The High Missouri (2 page)

Chapter Two

Dylan hung up his coat, mopped his wet head, and looked at himself in a hall mirror.

No, lad, he said to himself in his father’s voice, you’ll not do. Again in his father’s voice, You ought to wear a hat in this weather. A thousand similar thoughts murmured in the back of his head.

Dylan drew a deep breath. His father’s house had a distinctive smell, not strong but sly, a smell covered by years of fastidious scrubbing and cleaning, one strangers might not even notice. It was the smell of illness. Ian Campbell had taken sick three years ago, which now seemed to Dylan the man’s whole life. He’d taken a fever in the wilderness and come back to Montreal with his hands and knees all swollen, stiff, red, and arthritic. For a year he never left the house and was mostly bedridden. Rheumatism, said the doctor, a bad case. The treatment was rest, lifelong rest.

Ian Campbell settled down to resting, and rotting. To Dylan, the house had smelled like decay ever since.

It also smelled like fear. Like not saying what you mean, like smiling because you’re supposed to, and feeling rivalrous with your father and keeping it quiet, and loneliness. Especially loneliness.

The house didn’t change, except to get grayer and more worn. It was empty and lonely. Dylan was gone. Only his little sister—well, half sister—Amalie was still at home, and she was only waiting for the first proposal of marriage. Dylan thought she would take the very first, regardless.

Lonely. Because it was motherless. Two children by two mothers, both dead now, and Dylan remembered neither of them alive. His own mother, who was Welsh and insisted on his Welsh names, died a week after he was born. He couldn’t even remember his father’s last wife, Amalie’s mother, a Frenchwoman. She died when he was three. Since no one in the family was permitted to mention her, Dylan didn’t even know what she died of.

Two wives dead. As a schoolboy Dylan often imagined his father as some sort of evil wizard. He brushed women with his secret wand in their secret places, and they died of his touch.

He pushed his hair back. It was wet from the drizzle on this wintry day, and falling in his eyes. In the mirror he saw what his father called a likely enough twenty-two-year-old. His father often remarked that Dylan was good-looking, then followed with, “Why don’t you make more of yourself, laddie?”

One more glance at his reflection. Aye, boyo, it’s well you don’t look as scared as you feel.

This house and this life were like seeds chewed to pulp. Perhaps once they’d provided taste and nourishment. Now he needed to spit them out.

Thus resolved, he stepped into the double door of the parlor. He tried softly, “Father?”

“Yes, Dylan,” boomed the voice.

Dylan looked at the great chair by the French windows where Ian Hugh Campbell would be sitting, snuffbox nearby, snifter in his hand. The snuff would be cheap, and the snifter full of Burton’s Ale instead of brandy. Dylan was well aware of his father’s small pretensions: the house, struggling to be grand outside, much worn inside. The furniture, nicked and kept presentable only by much rubbing with oil. The housekeeper, whom his father could ill afford but couldn’t let go. The closets of his father’s clothes, mended and mended until to a sharp eye they resembled patchwork quilts. Since his illness, he wore only a dressing gown anyway.

There was nothing for Dylan here, nothing at all, and never had been. Except Amalie, poor thing. But she was beautiful, and had beaux, and soon would be married and gone.

Dylan supposed his father’s life would be over then.

A harrumph. “
Yes
, Dylan.”

He stepped near the great chair and looked at his father. Ian Campbell was sizable, imposing, with huge, menacing eyebrows, both eyes too wide open, like a bird’s, and opaque, unreadable features. With his stocky body, big head, and no neck, he looked like an irascible owl. The man was forty-eight, but no longer full of piss and vinegar. Forty-eight, and his life was already over. Just empty motions for a few more years, empty gestures of acquisition, and empty ragings.

Step forth and disappoint your father, Dylan told himself ironically.

He stepped close enough to shake hands.

“Pour yourself a glass, lad.”

Ian Campbell watched Dylan get a beer glass from the side table, pour his own drink, and then fill his father’s brandy snifter up to the rim, all without looking into his father’s face. Yes, beer glass—it seemed important to the lad to say, This is ale, not brandy. Not that the lad’s palate cared. Or that he cared at all. His son didn’t know what it meant to be well off, even to have riches within your grasp and see it all slip away. Because your body betrayed you.

Ian Campbell snorted. His body had betrayed him all his life, in fact, especially its appetites.

