Specimen Song (2 page)

“Okay,” said Du Pré. “So who was killed?” Madelaine was right about this Washington, D.C.

“A young Cree woman from Canada,” said Chase. “She was here as part of a singing group. Someone stabbed her to death. It’s just terrible.”

A telephone rang; one of the women answered.

Chase stood still, shaking his head after a minute.

“I don’t need this,” he said suddenly, his voice savage.

First they get shocked, then they either choke up or get mad, Du Pré thought.

“I needed to talk to you about another matter, anyway, Mr. Du Pré,” said Chase. “I need to think about another matter. Any
other
matter. We here at the Smithsonian would like very much to tape your versions of some of the old voyageur ballads, the ones you play and sing so competently. Could you possibly stay over a few days after the festival?”

“No,” said Du Pré. “I don’t like this place much. So I will be happy to tape what you want, but I do it at home. My daughter, she has a tape recorder.”

“Uh,” said Chase, smiling, “I hardly think that will do. We will need a studio, you see. Recording is very difficult.”

“Okay,” said Du Pré. “We got recording studios in Montana. Maybe not so fancy as you got here, I don’t know. But we got them and they have to do. I stay here till my plane out Sunday night, but I sweat enough for the rest of my life.”

Chase nodded. “The land upon which Washington, D.C., is built was largely swamp when the sundry states donated it. Since then, the swamp has risen, I often think.”

“Besides,” said Du Pré, “I got to go to a powwow, been planned long time.”

“Play fiddle?” said Chase.

Du Pré shook his head. “No,” he said, “both my father and grandfather were canoe builders, and I still got some of their tools. I am not all that good, but lots of that stuff got forgotten, so I try to remember.”

“Canoes,” said Chase. “What sort of canoes?”

“What the voyageurs called ‘big bellies,” said Du Pré. “They were kind of little freighters for the fur trade. They had a couple funny things about them—you know, way the struts and braces were fitted. Used bone joints where things were twisted a lot, like that. I have made a couple since for a museum up in Calgary, but they weren’t very good. You know how you got to do something a lot before you know it.”

Chase was thinking.

“So you give me a list of these songs you want, you get hold of a recording studio—there are several in Montana—pay them, I go in and make that music for you,” said Du Pré. He felt a little proud. Besides, once the music was safely here at the Smithsonian, it maybe wouldn’t get lost.

“You’ll hear from us,” said Chase.

The telephones started ringing. Du Pré looked out in front of the tent. There were a bunch of reporters headed their way.

Du Pré slid out the back way, through a slit provided for ventilation.

Some damn thing, he thought. Always.

M
ADELAINE WAS WAITING
for Du Pré at the bottom of the elevator stairs in the airport. Du Pré was carrying his fiddle. They went to the baggage carousel and soon his battered old leather suitcase crashed out onto it from the cargo room.

Du Pré had bought the suitcase in a pawnshop for ten dollars. It was covered in stickers from ocean liners. The ocean liners were all gone now, but the leather suitcase remained.

Like out in my shed, I got these brass tacks from the stock of a black powder rifle I found in the attic of an abandoned cabin, thought Du Pré. The steel was all rust and borers had eaten all the wood, but that brass stayed on. The gun had been so badly rusted that it didn’t even clean up enough to tell what it was.

“So you get the clap, all those groupies in Washington, D.C.?” said Madelaine.

“Probably won’t know for a while,” said Du Pré. “That clap, it takes some time to come on, you know.”

Madelaine kissed him. She was wearing some faint perfume—violets. She had rubbed the flowers behind her ears, he guessed. Sometimes she made tea. Du Pré thought of cool June mornings and the scent of violets and Madelaine. He was very glad to be back.

“So I see a girl singer got stabbed there,” said Madelaine. “I told you they kill each other a lot there in Washington, D.C.” She grabbed Du Pré’s arm. She had about worried herself sick, Du Pré knew. He should have tried to call her, but it was hard to find a telephone.

“It was hot and wet,” said Du Pré. “I don’t think I do that again. I like this dry Montana air.”

They walked out to the parking lot. Madelaine had brought Du Pré’s old sheriffs cruiser with the patches on the doors where the decals had been. Good road car, though. On those long, straight stretches of Montana road, Du Pré drove maybe 120. Had to slow down for some towns. Once a highway patrolman had stopped him, but Du Pré said call the sheriff in his home county of Charbonneau, told him he was on an errand and needed to make time. When the cop went back to his car, Du Pré smoked it, getting back up to speed. He never heard anything more about it.

