importance, Harry. If I can convince the audience the details are impeccably correct, who will dispute the interpretation? The truth of small things leads to confidence in the truth of large things. That is indisputable.” He looks at me anxiously, chewing his bottom lip. “ ‘The blood of America is the blood of pioneers – the blood of lion- hearted men and women who carved a splendid civilization out of an uncharted wilderness,’ ” he intones contemptuously. “Recognize it? It’s one of the titles from the picture we just saw. As soon as people start piously throwing around the word
Two girls are walking toward us, flapper dresses moving provocatively in the dusk like Victorian shifts glimpsed by gaslight. They lean together, deep in private conversation, and when they go by, one of them laughs, a low bubbling laugh like the cooing of a pigeon.
Chance follows them with his eyes, his hand tightens on my shoulder. He leans into me as the girls lean into one another. “They were laughing at me,” he says, “because of how I am dressed. Details again, Harry. Details are how most people read the world, the simple letters of their idiotic alphabet. They spell crude and literal meanings such as ‘clothes make the man.’ Most people don’t have what you and I do, Harry.”
“What’s that?”
“The gift to see beyond a flat cap, or beyond small facts.”
I can see how tired he is, his face looks jaundiced in the lamplight. He presses his shoulder to the lamppost and lifts his face to the light. It looks exhausted, drained. I follow his staring eyes to a delirium of moths whirling thickly around the electric light. Like the details chasing around in his head.
“Start work on the scenario, Harry,” he says.
23
Grace finally persuaded an old woman, Granny Laverdure, to cook them their Sunday dinner. She led them off to her son-in-law’s cabin, one of the most substantial in the Metis settlement. The logs were peeled and soundly chinked with clay, the walls standing twelve timbers high and set with three small windows of scraped fawn skin which shed a soft, tawny light into the quarters. Most impressive was a waterproof roof, canvas stretched over poles and topped with squares of sod.
“Snug as a bug in a rug,” Grace pronounced when he dipped his gangly frame through the low doorway.
The Englishman’s boy had to give the breeds their due. The cabin was stout as his own Pap’s. Except the breeds had a cast-iron stove where he and his kin had done their cooking and roasting in a fireplace chimbley. The breeds ate at a table, on benches, too; no Indian squat when they took meat. The floor was packed dirt swept with a spruce bough, you could smell spruce in the air and see the scrape-marks of the branch left in the dirt.
Along the walls more benches served as beds, piled high with Hudson’s Bay blankets, buffalo robes, grizzly skins; two youngsters sat on one of these, cheeks bulging as they chewed with frantic intensity.
Close to the iron stove, a few shelves holding flour, tea, a little dried fruit, roots, and meat were pegged into the wall. In a corner where a bitch lamp burned there was even a picture; he could see it from where he sat. One of them Cat-licker Jesus pictures. Him prying his chest open and showing his heart on fire.
He and Ed made easy at the table drinking boiled tea, black as coffee, while Granny clattered at the stove. A little twig of a girl of two, with gold rings in her ears, Rose Marie, stood clinging to the table leg, watching Grace wide-eyed. Every time he winked at her, she hugged the table leg all the harder.
“Those six bottles’ll be gone in an hour,” said Grace. “I spent a winter with those lads and experience has taught me liquor doesn’t lighten their dispositions. Put a pint of liquor in any one of them and they’re apt to turn quarrelsome. They’ll be fighting each other before the day goes out – or anybody else who’s handy. I’d just as soon not be handy. No, we’re better off where we are, drinking strong tea out of harm’s way.”
The Englishman’s boy couldn’t take his eyes off the two kids on the bench, jaws working like steam locomotives.
“Goddamn, Eagle,” he said, “what them boys over there chewing? They’re making my head hurt watching them.”
“Over there,” said Grace, squinting across the room, “is the ammunition manufactory. You know that lead foil the tea packets come wrapped in? They chew it to make bullets for their Northwest guns. A Metis kid’ll spit round shot for a five-eighths-inch bore like it came from a bullet mould.”
The smell of elk steaks frying and bannock baking put a glow of contentment and goodwill on the Eagle. He stretched his legs out comfortably under the table. “I tell you, son, once I lay hands on my share of that wolfing money I’m heading for the Red River country. This Whoop-Up country’s too wild for me. A betwixt-and-betweener prefers things by halves. Half-wild country. Half-wild women. I reckon those Red River women fit the bill. Half- French, half-Cree. Half-housebroke and half-wild, half-pagan and half-Catholic. I like a roof over me and a good bed under me, but on the other hand I’d sooner shoot my meat than raise it. I like to turn footloose in the summer when the sun shines and nest in a cabin in the winter when the wind blows cold and the snow flies. And those gals are handsome women, some light-skinned as any white women, and a few even have curl to their hair, or blue to the eye. I believe they’d suit me just fine.”
The food was ready. The boys hopped down off the bunk and put their feet under the table. Granny said grace and everybody but the Eagle and the Englishman’s boy crossed themselves, even the baby. They all set to with a will and an appetite, piling their tin plates with elk steaks and a stew of buffalo and wild parsnip. Everybody had a side bowl of boiled and sweetened saskatoons for bannock dipping and as much scalding-hot tea as they could drink.
In a bit, the Eagle had coaxed the little girl up on his lap and was spooning food into her from his plate. Soon she was clambering all over him like a squirrel, patting the bandanna on his head with her chubby hands.
It wasn’t long until he had a game of “creep mousie” going with the child, cautiously stealing his fingers up her arms, breathing, “Creep mousie, creep mousie, creep mousie,” into her ear, and then with a sudden cry of “Right in there!” burying a finger in her armpit, tickling her until she squealed loud enough to raise the roof.
Then, suddenly, he stopped the game dead, finger poised. An apparition darkened the doorway. The Englishman’s boy made an involuntary movement to the pistol at his side, but the Eagle caught his hand. “No,” he said, pulling the child protectively to his chest.
The figure in the doorway was sniffing the air, swaying, grunting to himself softly. He shambled a few steps into the cabin and halted.
The Englishman’s boy had never dreamed himself such a bogey man as this. The bogey man had shaved the top of his head bald and rolled the hair on his temples into balls so they resembled bear ears. His face was painted blood-red and down each cheek the paint had been scratched away to the skin, leaving claw-marks. The eyes and mouth were circled in black and a bear-claw necklace swung from his neck. His skin shirt was daubed thickly with ochre and hung in bedraggled yellow shreds; long cuts slashed the front, and holes were punched the length of the sleeves.
Now his face was lifted to the ceiling and he was casting back and forth with his nose, the way the bear does when it rises on its hind legs to take the wind for danger. He lowered his head and shuffled toward them, grunting.
“He got a knife in his hand,” warned the Englishman’s boy. The knife was broad-bladed, double-edged, and fixed into the jawbone of a bear.
Grace signalled him by dropping his eyes to something beneath the table. The Englishman’s boy caught his meaning. Grace’s pistol hung between his knees.
The bear stalked around the old woman’s chair. His nightmare face descended to the part in her grey hair, snuffled the hollow of her wrinkled neck. She sat like a stone. He stalked over to the boys, scented each of them in turn, panted
