Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont: A Short Play
Page 2
and advances the clock, then stands behind Gabe.].
Gabe : Four of us rode to Montana, where Louis was teaching school.
Saddle-sore and dry when we arrived.
It had been a long ride
And a hard trail.
Riel came out of the schoolhouse
I recognized him from the description -
He had a prophet’s eyes
We wondered if we were doing the right thing
Even in a dry climate
There are many wrong paths
But, far to the north, a prairie fire was burning
And behind me, dust devils were
Erasing our old road.
Louis: [to the audience] I think he’s almost done the history part.
Gabe : I am. Mr. John A. McDonald sent in the troops. We fought. We lost.
In a little place called Batoche we Métis lost forever. [He points to Louis] Dickhead here was still telling us not to fight, to negotiate. But them troops weren’t in a negotiating mood, you know.
Louis: A slight miscalculation, possibly.
Gabe : I escaped. They caught Louis, and put him on trial for a few petty infractions. End of the history lesson. [he walks to the clock, moves the hand back.] What were the charges, my crazy friend?
Louis: Treason, for one, and murder. Nothing serious
Gabe : He tried to give the west to the United States. How’s that?
[Audience member comes out, displays sign, “Hang the Bastard!”, returns to stands.]
Louis: I hate that sign. Anyway, I wasn’t serious. And I’m not crazy!
Gabe : [to audience] Oh no, not crazy, not my friend Louis Riel! On our way back from Montana we had meal breaks twice a day, pee stops three times a day, and prayer stops every ten miles.
Louis: God found me. He hasn’t found you yet, but that’s not my problem.
Gabe : The hero of the Métis. After his first success he’d gone to Montreal. He got off the train bellowing like a bull and shouting “I’m a prophet, I’m a prophet. He spent the next two years in a nuthouse in Montreal.
Louis: Now they’ve got a Louis Riel trail and a Louis Riel statue. I’m a hero to the Métis and practically a father of confederation. Not to mention top billing in this play of yours.
And you, the wily Gabriel Dumont, are forgotten. [he picks up the buffalo skull, contemplates it]. Alas, poor bison. Dumont knew you well…. [turns to Gabe]
You grew old, my friend.
I wish I had. Tell me this:
When the savage wind came down the Missouri
Thundering in the night, carrying
Boxcars of Canadian snow,
When you sat beside the fire, gray and nodding,
Did you dream of the time when you were young
And the most famous of buffalo hunters?
Did you remember the man with fiery eyes
And his impossible, crazy dream?
As you drifted off to sleep, did you imagine
In the corner of the shack, you could see
Moving shadows, crazy eyes.
Gabe : Fame everlasting. And a noose. Was it worth it,
Louis Riel?
You always sought walls, Louis -
I was after paths,
Trails, highways, the faint mark of the last buffalo,
The keen edge of the October wind, while
Making my own free trail across the shortgrass land.
This Métis was born to step over surveyor’s chain and
Thick sisal rope
On the day they hanged you,
With walls and walls around you
I rode out of the valley
To a high grassy knoll
Where I could sit in a medicine wheel
And watch all the suns go down..
They could wall in Gabriel Dumont
Only by mountains and sky.
After dark that day, I watched the stars
Making their own trail across the free and endless dark.
Louis : What can I say? Some talk to the wind, some talk to eternal fire. [looks significantly at Gabe. Looks at the audience] Who’s ever heard of Gabriel Dumont?
Gabe : You’re trying to tell me something.
Louis : I was chosen. God and I may have had our disagreements, but, all in all, I was chosen. I started my own church.
Gabe: Not many remember that.
It’s not that founding a church
Wasn’t one of your better ideas
But you had only the Mother Church
As an example.
Yes, Louis, your own church, but you couldn’t compete
With Big Mama from Rome.
A bit more foresight and we
Could have had the donut franchise.
We could have had Louis Riel’s instead of
That damn hockey player
And more branch parishes than the pope
Could ever dream of.
You were probably dropped on your head as a kid. Remember Fish Creek? The battle?
A bullet creased my skull, tearing off
A slab of my hair and spraying blood onto
The grass at Fish Creek
I looked around. The Métis were still firing
And the laughter of the Gatling still mocked
Our desperate petition.
I had a sudden desire for the morning
Along the river, the fog clearing out.
I have a tough skull, Louis. Think: A slight
Change in the angle of a piece of lead
And I could have leapt up yelling,
“Shoot me, hang me;
God wants me!”.
Louis: What God asked of me, I tried to do. What the people see in me, they see in me.
