by Peter Bowen
“Yeah,” said Madelaine. “That Bart, he is working so hard on his house and that ranch. Old Booger Tom run him around and Bart don’t say nothing to the old bastard, and Bart owns that place. Booger Tom, I saw him in the bar the other night and he say he try every way to make Bart blow up or quit or whine and Bart just won’t do it. I think that Booger Tom kind of likes Bart for that,”
So do I, Du Pré thought. Poor Bart Fascelli, rich boy, horrible family, then he is in his late forties and suddenly realizes that though he owns that ranch, “Booger Tom owns himself. Bart, he wants to own himself, too. I like that man. Hope he don’t never drink again.
“Bart is so very nice to Jacqueline and Maria,” Madelaine went on. “Like a good uncle, you know. He is always very correct.” Jacqueline and Maria were Du Pré’s daughters. Bart had helped out Maria a lot and was going to pay for a college education for her. Since Du Pré’s father had murdered Bart’s brother, Du Pré thought that was pretty tough of Bart. He’s probably a pretty tough man, don’t know how much yet.
They were headed east to pick up the two-lane norm to Toussaint. Du Pré looked down at the speedometer. Ninety. He slowed to seventy. Can’t go fast on the expressway, he thought, but I want to get home. Take a long hot shower. Feels like my soul and half of my ass is still in Washington, D.C.
That detective, he never came to ask me more questions, Du Pré thought. I only caught the horse. Don’t even know the name of the woman who was killed. Cree, though, like some of my people.
Madelaine fiddled around in a little cooler and brought out a can of beer for Du Pré and a wine cooler for herself. She popped the can open and handed it to him. Du Pré took a long swallow.
“That’s pretty good,” he said.
He saw the exit north up ahead. Get off this four-lane mess and back on a two-lane road. I am a two-lane man in a four-lane age. And they are welcome to it.
Du Pré glanced up at the bluffs above the Yellowstone as he turned round the exit ramp. The Roche Jaune of the voyageurs. They had been here so long ago, no one really knew how long. Tough men, could cover some country.
A huge hawk flapped up from a kill in a field across the highway. It held something small in one talon. Du Pré couldn’t see what it was. The big bird turned in the air and locked its wings and floated on. Du Pré grinned. Home, it sure felt good.
“So, this Washington D.C., what was it like?” said Madelaine.
“Hot and sticky,” said Du Pré. “But I met some nice people, some Cajun people from Louisiana. They talk some French like ours, only some different. Call it Coonass French.” Du Pré spoke Coyote French. Well, those Cajuns had been descended from Québécois deported by the English over two centuries ago to Louisiana. And we didn’t talk so much after that. Du Pré’s people were Métis—French, Cree, Chippewa, and some little English no one wanted to admit to—who were the voyageurs and trappers of the Company of Gentlemen Adventurers of Hudson’s Bay. Or the Hudson’s Bay Company. Or the Here Before Christ.
“They invite us down some winter to get away from the cold,” Du Pré went on. “They play some fine music, accordion, fiddle, washboard. Call it zydeco.”
“What they do with this washboard?” said Madelaine.
“Guy plays it; he puts big thimbles on his fingers, brushes them over that washboard,” said Du Pré. “It sounds good. Anyway, they say we come down eat crawfish, drink orange wine.”
“Orange wine sounds good,” said Madelaine.
Du Pré looked at his watch. His sense of time was off. It must be the middle of the afternoon. Of course it was; his plane hadn’t got to Billings until 2:30. Four o’clock and change. Du Pré was starving of a sudden.
“This next roadhouse, we get a cheeseburger,” said Du Pré. “I am hungry enough to have supper with a coyote now.”
It was still close to the longest day of the year, a little over a week ago. The light would remain past ten o’clock, and Du Pré figured if he pushed the old Plymouth, he could make Toussaint before sundown.
Up ahead, he saw a crossroads and the peeling white sign of a roadhouse that he knew and liked. He turned into the parking lot.
Christ, I am hungry, he thought.
