The High Missouri (18 page)

It was: What’s different? What’s different about this act of sex?

He thought of Fore, and that didn’t help.
He
was different. Like a reflected glint of sunlight it hit him, and he knew absolutely. He was happy. Now, he was happy. Then, even satiated, he was miserable.

Before, he felt wrong, grievously wrong. This, with Caro, was right, unmistakably right, overwhelmingly right. He knew it deeply. He was happy. It was his new, more powerful self. Which she had brought forth. He looked into her eyes with gratitude, and smiled his buoyant gladness.

She nicked her head forward, avoided his lips, and teased his ear with her tongue.

He chuckled.

He rolled over her for another moment of rightness.

Chapter Sixteen

The days of the journey to Rocky Mountain House were their honeymoon. Dylan and Caro were playful, daring, outrageous. They rutted. They were more intimate spiritually even than physically—they shared far-ranging talk, sang, told every sort of joke, ribald and otherwise, talked about their childhoods, reminisced about the painful awkwardness of adolescence, spoke their hearts about the awfulness of their home life.

The talk was Dylan’s father, Caro’s mother. Dylan confessed his fear of the remote, domineering Ian Campbell. Caro spoke of the loneliness of being an only child, her refusal to learn her place, as her mother expected, her rebellion against the role the world set down for a half-breed girl. And of her mother’s premature death, and of the months spent weeping. And of her vision—that she could go to England to be educated. Her maternal grandfather had left a small legacy. She begged her father for the use of it. Yves Troyes, preoccupied with rising in his business, let her go willingly enough, and off Caro went to England.

Yes, they were outrageous. They nearly pretended her father and Bleu did not exist. They rode and walked and sat at dinner with their eyes linked, intimate, exploring. Dylan began to believe the old love poems that said the eye is the window of the soul. When they looked into each other’s eyes, it was intimacy, seduction, mating of the spirit.

The most evident outrage was that Caro asked her father to leave the tent and let Dylan take his place. She asked graciously, Troyes stammered out yes, and Bleu guffawed. It was a fine moment.

Dylan loved her. He had never imagined love could feel like this. He never even asked himself whether what they were doing was sinful. It was so clearly grand, lovely, the way people were meant to live.

He did wonder sometimes how she could feel so sure, always, of what her higher self was. She was so young, nineteen. Yet she seemed more experienced, more mature, more fully fledged with her new self than he was with his own. It’s all right, he told himself. Dylan Davies, you’re still feeling your way. He watched her. Always she simply looked inside herself and saw truth. Wonderfully, she always heeded.

Dylan cherished her. While he was learning to listen, his Caro was going off like one of those Chinese rockets he’d read about. She would make a brilliant streak against the sky of life, this woman. She lived from her depths. He admired her as much as he loved her. He would streak the same sky, parallel to her, or intertwined.

He was learning. Every noon, while she sketched, he wrote in his journal. He wrote an odd kind of journal, not what was happening today, but the story of his years at home, his family life, his time at school, his job, his relationships with people. He would show her his pages at night, by the fire, and she would ask questions. Luminous questions. It was wonderful what she could ask that would open the windows of his soul. Her questions helped him begin to see himself. His father lived in dread of everyone—fear ran his life. Philomene, the housekeeper, had loved Dylan and helped him grow. Mr. Johnson, the teacher who acted so helpful, was in fact very manipulative. Dylan had always resented the subtle, almost invisible superiority of Claude MacDonald.

Caro would ask him questions about what he wrote, and suddenly he saw into it, as though murky water turned clear, and knew the truth. And then he could write the truth. She thought he was meant to be a writer, like Byron. Writing was a way of stripping the soul naked, she said, before the world.

He thought that, empowered by her, he could be a writer.

He remembered Dru’s story about the truth stone. There was a magic stone in Wales, the tale went, that gave any man who touched it the truth about himself. When you laid your hand on that stone, your heart was revealed to you. Dru said it was like hearing the music of your own soul, always there, but until now inaudible.

Caro was his truth stone. When he looked into her eyes, he knew his own heart.

Though he often felt tentative in his new power, it was already transforming his life. He was courteous to Yves Troyes without deference, and found he enjoyed the man’s company more. He asked questions of Bleu and learned the ways of the mountains without feeling like an oaf, and he noticed that Bleu now treated him like a man. He did not ask Caro for conversation, for time, for love. He joined with her spontaneously, easily, in these fruits of their two beings. It was natural and appropriate. He was claiming his own manhood.

