The High Missouri (40 page)

She took her hand off the hilt of the knife. She could never have used this knife on His-Many-Bells-Ringing anyway.

“Don’t let me see him in the country again,” she said.

Bells nodded. She thought he understood.

“I’m going to hunt the white buffalo.”

With that she simply walked away.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Dylan looked into his father’s eyes, wondering what in heaven or hell he would see there.

Somehow he had not expected to see pleading. It touched him.

He cut the ropes.

He got a blanket out of the lean-to and covered the old man. Ian Campbell curled up beneath it.

“You sick again?” Dylan asked.

The old man nodded.

Dylan got a cloth, wet it, and wiped his father’s feverish brow. The old man seemed only half conscious.

“I’m going to move you,” he told his father.

The old man started to mutter some sort of protest, but Dylan ignored it. He laid the rest of the blankets neatly between the lean-to and the sacrificial boulder.

He slipped his arms under his father at the shoulders and knees. Again he ignored a mutter of protest. When he lifted, he was surprised that his father was not especially heavy. He’d lost weight, a lot of weight.

Dylan went onto one knee to lay his father on the blankets. But he stopped there. Stopped and held the burden there for a moment, looked into the face.

The eyes opened.

Dylan saw pain there, and fear, and anguish, and the other lacerations of a lifetime.

Something in him altered, subtly but unmistakably. He set his father down, got the damp cloth, wiped the forehead again, and said with a small smile and a tone in which tenderness might have been heard, “Will you get well? For me?”

Ian Campbell seemed better tonight, Dru thought. They hadn’t moved him yet, and getting him back to Fort Minnetaree would be chancy, but he seemed better, and Dru knew he had the skills to treat a fever. He thought emotional solace would help the man. Campbell and Dylan had reminisced a little. Campbell and Dru had told war stories. All of it seemed to lift the sick man’s spirits.

Campbell had felt better a year ago, he said, and had wanted to risk the wilderness. Now he knew he might get better again, but he couldn’t go adventuring. Dru hoped he knew.

Ian Campbell had been eager to babble out why he risked the wilderness once more. His grand plan, what he wanted to build for his son, the great opportunity in the American withdrawal from the upper Missouri. He’d built Fort St. Nicholas in a central location, with good access back to Red River, and…

Yes, Dylan said, he understood, sort of. Ian Campbell had done it all for his son. Sort of.

Why, the very names told the tale, said the sick man, not quite raving. Père Noël. Fort St. Nicholas. Didn’t Dylan see that it was all for him? The restitution, at last, for a lifetime of not giving enough? Named for a Christmas Dylan had been cheated out of, a Christmas Ian Campbell had never been able to forgive himself for…. It was all Dylan’s, the trading post, the goods, the furs, everything, he’d done it all for Dylan.

Dylan didn’t say much. It was babbling, but it was manifestly true. Dru guessed the man now known as His-Many-Bells-Ringing was hearing some bells ringing clearly inside.

Now Ian Campbell was asleep, exhausted. After a while he would wake up and Dru would try to get some more broth down him.

Dru lit his pipe and handed Dylan some tobacco.

He saw Dylan smile to himself. Did he understand? Can you really repeat an entire childhood in your mind and see it as it seemed to your parent? Can you really look out through a father’s eyes, and see wholly?

“What do you think?” asked Dylan softly.

Dru told him Campbell’s grand plan was a good one. Not unlike his own. Might have been what the Welsh Indian Company did if it had any capital.

Dru watched Dylan to see if this was what he wanted to hear. He couldn’t tell. Taking over the Campbell trading business would be fine, he said. Merge it with the Welsh Indian Company, that would be good. Ian Campbell himself could be a partner, or not. Dru didn’t know if this was what Dylan was asking.

Campbell woke up. The man was half clear, and willing to try the broth. While Dru fed him, the fellow babbled at Dylan, justifying things that no longer mattered. Did Dylan understand? he wanted to know. He didn’t come home that winter because he had a sick child, a little girl, he was crazy about that little girl. He knew he was hurting his children back in Montreal, but…

A long silence. Finally Dylan broke it. “You’re going to be a grandfather,” he said.

Dru hadn’t known Cree was with child. He was glad.

Silence again. At last Ian Campbell said, “Tell me.”