CHAPTER 4
OLD BENETSEE SHOWED UP the next evening, carrying some herbs he had gathered for Madelaine. She used them to scent the shampoo she used. Madelaine took the little bundles off to hang them in a sunny window before she ground them in the old brass mortar and pestle she kept on the sink board. Du Pré wondered about that old mortar and pestle, it was a pretty crude casting and probably pretty old. Maybe Hudson’s Bay trade goods. He sometimes wondered how many pelts of beaver or mink or fisher cat or bobcat or fox the thing had cost. It might be the oldest thing in Toussaint, come to think on it.
“So you like them Cajun?” said Benetsee.
Du Pré nodded. He hadn’t spoken to anyone about the Cajuns except Madelaine, and she hadn’t been six inches away from him since he got back. But Du Pré was long past wondering how the old man knew things. He just did. When Du Pré listened to Benetsee tell stories or ask questions he had no way of knowing to ask, he believed in magic.
“I brought you this,” said Benetsee. He fumbled around in his pockets for something and then found it in the lining of his coat. Benetsee wore his clothes until they turned to mostly holes. Madelaine had to fight him to get him to wear something that at least would keep out the wind.
“You goddamned old fool,” she had yelled at him once, “you give me that mess of rags and put these things on! They are nice and dirty and you will like them fine! Hah!”
Benetsee brought form a strange knife, one shaped like a hook, but the bend of the hook went along the axis of the knife blade. It was just a ribbon of steel bent back upon itself. The handle was a finely worked green stone, it felt a little greasy to the touch. Soapstone. Du Pré took the knife and looked at it. The blackish steel had a bright rim along the bottom where Benetsee had sharpened it.
“That’s a pull knife,” said Benetsee. “You can do some fine carvings those canoe parts with that.”
Jesus Christ, thought Du Pré, I have forgotten this powwow. But it is not for four, five days. I suppose this old fart will wish to go, gamble some money. Probably my money.
Madelaine returned with a glass of wine for Benetsee, a big glass. The old man loved to drink a lot of wine.
“You maybe want a bourbon,” said Madelaine. “I get you one.”
Du Pré shook his head. He smiled at her.
Benetsee downed his big glass of wine, just poured it down his throat. Madelaine shook her head and smiled at him, then took the glass and walked back toward the house.
“You pull that knife to you, you know,” said Benetsee, “for the fine shavings.” He was digging around in his coat. “I got something else.” Finally, he took the tattered cloth off and squeezed it till he found it hidden somewhere in the tangled folds.
Madelaine came back. Benetsee struggled for several minutes and finally he pulled a little canoe out of the crumpled cloth of his coat.
It was a carving, in some fine-grained wood. All the struts and braces and thwarts and ribs were carved in, too, and the outside of the canoe carved like birch bark. Du Pré could see some stains on the carving—on the seams, where the pitch went. Ah.
It was the carving of the bâteau gros ventre—the big-bellied boat. These canoes had been made up to thirty feet long and eight feet wide. They could carry a heavy load. A thirty foot canoe would take six men to portage it around a falls or rapids, maybe eight men; those bark canoes were heavy. Then the voyageurs would move the heavy packs of furs. They would load one another with as many packs as a man could stagger with and then they would bull up or down the trail around the river. There were many songs about especially tough voyageurs and how many packs of furs they could carry.
Du Pré thought a man might take two, three if he was very strong, but any song that said a man carried more than that was just a song. The packs of furs w
eighed over a hundred pounds apiece.
“You see this here?” said Benetsee, pointing to a thwart. The thwart curved in a lot, giving the canoe a waist. “Easier to paddle.” He lifted the canoe carving and pointed to the stern, which was undercut with a roll on the bottom.
“They hang a piece of birch right there off its ass, make it go in the water better,” said Benetsee. A birch round with rounded ends. Du Pré had never seen anything like this.
This old goat never tell me he know about canoes, Du Pré thought, though he seem to know everything somehow.
Benetsee drained the big glass of wine Madelaine had brought. He got to his feet.