Something else the lad didn’t know. What it meant to love your son and for your trouble get his contempt slung in your face.

Dylan lifted his beer glass in a salute and sipped, then set the glass on the little side table with his father’s snifter and snuff.

“What’s wrong now?” asked his father.

“Why should anything be wrong, Daddy Ni?”

Ian snorted at that language. When Dylan was small, Ian Campbell had revered the memory of his mother, and brought in the boy’s maternal aunt, Meredith Davis, to take care of him and teach the boy a few words of the Welsh language and other things Welsh. Now the lad used these childhood indulgences to manipulate his father.

“You’ve been skulking out there in the hall, afraid to tell me something.”

Ian regretted the words immediately. Maybe he was a little drunk. He often was these days. When he drank too much, he stated the truth of life with a matter-of-fact bitterness the young were not prepared for. He felt more and more bitter these days, and cynical. Since his illness, he never went down to the office of Campbell Trading Company, which now looked derelict. A man who had roamed the vast interior of Canada, he was housebound, almost bedridden.

If he could only get well! The doctor said he would have intermissions with his illness, but mustn’t ever tire himself again. How could a man build an empire without exertion? He wanted to get well. His old partner, the Rat, was bringing Indian tar, a native remedy. Maybe it would help. He was only forty-eight!

“What happened, did you get discharged?”

Why did he speak so harshly to the lad? Since Dylan had moved out a month ago, he had asked his son that question on every visit. Dylan didn’t know how it felt to try to give your son a better start in life than you had, and worry that you’d failed. You trekked the wilderness, paddled those bloody canoes upstream and down, endured hunger and freezing, looked red niggers in the eye and stared them down, and endangered your very soul—for what? So your son wouldn’t have to. And now the sod didn’t notice.

“Why do you say that, Father?”

“Claude MacDonald sent your trunk around a few minutes ago.”

He handed Dylan a note, the envelope opened, the paper rumpled. So his father intercepted his mail and read it.

Dear Dylan,

Uncle Dugald was just here in a frightful temper—said you’d insulted him publicly and all that. Whatever you did, old chap, you did it all the way. He’s livid.

He made me pack your things while he watched, got a carter, and sent your trunk to your father’s place. Can’t do aught about it, the family owning the hotel, you know. The staff here is warned not to admit you. Dreadfully sorry. I guess you’re stuck at your father’s house for a few days, at least.

But come round, please, I want to hear the story of how you bearded the lion in his den!

Your friend,

Claude MacDonald

Annoyed, Dylan walked away from his father and looked out the windows. Still gray, still drizzling, the light fading, rainwater running down the glass, blurring his vision. Tomorrow is a new beginning, he reminded himself.

He wondered why his father was so bitter, so sure life would turn to ashes in the mouth. Yes, two wives dead, that was part of it, and his illness, and a sinking business, all part of it. Even his housekeeper, Philomene, had disappointed him. For years Dylan hadn’t known about their secret relationship. Then, suddenly one morning six weeks ago, they were acting like rejected lovers. That was when Dylan moved out.

It seemed clear that Philomene’s love would be the last in his father’s life. Yet all that was not excuse enough for bitterness, not to Dylan. If Ian Hugh Campbell wanted to give up, why did he have to ruin his son’s life?

His father didn’t pursue the questions. He’d asked in order to nettle, not to get an answer. Dylan tried to shock him with the reply.

“No, Father, I’ve quit.”

Campbell sniffed his disapproval.

Dylan wondered whether his father heard. “Don’t you believe me?”

“I believe you’re a fool for moods, like your mother.” It was a theme of his growing up. To Ian Campbell, as to Dugald MacDonald, the Scots were rough and ready and up to snuff. The Welsh were poetic, which meant moody, which meant weak, not up to the harsh business of life.

“
Hiraeth
,” muttered Ian Campbell, like grinding nuts in his teeth. Dylan knew his thought: Give me fine Scots, not melancholy Welshmen.

The pedal point of his childhood again. Whenever Dylan was sad, Ian said he suffered from
hiraeth
, like his Welsh mother.

It was Welsh for melancholy—according to his father, not just ordinary dejection, but a kind of world-despair that only a foolishly poetic people like the Welsh could be capable of. Dylan wondered why Ian Campbell had married Gwyneth, nee Davis, if he despised the Welsh.