He thought of Dru a lot. He’d love to see Dru now, and have him meet Caro. Dru would love the way he was coming into his own, the way he was learning to see with his dreaming eye.

One night he worried about the teachings of the Church. He reflected on how it had nurtured his decency, his consideration, his awareness of others, his compassion, his idealism, his desire to be fully a
human
being, not a beast. It made him fretful. He lay awake next to Caro. The Church condemned what he was doing—there was no way around that.

As soon as they got moving the next morning, he took the risk and asked Caro what she thought. Wonderfully, she offered some good advice from one of her teachers. The Old Testament, said this teacher, was essentially made void by the New Testament. The Old Testament taught a list of prohibitions. Thou shalt not this, thou shalt not that. It wasn’t wrong, but was a small view for those who really want to
live
.

“I’m no scholar,” she said, “but I believe what Miss Youngman taught me. The message of Jesus of Nazareth in the New Testament throws the Old Testament over. You are the son of God, and He is within you. The guiding force of your life should not be a set of rules, but the inner sense, the voice of the God within you. And you hear that voice as love. Follow the voice of love.”

The two of them agreed to reread the Gospels when they had the chance. “I think we’ll find,” she said, “that Jesus Christ is the greatest of revolutionaries.”

Every day Dylan talked to Caro for hours in a state of high excitement. Every day he wrote in his journal. Every night he lay with her and explored new worlds of emotions.

On the next to last day he wrote,

I know now there is a larger platform to play upon, manhood. And here a man needs to step beyond the boundaries that children required for their growing up, the mere codes of society. Here he must both look into himself and out at this grand theater, this human society upon the earth, and decide what he could be on this most fascinating and infinitely complicated stage.

No, not decide. Discover. I must look within to see the truth. I have no idea what this truth is, but I know where to find it.

The last night before they got to the fort, Dylan and Caro wrapped up in blankets away from camp. They wanted to see the stars without interference from the fire. Dylan could never get over how many stars jammed the sky, here far from cities, in the great western wilderness.

They made love first, and then nestled and nuzzled and looked at the sky and talked for hours. The Big Dipper said half the night was gone before Dylan got the courage to speak what was on his mind.

He took the chain of German silver from around his neck. He looked at the fire opal in the dark. Strangely, in the dark the stone looked like a dark spot in the ring, a kind of hole, utterly without light, much less fire. For a moment he felt something being sucked out of his heart.

He risked it. He took the ring off the chain and handed it to Caro. She was solemnly quiet as he got tinder from his pocket, made a tiny blaze, and held the ring over it. Now the fire opal glowed—will-o’-the-wisp light shone within it.

Caro’s eyes glowed too.

She kissed him. She moved her body against his.

“It was my mother’s,” Dylan said, beginning to feel aroused.

“I know,” she said, smiling. “You told me.”

She was making damned sure he got aroused.

“It’s all I have from her.” Caro rolled him on top of her. “The only thing.”

She held the ring with both hands in front of his face.

“Yes,” she said. She pulled him into her body.

“Will you accept it?”

“Yes,” she whispered. She was making him feel incredible.

“Will you wear it on your fourth finger?” he asked.

“Yes,” she breathed, and slipped it onto the ring finger of her left hand.

“Will you marry me?” he asked.

She pulled his face down and kissed him hungrily.

“Yes,” she said.

She thrust several times, and Dylan cried out.

They arrived at Rocky Mountain House just before dark on an evening that was deeply and peacefully cold. Arrangements were made hurriedly, and Dylan was pleased when Caro told Captain Chick gently, “I prefer not to share lodgings with my father but to room alone.” He smiled at her with his eyes, but she made no response.

Captain Chick made a show of being accommodating. Of course, arrangements would be exactly as his guests liked, there was plenty of room, the Indian women would help them get settled, and dinner would be laid out in two hours. They must allow him to show them the hospitality of Rocky Mountain House.

Dylan was slightly disconcerted to find that he was on the gallery in a room with Bleu, next to all the rough trappers, while Caro was all the way across the quadrangle beside the main apartments, and her father next to her. Like segregation. But he was an agile fellow, Dylan thought, and would overcome small obstacles.

