And then another. And another. They were thrown softly but accurately.

“They fit your hands nicely,” said Stewart, “and I think you have a touch.”

Stewart took the knives and threw them with extraordinary vigor.
Thunk! Thunk!
He walked forward, wrested them out of the tree, held them delicately, almost like fondling something. Then he thrust them to Dylan hilts first.

“They’re yours,” he said.

“No, no,” said Dylan foolishly.

“Please, young Mr. Davies, permit me. It will gratify me very particularly.”

Dylan looked at Dru, uncertain, looked at Stewart.

“I am retiring from this… savage land. I have carried these weapons… because this place requires a man to…” Something moved in his shadowed eyes. “I’m leaving behind that way of life, forever I’m sure. I want to make a gesture.”