So Dylan said simply that his wife was pregnant, that the child would be born late in the summer, probably during the moon of the home days, before the first frost. He did not say his wife was Cree Medicine, whom Ian Campbell had enslaved and used in the robes. Dru was proud of him for restraining himself.

Campbell reached out and covered Dylan’s hand with his own for a moment. “Thank you,” he said. “Maybe I could live at Fort St. Nicholas and see my grandchildren a lot.”

Dylan nodded thoughtfully.

Dru wondered why Dylan was withholding. What about Lara? And Harold?

Dylan watched his father’s face struggle. The man felt he had a life to justify, a world to make up for.

“I had two country wives, do you know that? Many men had more. When your mother died, I…” The son saw anguish on the father’s face. “The solace of the flesh.” Dylan half wished the old man wouldn’t go on.

“I abandoned them both. Went home one fall and just never went back. The second time because I got sick, but the first time…” Ian Campbell’s voice wavered. “You have a brother among the Crees on Camp River south of St. James Bay. Name Alexander. About five years younger. A good lad. Probably hates his white father now. With good reason. They all have good reason to hate us, the Indians, and one day they’ll rise up and kill us all.”

Not us, thought Dylan. The white men. I am His-Many-Bells-Ringing. My children will be Piegans.

Ian Campbell was quiet for a moment. “If I make another journey ever, if the damned Indian tar rescues me a little, it will be to see Alexander.” He looked at Dylan. “Maybe we can give him a job as a fur trader.”

Dru looked at his patient to see if Campbell had fallen asleep. But no, he seemed to be thinking. Dru offered the spoon, but Campbell shook his head no.

“The worst we brought them was disease,” he said. “Cholera, smallpox, the coughing sickness.

“Look,” he said, holding out his crippled hands. “These hands…” He hesitated, and choked back something. “That winter I was gone, it was because… Alexander’s sister got sick. Snowbird.” He got out the name with difficulty. “I doted on her. And felt guilty about it.” He chuckled a nasty chuckle. “Only a white man can feel guilty and let it make him act worse.

“I doted on her and wanted to be with her and Alexander and her mother and I wanted to be away from that house…” Dru thought Ian Campbell strangled what he was about to say. “That sad house of ours.” Where two wives died, thought Dru.

“Late that summer Snowbird came down with the coughing sickness.” He shook his head bitterly. “Which we brought them. I stayed with her. The only time in those two decades I didn’t go back to Montreal for the winter. I wasn’t sorry to stay with them, I was glad. I wanted to be there with a woman beside me at night—do you know yet what that means, lad?—and away from the place….

“Yes, yes, it meant I was away from you and your sister, and I missed Christmas, which you blamed me so terribly for. Yes, yes, yes.”

Campbell stared off into the twilight. The darkness was almost full.

“And I wasn’t sorry, that was the worst of it, I was glad.

“So God punished me, if you can believe a God would make a world like this. In February, Snowbird died in my arms. Coughed twice, once hard and once like a whimper, and died in my arms.”

Ian Campbell fell silent, his eyes gently closed, tears running down his face.

Dru saw the tears on the cheeks of Dylan’s father, and saw Harold’s father see them.

Dylan reached over and put his hand on Ian Campbell’s. It was warm. Crippled, ugly, bony, but warm, and human.

Campbell’s eyes opened slowly. Dylan willed them to look into his face. In grief they did, and saw the grief there. Dylan felt the warm tears trickle down his own face.

Now he said the obligatory words.

“My son Harold, your grandson, died in my arms last winter. Of the coughing sickness.”

Dru had read of a poetic fancy, from the days of the great Celtic bards, about lovers. When they looked into each other’s eyes, it went, sometimes there would be a true meeting of minds and spirits, and it happened through the beam of the gaze itself. It was as though lightning bolted from eye to eye, brilliant but soundless, from one mind to the other, and thoughts and feelings and intuitions and even the most intimate experiences of life leapt electrically from spirit to spirit. In that flicker of time, in that eternal moment, there was true understanding, an intertwining of spirits, even an ultimate oneness.

Now Dru saw that oneness.

Feelings lighted and flew from the branches of Dylan’s heart like sparrows. They hovered and fluttered.

He studied his father’s prone figure and his wearied face. He realized now what was odd. His face was above his father’s. All those years, even sick, Ian Campbell had risen to stand higher than his son. Now the man lay ill, his face no longer proud. Dylan saw all the struggle of humankind in it, all the reaching, all the grasping, all the hope, all the sorrow. He wanted to balm it.

