thirty-one

Dirk Skye heard Reilly’s ranch wagon before he saw it. The cold had congealed its axle grease so that the wheels protested. He stepped outside, along with the Métis women who were among the refugees at Reilly’s hog farm.

Reilly was steering the wagon toward the cabin. Dirk could see the wagon was burdened. Reilly and two of the Métis men had left with some cooked mutton and a heap of ancient canvas; he was returning alone with some bodies lying in the wagon box.

There were two of them. One wore an ancient gray union suit and his feet were bare. The other was a woman, also barefoot, wearing a thin cotton night dress. Dirk crowded close, along with the others. The two lying in the wagon were Lorenz Sylvestre and his wife Maude. Cold had killed them. There was little or nothing between the arctic winds and their flesh. It had been a slow, miserable, cruel death.

Reilly tugged the lines and the wagon creaked to a halt. Some of the Métis women moaned. The men stared silently.

“We found some of the half-breeds,” Reilly said. “Eight of them, all froze solid. The boys with me, they loaded these two here, and they went looking for live ones, taking the meat and rags with them. So I came back with these two.”

“These are Lorenz and Maude Sylvestre. They had a farm over in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains. Raised their own food, got burnt out but went back to start over.”

Reilly jumped off the wagon. “I don’t want their story,” he said. “All I get is trouble.”

The men stared. A woman approached timidly and ran a hand over Maude’s cheek. The face was blue, the flesh frozen hard.

Lorenz had tried to walk her to some shelter, somewhere. Bain’s cowboys had burnt the place again. There were more people somewhere, alive or dead.

Reilly stomped into the cabin and slammed the door behind him. Whatever might happen next was up to the refugees crowded there.

The bodies would keep.

Dirk unbuckled harness, freed the dray, and led it to the pen. One of the Métis took over, rubbing the horse, forking prairie hay into a manger. But the bodies lay in the wagon, rebuking them all. Sylvestre’s eyes were open; he stared upward at nothing. Maude looked simply to be asleep.

And so the wagon remained, the Métis caught in their own silence, and Dirk caught in his. No one wanted to make any decisions. It still was fall; the earth would not yet be frozen. A grave could be chopped out of the cold turf, a grave deep enough to keep Reilly’s hogs out.

He remembered Lorenz, hearty and brave, he and his family refugees from the Red River Settlement, people who had been in the United States for many years. Their farm was operating even before the Custer battle of 1876. But the enemy turned out not to be Indians but Yank cattlemen moving in and usurping all the land. These Métis had been subsistence farmers, growing their own food, selling a little, harming no one, benefiting many.

One of the women brought an ancient blanket and tenderly drew it over Lorenz and Maude, tucking it in as if it would warm them. Another of the women brought a small dark crucifix, which she laid on Maude’s breast.

Dirk still hadn’t mastered the names of all these people, but one of the men he knew as Francoise addressed him in that mostly French tongue. “Pardon, monsieur, would you ask our benefactor, him who is in the cabin, whether we might use his ox or a mule? We wish to take our beloved to Lewistown, where they will make coffins and we can bury them in a blessed way.”

Dirk nodded, headed for the cabin, asked Reilly, who glowered a moment and agreed.

A few minutes later, with an ox yoked to the wagon, the Métis, with Dirk along, headed south along an ice-patched road, the wagon complaining, the Métis men and women silent, wrapped mostly in black. With a slow ox, it would be a long walk. But the woodcutters could fashion a coffin, and maybe there could be some sort of service there. Some, at least, would know the Sylvestres, who had supplied produce to Lewistown its entire life.

By the middle of the day they had raised Lewistown and steered the wagon directly to the Trouffant place—and Therese. He wished he might see her in happier circumstances. The procession had taken on the nature of a cortege, the Métis men and women walking on either side of the wagon with its cold burden.

Armand Trouffant was shattering firewood as they drove in, his woolen cap pushed back from his bronzed face. He stopped, then walked directly to the procession, a single glance telling him everything. He lifted the woolen cap from his head, let the ox-drawn wagon rumble by, and followed it to the door of his cabin, where Therese stood, waiting for whatever was walking in her direction.

“Sylvestre!” Trouffant said. “Ah, Dieu!”

“Would you build us coffins?” asked Francoise.

“At once. But tell me…”

The Métis shared the news. Dirk understood most of it. Reilly had found them, brought them back. The others of the household would be straggling in.

“Froze to death,” Francoise said. “Sans shoes, sans shirt, sans dress, sans pantalones, sans fire, sans food, sans shelter.”

“Who?” Trouffant asked, a wrath blistering his face.

“It is unknown.”

Trouffant glared. “It is known perfectly well.”

He eyed the assemblage. “Mesdames, my cher Therese will brew tea for you. Please warm yourselves. Messieurs, we must saw planks.”

