Bain ignored him. “You will instruct them to take the coffins with them to Canada. We will bury citizens here. Why, I have no objection to a graveyard, so long as it’s for Americans.”
“The Sylvestres were living on their farm longer than you’ve been in the territory,” Dirk said.
“Ah, yes, squatting. Sorry, gentlemen. You will tell the half-bloods to remove the coffins. I will give you one minute. After that, my men will do it for them.” He pulled a gold pocket watch on a fob from a pocket in his pants and held it up. “There now, see? The second hand crosses the twelve.”
“I’ll break your bloody neck,” Reilly said.
But even as he spoke, the bores of Bain’s scattergun found his chest. And two of the escorting drovers had drawn their revolvers.
“You can tell them yourself, Bain,” Dirk said.
“No, Skye, you’ll be my messenger. And then of course you’ll remove yourself while you can.”
Dirk did nothing. If Bain had bad news to impart to the staring Métis, standing at the grave, let him do so.
Bain leaned over the edge of the carriage. “My friend Nelson, the postmaster, tells me you’ve written letters to my good friends in Helena, Governor Hauser in particular. Now what might that be about, Skye?”
Dirk kept his mouth shut.
“About the removal of illegal immigrants, I imagine. A letter from a noncitizen about other noncitizens.”
“Born here, Bain.”
“Ah, but of a Shoshone mother. You’re a ward of the government. You belong on the Wind River Reservation, where you will proceed immediately or be taken there by authorities. You’re an Indian, and will be treated as such.”
Dirk stared.
“But I’ll give you credit, Skye. You chose peaceful means to get at me. The frontier’s gone. We’re all at peace now, and modern times require modern means. It’s who you know these days, not who you shoot.”
Dirk eyed the scattergun in the carriage, which didn’t waver.
“There now,” Bain said. “The second hand’s gone around. Time’s up.” He nodded to the drovers.
Bain’s men dismounted, headed toward the grieving Métis with pointed revolvers. The people fled, suddenly terrified, scattering down the slope toward town even as Bain watched.
The drovers reached the burial ground, stepped into the grave, and lifted the box out.
“I’ll take it, damn ye,” Reilly said.
“Back to Canada, I trust. Or perhaps you should be deported, Mr. Reilly? For crimes done in Ireland?”
Reilly ignored Bain, headed for his wagon which was near the foundation of the church, and drove it over to the grave site. The cowboys lifted the oblong box onto the wagon bed.
“There, you see, Skye? It was all handled peaceably. Now if you are not out of here by morning, there will be federal authorities looking for you.”
Dirk’s helplessness was all too familiar to him.
Bain smiled, nodded, slapped lines over the croups of his trotters, and drove off. His men lingered on to enforce Bain’s will.
Dirk looked for Therese, fearful that harm might have come to her. She, above all, was the obstacle to Bain’s vision of a white man’s land. She was standing with the Métis, unharmed.
Dirk watched the ebony carriage roll away and could barely contain the tumult flowing through every ounce of his flesh.
Reilly settled in the wagon seat.
“I’ll bury them on my plot of ground in this great republic that’s welcoming all the poor of the world,” he said. “Makin’ a new world where everyone’s got a chance.”
He steered the ox toward town, while the Métis gathered around it, a cortege once again. Dirk thought to join the cortege too as it wended its slow way into Lewistown. He saw Therese walking beside the wagon, something fierce and proud in her bearing. Dirk stayed at the rear. This was a matter for the Métis people. They needed to come up with some place to bury the Sylvestres, a place that would suit their beliefs.
It surprised him that Reilly didn’t steer the burdened wagon toward the hog farm, but continued toward Trouffant’s wood yard. So maybe that would become a burial ground for these people. The weary people followed, and in a while were all collected there at Trouffant’s place, surrounded by mounds of firewood and logs.
Dirk put his saddle horse in the pen and joined the crowd, which had gathered around the wagon, waiting for Therese to say whatever was on her mind. It was her church, her hallowed ground that had been violated. She was the one who had received a vision.
