Specimen Song (3 page)

“I go see now,” he said, moving off toward the little creek that wound through Du Pré’s backyard. There was a path there, older than the house, probably there before the whites came.

“I go see now”—Du Pré had heard that so many times over the years.

The old man hopped across the creek; the tag alders on the far side swallowed him up. A squirrel chirred angrily. Du Pré heard the scrawk of a blue jay.

But he was gone, like smoke on a summer morning.

Du Pré turned the model around in his hands. He thought of his people paddling one of these, pulling out at the portage, reaching into the pouch at the end of their red sashes for pipe and tobacco. Jokes. Thinking about their women at the end of the journey.

“Du Pré!” Madelaine called from the back door. “You have a telephone! Sound like someone from far away.”

Who the hell be calling me from far away? Du Pré thought. I don’t know anybody from far away. He put the canoe model down on the grass next to the pull knife.

It was Paul Chase. He wanted to know if Du Pré would want to go on a journey—paid, of course—by canoe over a portion of the old fur-trade route. Starting on the first of August.

“We thought we’d try for the best weather,” said Chase. “We have a grant and can pay you, oh, four hundred a week plus your expenses.”

“Where is this route you want to take, there?” said Du Pré.

Saskatchewan and Manitoba, the route home, through chain lakes and down little rivers between them. On the way, they would come to a falls where archaeologists were recovering a mass of trade goods from the pool beneath left by voyageurs who had miscalculated and wrecked. Du Pré should bring his fiddle.

“How long this take?” asked Du Pré.

“Six weeks.”

“I don’t think that I want to,” said Du Pré.

“Just think about it,” said Chase.

Du Pré said he would, but he wouldn’t change his mind.

D
U
P
RÉ FINISHED
“B
APTISTE’S
L
AMENT
.” He let the last note fade off and he stood still till the man in the sound booth pointed his thumb up. Du Pré sighed. He had never worked so hard at his music in all his life. The recording engineer and producer were competent and relentless.

“Very nice. Great version. I’d like to maybe try it again in a little while, though. Maybe reach in there for something…darker.”

The engineer and producer would exchange a meaningful glance.

“Yeah. Darker. Exactly,” the engineer would say.

They had an uncanny ability to sense when Du Pré was just about to tell them to go piss up ropes and then stand under them while they dried. Then they’d break and wander out to a nearby saloon had good cheeseburgers.

Du Pré felt handled, like a cow in a chute. But the joke was on him, so he had to do his best. And maybe the Métis music would stay some alive. His daughter Maria was going off to some tony eastern school on Bart’s money and a little of Du Pré’s, and she would be a little Métis girl from Montana with a good education and the whole world before her. Her kids wouldn’t be Métis, they’d be out in that English world there.

But the music wouldn’t go on with Maria, anyway. She had a voice when she sang that would take baked enamel off cast iron. Jacqueline sang beautifully, alto,
a cappella
ballads she had learned here and there.

So this music maybe live in some vault in Washington, D. C, Du Pré thought. Freeze-dried. Like them college kids come to the fiddling contests can play every note just right but it still don’t work.

I am sounding like some old fart. I am getting close to
being
some old fart. Be fifty in three weeks. Shit.

Du Pré stuffed his fiddle in the case and then remembered his rosin, there on the floor by the chair. He picked it up, opened the case again, and tucked it under the neck.

I got everything. He looked at his watch. Six o’clock of a July evening. Sun should be down far enough, it won’t hurt my eyes too much when I go out in it. Du Pré had been snow-blinded twice and he couldn’t take too much sun without dark glasses.

A door opened into the sound room and Paul Chase came through it. He was dressed in the sort of outdoor stuff you got from expensive mail-order houses. The clothes were good and the boots were good; they had been designed by hardworking dilettantes for moneyed novices.

Du Pré thought of his father, Catfoot, going over the Wolf Mountains in the dead of winter, fifty below, with nothing but a pack on his back, snowshoes, to check that trapline. The trapped animals deserved a quick death, and anyway, it was hard to skin them frozen. Catfoot could cover his line in two days.

Carried some jerky, salt, and tea, a little chocolate. Find a fir tree and burrow down under the thick branches; the smoke from his little fire would go up through the dark green needles. Carried the same old pocketknife, a few matches.

