by Peter Bowen
My Aunty Pauline, the character. Du Pré liked her.
She was still a good-looking woman. Silk shirt, soft around the throat. Hard face, thick coat of makeup. Brown eyes very big still, lots of green eye shadow.
“So, Du Pré,” she said, sitting down. Cheap large stones on her hands, or maybe even expensive ones. Du Pré couldn’t tell. The shoulders of her crimson leather jacket were damp from the wet snow falling outside.
They didn’t hug, didn’t kiss. Aunty Pauline looked down, the barman brought her a drink brown over ice. Brandy? Du Pré paid for it, left the change.
“What you want?” she said. “All these years you don’t want to talk to your Aunty Pauline, now you do. Your mother never like me.”
“I got a question,” said Du Pré. “Then I’ll leave you alone.”
Pauline sipped her brandy.
“You have a lover once, man named Fascelli? Gianni Fascelli?”
Du Pré waited a moment.
“Aunty Pauline,” said Du Pré, “you hear me?”
She had frozen. Drink in hand. Her hand shook. She set her drink down.
“No,” she said finally.
“I think that I know better,” said Du Pré, “you know?”
“Look,” said Aunty Pauline. “This Fascelli man, he sees me ride in a show, OK? He fall in love with me, crazy love. He has lots of money, sends me gifts, follows me around the circuit. Miles City, he’s in the stands, Havre, Calgary, Spokane, all around. But he scares me. He has crazy eyes, he’s always drunk, he has so much damn money.”
Du Pré nodded, sipped his beer.
“So I tell him to leave me alone.”
Du Pré had another swallow.
“He gets mad with me one night, threatens me with all these gangster people in Chicago he knows. I don’t go with him, he have me killed. So I meet him at a hotel, stay in his bed three days. I’m very scared.”
Du Pré nodded.
“He pass out drunk, I get up, dress, grab my suitcase, run to Catfoot, hide.”
“So he was looking for you?” And, thought Du Pré, the money in his wallet and left nut, most likely.
“He sent people to ask questions, sent gifts, too, said he would be by soon, and just take me with him.”
Du Pré looked at her. We don’t none of us got a straight story, he thought, but poor Aunty Pauline.
“So that’s what you know now,” she said. “I got a younger man now, he’s very jealous, so I got to go.”
Du Pré nodded.
He watched his aunt walk away. Still had a nice ass, must be she still ride some. Whatever.
CHAPTER 36
DU PRÉ FIDDLED. HE stood in his Métis finery out in front of the bandstand, lights on him, while the people clapped and danced and cheered. People mostly looked a lot like him, some few English.
The men wore a lot of white with red sashes, the women silks in brilliant colors, white teeth in brown faces.
A man bowed from a life on horseback, hands twice the size they should be for his height, he played the good ringing bones. Somebody had a washtub bass, they pulled on the string and broomstick and the bottom bowed up, slide that deep note.
Good people.
Du Pré fiddled till his fingers hurt, found himself scooting off from the playing of the others, dropping little clusters of icy notes back down on the melody.
He was knee-walking, grass-grabbing drunk. Couldn’t lie on the floor without holding on.
Some people took him home with them, saying these Manitoba Provincial Police bad on drunk drivers, love to arrest people from the States.
Du Pré awoke the next morning, still pretty drunk. He was asleep in a cupboard bed, under a bunch of quilts. He sat up, and he smiled, thought about the night before.
The master of ceremonies had unfurled what he said was the new Canadian flag. A big green frog pissing on nine little beavers. Du Pré began laughing again, thinking about that flag.
Smell of smoked venison frying, slap of spoon mixing up the pancake batter.
Du Pré sat down at a long trestle table. He looked up, looked down, seemed like he was looking at a bunch of cousins.
“You got the big head, he?” said one man, about Du Pré’s age. When he smiled, he had no upper front teeth. Oh. That man, one of the fiddlers from the night before.
“Oh,” said a plump pretty woman, “you play that fiddle good.” She set down a platter of venison, big platter of fry bread.
Peppersauce for the venison, chokecherry jam for the fry bread.