Dirk listened, straining to understand the broken French and Cree tongue of these people, but he got the gist of what she was saying. At twilight the Métis would return and bury the Sylvestres exactly where the grave had been dug.
“Are you sure, madame?” asked one.
“I was given a vision. We will build the church there. We will build it no matter that they tear it down. We will build it again and again. We will replace every stone. We will shape every timber. We will build a house of God, and our people will worship in our house.”
“They have guns, madame,” said a young man.
“Then some of us who are building the church might die,” she replied.
It was an oddly tender statement, and Dirk could see it settling over these people.
“If I die, bury me there,” Reilly said in English.
They stared at him, well understanding his words.
“Well, we may as well enjoy ourselves while we wait to die,” Trouffant said.
The Métis were smiling.
Trouffant addressed Dirk. “Monsieur, would you slide into town and make some purchases?”
Moments later Dirk walked toward Lewistown, some dollar bills in hand, and purchased two quarts of redeye and two quarts of brandy, and didn’t much care that the barkeep would sell to him only through the rear door because he was an Indian.
By the time he returned, the Métis had already begun the party. Two fiddlers were tightening their strings. The women were preparing a kettle of stew. The men were chopping firewood to help Trouffant pay for the party. But not until Dirk unloaded his gunny sack of bottles did the party begin. It was an odd time, midmorning, but what difference would it make? One could party at any hour and bury the dead whenever the moment came to carry them back to the churchyard.
Miraculously, still more Métis arrived from somewhere, and Dirk marveled. These people slipped across the country unnoticed when they chose to. Trouffant’s cabin bulged, and the party spilled into the chill afternoon. By afternoon the stew was ready, the bottles were lined up, and the fiddlers were all tuned up. The Métis men drifted in from the wood yard, washed, and settled around the room.
The fiddlers struck a note or two, then burst into dizzying music, too fast and spicy for Dirk to keep track of. He watched Therese, wondering how she would take all this, but Therese was smiling and visiting with her people. The bottles began to circulate, with one or another taking a nip and handing it to someone else. Dirk could not follow the conversations, but he did translate scraps of the tongue, enough so he knew these people were talking about the death of the Sylvestres. The fiddlers slowed their tunes, until Dirk realized they were melancholy. The fiddlers were playing soft lamentations. This was not at all like a wake, nor was it like his wedding celebration. It was something else, a way of loosening up the soul to grieve.
He felt his usual aloneness. Once in a while Therese eyed him and nodded. But it all came to nothing. Reilly sat in a corner, red-faced, hogging a bottle of redeye, working hard at it, glaring at all the rest. He was as far removed from this event as Dirk was and looked ready to bolt.
Dirk didn’t feel much like drinking. He thought maybe he’d go catch his buckskin and ride away, maybe up to Reilly’s place. If this was mourning for the dead, he couldn’t fathom it. Who were the Métis, anyway?
He rose, but Reilly bellowed at him. “Sit here, Skye. I can’t understand a bloody word these savages are saying.”
“I’m going to ride to your place,” Dirk said.
“Quitting me, are you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m coming with you. Help me unload that coffin, and we’ll get the hell out of here.”
“They need you, Reilly.”
“Hell they do. Trouffant’s got a wagon and a dray.”
The pair headed for the cabin door, unnoticed as the mournful fiddles wailed dirges and the Métis sipped brandy or redeye and sat sadly, saying less and less to one another.
The icy air outside felt good. The silence felt even better. The autumnal sun had plummeted below the southwestern horizon, leaving only an afterglow.
“I don’t like them Métis one bit,” Reilly said. “Help me unload these buggers, and we’ll get out of here.”
Dirk thought that was a good idea. The box rested darkly in Reilly’s wagon bed. It would be heavy, and Reilly was not exactly sober, but somehow they’d lower the casket of Lorenz and Maude Sylvestre to the ground, and be on their way.
They hefted the box, found it lighter than expected, and started to lift it free.