“Du Pré!” said Paul Chase, “we thank you.”

Now he will ask me if I go on his canoe trip, Du Pré thought.

“Say,” said Chase, “have you given any more thought to perhaps going on this canoe trip with us?”

Du Pré nodded. Chase deflated a little behind the smile.

Them fucking boots he got on, they got buttons you press for maybe a beach umbrella or rockets take you up the rising trail. Du Pré thought for a moment why this stuff irritated him. It allowed people who didn’t know the country to go out in it. They could buy these keys that worked till they got in some trouble. Paper keys. Fill this out, send in a check, this stuff comes, the wilderness is yours.

“Yeah,” said Du Pré, “I will go with you.”

Chase looked surprised, but he caught himself.

“Oh, really?”

Du Pré nodded.

“Well. Wonderful. We will gather at Lac La Ronge and go by canoe down to York Factory.”

That’s right, Du Pré thought. He hadn’t known till he’d read a book on the Hudson’s Bay Company that the managers of the little fur-buying outposts were called factors. Then he asked Maria for her dictionary, but she had one in her computer. She punched a few keys and said it was someone who acted for someone else.

Du Pré had nodded and decided that he was glad his daughter liked this computer and the twentieth century, but Du Pré, him, he didn’t much care for either of them.

“We won’t be working as hard as the voyageurs,” said Chase cheerily.

Du Pré looked at his space-age boots and the well-cut shirt with all the pockets and little epaulets to hold maybe the camera strap.

“Halfway through the trip, we will stop for a few days and stay at a hotel, rest up,” said Chase. “But it should be interesting.”

Du Pré was very tired and he wanted to go next door to the saloon and get a good drink and a cheeseburger, maybe drive partway home tonight, or just sleep for a few hours and then go on so he was in his own country early in the morning.

“What made you change your mind?” said Chase.

Du Pré shrugged. I am a cowboy; we shrug when we don’t want to say nothing. It is not that we don’t have anything to say.

Benetsee had changed Du Pré’s mind for him.

“Something very bad going on up there,” said Benetsee one summer evening just before Du Pré had to drive over to Kalispell to make this recording. Benetsee had drawn a map in some detail of Hudson Bay. He had quickly sketched in some rivers on the great jutting peninsula on the east side of it.

“These people down here be killing this,” said Benetsee, putting a hasty X roughly where New York and New England were. “And this is where some of the great songs come from.”

“Killing how?” said Du Pré.

“These people want to build many dams on these rivers up here,” said Benetsee, “and that will poison the waters and kill the fish and everything else that lives on them. Some Cree and some Chippewa, you know, they still live the old ways. But there are not very many of them, and these people they want that electricity.”

Benetsee stabbed at the X.

“So this man ask you go along on that canoe trip, you ought to go,” said Benetsee.

“I don’t want to be slapping those blackflies and mosquitoes for six weeks, have to play my fiddle each night for these people like I am some tape recorder or something. Why I want to go across that country with a bunch of people don’t belong there anyway, want to think that they know what it was like back then couple hundred years ago; huh?”

“Some of the people are coming from here,” said Benetsee, “to go on this trip which is here.” He sketched a route on the west side of the bay. “But they will bring couple
bâteau gros ventre
. They from over there on the other side.”

“Why I want to leave Madelaine for six weeks, huh?” said Du Pré.

Benetsee looked at Du Pré with patience and contempt.

“There are these people come along with you there are our people,” he said. “They got a whole bunch of songs—you know, songs you never heard.”

“Okay,” said Du Pré. “I still will not go.”

Benetsee drank some more wine. He had his eyelids patiently down; he was nodding and his lips moved.

Du Pré looked over at the tag alder on the far side of the little stream that ran through his horse pasture.

There was a coyote sitting there, in the daylight. Du Pré had never seen a coyote this close or in the daylight.

The coyote had something in its mouth. The animal leapt over the little stream, came trotting up to Benetsee, dropped what he was carrying, ran back, and jumped the creek again, and he was gone.

Benetsee opened his eyes. He reached down and lifted the little black thing that the coyote had brought him.