Du Pré tossed his suitcase and fiddle in the backseat. He felt dirty from the city air and all the miles of flight. He itched.

He held Madelaine for a moment. Murmuring.

“We go home and in a while we both find out I got the clap or not,” said Du Pré. She looked shocked—for a moment.

“So everybody is all right?” said Du Pré. It seemed he’d been gone a long time, but it’d been only five days.

“Yeah,” said Madelaine. “That Bart, he is working so hard on his house and that ranch. Old Booger Tom run him around and Bart don’t say nothing to the old bastard, and Bart
owns
that place. Booger Tom, I saw him in the bar the other night and he say he try every way to make Bart blow up or quit or whine and Bart just won’t do it. I think that Booger Tom kind of likes Bart for that,”

So do I, Du Pré thought. Poor Bart Fascelli, rich boy, horrible family, then he is in his late forties and suddenly realizes that though he owns that ranch, “Booger Tom owns
himself
. Bart, he wants to own himself, too. I like that man. Hope he don’t never drink again.

“Bart is so very nice to Jacqueline and Maria,” Madelaine went on. “Like a good uncle, you know. He is always very correct.” Jacqueline and Maria were Du Pré’s daughters. Bart had helped out Maria a lot and was going to pay for a college education for her. Since Du Pré’s father had murdered Bart’s brother, Du Pré thought that was pretty tough of Bart. He’s probably a pretty tough man, don’t know how much yet.

They were headed east to pick up the two-lane norm to Toussaint. Du Pré looked down at the speedometer. Ninety. He slowed to seventy. Can’t go fast on the expressway, he thought, but I want to get home. Take a long hot shower. Feels like my soul and half of my ass is still in Washington, D.C.

That detective, he never came to ask me more questions, Du Pré thought. I only caught the horse. Don’t even know the name of the woman who was killed. Cree, though, like some of my people.

Madelaine fiddled around in a little cooler and brought out a can of beer for Du Pré and a wine cooler for herself. She popped the can open and handed it to him. Du Pré took a long swallow.

“That’s pretty good,” he said.

He saw the exit north up ahead. Get off this four-lane mess and back on a two-lane road. I am a two-lane man in a four-lane age. And they are welcome to it.

Du Pré glanced up at the bluffs above the Yellowstone as he turned round the exit ramp. The Roche Jaune of the voyageurs. They had been here so long ago, no one really knew how long. Tough men, could cover some country.

A huge hawk flapped up from a kill in a field across the highway. It held something small in one talon. Du Pré couldn’t see what it was. The big bird turned in the air and locked its wings and floated on. Du Pré grinned. Home, it sure felt good.

“So, this Washington D.C., what was it like?” said Madelaine.

“Hot and sticky,” said Du Pré. “But I met some nice people, some Cajun people from Louisiana. They talk some French like ours, only some different. Call it Coonass French.” Du Pré spoke Coyote French. Well, those Cajuns had been descended from Québécois deported by the English over two centuries ago to Louisiana. And we didn’t talk so much after that. Du Pré’s people were Métis—French, Cree, Chippewa, and some little English no one wanted to admit to—who were the voyageurs and trappers of the Company of Gentlemen Adventurers of Hudson’s Bay. Or the Hudson’s Bay Company. Or the Here Before Christ.

“They invite us down some winter to get away from the cold,” Du Pré went on. “They play some fine music, accordion, fiddle, washboard. Call it zydeco.”

“What they do with this washboard?” said Madelaine.

“Guy plays it; he puts big thimbles on his fingers, brushes them over that washboard,” said Du Pré. “It sounds good. Anyway, they say we come down eat crawfish, drink orange wine.”

“Orange wine sounds good,” said Madelaine.

Du Pré looked at his watch. His sense of time was off. It must be the middle of the afternoon. Of course it was; his plane hadn’t got to Billings until 2:30. Four o’clock and change. Du Pré was starving of a sudden.

“This next roadhouse, we get a cheeseburger,” said Du Pré. “I am hungry enough to have supper with a coyote now.”

