Authors: Peter Bowen
“You bet, Jim,” said Du Pré.
I still feel bad about busting him, thought Du Pré as he drove off. I always will.
D
U
P
RÉ PULLED HIS
car over to a turnout on the dirt road, high up on the Bench, to look down the high plains toward Toussaint and Cooper and the blue haze beyond. He could see fifty miles south and east from the shoulders of the Wolf Mountains.
He rolled a cigarette, lit it, walked to the edge of the scraped dirt where the fireweed rattled. Late fall, soon on winter. Hadn’t had a winter in a long time, but the summer had been cool and wet.
The winter right after the poor Métis fled south to escape the wrath of the English was the worst anyone remembered, 1886-87. That year there was no summer, two springs, the lilacs bloomed twice, some said because of the eruption of the volcano Krakatoa in the East Indies.
In December the winds howled high overhead, the air unstirred on the ground. The sky was pale gray and glittered. Snow began to fall, snow so fine that the cattle and horses inhaled it and froze their lungs and died of pneumonia. The temperature dropped to forty, fifty, sixty degrees below zero.
Then the Blizzard came.
The winds came.
Coulees a hundred feet deep filled with snow. Cattle wandered out into the flat white, sank into fluff. In the spring, the tops of the cottonwood trees had dead cattle in the forks of the branches.
Ninety percent of the range cattle in Montana died. The Texas herds had overgrazed the plains, too, so the cattle went into the winter lean and weak.
The Métis huddled in their tiny cabins, boiled moccasins for thin, stinking soup.
Corpses were stacked in the woodsheds, the ground was frozen many feet down.
Hard winter. There would be another someday.
Du Pré spat. He pissed, looking down at a couple of pickups racketing along the low road, one had a horse in back. Drivers were going too fast but everybody did here, you’d never get anywhere if you didn’t.
I drive too fast. Now where the hell is Benetsee? The old man came and went, dropped his riddles. The old fart knows something. If the Headless Man is Gianni Fascelli, is who killed him down there right now? Could I see him if I had my binoculars?
Play my fiddle at midnight in the graveyard, summon up the Headless Man, have him tell me who? And this Headless Man, what would he speak with?
A rifle sounded, far away. Up in the mountains. All the hunters from the Flat States come here, think the game feeds on the snow up top of the peaks or something. Very little game up there in the deep green trees. Nothing for them to eat. Down here, there is a lot for them to eat. The haystacks of ranchers, for one.
I ought to go hunt this weekend, make winter meat.
When Gabriel Dumont led the buffalo hunt, he wore his red sash. I’ll wear my red sash.
Benetsee. The prophets must have been a lot like him. No damn wonder folks killed them. Irritating sonsofbitches.
Where had Benetsee gone? Some city, sleeping in doorways in his old clothes, begging quarters?
I could find the old bastard, lock him in a room or something. Say, Benetsee, I got this wine out here, you tell me stories that I like, you get some. But not till I really like them damn stories.
I got no talent for being a bastard, torture a harmless old man. Leave that to Bucky Dassault, other helpful bastards. The Sheriff’s such a fool, he think Benetsee’s one too.
I got to find that old man, ask him, please, here, take this wine but tell me what you know. I won’t tell anyone else, I tell you before God (who is deaf, or was when my wife died) but I need to know.
Coyotes sing now, they make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, there. Real straight.
Du Pré looked down on some fine big country. He thought about the skreeking Red River carts, the people, the buffalo driven into stout log pens to be killed at leisure, the meat sliced off their bones in sheets a quarter-inch thick, hung on willow racks over fires, baled up and tied with sinew, bundles stacked in the carts arid then everybody turned around and went back north.
At night the fiddles came out, the people danced, the men smoked and played cards on a blanket.
They smoked that meat right down there, went round the mountains to the east, played the fiddle right down there, made babies, longed for home, the priest.
The Black Robes, they come, have incense, golden kingdoms up above. But what good are priests, anyway, won’t make medicine help you to steal more horses? Send smallpox to them damn Blackfeet and Sioux. Protestants even sorrier, not even incense, they get called Short Robes.
So I find that old man, see if maybe he tell me something.
’Sides I miss him, he comes from another time, like them buffalo hunters, like my grandfathers.
Red River.