“I go see now,” he said, moving off toward the little creek that wound through Du Pré’s backyard. There was a path there, older than the house, probably there before the whites came.
“I go see now”—Du Pré had heard that so many times over the years.
The old man hopped across the creek; the tag alders on the far side swallowed him up. A squirrel chirred angrily. Du Pré heard the scrawk of a blue jay.
But he was gone, like smoke on a summer morning.
Du Pré turned the model around in his hands. He thought of his people paddling one of these, pulling out at the portage, reaching into the pouch at the end of their red sashes for pipe and tobacco. Jokes. Thinking about their women at the end of the journey.
“Du Pré!” Madelaine called from the back door. “You have a telephone! Sound like someone from far away.”
Who the hell be calling me from far away? Du Pré thought. I don’t know anybody from far away. He put the canoe model down on the grass next to the pull knife.
It was Paul Chase. He wanted to know if Du Pré would want to go on a journey—paid, of course—by canoe over a portion of the old fur-trade route. Starting on the first of August.
“We thought we’d try for the best weather,” said Chase. “We have a grant and can pay you, oh, four hundred a week plus your expenses.”
“Where is this route you want to take, there?” said Du Pré.
Saskatchewan and Manitoba, the route home, through chain lakes and down little rivers between them. On the way, they would come to a falls where archaeologists were recovering a mass of trade goods from the pool beneath left by voyageurs who had miscalculated and wrecked. Du Pré should bring his fiddle.
“How long this take?” asked Du Pré.
“Six weeks.”
“I don’t think that I want to,” said Du Pré.
“Just think about it,” said Chase.
Du Pré said he would, but he wouldn’t change his mind.
CHAPTER 5
DU PRÉ FINISHED “BAPTISTE’S LAMENT.” He let the last note fade off and he stood still till the man in the sound booth pointed his thumb up. Du Pré sighed. He had never worked so hard at his music in all his life. The recording engineer and producer were competent and relentless.
“Very nice. Great version. I’d like to maybe try it again in a little while, though. Maybe reach in there for something…darker.”
The engineer and producer would exchange a meaningful glance.
“Yeah. Darker. Exactly,” the engineer would say.
They had an uncanny ability to sense when Du Pré was just about to tell them to go piss up ropes and then stand under them while they dried. Then they’d break and wander out to a nearby saloon had good cheeseburgers.
Du Pré felt handled, like a cow in a chute. But the joke was on him, so he had to do his best. And maybe the Métis music would stay some alive. His daughter Maria was going off to some tony eastern school on Bart’s money and a little of Du Pré’s, and she would be a little Métis girl from Montana with a good education and the whole world before her. Her kids wouldn’t be Métis, they’d be out in that English world there.
But the music wouldn’t go on with Maria, anyway. She had a voice when she sang that would take baked enamel off cast iron. Jacqueline sang beautifully, alto, a cappella ballads she had learned here and there.
So this music maybe live in some vault in Washington, D. C, Du Pré thought. Freeze-dried. Like them college kids come to the fiddling contests can play every note just right but it still don’t work.
I am sounding like some old fart. I am getting close to being some old fart. Be fifty in three weeks. Shit.
Du Pré stuffed his fiddle in the case and then remembered his rosin, there on the floor by the chair. He picked it up, opened the case again, and tucked it under the neck.
I got everything. He looked at his watch. Six o’clock of a July evening. Sun should be down far enough, it won’t hurt my eyes too much when I go out in it. Du Pré had been snow-blinded twice and he couldn’t take too much sun without dark glasses.
A door opened into the sound room and Paul Chase came through it. He was dressed in the sort of outdoor stuff you got from expensive mail-order houses. The clothes were good and the boots were good; they had been designed by hardworking dilettantes for moneyed novices.
Du Pré thought of his father, Catfoot, going over the Wolf Mountains in the dead of winter, fifty below, with nothing but a pack on his back, snowshoes, to check that trapline. The trapped animals deserved a quick death, and anyway, it was hard to skin them frozen. Catfoot could cover his line in two days.