“Please, Dirk, please no.” It was Therese, silhouetted in the open door by the lamplight within.
“Trouffant can carry these.”
“You are ill at ease, Dirk. You are trapped, oui?”
“Your ways aren’t my ways, Therese.”
She approached him, while Reilly stared meanly. “We will go now. Just you two and me, and we will bury our friends.”
Reilly stared. Dirk stared. She slid inside, got a shawl, and then settled on the wagon seat.
“There are shovels over there,” she said.
They drove quietly away, Reilly’s ox lumbering through town and up the grade, the three of them sitting tightly on the bench. No one said anything. Not even Reilly, who was oddly quiet for a mouthy man.
The churchyard was dead silent. A rim of afterglow lined the western horizon as Reilly steered the ox toward the hallowed ground.
This was going to be hard work, especially if Reilly was half-loaded.
But it went oddly well. They lifted the box out and rested it beside the grave. Dirk got down and received the box as Reilly slid it half into the grave. Then Reilly joined him and they eased the coffin into the cold earth.
They climbed out, and Reilly turned his blue scarf into a stole once again, and committed the bodies of two beloved Métis to the earth and their souls to God, while Therese stood quietly in the cold air and made the sign of the cross.
Dirk and Reilly set to work with the shovels. It didn’t go quickly or easily, and Reilly wasn’t helping much. But through the quietness of dusk and darkness, they heaped the cold clay onto the casket, until in deep dark they piled the last of the good earth over the grave and smoothed the earth into an orderly mound.
It was full night. They stood, staring. Reilly had indignantly wrapped his scarf around his throat once again.
Therese caught his hands and thanked him. And then she turned to Dirk, clasped her arms about him, and kissed him.
thirty-three
That kiss was the sweetest that Dirk Skye had ever known. But he rejected it. He had no intention of reviving a liaison with a woman who had abandoned him. That was cold hard reality. She was fickle. But that brief hug, and the touch of her lips, lingered through all of him.
“You heading for your place? Want company?” Dirk asked Reilly.
“I’m sure not going back there where a man can’t hear himself think,” Reilly said. “Damned Métis.”
“I’ll catch up with you. I’ll escort Miss Trouville home first.”
Reilly laughed, and Dirk couldn’t fathom why. But the man whipped the ox into action and the farm wagon creaked away. Dirk led his horse and walked beside Therese, through the thickening cold.
“Are you leaving now?” she asked.
“Bain told me I must. But no, I’m not. There’s work to do.”
“Work? Translate?”
He wondered if he should tell her what he had in mind, and then decided to go ahead. “There may be more of your people burned out, abandoned, dying of cold, by Bain’s night riders. I’m going to go look for them.”
“Why?”
That response surprised him.
“I don’t like people suffering, starving, dying from the cold.”
“Even if they are Métis?”
“What has that got to do with anything?”
“You were with the army.”
“I was discharged in the field by a captain.”
“For what?”
“For interfering with command. My office was to translate.”
“And?”
“I got riled up, I guess.”
She pondered that and reached over to him and took his hand. “Merci,” she said.
Her hand felt good, but he was damned if he’d let some small affection trump what had happened at their wedding.
She sensed it and withdrew her hand. They walked quietly through the saloon area of central Lewistown, and he was glad he was there to offer some safety for her. And then he escorted her into the Trouffants’ wood yard. The place had turned quiet. It wasn’t that people were sleeping, but that they sat about, mostly inside, lost in their own reveries.
“Thank you for taking me home,” she said.
“Yes, this is your home,” he replied. “Your people.”
She smiled softly, caught in lamplight from the window. “Oui,” she said.
She stepped in, and he could see the crowded mass of humanity there, quiet and sad, but somehow content with the evening.
He closed the door behind her, collected his buckskin, and headed into the bleak night. He’d catch up with Reilly and his lumbering ox soon enough. The air eddying out of the north whispered of snow, and even as Dirk rode through the night, the air turned bitter. The stars vanished and he let the buckskin pick the trail because he couldn’t see it. He pulled his coat tight and endured.