That’s how the next hours went. Dirk and the rest steadily sawed planks from the logs, which rested on a high cradle so two men operating a bucksaw could chew through the wood. By late in the afternoon enough sawn wood was readied to build two coffins.

By late afternoon, others of the Métis had arrived. The miller, Poule Blanc, and his wife Cherie appeared, along with a dozen Métis refugees they were harboring. All of them paused at the wagon out front, made the sign of the cross, and entered the somber cabin. Still other Métis arrived, from who could say where? Dirk marveled. They seemed connected by some sort of moccasin telegraph. They filled Trouffant’s cabin and wood yard. His sons Beau and Martin showed up with a load of wood, and eyed the burdened farm wagon somberly.

Dirk watched Therese welcome the Métis, boil more water, brew more tea. Her lips formed a thin straight line, compressed with sadness. She barely glanced at Dirk, and yet she was accepting him. Her anguish was palpable to him, and he wished he could help in some way, but she was caught in a grief that belonged to her own people. She who had come to build a church was burying its parishioners. She looked oddly beautiful to him, as if the more sorrow that was placed on her slim shoulders, the richer and sweeter was her face and upright bearing.

As the day waned, the Métis men fitted their planks into a double coffin, narrow and square but sturdy, fastened with mortise and tenon. It was as if these people were born to shape wood. By the light of lanterns, they lowered Lorenz Sylvestre and Maude Sylvestre into their casket and anchored the top. They eased the double coffin into the wagon.

But the task was not ended. The men gathered shovels while Therese wrapped herself in a cape and a black hat. Dirk joined them. He wanted to help dig the graves. It was important to him. Therese joined him without saying a word, and Dirk sensed that this was an important thing to her, as well as to him.

She led them all to the dark slope where the ruins of the church were scattered, and then to a far corner of the lot she had staked out.

“This will be the sacred ground,” she said.

So there would be a churchyard cemetery, and the Sylvestres would be the first to lie in it.

The burly Métis measured a double width grave and scraped the topsoil away. And then each man present, in turn, dug a few minutes. It was a ritual. Each would contribute to the grave; each would partake of the mourning. The spade came to Dirk, and he bit into the cold earth, worked past a rock, and pitched the bitter soil aside. There was a strange power in it, as if this were a sacred act that bound him to the dead, and to these people beside him who were sharing the toil. And to Therese. With each shovelful of earth he unloosed from its primordial bed, he found himself becoming more Métis, and he could not explain it. Their blood was not his, and yet it was.

It consumed an hour. But when all was done, a rectangular hole pierced the earth in the rear corner of the churchyard, and the party walked quietly through an inky night, past the lively saloon district, to the Trouffants’ wood yard to await the dawn, and that ceremony that would lay the dead to eternal rest.

There was stew awaiting them all, for the Métis women had been busy at Trouffant’s stove. Outside, resting on the wagon, were the Sylvestres. In the morning, one of Trouffant’s draft horses would be hitched. Poule Blanc and his people returned to their own place, and the rest settled down to a night on the floor, in whatever blankets might be found.

Dirk caught Therese just before she disappeared behind her wall of blankets.

“Have you a priest for tomorrow?” he asked.

“Non, Dirk. Maybe you will?”

“Me?”

“You are the teacher.”

“But … me? I don’t know anything.”

She smiled. “All the better, Monsieur Skye. Just talk English. No one will understand a word. Like Latin.”

“Some solace that is!”

But she had slipped into her alcove. He found a corner near the stove where he could stretch out. It was going to be a long night. And in the morning he’d follow Therese to some place and deliver a funeral to Métis who knew some French, plus some Cree, and very little English, and probably a little of the mass. Dirk thought he’d try French, if he could think of something to say. But it could be short. A prayer and a benediction.

Dawn was a long time coming, and the hard floor left him bruised. The dozen or so people in the cabin, snoring, coughing, rising in the night, didn’t help matters at all. But he would endure.

No sooner had the sun whitened the eastern sky than the procession started through slumbering Lewistown. There was that about it. Few people were out and the mercantile was not yet open.

He spotted a man riding a mule, slapping its rear with his reins, while flopping about in a most unseemly manner. The rider proved to be Reilly, who slowed the heaving mule and settled into a walk beside Dirk.

“Made it,” he said. “I’ll recite the service.”

“You?”

“What do you think this is, eh?” He waved some sort of breviary or text at Dirk.

“You? Are you ordained?”

Reilly grimaced. “Don’t ask. Don’t say a bloody word. You’re going to translate into French. I’m going to do it my way. And if you ask any more questions I’ll consign you to hell.”

They cleared Lewistown and headed up the long grade toward the churchyard. It would be a graveside service, then, Dirk thought.

But it wasn’t. In the ruined rectangle where Therese’s church had started to rise, the Métis had prepared an open-air altar, and below it rested the casket, the morning sun illumining one side of it.

Therese’s church would serve for the first time.