The High Missouri (26 page)

Dylan flinched. What was wrong with Caro? Why didn’t this woman speak up?

“It is her time.”

“I won’t live,” she said simply.

Her face glistened with perspiration. She was wan, pale, suffering. She took Dylan’s hand and looked at him with supplicating eyes.

Then her body wrenched with pain.

The violence of the pain alarmed Dylan, and frightened him. How could people think suffering was ennobling? It was ugly.

“Of course you’ll be fine,” he stammered.

In her next calm moment she grasped his hands with both of hers. “Take care of the child,” she begged. “You, not my father.” The enigmatic Monsieur Troyes who was always gone anyway. “Take care of her.”

“
We’ll
take care of her,” he said gently.

She started to speak, but the next pain took her breath away.

“Get gone,” Dru said. He touched Dylan gently on the arm. “We have work to do.”

Dylan felt a rush of irritation at being kicked out. He looked at Anastasie questioningly.

She shrugged. “Dru knows what to do, not me.” At that moment Dylan was grateful Dru had learned to be a healing woman. He kissed Caro on the forehead and left.

“You are trespassing upon my quarters,” said Courtney, squeezing the words out one at a time and underlining each one. “I require you to be gone.”

Dylan didn’t explain. Courtney knew that Caro was delivering in there. You don’t explain things to arses. You just coerce them. Dylan stood in front of the door. The Balmat was gone to the kitchen for hot water, lots of it. Dylan could protect Caro against this one or any number of arses.

“If you persist,” Dylan said evenly, “I’ll kill you.” As he said the words, he raised both hands to his knives. He had a remarkable realization then. He meant his threat. Not in anger or ferocity or bluster. Partly in justice. Mostly in defense of what he loved.

Courtney must have seen something in Dylan’s eyes. He pivoted and stalked off.

Dylan took his hands off his knives. Something moved in him, like some music finding a new key, closer to the home key. He was a killer, potentially, a killer out of love.

Fine. That’s the way it was.

He thought fleetingly of Mr. Stewart, and felt sorry for the man.

Before long Dylan wished Mr. Courtney would come back. Just to have something to do, Dylan would kill someone. Just to get his mind off the bloody silence from inside that room.

Since the Balmat passed the water and rags through that door, no word came from inside the room. Even standing close, Dylan could hear nothing.

He paced the gallery. The Balmat leaned against the rail and watched his friend with a look of suppressed amusement. Whenever the Balmat said anything, Dylan silenced him with a murderous glare. How could this idiot make noise, Dylan asked himself, and risk covering sounds that would be precious?
Idiot!

He heard nothing, actually, until the door scraped. Anastasie stood there beaming. A tiny, naked infant rested in each of her arms. A boy and a girl. Twins.

Dylan staggered. His head whirled.

Twins. A boy and a girl. Harold and Lara.

“You may see her for just a moment,” Anastasie said gently.

At first he couldn’t see her. Dru was in the way, attending to something, and blood was shrieking at Dylan from everywhere in the room, on the bedclothes, on other sheets thrown off the bed, on rags heaped up, on Caro. He forced himself not to look at it, not to allow it into existence.

Dru stepped back, gestured Dylan forward. The sight of Caro sleeping scared him. She was wan, waxen. She looked relieved, but far from peaceful. Drained, and worse than drained. Desperate, half dead, withered, like fruit with the juice sucked out. What shocked him was that she looked ugly. Yes, his Caro. Limbs akimbo, body twisted, head thrown to the side too hard, face contorted. He wanted to straighten her up and then stroke her nurturingly, but he didn’t dare.

Anastasie reached around him, untied Caro’s nightgown at the bosom, reached to the end of the bed, picked up the two tiny people, Harold and Lara, and set them at Caro’s breasts. They nuzzled and nursed.

A chill flickered through him. The children were dark-complexioned, darker far than Caro. Perhaps they looked dark because they lay on Caro’s fair breasts.

Dylan wanted to jerk them away. He wasn’t glad to see his children nursing from their mother. He had a wild and irrational conviction that they were sucking her life out. He wanted to grab them and hurl them away.

He noticed that Caro’s eyelids were slightly open. He took her hand. Perhaps her face changed toward a smile, or at least softened. She gave his fingers the slightest squeeze.

Perhaps she drifted off to sleep again, perhaps not. After a few moments he felt her fingers tighten again, not affectionately this time. She looked into his eyes, and he saw awful, awful pain. “I won’t live,” she said.