He was feeling uncertain of himself tonight. He didn’t know why.

At dinner Captain Chick was expansive and entertaining. A big mulatto, a mixture of white, red, and black races according to the tale, well over six feet and surely fifteen stone, he seemed huge and dominating at the table. He wore a smart scarlet military coat with gold braid, stovepipe hat, and black breechcloth. As they came in to dinner, he took off the hat and revealed a gleaming head, shaved except for a topknot and braid. On his wrists dangled showy bracelets of gold engraved with intricate patterns Dylan couldn’t see clearly. Around his neck hung a
gage d’amour
, from one of what must be a legion of lovers. A necklace of huge claws of the grizzly bear lay atop the
gage
, a boast of his courage. Under the stiff coat, which did not meet in the middle, he wore no shirt, and his broad chest gleamed—Dylan wondered if he oiled it. Since the breechcloth exposed a lot of dark leg and bottom, the overall effect was vulgarly carnal, Dylan thought—it reeked of the rutting bull.

He was cordial. Caro laughed gaily at his witticisms, and Troyes seemed eager to be ingratiating. Yet it seemed to Dylan the impersonal cordiality of the man who holds power over you, the teacher who graciously tells you that you failed, the executioner who offers you a last cup of tea, even the owner who plays with the monkey in its cage. Captain Chick did not so much entertain people as capture them, charm them into his sway.

Caro was on the left of the swarthy half-breed, her father to her left. To the Captain’s immediate right sat a tall, handsome Indian woman, very dark-skinned, who seldom opened her mouth but wore a fashionable gown that showed her bosom enticingly. Though Captain Chick ignored her, surely she was his mistress. Dylan sat beside this woman, at the end of the large table.

The Captain commanded up a feast—hot, buttered bread, boiled squash, roasted pumpkin, baked lake trout, and boudins, whatever they were. Captain Chick told stories and jokes about the English, who seemed a convenient butt for everyone.

There were no Englishmen at hand. The Captain’s clerk was a thin Scot named MacDougal who seemed to have little to say but “Sod the English.” MacDougal was small and dark and had a strange smile, as if he shared guilty knowledge with everyone. Next to MacDougal sat his wife, a tiny woman approaching middle age, probably older than her husband. She wore a dry expression and did not participate in the revelry. Directly across from her sat the smith, whose name Dylan never heard, and a woman fairer than he, though surely of mixed blood. When she did not have silverware in her hands, she did her knitting, and paid no attention whatever to the proceedings.

Captain Chick leaned close to Dylan’s ear to explain the subtlety of the boudins to him before they tried them. They were something like the English or Scottish black pudding, the Captain said, but Dylan wasn’t familiar with those either. The cook took the part of the buffalo entrails that had this nice, fleecy fat—Captain Chick pointed—cut it into portion-sized lengths, turned it inside out so the fat would be inside, and stuffed it with chopped tenderloin and certain secret seasonings. Then she tied it off on both ends like a sausage and roasted it a long time.

“A specialty of our hosts the Bloods,” he said. The Blood Indians were cousins of the Piegans. Biting into a sausage, he winked at Dylan, as in complicity. Captain Chick was a man who celebrated his own huge appetites, and expected you to enjoy watching.

Dylan tried the sausage cautiously. He didn’t know why it required such a sale. It was the best meat he’d ever tasted.

After dinner Captain Chick served some whiskey, rougher, rawer than Dylan was used to, clearly the stuff they traded to the Indians. He gave a one-man entertainment for his guests, with stories that showed himself, the big, swaggering half-breed, as the comic hero. Dylan was irritated to see Caro look enamored of this figure the Captain was presenting her, this mesmerizing illusion.

One story thrilled and frightened Dylan. To the north, beyond Lake Sophia, according to Captain Chick, lay great reaches of glacier. Once he’d taken a party of two onto the glacier, for no reason at all, except to let him brag he knew every inch of his territory, and for the general hell of it. Captain Chick was a man who swore in front of women and managed to seem charming while he did it.

The three spent the day winding their way among the great crevasses. When you looked down into them, said the Captain, they grew bluer and bluer with every few feet, until they finally became so enticing a deep aquamarine, they became seductive—you wanted to feel their cold embrace. The men peered at the strange
seracs
, sculptures shaped by the wind from snow-ice, and walked around cubes of ice as big as palaces.