The High Missouri (20 page)

He quoted for her one of his favorite bits of verse when he was a kid, long before he read Byron:

Under the greenwood tree

Who loves to lie with me,

And turn his merry note

Unto the sweet bird’s throat,

Come hither, come hither, come hither:

Here shall he see

No enemy

But winter and rough weather.

They sang together, foolishly and happily, the old French song,
Allouette, gentille allouette

Allouette, je te plumerai

Je te plumerai la tete

Je te plumerai la tete

et la tete

et la tete

Oh! allouette, gentille allouette

Allouette, je te plumerai.

They plunged through many verses, and at the end they laughed and nearly cried and clasped each other’s hands and looked long into each other’s eyes.

Caro put her hand on Dylan’s knee. “I need something,” she said gently, and put her head in his lap and closed her eyes. They were still for a while, and he thought maybe Caro was asleep. Then she said, “It’s a strange time.” Her voice seemed a little quavery. “I want to ask you for something.” He couldn’t see her face as well as he wanted—it was turned away. “If I get too crazy here, will you save me?” She seemed to contemplate. They both knew the difficulty was that he already thought she was acting too crazy. “If I try to give you this ring back, will you just put me on a horse and take me away?”

Dylan smiled gravely. “I will.” He put his hand on her head and rubbed it. She smiled and sighed deeply. They stayed like that for a long time.

Walking back to the fort, Dylan told himself it had been a good time, a healing time. Their closeness was real, palpable.

Then he told himself that tonight Caro would be close to Captain Chick, underneath him, and he would be frigging her wet
chatte
.

He felt his body stiffen with rage.

Calm, he told himself. Be calm and wait and all you ever wanted is yours.

He swallowed and rolled his shoulders and glanced sideways at Caro.

She looked lost in reverie.

That night at dinner the seating struck Dylan as symbolic. Captain Chick put Caro at his left and his Blood mistress at his right. Next to the mistress sat Monsieur Troyes. Next to Caro, Saga. Dylan was banished to the far end of the table.

The meal was gay, and Dylan got the impression that Monsieur Troyes was delighted that his daughter had made a liaison with so powerful a man as Captain Chick. But maybe he was imagining things, Dylan thought. He intended to keep to himself, not even to ask Saga where Dru was. All was frivolity and laughter, as far as an outsider would have been able to tell, right through dessert, and right on through the drink that followed.

Too much drink. Finally Dylan got up, made his excuses, and took his leave. The Captain bid him good night lightly. Caro stared at him warningly. He remembered her words: “If you spy on me one more time, I will never speak to you again.”

He looked to see if she was wearing his ring. She was, but now on a chain around her neck.

Surprisingly, he slept, heavily, stuporously, like an animal without the gift or curse of imagination. He did not want to imagine what Caro was doing, and did not want to dream. He simply wanted to be alive, and sane, when this nightmare ended.

This time it was Caro who suggested the picnic.

He felt strange with her. It was awkward, painful, to be in her presence, yet it was also rich, still, deep, in a way right. Once Claude had invited him home to a concert given by his two sisters on duo harpsichords. They had played a funeral march from a symphony by Beethoven, a German they said was famous but whom Dylan had never heard of. The funeral march was somber, slow, with a kind of magisterial gravity. It seemed to move only in a small circle around a center point, and that point was infinitely painful, yet the experience of the pain was right, healing, human. Dylan found the family’s applause at the end of the march jarring, embarrassing, making his experience silly. Sitting with Caro was like that performance, a healing pain.

He never escaped from the agony of thinking what the two of them were like only a few days ago, when they would have been embracing each other, kissing, hurrying off to make love before soaring to the stars with incredible talk. Now they were wary of touching, feeling each other out delicately, concerned about sticking to safe subjects. Their best moments were childlike, lightly playful.

But Dylan needed this time. He needed it as the promise of a future. Even more, he needed to come gravely to his touchstone and see the truth within himself. This was deep, somber grief, but it was not the shattering anguish of his other waking hours.

She told him what an interesting man Captain Chick was, what an intriguing mind he had. She admired his boldness and dash. Other men sat back and longed, she said. The Captain seized what he wanted, and chuckled at those too frightened to take it back. He was a man, and unafraid to seize dominion over other men. She was excited by Captain Chick all the more because he was a half-breed like herself, and brazen enough to take what he wanted from the ruling white men.