“You must, you must,” he answered pathetically.

“It’s time to go,” Dru said firmly.

Caro wrapped her arms around the children where they suckled. “Take care of them,” she whispered. “Remember that they’re truly yours.”

“You’ll be fine,” Dylan urged.

Dru pushed him out the door.

Caro spoke very little during the next three days. With a kind of grace she permitted Dru and Anastasie to care for her, more for their sake than hers. Twice she told Dylan, “Lara looks so much like you.” He had no idea whether it was true, especially since the child was so dark-complexioned. Often Caro slept with her hand in Dylan’s. He sat beside her for hours on end, looking at her supplicatingly.

Harold and Lara nursed often, and that worried Dylan. He suggested that Anastasie get milk from one of the fort’s fresh cows. Anastasie did. Dylan sat holding the children, dipped a handkerchief in the warm milk, and squeezed it drop by drop into their mouths. Whenever Caro saw him doing that, she glared at Dylan and demanded to nurse them. He gave in because he didn’t want to spend her energy arguing.

Lots of the time she slept, sometimes in half delirium. She had a fever, which rose often and didn’t fall often enough. Dru did his best to keep her cool with river water, sometimes wrapping her in wet sheets. Caro didn’t seem to care what they did for her, as long as she could hold the children when she was conscious.

On the morning of the fourth day, Dylan was sitting with her in the predawn light. He got up to stretch, and stepped outside into the dawn air. In the glass of the window to her room he watched the sun come over the eastern horizon, a reflection smeared across each pane. He went back in, opened the curtains to let the sun in, and sat beside her. She seemed to be sleeping peacefully enough now. She’d had a hard night, turning and tossing and half crazy with fever.

The sun struck the wall above her bed. Dylan saw that in a few minutes it would slant down onto her form. He held her hand and waited for that moment, a beatification.

The sunlight came onto her body fully, and onto the tossed bedclothes. But it missed her face. He wanted to see her face shining in that golden dawn light. He waited, holding her hand, to see if the sunlight would shift slightly, or she might move down in bed.

He held her hand and waited. Held her hand and waited.

Reached out and put his hand below her nose. Felt nothing.

Touched her neck to feel her heartbeat. Felt nothing.

Understood.

Gently, tentatively, he slipped the necklace with his mother’s opal ring from around Caro’s neck. The slender gold chain was warm from the touch of her body. Suddenly, like life to death, it changed—it felt like a thread of icicle on his fingers. One lightninglike shiver jolted him.

With difficulty, in fear of its cold, he put the icy necklace around his own neck. With his own body he would keep it warm forever.

Then, like cold rain, the tears came.

They buried Caro Troyes on a mount above the river, north of the fort. Dylan refused to let her lie in the ground either post used as a cemetery. No, she lay in death as she had lived, alone. No one attended the little ceremony but Dylan, Dru, Anastasie, Saga, Lady Sarah, and the two children in Anastasie’s arms. Dylan resented Saga’s presence, but there was nothing he could do about it.

He read lines from Byron, slightly adapted:

I have not loved the world, nor the world me.

And:

                                          She stood

Among them, but not of them; in a shroud Of thoughts which were not their thoughts.

And his favorite:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep sea and music in its roar:

I love not man the less, but Nature more,

From these our interviews, in which I steal

From all I may be, or have been before,

To mingle with the Universe, and feel

What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.

Chapter Twenty-Three

At Dru’s insistence they set out downstream in canoes immediately after the funeral. Dylan didn’t know where he was going, but he was getting out of here, pressed no more by the obnoxious Courtney than his own wants. He didn’t want to see Fort Augustus or Edmonton ever again. Ever. They would always be for him the place where Caro’s spirit left her body.

He hardly knew what he wanted, about anything. He was numb and beyond numb. But he wanted out of here.

As they pushed away from shore, they saw smoke from the direction of Fort Augustus. Where the bank dropped low, they could see what was happening—the trading post was on fire in three or four places. Dylan and Dru looked at each other. Courtney was burning the NWC fort to the ground.

Frightened somehow, one of the children let out a cry. Anastasie cuddled him—it was Harold—and cooed at him.

The goat grunted. They’d bought a fresh nanny from Courtney to provide milk until they got back to the tribe. Every time Dylan thought of the goat, he felt disgusted. He seldom fed the children himself. Right now he could hardly bear to look at them.

What on God’s earth was he going to do?

It became the winter of his despair.

