Armand stuffed tobacco into a pipe and lit it with a lucifer, and smoked awhile as she cleared away the bowls.
“I’ve been thinking about the church,” he said. “We will begin tomorrow.”
This was a wonder. These men were much too burdened to be thinking of her church.
“I don’t know how to start,” she said. “But you do.”
“Oui, I do. First we must claim land.”
“Merci, but I have no head for it,” she said.
“The Americans don’t either. This is all government land. It’s not surveyed. You cannot claim anything with a legal boundary, like a quarter of section twenty-seven, township thirty. There was a fur post here, and the town’s grown around it. These people simply claimed land. They decided on fifty-foot lots, and drove their stakes, and someday a surveyor will come along and make it legal. It’s called preemption. Sometimes the government accepts, sometimes not. Usually the government sees that there is a town and the squatters need legal title, and it is all settled. Eh? See where I am driving?”
“I don’t know a thing, but I’ll learn.”
He sucked until the pipe crackled, and he exhaled a blue plume. “Tomorrow, we will pick a place outside of town, where the people won’t care what you do. You’ll pick a good place for your church, and we’ll drive in the stakes and leave a claim in a bottle. We’ll give the church two hundred feet, eh? Not that the crooked church deserves an inch.”
“I have nothing to measure with, sir.”
“I do. I have a cord with fifty knots in it, each knot a foot.”
“How do you make a rectangle?” Martin asked.
“The distance from the opposing corners must be equal,” Armand said. “From upper left to lower right, and from upper right to lower left. Make those the same, and you have a rectangle.”
“Where did you learn that?” Beau asked.
“Geometry, taught in the schools at the Red River colony, by the miserable priests.”
“Tomorrow, my church will have land under it?”
“Oui. As good a claim as any merchant in town has.”
“I am blessed,” she said.
He smoked a moment. “At the Red River colony in Manitoba, the Earl of Selkirk, Thomas Douglas, said that our ancient claims along the river, upon which our fruitful farms rested, were not good. The land must be surveyed into square miles in the British manner, and we must leave. And so we did, with a little help from their bayonets. The British are as bad as bishops.”
She couldn’t think of anything to say about that.
nineteen
After a breakfast of oat gruel, Trouffant asked a question:
“Would Madame wish to show us where the church is to be?”
It startled Therese. She had thought the time for that would be weeks, months, seasons away. She stared. “I don’t know.”
She didn’t have the slightest idea. She had only once passed through the cluster of rude buildings calling itself Lewistown. She knew there was a road heading north, and another heading west, and one heading east.
“I have a site in mind, with your permission.”
“Yes, of course!”
Trouffant collected his knotted string, some stakes, a hatchet, a small brass compass, some foolscap, and a pencil. These he tossed into the ubiquitous burlap sacks of the frontier.
He turned to his sons. “Do you wish to join us?”
“I’ll cut wood,” Beau said.
“I’ll come,” Martin said.
Soon Armand Trouffant, Martin, and Therese bundled against a sharp wind and braved the dawn. Lewistown was slumbering. The saloons were dark. The various residences around them, which housed gamblers and saloonkeepers and tarnished women, slept in the rising light.
Trouffant strode so fast that Therese couldn’t keep up, but then he slowed. He took them through the trash-filled town and out into the open fields west of it, until the road began to ascend a long grade. And there, just where the road rose, was a flat on the south side of the two-rut trail, a little higher than the valley yet easy to reach.
“Voilà,” he said.
She felt the power of the place, yet wasn’t sure. “It looks right, but is there any place on the other sides that might be better?”
Trouffant shrugged. “The choice is yours, madame.”
“There are no creeks here, no bridges to build,” Martin said. “The land is high and will not flood. It’s far enough from the town so no one will scheme against us.”
She turned to him. “You’ve given this some thought,” she said.
“Much thought,” he said.
“Are you in the faith?”