It was still close to the longest day of the year, a little over a week ago. The light would remain past ten o’clock, and Du Pré figured if he pushed the old Plymouth, he could make Toussaint before sundown.

Up ahead, he saw a crossroads and the peeling white sign of a roadhouse that he knew and liked. He turned into the parking lot.

Christ, I am hungry, he thought.

O
LD
B
ENETSEE SHOWED UP
the next evening, carrying some herbs he had gathered for Madelaine. She used them to scent the shampoo she used. Madelaine took the little bundles off to hang them in a sunny window before she ground them in the old brass mortar and pestle she kept on the sink board. Du Pré wondered about that old mortar and pestle, it was a pretty crude casting and probably pretty old. Maybe Hudson’s Bay trade goods. He sometimes wondered how many pelts of beaver or mink or fisher cat or bobcat or fox the thing had cost. It might be the oldest thing in Toussaint, come to think on it.

“So you like them Cajun?” said Benetsee.

Du Pré nodded. He hadn’t spoken to anyone about the Cajuns except Madelaine, and she hadn’t been six inches away from him since he got back. But Du Pré was long past wondering how the old man knew things. He just did. When Du Pré listened to Benetsee tell stories or ask questions he had no way of knowing to ask, he believed in magic.

“I brought you this,” said Benetsee. He fumbled around in his pockets for something and then found it in the lining of his coat. Benetsee wore his clothes until they turned to mostly holes. Madelaine had to fight him to get him to wear something that at least would keep out the wind.

“You goddamned old fool,” she had yelled at him once, “you give me that mess of rags and put these things on! They are nice and dirty and you will like them fine! Hah!”

Benetsee brought form a strange knife, one shaped like a hook, but the bend of the hook went along the axis of the knife blade. It was just a ribbon of steel bent back upon itself. The handle was a finely worked green stone, it felt a little greasy to the touch. Soapstone. Du Pré took the knife and looked at it. The blackish steel had a bright rim along the bottom where Benetsee had sharpened it.

“That’s a pull knife,” said Benetsee. “You can do some fine carvings those canoe parts with that.”

Jesus Christ, thought Du Pré, I have
forgotten
this powwow. But it is not for four, five days. I suppose this old fart will wish to go, gamble some money. Probably my money.

Madelaine returned with a glass of wine for Benetsee, a big glass. The old man loved to drink a lot of wine.

“You maybe want a bourbon,” said Madelaine. “I get you one.”

Du Pré shook his head. He smiled at her.

Benetsee downed his big glass of wine, just poured it down his throat. Madelaine shook her head and smiled at him, then took the glass and walked back toward the house.

“You pull that knife to you, you know,” said Benetsee, “for the fine shavings.” He was digging around in his coat. “I got something else.” Finally, he took the tattered cloth off and squeezed it till he found it hidden somewhere in the tangled folds.

Madelaine came back. Benetsee struggled for several minutes and finally he pulled a little canoe out of the crumpled cloth of his coat.

It was a carving, in some fine-grained wood. All the struts and braces and thwarts and ribs were carved in, too, and the outside of the canoe carved like birch bark. Du Pré could see some stains on the carving—on the seams, where the pitch went. Ah.

It was the carving of the
bâteau gros ventre
—the big-bellied boat. These canoes had been made up to thirty feet long and eight feet wide. They could carry a heavy load. A thirty foot canoe would take six men to portage it around a falls or rapids, maybe eight men; those bark canoes were heavy. Then the voyageurs would move the heavy packs of furs. They would load one another with as many packs as a man could stagger with and then they would bull up or down the trail around the river. There were many songs about especially tough voyageurs and how many packs of furs they could carry.

Du Pré thought a man might take two, three if he was very strong, but any song that said a man carried more than that was just a song. The packs of furs weighed over a hundred pounds apiece.

“You see this here?” said Benetsee, pointing to a thwart. The thwart curved in a lot, giving the canoe a waist. “Easier to paddle.” He lifted the canoe carving and pointed to the stern, which was undercut with a roll on the bottom.

“They hang a piece of birch right there off its ass, make it go in the water better,” said Benetsee. A birch round with rounded ends. Du Pré had never seen anything like this.

This old goat never tell me he know about canoes, Du Pré thought, though he seem to know everything somehow.

Benetsee drained the big glass of wine Madelaine had brought. He got to his feet.