It was an amulet, a carving in a black stone with rust red streaks in it. Du Pré looked at it. The carving was of a dog or a wolf, one just rising from the ground. The carver had used the rust lines for the animal’s outline, the shape of the bones underneath the skin. It was perfect; there was nothing there that did not need to be and everything that had to be. A dog or a wolf getting up from the ground.

“Them coyote carry this all the way from where the dead are,” said Benetsee, pointing at the black carving. “Our dead. This is very old, you know. The songs I am talking about, they come after this, but you know after the priests come, we speak them French some everywhere. So you go and get those songs; there is one for you.”

Well. My son-in-law Raymond can fill in for me, inspect those cows, since he is through the paperwork for brand inspector. Not that the cow business is much left.

Benetsee was walking back along the path the coyote had taken. The conversation was over, Du Pré was going, and that was that.

Buy me few extra sets fiddle strings, Du Pré thought. Buy me a lot of insect dope, scare off them blackfly, too.

T
HE CATTLE WERE JAMMING
up in the chute. Du Pré and Raymond had already checked the brands and Du Pré had Raymond sign off on them.

“Way this cow business is, I don’t know they need brand inspectors much longer,” said Du Pré.

“Some people say they will raise buffalo,” said Raymond.

“Oh sure,” said Du Pré. “They say that, they don’t know buffalo. I went out to South Dakota once, help some people round up buffalo. They don’t round up. They tore up the corrals like so much wet paper and then they tore up the trucks and a lot of them got out. Buffalo. Bah. You know them things pivot on their front feet? They change directions so fast, while a horse, he has to take this wide circle he moving any fast.”

“I guess they still have to be branded and inspected,” said Raymond. He liked this better than hanging sheet-rock or plumbing. Du Pré could not blame him for that.

“Madelaine said you were going to drive all those miles to Lac La Ronge,” said Raymond.

“Fuckin’ A I am,” said Du Pré. “I fly to that Washington, D.C.; I will not do that again. Moves too fast and I am too old. Whoosh. Makes my head ache. Scares me shitless, too.”

They got into Du Pré’s old Plymouth cruiser. Du Pré’s car was badly dented on the passenger’s door where he had slid into a fence post on a road mudded up good. Corner fence post, railroad tie stuck down in some concrete. Crunch. Railroad tie hadn’t moved much.

“How come you aren’t taking Bart?” said Raymond. Kid was worried about something, asking a lot of questions. Shut up, Du Pré thought. Go on home and make me another grandbaby.

“That Bart is so rich, he would sort of buy the trip up,” said Du Pré. “We would be out in the bushes there, and a helicopter with a big dinner and a chamber-music group would show up.” Also, if he got drunk and off his head back there, he could be a real problem.

They drove on the wet yellow road back toward town. It had rained hard the last two days, unusual for late July. The weather seemed to be changing.

Du Pré had read somewhere that the big volcano that blew off in the East Indies had caused this. But Du Pré also remembered some old songs about much rain and cold winters, so maybe the weather just did this, but over a long time, time greater than one human life. Pretty big world there, and those stars are very far away.

When Du Pré and Raymond got to Du Pré’s house, there were people there already putting up trestle tables and stapling tablecloths to them, against the wind that would come up late in the afternoon. Always did, blew out of the west hard for maybe a quarter of an hour and then either kept up if there was rain coming in a day or quit if there wasn’t.

Jacqueline’s babies were toddling around the lawn. Madeline’s and some of their friends were playing volleyball in the pasture over the creek.

Du Pré showered and put on fresh clothes. His suitcase was packed—or, rather, a nylon duffel bag Bart had given him, along with a sackful of crap to survive on in the wilderness. Best way to survive in the wilderness is stay warm and dry and fed and don’t get lost, but you make those arrangements before you go there.

Du Pré sat on his porch, watching the hummingbirds at the flowers along the creek. Summer ended when those whirring little birds left—usually about the middle of August. The Métis had known that, and when the English had come and put out little feeders for the hummingbirds, the Métis protested and said it made the birds stay around too long, so that there were not enough flowers to the south of them to feed them on their long journey. The English looked down their long noses and left the feeders up, and each year there had been fewer birds, until some English newspaper had said the same thing the Métis had. Du Pré knew some songs that weren’t complimentary to the English. They did that sort of thing a lot.