For the children’s sake, they spent the winter near Fort William, with Anastasie’s people. Dylan didn’t know what he wanted to do anyway, or where he wanted to go. Everywhere was the same to him, as long as Caro was nowhere.

The children fared dubiously on goat’s milk. On the trip east neither child seemed to gain weight properly, especially Harold, who was constantly sick, unable to keep milk down. Dru came up with a feeder that helped—he sewed a buffalo teat onto a buffalo bladder. The nursing bottle looked strangely primitive, but the children loved it. Dru made a couple more on the way to Fort William.

Once the group got to Anastasie’s Crees, they found a wet nurse, and both children improved.

Dylan was moody, lackadaisical, lost in depression. He seldom slept well and barely ate. The children lived with their nurse, a plump, jolly young woman, and he didn’t even go to see them every day. He lay around the lodge, near the fire, and stared through the smoke hole at the empty, empty sky. Empty because Caro was nowhere on the earth. He couldn’t explain it, even to himself. She had caused him the greatest pain he had known. And she had shown him himself. Not only in Byron’s verse—much more in the way she was with him. He thought about it and could find no better words than that. She saw his spirit as clearly and simply as others see a flowing spring or a gray stone or a piece of bark. The way she acted acknowledged it unmistakably, as people’s behavior shows they see a curve in the trail. No one else acknowledged it.

Dylan owed her all the joy and all the grief of his life.

He needed her.

She was gone, gone, gone.

He didn’t go on the fall hunts. He quit practicing with his knives. He quit keeping his journal. He nearly quit eating.

Dru tried to snap him out of it. The Druid said pointedly that without himself and Anastasie, the children’s godfather and godmother, Harold and Lara wouldn’t even be alive. Dylan just nodded. Anastasie blistered him for his seeming indifference to his children. He didn’t give a damn what she said.

Dylan never told them he wasn’t sure Harold and Lara were his children. For one thing, Anastasie kept on with Caro’s line, saying how much Lara looked like him. He couldn’t see it. He saw mostly how dark she was, darker even than Harold.

One evening in the lodge he spoke of going out into the great woods and not coming back. Said he’d heard freezing to death was pleasant, even euphoric.

Dru slapped him. No words at all, just a slap, neither hard nor soft.

A moment later Dylan apologized. After he spoke the words, he felt real to himself, a peculiar feeling, like his body really belonged to him and he could feel his fingers and toes and be alert or torpid all on his own. He apologized to Dru for his uselessness.

Feeling hungry for a change, he ate a little.

When Dylan finished, Dru asked him bluntly, “What are you going to do with your children?” Dru and Anastasie had asked, or hinted, a score of times over the winter. Dylan always just shrugged. He didn’t know.

He still didn’t know. He couldn’t bring himself to think. He depended on Dru and Anastasie for answers, mutely and helplessly, and for doing whatever needed to be done. Dylan was useless and willing to be useless.

It was Saga who came up with the idea that snapped Dylan back to reality. He suggested they fight.

Saga had learned to fight, to brawl, from a Metis whose name Dylan could never get. Saga had discovered that there were real techniques. You needed to know when to kick, how to kick, and when to keep your feet. Certain situations called for butting, others for throws. You hit with your elbows a lot and with your knuckles never. Frenchmen gouged and bit, but Saga wouldn’t.

The two young men practiced fighting in the snow. Dylan liked it, found something akin to his soul in its ugliness. He even liked the pain of getting bitterly cold hands and feet. He fantasized a lot about hurting Saga, but he held back.

Many techniques were purely defensive, Saga showed him. These are the moves against a man who charges you with his head. This is how you counter the kick with both feet. If someone gets hold of your arm for a body throw, this is how you go with the throw and end up on your feet. It was intriguing. It was fun. It was nasty.

One day when they came into the lodge from their practice bout, Dylan suddenly knew what to do with the children. He looked Dru in the eye. “We’re going to take them to Montreal,” he said. “Put them in school. Raise them civilized.”

Which meant, among other things, confront Ian Campbell, the children’s grandfather. Confront and somehow come to terms with the old man. In his mind’s eye Dylan could see only that trickle of blood, running down the side of his father’s nose, from where Dylan struck him.

That night, before supper, Harold started coughing. Dru touched him, felt his fever, and immediately knew it for what it was, the coughing sickness the white people gave the red people, now common in every village.