“I bring you a gift,” he said. The feelings fluttered still. “In Montreal with Amalie is Lara, your granddaughter.” He saw his father’s face still waiting. “I will bring her to see you next summer.” Still waiting. “She is my gift of love to you.”

Ian Campbell clasped Dylan’s hand in both of his.

“I am proud to be your son, Ian Campbell,” said Dylan.

He leaned over and kissed his father’s forehead.

The sparrows lifted from Dylan’s heart and flew away, taking something with them, perhaps his youth. The branches where they once sat quavered in the air, and then gentled.

Part Six

A BOON

Chapter Thirty-Seven

They transported Ian Campbell across the plains toward the Minnetaree villages on a travois. The very next day he was much better, and even wanted to sit a horse. The day after that worse. Basically, though, he gained. Dru thought his patient was doing very well, thank you. That Indian tar did seem to help sometimes, and he could concoct more of it, but that was not the remedy. After half a century of struggling, Ian Campbell had earned some peace.

Dru was more concerned about Dylan Davies, once Dylan Campbell, now His-Many-Bells-Ringing.

Dylan seemed distracted. He talked about wanting to be with Cree. He spoke of the spring trapping season, which was already at hand. He spoke of the people’s spring buffalo hunt, and he used poetic language—their acceptance of the gifts of a fecund earth after a barren winter, he called it. He praised the wisdom of White Raven, which he said he wanted to emulate.

He seemed glad to be with his father, when he was mentally with Ian Campbell. They talked lightly, and joked sometimes, and Campbell gave advice about trading that was unneeded and unheeded. When he was not talking, though, Dylan’s mind seemed to be elsewhere. It was as if Dru thought, he was hearing some indistinct, far-off, windblown music that came to his ear intermittently, and no one else’s at all.

Dru nodded to himself, and smiled to himself.

“So what’s really on your mind?” he asked his spiritual son.

“The High Missouri,” said Dylan. “It’s calling.”

At Fort Minnetaree they did get news of Red Sky. She’d gone back to Ian Campbell’s camp that night and stolen the best buffalo-running horse of the lot. It had been staked right next to its sleeping owner, and he was furious.

Ian Campbell laughed as loud as anyone.

As they left, Dylan promised his father that he would see both his grandchildren next summer. One brought from a Piegan village, the other from Montreal, both would be right here at the fort.

They took their time getting home. Cree probably got a little impatient to see her family and tell them about the child on the way, but she said nothing. Instead of hurrying, they trapped the Milk River and its tributaries flowing from the west, out of the Bearpaw Mountains. Dru and Dylan got top-notch at making beaver come to medicine—finding the best sets, getting in and out of creeks without leaving scent, using the bait mixture just so, planting the stick so the beaver drowned instead of gnawing his way free. They would trap as well as any Americans.

No one complained. When Cree said she missed her sister, Dylan answered that he missed his father. Well, Cree commented, she didn’t. Everyone laughed, and it was an easy laugh. Dylan thought his future probably would include putting his father and his wife together, sometime.

Dylan knew Dru was probably wondering what was on his mind, moving slowly like this, camping in sweet places and not moving on, trapping the creeks more thoroughly than they had to. They didn’t need the beaver that much. Still, they were taking pelts, and Cree spent her days scraping them and stretching them on willow frames. And Dylan kept saying he wanted to take his time, to move gently, savoring all. He offered no explanation.

In fact, he didn’t know why. But this was the country of the High Missouri. He was looking for something. He didn’t know what, but he felt it around him everywhere, vibrant. He thought one day his head might know what it was.

They came into the village camp late in the moon when the buffalo plant is in flower. Even as she was putting up the lodge, Cree touched her belly in a certain way and smiled to let her mother know that a child grew within her.

There would be time enough for words later tonight. Cree was glad to be home. For now came the time of the great ceremonies of renewal, first the sun dance, during the first moon of the home days, and then the beaver ceremonies, in the moon of when the leaves are yellow. And between those two her child would be born. A daughter. She knew it would be a daughter. She felt, somehow, that this child replaced the womb lost to the people when Red Sky followed her medicine. Red Sky, whom they probably wouldn’t see until after the child was born.

