Blue Ravens: Historical Novel (29 page)

The Banquet Français menu was printed on deckle-edge paper in fancy calligraphy. The title,
Soldiers of the Fur Trade
, and four names,
Lawrence Vizenor
,
Basile Hudon Beaulieu
,
Aloysius Hudon Beaulieu
,
Patch Zhimagaanish
were printed on the cover, and inside with the actual menu were the names of the invited guests and banquet storiers. That invitation became a historical document of the reservation and the end of the war.

I could pronounce most of the descriptive names of the four courses printed on the menu. The French banquet was our first country dinner, the sublime irony of a fur trade legacy and a federal reservation. Mostly we had ordered omelets and sausage at the Café du Départ, Café de Flore, and Café du Dôme. Nothing we ate was ever fancy or even the daily fare of peasantry. Marie Vassilieff had served roast turkey and potatoes at her atelier in Paris.

Leecy organized the elaborate banquet celebration because he honored veterans, of course, and because he was very close to our uncle Augustus Beaulieu. The Hotel Leecy was always advertised on the front page of the
Tomahawk.
Augustus and John had shared some business interests, commercial trade, and land development on the reservation, but that remained a mystery.

Messy prepared and two native waiters served four courses at the Banquet
Français. She had served a similar dinner four years earlier in the hotel when we were mere stable boys. We were twenty years old at the time and drank the Green Fairy, the banned absinthe, for the first time that night. I remembered the stories about traders and the federal agent that were told by Augustus and Odysseus.

Odysseus was rather mystical as he told the stories of tricky commerce to secure four bottles of wine from France. Messy stored the bottles on crushed ice, and on cue with the first course she rounded the table and poured
Château La Tourelle
, a white wine from Bordeaux. John Leecy raised his glass to honor the three veterans at the table, and then he read out loud my story about the death of Ignatius Vizenor.

Private Ignatius Vizenor and the Hundred Eighteenth Infantry Regiment
advanced with artillery and heavy tank support early that rainy morning, Tuesday, October 8, 1918, sixty-two days into the Hundred Days Offensive. Ignatius was shot in the chest by an enemy machine gun. He collapsed and died slowly on a cold and muddy verge near a series of trenches east of Montbréhain,
France
.

Silence, and then the trader teased me about the words “muddy verge.” The tease was perfectly timed to relieve that solemn moment, and the memories of our dapper cousin. The wine was delicate, exceptional, and the taste reminded me of Paris. Aloysius saluted the trader, and as a gesture of gratitude he promised to carve more blue raven pendants. My brother had not painted or mentioned the blue ravens since we boarded the ship at Brest, France.

John Leecy, the
vin blanc
, and later the moonshine were praised many times that summer night, and the quirky scenes of ironic stories transformed the mundane cast of the reservation. Aloysius declared that Sergeant Sorek, the man who had ordered us on risky missions as scouts, was more humane than the federal agent. Doctor Mendor was more inspired in his tribute to the soldiers and recited a few lines of poetry from
Leaves of Grass
by Walt Whitman.

The moon gives you light,
And the bugles and the drums give you music,
And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans,

My heart gives you love.

Messy changed the solemn mood as she sounded a chime and marched into the dining room with the first course of the Banquet Français. She wore a thin black gown, black apron, a blue cape, and bound her black hair with a thick white turban, a very exotic pose in any great restaurant.

The first course was
Soupe de Poissons
, or puréed fish soup with sunfish, perch, and crappies, and stewed with fennel, tomatoes, garlic, orange peel, and black pepper. The soup was served with fresh butter and warm baguettes. Animosh caught the fish that very day at Bad Boy Lake.

Messy told the first story that night about the federal agent as she poured more wine, and as the waiters removed the soup bowls. Foamy had tracked the scent of prohibited alcohol that morning to the kitchen of the Hotel Leecy. The agent had an acute nose for the wine in the
Coq au Beaulieu
, the main course of the banquet. The red wine, sliced onions, celery, carrots, garlic, smoked thick bacon, and peppercorns were simmered with two chickens. Later the chickens were garnished with baby onions, mushrooms, and parsley.