Dru had seen the change in Dylan. The lad let his children into his imagination—he envisioned life bringing up two children—and immediately he let them into his heart. It was a grand thing. Dru feared it was too late for Harold. Yes, they recovered sometimes. Sometimes they were sick for a couple of years and died. Dru had seen them get sick one evening and be gone the next morning.

The child coughed all through the first night, a soft, gentle, half-audible whimper, like seeping blood. Dylan held Harold in his arms—his
son
—and rocked him and cooed at him and patted him gently when the coughs came. Dylan wiped the child constantly with a damp cloth to keep the fever down. He murmured that he would take care of Harold all through the winter, the spring, however many seasons or years were necessary. Dru hoped they would be necessary.

He went outside and raised his arms to the night sky and spoke silently to the powers of life, the power that makes clouds blow and rain fall and resides in all creatures and makes them grow. He didn’t know what to say, because he hurt so terribly. He asked that the power living in Harold rise up and fight. He thanked the power for being in himself, and in those he loved, and simply for being.

Harold coughed all night and all day, and grew paler and weaker. Dylan held him and rocked him. Dru could see him reach for the hope that had been inborn and he’d let get away, but he found only blackness. Dru went outside several more times, yes, to speak to the powers, but also to remove himself just a little from the pain.

The second night, Dylan never did put Harold down. He held both of the children a lot, talking to them and for them, making up the conversation they couldn’t have yet with each other. The lad knew what was important now. It was a terrible way to learn.

Harold coughed very little that night, only little whimpers, really, but his fever raged. When he was hot, he was squirmy, uncomfortable. Twice he cooled off and got peaceful.

The wet nurse came to feed the children, and Dylan gave up Harold very reluctantly. Harold would eat almost nothing. Finally Dylan took the child back greedily. Harold fell asleep immediately, comfortable in his father’s arms. Twice he whimpered, but he stayed asleep.

About mid-morning he took a deep breath and suddenly opened his eyes. Dylan saw how bright his eyes were, and saw—or imagined—a hint of a smile in them. Harold waved his arms, almost like he was clapping his hands. He wiggled. He made a speechlike sound, followed by what sounded like a chuckle.

Then his body arced and twisted, like he was having a spasm. For a long moment he was rigid. Then, abruptly, Harold went soft against Dylan’s chest.

Dylan put a palm on the child’s chest. It didn’t rise or fall. He put a finger beneath Harold’s nose. Harold Yves Davies was dead.

Dylan nodded and followed Dru outside. Anastasie and Lady Sarah were wailing. Dylan didn’t care what he did right now. It was all the same, and always would be the same.

Dru was carrying the pipe bag that always hung in an honored place in his lodge, the one he smoked ceremonially when they met Indians, and sometimes by himself. He was going to pray, or perform a ceremony, whatever. Dylan didn’t care. It was all the same.

He followed Dru to a little rise and stood there stupidly while Dru lit the pipe and sent the smoke to the four winds, the earth, and the sky. Dylan could hardly see Dru for the awful pictures in his mind. Since it was the dead of winter, Harold would have to be put high on a scaffold, wrapped in blankets and hides and left there alone in the cold of the weather and the cold of infinity.

Words from Dru’s ceremony or prayer or whatever it was came to Dylan’s ears. He heard thanks. Then his mind would bolt away to Harold, being picked at by birds, his skin being dried by the sun and the winds, his skull showing through.

Words of thanks. Thanks to the earth. Thanks to the sun. Thanks to the very winds that would desiccate…

The man was mad. Not a word of grief or loss or pain.

Thanks to the powers of life, he heard Dru say. Thanks to the powers of growth. Thanks to the forked, the four-legged, the winged, the crawling and burrowing things, the creatures that swim, to the rooted, to all living creatures. To water. To Mother Earth and Father Sky.

It was all thanks. In his anguish, in this havoc and devastation, thanks seemed infinitely peculiar to Dylan.

Thanks again—Dylan heard his own name mentioned, and Lara’s and Anastasie’s, and others’, but he was shivering, shivering in the aloneness that his son now felt He heard Harold’s name, and heard Dru say thank you for the gift of his life, and of their time with him.

Thanks for warmth, for sound, for taste, for color, for the sight of the eyes. For the sight of the dreaming eye. For imagination. For feeling. For the gift of being alive.

Thank you, said Dru, the four winds, Mother Earth, Father Sky, all living creatures, and all the things that are.

Peculiar, yes, very peculiar, but Dylan did feel, in the wasteland of his soul, a small, warm, healing trickle.