This talk made Dylan woebegone. Not so much because Caro was infatuated with Captain Chick, or because she seemed well matched with another half-breed, but because she was enamored of a kind of man Dylan could never be. Dominion, and all that it seemed to mean, was alien to him.

He considered telling her that the Captain would only use her until she ceased to amuse him, or until he could no longer flaunt his piracy in his, Dylan’s, eyes, and discard her. He thought of telling her that Captain Chick compared women to handkerchiefs, to be used and thrown aside. But he didn’t. It didn’t feel right. Besides, he was sure it would backfire and Caro would think him a liar or hurl contempt at the tattletale. Then, too, he half feared Caro would secretly admire a man daring enough to use women as he wanted, defying the conventions.

She was also full of talk of Saga, in a way that made Dylan nervous. He was gorgeous, she said, and his beauty was dramatic, startling, the sort that unsettles conventional people. “A
dangerous
beauty,” she emphasized, almost to herself. She wanted to know more about his background. Dylan didn’t know why Saga didn’t live with his Metis people. He knew Saga hated the English with the passion of most Metis. And he slipped in the fact that Saga was married.

“Is it true you gave him that scar?” Caro asked.

Dylan nodded.

“In a fight?”

Nodded.

“With a knife?” Her glance took in the weapons strapped on his back.

“Yes,” Dylan muttered.

“It’s a perfect scar,” she said. “Without it he would look… innocent, above morality, devoid of humanity, like a statue. But the scar brings out his dark side.”

Dylan was surprised Caro didn’t think Saga’s dark skin, almost black, did that well enough. But she was a dark-skinned person herself.

“He gave you your scars.” Dylan nodded. He told her the story of the fight, and his bad throw that injured Saga with the knife handle. She said he should not worry. Saga was his brother—the half-breed had told her so. Yes, brothers quarrel, but if one tries to raise his hand against the other, the better self will intervene.

Dylan accepted being called the brother of a dark-skinned man. He knew Dru would want him to.

“Why does Saga live in the village?” she asked. Her glance indicated the Indian village up the river from the fort in the cottonwood grove.

Dylan said he didn’t know. Actually, he hadn’t realized Saga was not staying in the fort, sleeping in the big room with the other French Canadians.

“He’s mentioned his mother. Is he living with her? Have you met her?”

Dylan certain had not met any mother of Saga’s. He was sure his mother was back with the Metis, on the Red River of the north. He wondered what trick Saga was pulling on Caro, and why.

“I hear she’s in the village,” Caro said, eyeing Dylan.

He shrugged and shook his head.

Caro went on lightheartedly. Would Dylan like to hear a new theory she was developing? All men had their dark side, she said. Literature confirmed that—it was full of Mephistopheles, demons, vampires, trolls, monsters, evil gods, and the Satan of the Bible. The Church even created exorcists to cast these demons out. “Ill-favored human behavior,” she said, “comes from the unnatural suppression of the dark side.” The sins of greed and miserliness, for instance, came from the unhealthy suppression of acquisitiveness, a natural drive. The sin of debauchery and all perverted expressions of sexuality came from the suppression of the natural sex drive. To claim his full humanity, she argued, a man must become at home with his dark side, let his actions express his entire nature.

“Of course society will not tolerate that,” she said. “They drove Byron into exile for it.”

Dylan kept his mouth shut, but thought, That’s rationalization.

“It’s time to go back,” she said at last. He offered her a hand up. She took it with her left hand but didn’t rise. Instead she touched his mother’s ring with her other hand. “I’m still wearing your ring,” she said gravely. She studied his face. “I still need you in my life. I have no idea when I may want to be married. I’m flying. Don’t try to pull me down.”

Dylan inclined his head in acceptance.

She got up and dropped his hand. They rode to the fort in silence. When they dismounted in the corral, she touched his elbow and said, “I want to tell you something.”

He waited.

“The Word”—they had all begun calling the message from Montreal the Word—“must go on to Chapelle’s post. My father doesn’t want to go. Saga has asked me to go with him, just the two of us. I’ve accepted.”

Dylan looked into her eyes, hearing the funeral march.