“No, madame, I don’t believe a word of it.” He smiled softly. “But a church will be good for the Métis.”
“If any are left here,” his father said. “Very well. Madame, let us choose a corner.”
Martin strode to a spot south of the trail and stopped. “The west and north lines from here, eh?”
It seemed fine to her. Could it be? Was this the beginning? She watched as father and son drove a stake at that point, and measured eastward four lengths of the fifty-foot cords, and drove a second stake, also back from the road. While she watched, they staked a rectangle two hundred feet wide by four hundred deep, and made it true. Then they built fieldstone cairns at the corners.
“Now, madame, where will your church rise, eh?”
“And how big?” Martin asked.
This time she had a sense of the right spot; close to the road fronting the property, and midway between the stakes.
“I like it here, but I know nothing about size, messieurs.”
Martin turned to her with a faraway look. “Grand enough for all the Métis.”
“Yes! That grand.”
The father and son drove four more stakes, but they seemed very near to one another, and she thought this church would hardly hold a dozen.
“This is a big church, madame. It will hold all the Métis,” Armand said. “Now, we must leave a claim here. What are you going to name the church?”
That was easy. “For the blessed one who came down the ivory stairs from heaven and told me to begin this task. Saint Therese.”
“Maybe Saint Martin?” Martin asked, one eyebrow cocked.
“Aren’t you full of conceits,” she replied.
“There were two Saint Martins,” he said. “So my name is holier than yours.” He was smiling for the first time.
Armand nodded. “It is yours to choose, madame. The only thing I am going to do is write the claim in English. Then it will be respected because it can be read.”
“Do you know English?” she asked.
“The priests at the parish school on the Red River taught me.”
He settled on the frosted grass, turned his back to the bitter wind, and pulled the foolscap and a bottle from his sack. Then he penciled a claim. “This lot claimed by Saint Therese Church, October 14, 1885.” He thought a little and added “200 ft by 400 ft.”
He rolled up the foolscap and jammed it into the bottle. Then he and his son built a small cairn of fieldstone and set the bottle into its top layer.
“C’est bon,” Armand said.
The men studied the ground where the church would rise, noting the topsoil, the presence of stray rock, the lay of the land.
Therese stood in the wind, blessed herself with a soft articulation of her hand, and the three stared at their handiwork, which had consumed so little time that the distant town was not yet awake.
Martin strode beside her, and she sensed it was no accident.
“Madame,” he began, “ever since you arrived here, I have been curious. I have been awash in speculation. I have weighed and pondered. And I am just as mystified now as I was the moment we met.”
She knew what was coming, and knew she had to give some explanation.
“Madame,” he continued. “Would it be rude if I were to satisfy my curiosity? Would you forgive a young man’s boldness?”
“I think you are wondering how I arrived here without the protection of my husband.”
“Yes, those are my very thoughts. And what he thinks of all this. This amazing vision that you speak of. This mission to this place.”
She weighed her response. But there could be no concealing of the truth. The Métis gossiped, and gossip would soon reach this boy’s ears, and if she lied now, she would be greatly embarrassed soon.
“Martin, my husband does not know of this trip. He does not know of my vision. He probably wouldn’t believe me anyway. So he has no opinion about what I’m doing.”
“But how can that be?”
“I am married in name only, Martin. And someday I will have my marriage annulled. It was … I am … not yet a wife. Is that enough for you?”
She was annoyed. He surely had a right to some answers. A Métis woman traveling alone, a great distance, was unthinkable.
He plainly was not emptied of his curiosity. “Madame, what does your husband do?”
“He is a civilian translator with the army.”
“Ah! Does he translate our dialect for them?”
“He understands it, but not as well as several Indian tongues. He speaks French. He can speak Shoshone, Crow, Hidatsa, some Sioux, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, and he’s learned some Cree too.”
The wind was picking up, and it was chill. Winter stood at the gates.