I feel like home here, thought Du Pré. Montana, it is home, I know, I like it, I will die there, but my people are up here too.
Du Pré was famished. He ate and ate till the hosts clapped and laughed at him.
“He need a good woman feed him more,” said a man at the other end of the table. “They got no good women down in them States, eh? You take one of ours back, eh?”
Du Pré blushed, he thought of Madelaine.
Now I got to go all the way over to Moose Jaw, the Oblate Fathers Home, see that old Father Leblanc.
He can’t break the secrets of the confessional, but I have to know this.
I have to know all of this.
After the big breakfast, one of the men drove Du Pré back to his old cruiser. Du Pré felt a little dirty, he’d sweated a lot in the stage lights. He was still wearing all the fine clothes that his women had made for him, leggings, sash, silk shirt, kerchief, vest, hat, moccasins. He had a flight feather from a red hawk in his hat band now, someone had given it to him the night before.
Métis man with a hangover, fiddle on the seat beside him, smell of rum and cheap tobacco, going down the road in a old car with American license plates.
No one stopped him. He drove through the little towns, some English, some Métis, the old Red River country, must have been some fine country once, before the English.
This air, I know it, Du Pré thought, breathing deep. It was cold out, but he drove with the window down, to clear his head.
He stopped for lunch in a little Catholic town, asked the man at the garage where there was a good cheap little motel. The man at the motel looked like Du Pré and charged him fifteen dollars for the night.
He bathed and changed into jeans and boots and a sheepskin vest, waxed cotton coat, put on his battered Stetson. Packed the Métis finery away, he would take it out the next time he found a fiddling contest, here or back over the border. Du Pré was in no real hurry.
The next morning he went to confession, went to Mass. He asked the priest where he could buy a pretty missal. He paid the priest a hundred dollars for one, a beautiful thing, cover by some Métis woman, soft white deerskin, beaded, quilled, the priest said it was a hundred years old. Some of the pages were stained, it looked like the marks of tears.
This book had lived some, that’s for sure.
He found a quick dry-clean place, had his scarf and sash and shirt cleaned. Now I am ready for the next fiddling, yes.
Moose Jaw. It couldn’t be any place else, this place that did need to be named Moose Jaw. He didn’t care why it was named that.
The Oblate Fathers Home was a big old brick building, well kept, a lot of pretty junipers around it, the white trunks of birches. Chapel right off the entrance. Du Pré went in, crossed himself, and he prayed for a while.
He asked where Father Leblanc was. The attendant led him down a brightly polished hallway, floors and walls of maple and birch. He motioned Du Pré into a room, a small one with leaded windows and bright chintz curtains. A narrow bed, a desk, a prie-dieu. Father Leblanc was slumped, boneless, in a heavy old leather chair.
His old head and face were hairless, so wrinkled he looked like a ball of string. He wheezed and whistled, dreaming.
“I won’t bother him now,” said Du Pré. “I am one of his old flock. I will wait here till he wakes.”
Du Pré took out the missal, opened it to the page marked by the faded blue silk ribbon, read.
Father Leblanc slept.
&
nbsp; CHAPTER 37
DU PRÉ’S LATIN WASN’T so good, never had been. He closed the missal, looked out the window at what was left of the day. Not too far back, it was the shortest day of the year. He was some farther north here, the shadows seemed longer, the blue in them colder.
Winters used to be much tougher, back in the time of the grandfathers. And there had not been so much to fight the winter with.
Or hunger.
Or cold.
Father Leblanc stirred. His sagging old eyelids lifted, he looked for a moment like a very old turtle.
Father Leblanc blessed Du Pré.
“You don’t remember me,” said Gabriel, pulling off his hat: He leaned close, put his face near to the old man’s. “Can you hear me, Father Leblanc?”
“Yes,” the old priest said, his voice a wet whisper, “I think I know you. Are you not the son of Guillaume Du Pré?”
“That was my father, Catfoot,” said Gabriel. “You know, you baptized me, gave me my first communion.”