The sound of the wagon’s wheels groaning on their axles greeted him out of the blackness.
“That you, Reilly?”
“Froze to death and it’s all your doing. I should be tight in my cabin, storm coming, but you put all the Frenchies on me, and now I’m cold and stuck and needful.”
“What do you need, Reilly?”
“I haven’t any idea where I’m steering this ox, and I need a bottle to warm me.”
“Well, we’re both stuck.”
“It’s all your fault, Skye.”
“Yes. Out in the night, burying people, and you don’t have a drop with you.”
“You’re making fun of me, Skye, and I won’t forgive it.”
“This horse seems to know where he’s going, because I sure don’t. So we’ll let him take us to your place.”
“Or drop us in some ditch.”
They proceeded through the blackness awhile, and then the overcast vanished and there was starlight again. They were close to Reilly’s place, with the black bulk of the Judith Mountains off to the right.
“There, luck of the Irish,” Skye said.
“There’s no such thing, Skye. We were born to misery and doomed to sadness.”
“A bottle would fix you up fine.”
“You’re persecuting me, Skye. You haven’t a Christian bone in you.”
“I guess I don’t, and neither do you.”
“You go to hell, Skye.”
The ox lumbered into Reilly’s ranch yard.
“Go build a fire, Reilly. I’ll put the ox out to pasture.”
Reilly didn’t argue. He had wrapped his scarf tight around his neck but still looked drawn with cold. Dirk unsaddled his buckskin, found some oats for it, and turned it loose in the pen. Then he parked the wagon, freed the ox, and hung up the harness.
Reilly had a fire going in the stove and hovered over it, his bony hands absorbing what small heat the infant fire threw up.
“You should have brought a bottle. That was the least you could do,
after all I did for them Frenchies.”
“I guess I should have, Reilly.”
“Them people, there’s more of them coming down from Canada, getting caught in the storms. They’ll all croak. The ones around here, they’re getting froze to death on purpose, Bain’s night riders.”
“Tomorrow, you and I are going to go save any we can, Reilly. Your horse’ll be rested. We hitch up the wagon and go looking. We can bring some food and matches and whatever we can find. Flour sacks, gunny sacks. Anything.”
“I knew you were going to say that, Skye. You just want to kill me off.”
“I’ll go alone, then.”
“The devil you will!”
Dirk joined him at the stove, blotting up the heat, which finally was beginning to take the ice out of the cabin.
“Was that a wake at Trouffant’s wood yard?” he asked.
“The Frenchies wouldn’t know how to have a wake no matter how hard they tried. There’s no such animal as a Frenchie wake.”
“What did they have then?”
“Fiddle music and whiskey.”
“Well, that’s a wake.”
“You get more and more insulting, Skye.”
They hunted up stuff for the cold journey in the morning. There wasn’t much. Reilly didn’t live in luxury. But they managed a tin of hardtack, or ship’s biscuit, Reilly kept for emergencies, and a bunch of burlap bags and a few flour sacks. Reilly added a couple of ancient shirts, but that was it. This wouldn’t be much of a rescue. Still, Dirk had a feeling that some of the refugees were holed up and desperate for any kind of help.
“You got any riding animals? Mules, jackasses?”
“They can ride my hogs,” Reilly replied.
Dirk napped restlessly, and at the first sign of gray morning, he was up, loading their miserable succor into Reilly’s wagon, while Reilly made some tea.
“You’re making me do this. I should stay here. It’s about to snow. You’re risking my life,” he said.
“You stay, then.”
“To the bottom layer of Hades with you.”
They rolled out into a deep gray overcast and a northwest wind, and immediately the bite of cold chilled Dirk’s face. Reilly simply hunkered low, wrapped in a blanket. Dirk had no idea where to go other than west, out upon lands controlled by Harley Bain, lands where the Métis wanted to settle. Dirk had no idea how many had filtered through that country. A dozen? A hundred?
The First Dance Page 22