Messy raised a cleaver and shouted at the agent that she would chop his skinny
niinag
right down to the short hairs and throw it to the dogs if he ever came sniffing around the kitchen again. Foamy protected his crotch with both hands, turned and hurried back to the government house. Misaabe announced with a tricky sense of native stories that only a rabid dog would eat a federal pecker.

Messy and the waiters served
Coq au Beaulieu
, the main course, or
plat principal
, and with salads and fresh vegetables on the side. The
Truffade
, a potato cake with cheese and bacon,
Poireaux Vinaigrette
, leeks with shallots, chopped boiled eggs, cider vinegar, mustard, and parsley,
Petits Pois à la Française
, sweet, fresh green peas with butter and sugar, and
Fèves à la Tourangelle
, baby lima beans, bacon, butter, baby onions, chives, and parsley, were so distinctive and delicious that each vegetable on the menu could have been the third, fourth, fifth, and other courses at the Banquet Français. Lima beans were a substitute for the
fèves
, fava or broad beans, because no one on the reservation had ever heard of fava beans or the country recipe. Messy smiled as she circled the table and related that fava beans were colonial not fur trade stories.

John Leecy poured out Wiser's rye whiskey, his favorite from Ontario,
Canada, in thick glasses with the third course of cheese, a special selection as usual from the Marin French Cheese Company in California.

Odysseus, Catherine Heady, and Doctor Mendor were heavy whiskey drinkers. John Leecy was a connoisseur of singular white lightning, and later the moonshine drinkers were extremely pleased to savor Cape Breton Silver, a special raw moonshine distilled from potato skins in Nova Scotia, Canada. The moonshine was served from a mason jar and with no label. My tongue hurt, and my eyes smarted over a torture taste with no name that could have been distilled in a rain bucket on the reservation.

Wine was my choice, a palatable drink with a culture and a savored memory. Whiskey and moonshine were too strong for me, and the outcome was risky in the best of company. My choice of wine was a serious deviation on the reservation. The big boasters of white lightning were scored as more manly, an ancient pretense, and wine drinkers were teased as pompous outsiders. I was only an outsider among the hard drinkers. Yes, the fur trade created a new culture of outsiders with traces of a wine culture. France and the war only increased my deviation from the reservation of white lightning drinkers.

Augustus was an outsider, and yet he was a heavy drinker. The distinction of his influence and cultural acceptance was based more on his ambition, courage, and generosity. He drank with a sense of the future, a new native culture of art, literature, education and commerce, and those who named him an outsider were drunk and twitchy with nostalgia and lazy traditions.

I drank wine with a sense of chance and the future, and especially since my risky missions as a scout in the war. I was a writer, my brother was an artist, and with the memory of our uncle we were the best of the outsiders on the reservation.

Odysseus cut thick wedges of Camembert and slowly savored the Cape Breton Silver. French cheese, white lightning, and ironic stories were worthy courses of the trader, or the marvelous dance moves of respected outsiders. Odysseus, as usual, told a perfect story about a moonshiner with crazy hair that night between the banquet courses of cheese and dessert.

Carolina moonshiners were the first revolutionaries to resist every tax and government edict by the sovereign right of white lightning production and commerce. The age of the moonshine was measured in hours and
days, not in years. The distillation of alcohol was backwater and more dicey than the culture and fermentation of grapes for wine.

Handsome Bird was a famous moonshiner and resolute drinker of his own concoctions. Handsome distilled white lightning on a wagon in the Blue Ridge Mountains of South Carolina. Government agents, tax inspectors, and the moon detectives might have noticed the scent of the sweet moonshine but they never tracked down the actual mobile distillery. The wagon was always on the move, and the scent was only a teaser. Only the dedicated drinkers could locate his wagon at night. He sold distinctive white lightning in clay jugs, tin cans, and mason jars. The jars were never marked but drinkers could easily recognize by the smack of mountain air the potent Handsome Bird Sweet Midnight Moon.