Carried some jerky, salt, and tea, a little chocolate. Find a fir tree and burrow down under the thick branches; the smoke from his little fire would go up through the dark green needles. Carried the same old pocketknife, a few matches.
“Du Pré!” said Paul Chase, “we thank you.”
Now he will ask me if I go on his canoe trip, Du Pré thought.
“Say,” said Chase, “have you given any more thought to perhaps going on this canoe trip with us?”
Du Pré nodded. Chase deflated a little behind the smile.
Them fucking boots he got on, they got buttons you press for maybe a beach umbrella or rockets take you up the rising trail. Du Pré thought for a moment why this stuff irritated him. It allowed people who didn’t know the country to go out in it. They could buy these keys that worked till they got in some trouble. Paper keys. Fill this out, send in a check, this stuff comes, the wilderness is yours.
“Yeah,” said Du Pré, “I will go with you.”
Chase looked surprised, but he caught himself.
“Oh, really?”
Du Pré nodded.
“Well. Wonderful. We will gather at Lac La Ronge and go by canoe down to York Factory.”
That’s right, Du Pré thought. He hadn’t known till he’d read a book on the Hudson’s Bay Company that the managers of the little fur-buying outposts were called factors. Then he asked Maria for her dictionary, but she had one in her computer. She punched a few keys and said it was someone who acted for someone else.
Du Pré had nodded and decided that he was glad his daughter liked this computer and the twentieth century, but Du Pré, him, he didn’t much care for either of them.
“We won’t be working as hard as the voyageurs,” said Chase cheerily.
Du Pré looked at his space-age boots and the well-cut shirt with all the pockets and little epaulets to hold maybe the camera strap.
“Halfway through the trip, we will stop for a few days and stay at a hotel, rest up,” said Chase. “But it should be interesting.”
Du Pré was very tired and he wanted to go next door to the saloon and get a good drink and a cheeseburger, maybe drive partway home tonight, or just sleep for a few hours and then go on so he was in his own country early in the morning.
“What made you change your mind?” said Chase.
Du Pré shrugged. I am a cowboy; we shrug when we don’t want to say nothing. It is not that we don’t have anything to say.
Benetsee had changed Du Pré’s mind for him.
“Something very bad going on up there,” said Benetsee one summer evening just before Du Pré had to drive over to Kalispell to make this recording. Benetsee had drawn a map in some detail of Hudson Bay. He had q
uickly sketched in some rivers on the great jutting peninsula on the east side of it.
“These people down here be killing this,” said Benetsee, putting a hasty X roughly where New York and New England were. “And this is where some of the great songs come from.”
“Killing how?” said Du Pré.
“These people want to build many dams on these rivers up here,” said Benetsee, “and that will poison the waters and kill the fish and everything else that lives on them. Some Cree and some Chippewa, you know, they still live the old ways. But there are not very many of them, and these people they want that electricity.”
Benetsee stabbed at the X.
“So this man ask you go along on that canoe trip, you ought to go,” said Benetsee.
“I don’t want to be slapping those blackflies and mosquitoes for six weeks, have to play my fiddle each night for these people like I am some tape recorder or something. Why I want to go across that country with a bunch of people don’t belong there anyway, want to think that they know what it was like back then couple hundred years ago; huh?”
“Some of the people are coming from here,” said Benetsee, “to go on this trip which is here.” He sketched a route on the west side of the bay. “But they will bring couple bâteau gros ventre. They from over there on the other side.”
“Why I want to leave Madelaine for six weeks, huh?” said Du Pré.
Benetsee looked at Du Pré with patience and contempt.
“There are these people come along with you there are our people,” he said. “They got a whole bunch of songs—you know, songs you never heard.”
“Okay,” said Du Pré. “I still will not go.”
Benetsee drank some more wine. He had his eyelids patiently down; he was nodding and his lips moved.
Du Pré looked over at the tag alder on the far side of the little stream that ran through his horse pasture.
There was a coyote sitting there, in the daylight. Du Pré had never seen a coyote this close or in the daylight.