O
LD
B
ENETSEE WAS AT
his shack, carving pipes from the red, close-grained stone quarried for five thousand years over near Pipestone Pass. He would fit them with a willow stem, hang a few chicken feathers on them, spread them on a blanket and wait for shoals of tourists.
Benetsee’s hands shook quite a bit, but when he bent to dig another bit of red stone out of the deepening bowl they didn’t.
“Ho Benetsee,” said Du Pré. He had a jug of cheap white wine in a paper sack. He felt like a turd.
The old man looked up and nodded.
“I been expecting you,” he said. “How are all your beautiful women: Jacqueline, Maria, that nice Madelaine?”
“Fine,” said Gabriel. “They ask about you some. Wonder if you all right, hope things go well for you.”
“I got no pretty women,” said Benetsee. He seemed relieved about it. “If I had one now I’d be doing too well. Better this way, I don’t have to wash so much.”
Scritch scritch on the pipe.
Fifty centuries of that sound. Make that a couple million years. Some old fart going scritch scritch on the whatever, punctuate his teasings of a younger fool. Lot of men, stand where I am now. This dust is full of them.
“You hear about I find these three skulls where there should be only two?”
Scritch scritch nod.
“Well,” said Du Pré, “what about that, you know?”
Benetsee looked up, head cocked, eye bright as a bird’s.
“Coyote tell me much,” said Benetsee, “but it very hard pick out just what he is saying, how much he is playing with me.”
Tell me about it, thought Du Pré.
Benetsee dug at the pipe bowl. He seemed to have forgotten that Du Pré was standing there.
“You want some wine?” said Du Pré. Now maybe you remember me.
“Good morning to drink wine,” said Benetsee, putting down his pipe, the little black awl with the deerskin wrapping the end held in the palm.
Du Pré handed Benetsee the jug.
The old man took a long pull of the gassy cheap wine. He belched and handed the jug back to Du Pré. A whiff of the wine hit Du Pré’s nose, his mouth ran water, he felt like throwing up.
I am drinking too much whiskey these days, Du Pré thought, I know better but when I drink a lot of it I don’t grind my teeth in my sleep so much.
“Have some wine, good morning for it,” said Benetsee. He looked far away, up to the Wolf Mountains. Little sharp face, Du Pré thought of the shrew’s skull in the coyote scat. In his pocket.
Du Pré choked down some. Jesus, like drinking bubble gum.
“Whew,” said Du Pré “you much man, drink that.”
“Poor man drink that,” said Benetsee. He looked at his fingernails, rimmed in black, clawed old hands, the veins and tendons seen easily through the transparent skin.
“So what you want to know?” said Benetsee. “I don’t know too much. Coyote knows a lot, but me, not too much.”
Du Pré felt the warm bloom of the wine in his stomach. A nice warm peaceful feeling, he sat down next to the old man, put his elbows on his knees, rolled a cigarette. Gave it to him, rolled another for himself, lit both.
“Brings me wine, brings me tobacco,” said Benetsee. “Hard to find a respectful young man these days.”
“The Headless Man,” said Du Pré, “how did his head get up in the mountains, in a place a goat wouldn’t have, next to a wrecked plane fell down so long ago they think maybe it just flew to heaven.”
Benetsee reached for the jug. Glug glug glug.
“Well,” said Benetsee, “somebody very angry, of course. So you kill someone, you put the head and hands with some other bones, let the magpies and coyotes and skunks stir them. So maybe no one will know, what happened.”
“I got that,” said Du Pré.
“How long your parents been dead now, Gabriel,” said Benetsee. “A bad day, that one.”
Very bad day. Papa drunk and Mama deaf, car stall on a railroad crossing, didn’t find a piece of either of them big enough to call Mama, Papa. Closed coffins at the funeral, coffins very light to carry, too.
Good people. Du Pré had loved them both. Killed while Du Pré was in basic training, Fort Ord. Du Pré, eighteen, only child. His mother always shamed she couldn’t have more babies, like a good Métis woman.
“You know,” said Benetsee, “most times there is a killing, there is a pretty woman in it somewhere, you know?”
Du Pré thought. His mama? Jesus, no, the two of them loved each other, make a pass at either, whoever, they wouldn’t even notice.
“What the hell you mean?” said Du Pré.
But the old man had picked up the pipestone again.
Scritch scritch.