The old priest’s eyes moved slowly to the gathering dark out his window. He pushed a little button on a cord pinned to the sleeve of his cassock.
The attendant came in a few minutes. Father Leblanc ordered some tea.
The old priest asked questions of the Toussaint people, who had married, who had babies, how was the youngster Van Den Heuvel?
Du Pré answered. They sipped tea.
“But I didn’t come here for a simple visit,” said Gabriel. “I have a question for you. So I must tell you what I know. Then I will ask you the question, and when I do, I will offer you the missal here … ”
He let the old priest look at it. His eyes were infinitely sad. Du Pré took it back.
“My father, Catfoot, he killed a man named Gianni Fascelli, cut off his head and his hands and put them up in the mountains, next to an old plane wreck had a couple other skeletons. This man, this Fascelli, was an animal, my father killed him because he loved his sister, my aunt Pauline, and this man was threatening her. Us Métis, you don’t mess with our women.”
The old priest was still, looking out the window.
“So I know all that,” said Du Pré, “figured out some more things, too, but they are not very important. But I need to know this, for my father’s soul, and I don’t want you to say anything. I need you to sin just a little for me, Father Leblanc.”
Du Pré picked up the old man’s hand, wrapped it around the missal.
“What I need to know is did my father feel bad about killing this man. Did Catfoot repent and ask God’s mercy? That’s all. I need to know that. So if he did, I want you to take this missal, and if he didn’t, I want you to let it go. For the living, I want you to sin just a little.”
The old priest looked at Gabriel with his sad patient eyes.
The old hand clamped shut on the missal. The old priest pulled the little book away.
Du Pré bowed his head and wept. The old priest reached out, made the sign of the cross on Du Pré’s forehead with his thumb, fingers light as smoke on Du Pré’s skin.
Du Pré looked up, nodded.
“I thank you for the living, Father,” said Du Pré.
The old man was looking out at the dark. He held the missal lightly in his hands, his lips moved.
Du Pré picked up his hat and left. Outside the cold winter air stung the tears on his cheeks.
He drove down into Moose Jaw, found a motel, put the fiddle in his room so it wouldn’t get frozen. There were some restaurants close by, Du Pré ate a bad supper of overcooked beef and vegetables that had been simmered so long they were transparent mush.
He walked on, found a saloon, went in and had some whiskeys.
He went back to his motel, there was a stupid movie on the television, fine with Du Pré. Well, Du Pré thought, I know it all but for that last thing with the priest before I come up here. But it was the only question that was important, can’t bring the life back to any of them, can’t pull the bullet out of time, can’t do much. But Papa, he have hot blood and a lot of pride, and I am glad he apologized to God for his sin, there, that his pride didn’t take and carry him all the way up to that damn train. Well, Catfoot, now I go and clean up the last of it. You old bastard.
He went to sleep and slept till midmorning, with his fiddle asleep on the table beside him.
Du Pré drove south the next day, down toward Montana, down the route that Gabriel Dumont had taken, thousands of English hunting him. The little man slipped through them all, drifted through the Cypress Hills, down to Montana forever.
Spent the rest of his days not talking to priests.
CHAPTER 38
“DU PRÉ,” SAID MADELAINE, when he stood in her doorway, tired from the road. “Du Pré, I think that you find everything that you were looking for, eh?” She kissed him.
Du Pré nodded. Well, not exactly, but he knew pretty much where everything was, pretty soon he’d have everything, everyone paid, the loose ends all knotted off. Then what? More grandkids, piss in my lap.
“You hungry, Du Pré?” Madelaine pushed a strand of dark hair back from her forehead. Little gray in it, looked very good. She was not a vain woman, dye her hair, look foolish. Du Pré smiled, loving her.
“Yes,” said Du Pré, grabbing her, lifting her up, carrying her to the bedroom.
“Du Pré!”
After, they lay laughing for a while. Madelaine ran her finger over Du Pré’s chest, nuzzled his ear.
“I miss you. You find your crazy aunt?”
“Yes,” said Gabriel. “You know, I love my aunt, but I don’t think she will have it. She got a young, jealous man, don’t sound good.”