“It’s an easy trip, very safe, just a couple of days. On the way back Saga and I may take a few extra days to see a lake he says is beautiful.”

She touched his cheek gently with one hand, looked at him with what seemed a kind of love, and walked away.

Chapter Eighteen

No one could have been better company for Dylan than Bleu. Bleu was profane, blasphemous, coarse, lewd, obscene, vulgar, cynical, acrid, sardonic, misanthropic, and more in the same spirit. He was a good companion and a quick wit, indulging in few of his evasions, like “Just as you say” or “Chin up, there’s a good fellow.” He tolerated none of Dylan’s self-pitying moods at all. When Dylan spoke of Caro and Saga together, Bleu brought him up short. The Frenchy rolled his eyes, gave a huge, ominous grin and proclaimed, “
Oui certainement
, and when zey finish zat, zey head for the blankets”—here he would give a nastily vigorous thumpety-thump of his fat hips—“and go tallyho!”

They were surveying. That’s what Dylan told Bleu, and his companion had the grace not to laugh.

The hours on the trail passed slowly. Dylan tried to learn Bleu’s habit of watching the country closely, noticing what animals grazed where, where beaver sign was, how wind and water shaped the land, even how the wind blew through certain areas and bent the trees. Instead he wondered whether Saga and Caro were back at the fort yet.

The instruments felt good in his hands, his measurements at sunrise, noon, and sunset, his calculations at night that kept him from having to think, the
Requisite Tables
that theoretically could show you how far into the pagan west you were from Greenwich.

In the middle a mental picture of Caro making tallyho with someone—anyone—would rise up and drive him crazy. Then he would pound his head and ask himself whether he was deluding himself about the glory of what he was doing with Caro.

What if the inner sense of profound rightness meant nothing?

What if Satan presented his temptations in the most scintillatingly alluring form?

What if the true cunning of evil was that it
seemed
so right?

Maybe their difficulties—her mad infidelities—were punishment for their transgressions. Maybe they were a sign, at least, of having strayed from the true path.

He brooded about asking Bleu’s opinion. True, Bleu was a rustic. But when Dylan asked him his religion, the interpreter said firmly,
“Catholique.”
Dylan pressed him about having drifted into pagan beliefs, like many of the half-breeds in the interior for generations. Bleu shook his head firmly.
“Catholique,”
he repeated. “Baptize. Twice go St. Boniface, confess.” Dylan saw something stalwart in Bleu’s faith, more stalwart than in his own. Maybe such loyalty brought a gift.

“Bleu,” he said at last, “do you think the Church teaches right morality?”

Bleu gave the impression he always did, of being drawn away from a deep concentration to the world of human intercourse, not entirely willingly. “Is sure. What Caro do not right. What you do with her not right.”

“Don’t you think, sometimes, that such rules are for children? When we grow up, we’re meant to see there’s more to life than that? Meant to throw off the crutches and
live
?”

“Not right,” Bleu repeated. “You not right, she not right, I not right, we all not right. We flesh, yes, we commit ze sin. Then we confess. I confess.”

They rode in silence a small while.

“You, boy, you think you big, make new rules like God to yourself, you crazy. Not right. You go boom.” He clapped his hands theatrically.

Dylan had a jolt of fear that this simple man was telling the truth. He quelled his heart.

Dylan wrote in his journal one day in mid-December.

It is so difficult. I sometimes think I am required by a perverse world to endure this greatest pain to get the greatest of prizes. I am not such a fool as to give up, to sink in my sea of woes, to fail to reach port. For Caro is the richest and finest of ports.

Yesterday we made love for the first time since she strayed…

Here he hesitated and dipped his pen unnecessarily, wrote,

into Captain Chick’s sticky embrace. It was not spontaneous at all, but seemed closely planned in her mind. She asked me to her room after luncheon and directly, without hesitation, kissed me, opened my shirt, went to the bed and took off her clothes. It was tender, gentle, wonderful. It lacked the robustness, the vigor, the freedom of the old days, but surely that’s understandable. We are trying to find our way back to each other across a gulf of pain. I confess I wept a little afterward. She said to me at the end, again, “Please be here for me. I need you. You are my Gibraltar.”