There are three Riels, you know:
The crazy prophet torching buildings
Till he gets to jig a bit
At the end of a rope
The quiet boy just out of school
Who said, “Yes, Lord, I will
If you ask.”
And the one they made out of me
Ashes starting to stir
On every wind.
Gabe : And the husband. Or did you forget that, again.
Louis: Heresy, treason, and madness:
Oh, Marguerite
My only sin.
Was in the leaving
Marguerite
I left you my wool coat.
For me
Plant a flower
Walk away
Don’t look back:
Heresy, treason, and madness
Make fine fertilizer
But the memory of a fire
Brings little warmth.
Gabe: [To audience] Louis left his wife his wool coat, and memories. It was all he had. Neither kept Marguerite warm enough; she died a few months after him.
Louis: [Tapping Gabe on the shoulder.] Hey, did you leave Madeline any more than that? I left her my fame. Which is more than you could do.
Gabe: Madeline. A daughter of the prairies.
She was born in a Red River Cart, of a Scottish trader
And an Cree woman, somewhere on the wide lands
As the last great buffalo hunt came home
From Montana. Twelve hundred carts, Louis,
Of dried meat, and hides. One priest.
I was three, then, and rode with my parents
In another cart.
When I was twenty-one, I was a Dumont
There were none like us, on the prairie, but
The buffalo were gone.
Madeline, that young man would have hauled
A thousand carts for you, but all you asked
Was for a strong hand as a world rolled over us.
Louis : You outlived your wife. You took her into exile
in Montana.
Gabe: After we Métis lost the war, I hid Madeline
on an island. Then we made our way into Monta
na.
Early that November I looked out the window
To see our world had become white with snow.
I was newly an exile
You were in the ground, Louis
I was long ago, far away
Madeline was reading poetry in English, by the fire
She had the cough then
We both knew what that meant.
She read some Shelley, and Wordsworth
Trying to translate it into Cree and French for me
It made little sense
I sang her a Blackfoot song
She smiled at me, then we watched
Our last winter coming in.
Madeline died within a year of leaving Canada, of tuberculosis. She was gone. The buffalo were gone. The world didn’t need Métis any more. The white people had their eyes on the prairies. The Indians were all being herded onto the reserves. Us half-breeds - well, we were half-breeds.
Louis : We lost. I became history. You became a footnote. I hear you joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Circus. The one and only Gabriel Dumont, forgotten revolutionary of the plains.
Gabe: It was a job.
I remember the shooting. A lot of shooting.
There were horses galloping around and
Dust clouds rising and
Indians falling over
Kerplop. Kerplop.
Mostly Indians, of course,
Or anybody who looked enough like one
To qualify to be shot.
After a year, the excitement wore off
And I figured the good folks had had enough
Of the wild and wily Métis Gabriel Dumont.
I left Buffalo Bill’s show in Pennsylvania
Riding back west
Into my own sunset.
Frenzy and dust. Dead natives.
That was the problem;
It was just too much like my first
Wild West melodrama.
Louis: [Points to the clock] Time’s up. Play’s over. One parting thought?
If the soil heaves and we
Crawl out of the crypt
Covered in cobwebs and dust
Dazed in the sunlight…
Two good ol’ halfbreeds
Planning revolutions…
Put us back.
Put prairie willow through our hearts,
Duct tape over our mouths.
Gabe: Remember this
The prairies were made for love
Its days for humming of bees and laughter
In the coulees.
On long August days
Life is short, and every day
Is one less day for bumblebees and love.
Louis: If we do not offer love and laughter,
Put us back.
Gabe: And lock the door
More securely this time.
Louis: God calls. [Starts to leave.]
Gabe : One more song for my little play. Before you go.
They sing, to the tune of “Red River Valley”
There are ghosts in the winds of the prairies
There are bones in the black prairie loam
There’s a cry in the hearts of the Métis
For the loss of their wild prairie home
Sing the songs that are lost now forever
Sing songs that are over and done
We were the hope of the Métis
And the fire in the bright prairie sun
We are the bones in the soil of the prairies
We are ghosts in the winds of the night
We’re the song that is lost now forever
We’re the fire that once burned so bright
Sing the songs that are lost now forever
Sing songs that are over and done
We were the hope of the Métis
And the fire in the bright prairie sun
Louis bows to audience, leaves, spotlight stays on his exit point
Dim light on Gabe
Gabe : [removes hat]. One day, we were revolutionaries. The next, we were only history.
Suddenly the stage was empty
The audience filed out, leaving
One lone spotlight on the magician’s trapdoor
Behind the curtain
In the cobweb darkness
The stage hand, hat in hand, exits.
[Gabe exits. Fade to dark]
End
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