Dylan Elfed Davis Campbell was tired of telling his father what he was not, tired of denying afflictions he didn’t have—bloody
hiraeth
!—and tired of asking his father for things. This would be the last bleeding time.

He turned away from the window. He looked at his father, squat, old, bitter, angry. He would approach his father for the last time, and his father would not refuse him.

He came back to the great chair, moved the ottoman his father never used, sat on it and looked up at this weak, tyrannical man.

“Father, I did quit the bank. I loathe it. I’m going to become a priest.”

So. Ian Campbell knew better than that. It was not a priest Dylan wanted to be, it was a missionary. The boy had read too many books as a youth and got his imagination inflamed. Blackrobes bearing the torch of Christ to the benighted, indeed. The white men didn’t raise the savages to civilization, no, Ian Campbell knew that firsthand, and it had cost him dear. It was the other way. The savages pulled the white men down to bestiality.

This was not the ambition of a grown man, thought Campbell. It was the fantasy of an adolescent.

“A missionary, you mean,” he growled.

This had been Ian Campbell’s fear for a decade. The father braved the wilderness, suffered privations of the body, temptations of the flesh, perhaps even put his soul in mortal danger, but for a prize worth having, by God, and a prize he could pass on to his issue. Respectability, so nicely symbolized by the exclusive College de Montreal, and a tidy bit of capital.

The son would throw it all away, would disdain the prize, instead would foul himself in the same wilderness, and for nothing. For an illusion. Throw away fortune, civilization, body, soul, all for nothing.

He repeated bitterly, “A missionary.”

“Yes, Father.” Dylan couldn’t look his father in the eye.

He didn’t restate his dislike of the bank, or his revulsion for the future his father kept hinting at, as accountant of Campbell Trading Company.

He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t understand why his father despised missionary work or loathed the interior. His father had never taken him among the Indians, even on a short trip. Instead he had disappeared for months at a time, once for more than a year, and come back with tales only of how vile it was.

“Juvenile,” his father grunted.

Dylan hated his father.

The lad was too young even to know what he didn’t know. His son knew nothing of the two country wives he had had, the women who gave him solace of the flesh during his long years as a widower. He knew nothing of the other lusts and vilenesses of Indian country. He knew nothing of the heartbreak out there. That one winter he, Ian Campbell, had stayed over, like a true
hivernant
, a winterer. His daughter by the Cree woman was ill with the coughing sickness, and he loved the daughter. He deprived himself and his two white children to stay with her, and in February she died.

All ten-year-old Dylan could say, when Campbell came home the next summer, was, “Daddy Ni, why did you miss Christmas? Daddy Ni, why did you miss Christmas?”

The boy adored Christmas, the singing of carols, and the time they all had as a family to be together over the holiday, most especially loved the way he would outfit himself like St. Nicholas and they would take presents to the children of widows of his employees.
Voyageurs
died in the wilderness, sometimes, and this was the Campbell family’s acknowledgment. According to his aunt Meredith, the boy had sworn over and over that Daddy Ni would never fail to be home for Christmas, especially for the sake of the fatherless children. He cried furiously when Ian Campbell didn’t appear, said the aunt. Ian Campbell knew he’d never quite won back the boy’s trust.

But Ian Campbell was holding another child, a dark-skinned girl, day and night.

Fool. Fool who knew nothing.

Did “fool” mean Dylan? Or Ian Campbell? He snorted. Both, oh, yes, sod it, both.

Campbell repeated, “Juvenile.”

Dylan strangled a retort. Carefully, in a measured way, he told himself it was a lie. Ian Campbell might say it was juvenile now. He wouldn’t think so later, silently, in his heart of hearts. A priest was something Ian Campbell admired. He was proud of being a Catholic in a city where respectable people were Anglican when British, Presbyterian when Scottish. Ian Campbell would admire his son for keeping up the tradition of defiance.

“Daddy Ni,” he began, “will you help me with Father Quesnel?” Now the old family friend, Dylan’s godfather, would become the connection he needed. Once, Quesnel had been a frequent dinner companion, and their guest for the entire twelve days of Christmas. In those days it was a happier house, and the children had fun with his name—Père Le Chat Noir, they called him, Father Black Cat, for his feline features and black robe. “Speak to him for me. Or give me a letter to him.”