I will be here for her. I do not understand what she has done, what she continues to do. Is it some rebellion, some great defiance of her upbringing, some declaration flung in the face of her father? What was her mother really like? Sometimes I want to tuck tail and flee from the pain she causes me. She has asked me, however, and I continue to offer her the haven she wants. I shall offer her love while the world offers lust, confident that she will know the difference. I shall not let pain drive me away from what I want most on this earth.

Though it is difficult, I do not offer Caro this treasure of my heart for her sake. I do it for mine. I do it out of love. I do it, in fact, because my very nature is to love Caro. As a flower’s nature is to blossom, mine is to love Caro. Only in that love can I live as myself.

He pondered for a moment. For some reason he felt sure—almost sure—that Caro would belong to him in the end. He thought he should write down why.

I know enough of human nature to know that the joy Caro and I give each other, an ecstasy of body, mind, and spirit in one, is very rare. No one will willingly give up that rapture. Not I, and not Caro.

The band played on.

Everyone was drinking, dancing, telling jokes, shouting out in exultation, and the band played on. That was the rallying cry of Captain Chick’s party to ring in the new year of 1821. Rallying cry in this case meant revelrous clamor. Less politely put, drunken shouts.

Doing a reel, some couple would tangle legs and fall, sometimes taking another frolicker or two to the floor—why not? The remaining dancers would do their tipsy best not to miss a step. Around the fallen they would prance, roaring, “The band played on.” Even the Frenchies joined in the roar, though Dylan was never sure they knew what the words meant.

The band was hale and hearty, three fiddles, two fifes, one tin pipe, one loud Indian drum, and one bagpipe. It was a multiracial band if ever there was one, five Frenchies—all half-breeds—one Irishman, one Scot, and the mulatto Captain Chick on the drum.

As he danced, Dylan felt pulled up and down by the music. Literally pulled up and down, as by an elemental force. Down by Captain Chick’s ominous drum. It throbbed carnally, driving the dancers like blood coursing swift and dark through the body, the beat of the heart, the rhythm of mad, unrestrained sex. Dylan tried to keep his mind on the bagpipe, which he loved, and the fiddles and fifes and pipe. They were spirit to the drum’s carnality, melody, lilt, emotion, raising him up, inspiring his feet to lift into the air, and his spirits with them.

Yes, he was a little drunk.

The bagpipe was his favorite. He’d never danced to one before. Why or how MacDougal had gotten one into the remote Canadian wilderness he had no idea. The man was no artist on the instrument. In his hands it bawled, brayed, and blustered, wailed, shrieked, mewled, bellowed, and caterwauled. But his enthusiasm was somehow enough to overcome all the little blunders, the infelicities of sound, the homeliness. To Dylan’s ears MacDougal’s musical brazenness was manly, his coarseness martial, his raucousness vigorous. Even his squawks were the anguished cries of a noble heart.

Dylan was a little drunk because, as Captain Chick warned merrily, the wine was laced with laudanum. Also because he had to dance mostly with other men.

Everyone had to dance mostly with other men. There were a score of male cavorters and only four women—Caro, MacDougal’s wife, the Captain’s presumed mistress, and her Indian sister. Captain Chick set out a rule at the beginning: No one could dance with a female two dances in a row. Everyone would have to trip the light fantastic with stand-ins.

It could have been worse. Troyes and two other men were sick with influenza.

At first the Captain had no volunteers to be stand-ins. Then he waved bright, scarlet bandannas for the men to wear on their heads as a sign of femininity for the evening, and declared that dancers could keep the bandannas. He immediately had more takers than bandannas.

Everyone danced. From what Dylan could see, Caro had a grand time. In his first dance with her, well into the evening, she seemed very gay, in highest spirits made higher by spirituous liquors. She danced with him happily but he thought impersonally, like any other suitor. She seemed a little remote, a blithe dancer not quite in this world. Maybe it was the laudanum.

Saga tapped Dylan on the shoulder, smiled, and made a courtly bow. Cutting in was not accepted. You got a full dance with your real woman. Dylan turned his back to Saga and whirled Caro away. He saw her look at Saga over his shoulder, with what feeling he couldn’t tell.