“And you quarreled about this?”
“No, not a word. But the moment the priest was blessing our marriage, I knew it was a mistake. I could not go on. I—walked away.”
“And him?”
“He loves me. He is a good man taking pay to destroy us. I mostly don’t like him, but he’s a good man.”
“And your vision, it came afterward, after you had walked away?”
“Yes, while I was staying with cousins near Miles City. That’s where the heavens opened up to me.”
“And when this church is built, what then, madame?”
“I have no life in me after that, Martin.”
He glared at her, turned away, and walked toward the Trouffant wood yard keeping his distance from her. She didn’t feel sorry. She had told him everything he wanted to know, not sparing herself. She glanced at Armand, who was feigning disinterest. Well, now they knew. Maybe they would toss her and her small possessions out the door.
The thought of her wedding, and her flight from Dirk Skye, troubled her. Could he be in this area? She dreaded the thought of running into him. Fate had brought her here. An army mission had brought him to the Judith Basin.
She hurried up to Armand.
“Monsieur, perhaps you can tell me. Where are the soldiers now?”
“In their forts, I am told. They are done.”
“The big campaign, to find us and ship us away, is that finished?”
“Yes, madame. They succeeded, you know. They intercepted many Métis fleeing from the Northwest Mounted Police, and sent us back, and followed our people for many miles to make sure.”
“You’re here.”
“Oui. The Métis that found hiding places in the towns, they are here. It was the ones out in the country that got chased away.”
“Did any die?”
“A great pity. Some old were buried. But many more will perish in Canada. They have nothing and winter is here.”
“Who will come to my church?”
“It will be a congregation of ghosts, madame.”
She felt the wind cutting through her coat. Did things only go from bad to worse?
“The soldiers, the ones from Fort Keogh. Are they still here?”
He shrugged. “They don’t tell me much in Lewistown. If I didn’t sell firewood, they would have sent us packing too. But I hear a few things, whispers in the night. Oui, the column from Fort Keogh left. That was Captain Brewer’s column, and it was the worst. It was the one that awoke people in the night, and sent us out into the wilderness, half-dressed, with nothing to spare us our lives. They were like a plague over the land, the finger of death. Be grateful they are gone, madame. Some of us lie in our hasty graves now.”
She felt the stain of bitterness. How could he? What lies did he tell the people? What did she ever see in him? Gone from here! And now he was many leagues away, and she was glad of it. If God was just, he would send Dirk Skye another thousand miles away. She hoped Dirk Skye would leave the territory. She hoped he would vanish from her mind. Only she knew he wouldn’t, and that only made it worse.
“Madame, it would be wise to remain very quiet. We will build the church, but we will do it by fits and starts, by the light of the moon. We will draw no attention to ourselves. You must say nothing. Tell no one you are here. Do not talk about the vision you received. Do not walk the streets of Lewistown. Learn a few English words, and never speak our tongue.”
“Why do you say this?”
“Because you will be a lightning rod. You will draw down the wrath of the heavens. You will endanger the people you wish to help. And you might be in danger. There are men who hunger for land and will commit any crime to have it. Men who want more and more grass for their cattle, and intend to have it. Men who would see you as a menace.”
The prophecy chilled her.
They reached Trouffant’s yard, and he wordlessly began his chopping, splitting one piece of firewood at a time, which is how he would expend the rest of the daylight. Martin stopped briefly at the cabin to bag a lunch, and then walked away, going to wherever Beau was, to fell trees and saw them into rounds, which could be split and turned into firewood.
And Therese wondered what madness had brought her to that place.
twenty
Sylvestre was morose. He rode northward lost in gloom, muttering to himself. That keg of brandy was the Holy Grail. Dirk watched him mutter and sigh, and wondered whether the others hidden in the Missouri Breaks would regard the loss as bleakly.