Odysseus paused to swig more of the Cape Breton Silver, and then he roamed around the dining room table and continued with the story and a song about moonshine, “Carolina on My Mind.”

In my mind I'm gone to Carolina.
Can't you see the sunshine,
And can't you just feel the moonshine,
And ain't it just like a friend of mine
To hit me from behind,

And I'm gone to Carolina in my mind.

Handsome Bird was a serious drinker of his own moonshine, and sometimes drank the alcohol by tasty drops directly from the still in the early morning. He was lanky and rawboned, more secure in moonlight than as a planter in the sun. After a decade of nightly white lightning coarse hair sprouted out on unusual parts of his body. The steady moon customers noticed dark, curly, crazy hairs on his ear lobes, elbows, forehead, and fingers. The crazy hair grew several inches out of his nostrils. Some drinkers wondered why hair grew on certain parts of the body and not others, but crazy hair grew even on the palms of his hands wild and wolfishly. Crazy hair heightened the demand for the white lightning, and some drinkers were convinced that the chance to become a wolf with hairy palms was much better than blindness or the risk of a ginger jake walk.

Handsome Bird sweetened the backcountry weather with white lightning
and at the same time he became a shaggy legend in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The crazy black nostril hair, and the hair on his elbows, ears, forehead, and nose grew at least an inch a month with moonshine. Doctor Mendor touched his thick beard and toasted the white lightning wolves of the mountains.

››› ‹‹‹

Catherine Heady was roused by the crazy hair stories and then she wobbled around the table to toast each soldier at the banquet. There were more toasts with white lightning than with wine, and the stories seemed to be more obscure and disconnected. Catherine commented that most of the soldiers from the reservation were her students, and she taught them literature. She had promised that literature would be the salvation and liberation of native students on the reservation. Yes, the stories and literature of war, as it turned out, were more memorable than the politics of peace.

Toast the peace and fall asleep, toast the war and strut the colors, and she strutted the colors with several toasts and tributes to the soldiers that night at the banquet table.

Catherine turned to an empty chair and with school stories created the presence of Ignatius Vizenor. She proclaimed that he was one of the worst students of literature, but she raised her arms and swooned with the recollection that he was natty, naughty, witty, and never worried about grammar or the agreement of verbs and subjects. She turned teary and announced her true love for our cousin, and at that crucial moment we launched a tease of bad grammar to rescue the woozy revelations of the romantic teacher and storier.

Misaabe mentioned the nativity cigar box.

Aloysius shouted out that his grammar was much worse than any other student, and grammar don't make no difference in war, and maybe don't not make no difference in peace.

Catherine rushed to the other side of the table and kissed my brother on the forehead, smudged the blue warrior bands on his cheeks, and ruffled his hair. She was grateful for the gentle tease. Doctor Mendor toasted the necessary play and parody. Odysseus and John Leecy celebrated the absolute worst of grammar, the structure of poetry. I shouted out that my grammar
don't make no difference either, and in the spirit of the native tease and gentle rescue our tender teacher kissed the forehead of every man at the banquet table.

Misaabe was shied by the touch of the teacher.

Patch had only been kissed by his mother.

Shona Goldman, the cultural anthropologist, surely mocked the double negatives of reservation grammar and waited to be teased for her great love of native soldiers. One by one we teased the fur trade anthropologist, and she happily made the rounds to touch and buss the banquet men.

I declared that the war goes on in memory.

Misaabe smiled and was silent.

John Leecy saluted Messy.

Aloysius honored our uncle Augustus.

Odysseus praised his father and the old traders.

Lawrence celebrated his parents.

Patch honored his mother.

Shona promised a lusty song of the fur trade.

Messy announced the dessert course.

Doctor Mendor invited Lawrence Vizenor to recount the story of his combat bravery and the presentation of the Distinguished Service Cross. No one on the reservation had ever been awarded the decoration. Lawrence was a storier, one of the best when we were students at the government school, but he could not easily convey the details of what happened on October 8, 1918, at Bois-de-Fays in the Argonne Forest. He was not actually nervous that night, but rather hesitant because of the expectations of any account or description of his bravery.