He also danced with the Indian mistress, a woman whose name he never heard. He called her Mistress in his mind. She made him strut a little, conscious that he looked his best. He’d spent a month’s pay in the trading room to cut a fine figure tonight, even buying a fine necklace of
cornaline d’Aleppo
beads, and had polished his knives carefully. He noticed Mistress looking at his knives at every chance. She looked fascinated. He liked dancing with her. Even the touch of a woman’s hand felt good. He wanted to dance with her sister, who was more beautiful.

The band played on.

Everyone drank. Captain Chick broke open kegs of high wine and proclaimed this night a night to hold nothing back. Dylan had the impression everyone drank to excess. Including himself.

He sought out Sister for a dance. He eyed her seductively. She was more striking than beautiful, he supposed, but wonderfully desirable. Her slow, sensual smile said she was available. Sauce for the gander, Dylan thought vengefully.

The band played on.

What Dylan noticed was that the drum stopped. The band went on, but the drum stopped.

It seemed a most propitious moment. Caro was his partner for the second time—they were doing a gigue. When the drum stopped, Dylan felt liberated, set free from the downward pull of the carnal, and the song of the fiddles and pipe lifted him. Wonderful that he should be dancing with Caro at this moment.

He looked into her face. It was bright, even radiant, full of the music and the movement and, he had to admit, the wine and laudanum. He was glad to see it happy.

Her face, head, body—all blackened into shadow.

Captain Chick stood beside them. They stopped dancing, paralyzed by his presence. He bowed deeply, letting Caro glow in the candlelight and then obscuring her again as he rose. In defiance of his own rule, he held out his hands for hers.

Dylan felt struck down. He gave the Captain Caro’s fingers and turned away, unexplainably desolate. Stupid, he accused himself. This is mere dancing. You accept the frigging—why feel desolate now?

He turned back to them and refused to let himself scream.

They were not dancing. To Dylan, Caro looked entranced, mesmerized, held in the sway of psychic power. Captain Chick led her across the room. To the door of his apartment. He opened the door and Caro went through. The Captain gave the room a last look, the glance of the master, the conqueror. His eyes flicked across Dylan’s face and went on, flicked back, lingered, and perhaps a faint smile curled the corners of his mouth.

When they came back, Caro was flushed—satiated, surely, with sex, with liquor, with laudanum, and with the dance.

At first the two did not dance. Captain Chick held Caro’s hand high and perfectly still, displaying his trophy. Suddenly they whirled into motion. It was jarring, like a wax effigy jumping out at you.

Dylan sought out Sister. She was dancing with Bleu. Dylan decided not to await opportunity politely. “May I?” he said to his friend.

The interpreter looked at him most peculiarly. “Excuse me,” answered Bleu, and gave Dylan the lady’s hand.

Dylan did not commence the dance. With his free hand he stripped off the
cornaline d’Aleppo
necklace and held it out to Sister.

She took it, contemplated it, rubbed the beads between her fingers. Then she turned decisively and pulled him toward the door.

He put an arm around her waist and led her to the room he shared with Bleu. Next to it was the room where a half-dozen Frenchies slept. From there came the sound of a bed slapping against a wall, rhythmically, like a man cutting wood. Who was it? he wondered. Not a Frenchy and Mistress, he’d just seen Mistress dancing. Possibly Mrs. MacDougal, he didn’t know where she was, but surely she was a sedate married woman. Maybe two Frenchies together, sinning abominably. The night was madness.

What Dylan wanted was to see Sister naked, to touch her with his hands all over, and use her in ways he’d never done a woman.

She let him do all of that. She invited, encouraged, and inspired him, and he drank his fill.

As they went back toward the music, he felt prickly, irritable, vexed, dissatisfied. He wondered if he’d done it all too fast. Far from satiated, he felt ragingly empty.

The band played on.

In the room they separated immediately, Sister melting into some man’s arms, Dylan didn’t even see whose.

He couldn’t see Caro.

Captain Chick was throbbing out the drumbeat.

Dylan found a chair in a corner, stood on it.

Caro was nowhere to be seen.

He looked, looked again, studied the room a third time.

Caro was not here.

Knowledge came to him.

Saga was nowhere to be seen.

Dylan knew.

He forced himself out of the room, onto the gallery, into the cold night, away from the pulsing music. He looked at the pitiless stars. And looked and looked.

He did not know how long he stood there. Once he glanced at the window of the Captain’s room, where an inflaming sight awaited him, but it held no fascination for him, only disgust.