He turned to other thoughts, not wanting to rail against his fate. The encounter with Bain actually was valuable on two grounds: they learned that the army had quit and was now in winter quarters. And they learned what fate the big ranching outfits had in mind for stray Métis they came across.
Maybe it was time for these people to filter back and simply brave the threats of the ranchers. Or maybe not. Let one Métis man be hanged, while his weeping family watched, and these ill-starred people would be plunged into an even deeper pit.
On the other hand, each day these people waited, surviving in their rude huts in the Missouri River hinterland, the closer they came to starvation. He slowed his buckskin, letting Lorenz draw up beside him.
“We’ve got to do some thinking,” he said.
“Don’t ask me to think! Give me some brandy, and then I’ll think.”
“The army’s gone. The soldiers are wintering. Maybe this is the time to come back.”
“And get hanged.”
“I know something about these big open range outfits. They don’t do much in the winter. The cattle survive or not, pawing through snow to get at grass. The cowboys just hole up and play cards until spring. And they mostly hole up at the ranch headquarters. They don’t winter in the line camps. They’d go crazy, two or three in a camp, trying to make the weeks go by. The line camps are empty all winter. Are you following my drift?”
“As little as possible, ami,” said Sylvestre.
“They might not even be in your place, when winter hits. The army’s gone. They think your people are too. So why would they stay? When it gets a little colder, they’ll pack up and move. Never trust a cowboy to cut firewood or wash dishes if he doesn’t have to. You following my drift?”
“So we slip in, take over our old places, and eat their cattle all winter, ami?”
“And get hanged in the spring, while you are fat on borrowed beef.”
Sylvestre laughed. “That is a good Métis plan.”
“You can starve in your huts, then.”
“You got some money, eh?”
�
�Some loose pocket change.”
“Ah! You ride to Lewistown and buy a bottle of brandy, eh?”
“You won’t find brandy there. Redeye whiskey, maybe some beer.”
“Here’s what you do, eh? You ride to Lewistown. You take my mule, and you buy enough stuff, long as it’s got spirits in it, you load dat stuff on the mule, and we’ll have us a party. Then, after some festivities, when we don’t got any more headaches, we’ll come down here and move into our farms, and all the ones from Canada, they move into the line camps, and eat beef, eh?”
“And then what?”
“We all get hanged.”
“Your choice, I suppose.”
“Hey, Skye. You got it all wrong. This is justice. If I’m gonna get hanged, and I ate none of their beef, that would be unjust, eh? I eat none of these steaks and tongues and ribs, and get hanged, and they take me out to the cottonwood tree, and I’m hungry and skinny and angry because this hanging’s unjust, and they string me up even if I’m innocent, then it’s unjust. It ain’t right. So what’s just? If I’m gonna get hanged no matter what, then I should eat all the meat I can find, and get fat, and feel good, and enjoy all that beef in my belly, and then if they hang me, it’s justice, right? Then I got no reason to be angry. Then I got no reason to be bitter. I got no reason to shake my fist and say they’s making a mistake and strangling an innocent man, eh? I get fat, keep my family fat, and then if they hang me it’s all good and just.”
Dirk was laughing. But he had the awful sense that this was the future.
“I’m gonna tell them up there, we should all go get fat and get ourselves hanged,” Sylvestre said. “We’ll eat good first.” He rode a while in silence, and then added one more thought. “A good steak, it’d sure taste good, eh?”
Dirk didn’t go to Lewistown on a booze run. He and Sylvestre followed the Judith River north until it plunged into the mysterious canyons of the Missouri, and then they followed barely visible trails until they turned into the one that Sylvestre called home. About the time they left the high plains the weather turned. The deeper they rode into the great trench of the Missouri, the darker the clouds and the colder the air. By the time they reached the great river, the wind was carrying ice crystals, which stung Dirk’s cheeks and numbed his hands. He saw a rime of white forming on Sylvestre’s black hair and collecting in the mane of the bay.
The First Dance Page 13