You must always follow your medicine, yes, but the loss of a womb, the loss of children of the people, was a sadness. A daughter, Cree was sure.

Her husband His-Many-Bells-Ringing and the man called the Druid, well, they might have some traveling in mind, some exploits. Men always did. But they would go alone. Cree would stay in her village until her child entered the circle of the people.

His-Many-Bells-Ringing went the first night to White Raven. He felt like a different person now, a person living in… He could not have said what, but it was blessed, and he was grateful for it. In this state he wanted to listen to White Raven show him the world as the Piegans saw it. Though the Piegans did not even know the planets circled the sun, and not vice versa, they knew something Dylan wanted.

He had thought of a way to start. Cree had given him a key to her father’s life. As a pubescent boy, White Raven had had a great dream, a vision that would help the people. Because of that dream he had devoted his life to learning the beaver ceremony, the most ancient and elaborate of all Piegan ceremonies, involving hundreds of songs. He would one day be the owner of Two Runners’ beaver bundle, she said.

“Tell me about the beaver ceremony,” said His-Many-Bells-Ringing. They were having a pipe after supper in front of the lodge.

White Raven considered. He was glad that his son-in-law wanted to understand the medicine of his adopted people, but the young man was speaking before he thought. He could say there was a tale of how the people got the beaver bundle, which gave birth to the ceremonies in honor of Tail Feathers Woman, Star Boy, and Scarface, which in turn gave birth to the medicine lodge ceremony, but he could not tell these stories now. When the snows were deep against the back of the lodge, that would be the time.

“I would be glad to speak to you about this,” he said, “but summer is not the time for stories.”

Dylan no longer felt so young, so restless. He listened to White Raven patiently, struck with what he was learning in being refused. He saw that for White Raven, as for Dru, the meanings of things lay in stories and not in theories or explanations.

“In the moon of the first frost,” White Raven said, “we will dance the beaver ceremonies, and you will see their holiness.”

On other nights White Raven did talk at length to His-Many-Bells-Ringing, and in this talk was a notion of how the world works, and Dylan did begin to understand. Actually, there wasn’t much to understand, if by that you meant analyze. In White Raven’s view, you knew that life was spirit, something everywhere abiding, making water run and wind blow and leaves bud and grass grow, and animals make more generations of themselves. White Raven didn’t understand such things in the way scholars tried to, he simply honored them. Saluted their presence in everything. Their immanence, Father Quesnel would have said.

White Raven didn’t ask him to learn about it. There was not so much to learn as much to honor. He suggested that His-Many-Bells-Ringing endure the sweat lodge, raise his voice in song, seek a vision, dance with the people in their dances, and pay silent, rapt attention to his dreams.

One night White Raven said that wisdom was not in thinking, any thinking at all. It was in hearing the pulse of the drum, feeling the thump of the foot on the earth, sensing the throb of your heart in tune with the drum, and in tune with the hearts of all the people. Then, for the fortunate, it was in dreaming.

His-Many-Bells-Ringing must dance in the sun dance, White Raven said. Must come to know not by thought, but by immersion, not with his head, but with his feet, his arms, his bottom, his balls, his heart.

Dylan pondered, and waited. It felt odd to him, the idea of participating in a dance. Two years ago, when he first heard them, the songs of the Piegans sounded profoundly alien to his ears, the drumbeats coarsely elemental, the dancing queer, base, alarming. Now he could at least imagine it seeming different. In his state of blessedness he was willing to wait, to inquire, to look, and perhaps find out how to be a human being.

He chuckled to himself. Yes, quite possibly a barbarian. Certainly not a civilized man. Pagan Piegan.

He reached into his pocket, got out his watch and handed it to White Raven. Though the old man had noticed it, he’d never had a chance to look at it. Dylan showed him the second, minute, and hour hands and said they measured time. He opened the back and showed White Raven the intricacies of the gears that ran the watch. White Raven was fascinated. He said he didn’t see any need to measure time by hours and minutes and seconds, or whatever they were called—what was the point?—but he loved the clever movements of the mechanism, the luster of the gold plate, the shine of the glass. A perfectly wonderful bit of uselessness, he thought.

“I want you to have it,” said Dylan. “A gift.”

“You don’t want to tell the time in the hours anymore?”

Dylan shook his head. “Maybe I need to get my mind away from the tick of the watch and in tune with the beat of the drum.”