“I
TELL YOU,
M
ADELAINE
, I like to strangle that old bastard,” said Du Pré. Diddle me out of that wine, leave me more confused than a newspaper.
“Well,” said Madelaine, “you men get crazy, kill each other over us, you know. But you right, I don’t see where he’s pointing.”
Early morning, her kids were stirring, time to get ready for school.
Du Pré rolled on his side, held her sweet warmth close.
“Got to cook them breakfast, see about their clothes,” said Madelaine. “Old Benetsee, he talk to me, maybe?”
“Don’t know.”
Madelaine nuzzled his neck.
“Long time ago,” said Madelaine. “Who around then? That old priest, Father Leblanc?”
Du Pré remembered. Father Leblanc had retired long ago, moved back up north to Canada, the fathers had a rest home there.
Red River.
Madelaine got up, Du Pré slept till the door banged to for the last time. He heard the grind of the school bus going off. Madelaine had four kids, they left Du Pré alone, he left them alone. But the oldest boy was needing a man to learn from.
I don’t know what to do for my daughters, thought I at least would not have to not understand a son, too. Jesus, she got three more of them. Life, it get you every time.
Du Pré dressed, walked to the kitchen, carrying his boots. Madelaine dished him up some scrambled eggs, salsa, a couple slices of her good bread with chokecherry jam.
Du Pré ate.
“I got some fence to fix,” he said, “check my place out.” My few cows, horses, brushed-up little creek. I fix it up, work hard, lose more money.
He drove home. Maria was gone, off to school, bad-ass girl on the Honor Roll. People she hung around with probably couldn’t read well enough to see her name, she’s safe.
What about all this.
Du Pré filled a pocket of his down vest with fencing staples, took a fencing tool, a shovel, a topper’s ax.
When he heaved against the rusty barbwire gate the top strand broke, so he had to go back and pull a coil of wire off the spool. He fixed the gate, shut it, began to slowly walk the fence. Do a mile or so today, then more sometime. If his cattle got out they would be hazed back by the neighbors. No bitching, no cattleman needs the brand inspector pissed off at him.
Du Pré topped a little rise, looked down, saw four of his neighbor’s steers at rest in his pasture. They got up when they saw him, trotted back home. Du Pré followed them to the downed fence. A post had rotted off, a cow had leaned against it until it snapped and the fence went down. Lots of tracks both ways.
I’d better fix this fence, here. Not too good a neighbor, me.
Du Pré cut a new post from a dead juniper, dug out a shallow hole, set and tamped the post. He stapled the wires back on.
The four steers looked glumly at him from the neighbor’s pasture.
Spoilsport.
Du Pré saw his horses, one was limping. He hadn’t worked his stock, they looked at him and trotted off, all but the one who was hurt in the foot.
“Tch tch,” Du Pré clucked, coming up to the gelding. The oldest one, twenty years, gentle old fellow.
Du Pré patted the horse’s neck. He lifted the left front hoof, saw the bad split.
Du Pré slipped his belt off, put it round the horse’s neck, led him back to the little tumbledown barn. Got to fix these hinges, too, whole place is slumped and tired.
Us Du Pré, we been here a while.
Du Pré found the old inner tube, the rope, the Epsom salts. He went to the house, made up a batch of warm water, poured in the salts. He carried the kettle back out to the barn and slipped the inner tube over the horse’s leg; tied it up, rope over the horse’s withers. Poured in the warm drawing water, the horse danced a little at the strange feeling.
“Hohoho,” said Du Pré. The horse stood, liking the warmth on his sore hoof and leg.
Du Pré left him there, went to the house for lunch. He found a can of sardines, can of tomatoes. What the West was built on, cowboys ate and drank these. Piles of rusty cans at every good place to stop and have lunch. Ghost meals.
Du Pré went to the living room, cluttered with the magazines Maria brought home, but clean. He looked at the pictures on the mantel. Catfoot and Maman. Maria. Jacqueline, big smile, first baby, boy of course, Gabriel, of course.
Du Pré at a fiddlers’ contest, first place, Du Pré half-drunk in the picture, little cheap trophy in his hand.
Picture of his father’s sister, Aunt Pauline, with one of her husbands.
Aunty Pauline, blond, brown-eyed, good-looking woman. Trouble woman, she’d had three husbands.
Aunty Pauline, used to ride trick horses in the rodeo.