“You got an old jealous woman here. You play your fiddle for them Red River women, eh? You forget your Madelaine?”
“Just the six times,” said Du Pré, “I’m so drunk, maybe more.”
Madelaine whacked him, not hard.
“You not like that,” she said, propping herself up on her elbow. “Too good a man, hurt those who love you. Six, maybe more, some bullshit, Du Pré. Hah.”
Du Pré looked at the ceiling. She got me there.
“That Bart working horses with Booger Tom, he get kicked, got his leg in a cast now,” said Madelaine. “I don’t think nothing else happened while you were gone. Maria comes by every day, we are going to be all right, now she got something to look after besides you.”
“What?” said Du Pré, “she got a new boyfriend?”
“Oh, no,” said Madelaine. “She got no time for a boyfriend. Now she is studying to be a senator, she says.”
“Oh,” said Du Pré. She go to Helena one time, but Washington? Never. Oh, God. Senator Du Pré, the one in the miniskirt. Don’t you got to be old, like twenty-five or something?
“So what you find up there,” said Madelaine.
Du Pré didn’t say anything.
“Don’t tell me, huh?”
“I don’t tell anybody till I have it all right here, in my hand,” said Du Pré. He closed his fist, gripped hard.
Madelaine grumbled about it a little.
“You see Benetsee?” said Du Pré.
Madelaine shook her head. The old man hadn’t been in church this last Sunday, but then he often didn’t come to church. But the smoke was coming up from his chimney, so he had to be all right.
They got dressed. Du Pré yawned, he was all off in his sleep, been making too much road, found out too much, he was worried about his aunt.
Write her? Say when your young man leave you you remember your nephew down here? She would hate him forever for his pity. What Pauline would do, get dead drunk, drive her car very fast, point it into something big. Waaahaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Bam.
She was plenty tough, all right. Tough herself to death, that girl.
I am glad that Maria doesn’t much like horses, thought Du Pré, she’s the same tough, but at least she have a chance. Pauline, there is just a poor girl with big tits and good legs.
“Well,” said Du Pré, “I got to
go now, see that Bart and the old man.”
Madelaine nodded.
Du Pré’s car smelled a little of garbage. He had a paper sack full of browning apple cores and sandwich wrappings. He drove to the Toussaint Bar, put the sack in the trash bin at the side of the place, along with the empty bottles and the soggy napkins and paper plates from their lousy hamburgers.
The Toussaint Bar, where love is suddenly taken drunk.
Pauline, you ought to come down here, not stay up there alone, down here you got family.
Old Benetsee, now he’s family, too. Spooky old man, lived on nothing, people brought him food, fixed his window it got broken. Split his wood. Benetsee, wheezy old dogs, wheezy old man with his flute in the side of his mouth.
Thing is, thought Du Pré, since we invent writing we remember too much and forget the important things.
Du Pré drove away. The day was warm and overcast and there was a black smudgy line on the northern horizon, soon they would have an Alberta Clipper run down the front of the Rockies, make the windows rattle in their frames.
Glad I come down before that thing, thought Du Pré. Most storms came from the west, the ones from the north were in a bigger hurry and they dumped a lot more snow.
Du Pré knocked on Benetsee’s door. He heard a chair slip on dirty linoleum, the old man pushed back the faded calico curtain and peered out at Du Pré. He smiled, couple teeth here and there. Very yellow, brown at the roots.
“Du Pré!” said Benetsee, “good to see you! Some wine, you bring?”
Du Pré shook his head.
“You go get some then, or I don’t talk to you,” said Benetsee. He shut the door, real firm.
Du Pré did as he was told.
CHAPTER 39
BENETSEE, PLAYING THE FLUTE, glass of cheap white on the table, stuck there among the crumpled papers and bread rinds, a cut of venison black and dried, some apples as wrinkled as the old man.
Benetsee, playing his flute, looping melodies, came from somewhere Du Pré had never been. Played until Du Pré fidgeted, then he stopped the tune. Chop.
“So,” said Benetsee, “you find out some things, maybe too much?”
