The High Missouri by Win Blevins Read Free Book Online

singing—he’d just lost his lifelong dream, what he’d quit his job for, what he’d lost his family over. Why should he sing?
    “Quand on part de chantier,
    Mes chers amis, tous le coeur gai,
    Pour aller voir tous nos parents,
    Mes chers amis, le coeur content.”
    (chorus)
    “Envoyons de l’avant, nos gens!
    Envoyons de l’avant!
    Envoyons de l’avant, nos gens!
    Envoyons de l’avant!”
    It was a song of the French-Canadian boatmen, the voyageurs who went deep into the wilderness among the Indians. A song with a vigorous beat the canoe men used to time their paddling. It spoke of going home, so it added power to every stroke.
    “Pour aller voir tous nos parents,
    Mes chers amis, le coeur content….
    Envoyons de l’avant, nos gens!
    Envoyons de l’avant!”…
    “Let’s go forward, fellows!” cried the Chorus. “Let’s go! You have to get wet to go to Canada.”
    “Ah! mais que ça soit tout mouillé
    Vous allez voir que ça va marcher!”…
    The men sing that they’re eager to see their friends, to throw a party and laugh and sing.
    “Dimanche au soir, à la veillée,
    Nous irons voir nos compagnees,”…
    “Et au milieu de la veillée
    Elles vont parler de leurs cavaliers.”…
    The girls will talk about their other beaux until it’s time to go home. Then they’ll say to us, do you have other lovers? Do you?
    “Elles vont nous dire, mais en partant
    As-tu fréquenté les amantes?”…
    Unspoken: They’re thinking of dark lovers, of course, Indian girls. And we do have dark lovers, don’t we?
    “Envoyons de l’avant, nos gens!
    Envoyons de l’avant!”…
    A song to make the men work with a will: “Let’s go home!”
    Dylan and Dru were waist deep in the soft, wet, spring soil—shoveling. This was St. Anthony’s at Coteau St. Louis, the new cemetery. Dru sang lustily and repeated the song over and over, apparently without getting bored with it. “You do this all day when you paddle, laddo,” he’d said. On the hour he stopped and loaded his white clay pipe and had a smoke and a rest. He claimed this was the fixed custom of the canoe men.
    I’ve lost everything, thought Dylan. Why am I digging a grave with the Druid?
    Having no pipe, Dylan could not indulge. He didn’t want to smoke anyway—he wanted to quit digging these sodding graves, to sit on a pile of fresh dirt like the sexton and breathe the young breezes and… daydream about delicious female flesh. Yes, now that you’re not going to be a priest, Dylan Elfed Davis Campbell, you can daydream of carnality.
    The reality was, he needed the Halifax pound. The sexton, whose name Dylan kept forgetting, had offered them a pound to dig the graves, and the Druid had sweet-talked him up a few shillings. Life of a Montreal sexton in April, Dru said—digging graves for the corpses that have spent the winter in the dead house. But this sexton was a fat fellow, past digging graves, Dylan would have thought, and from the look of his nose, a tippler. He did nothing but lie about and produce one chocolate treat after another from his garments, look at them avariciously, and consume them bite by slow, savory bite.
    I’ve lost everything.
    Dru and the sexton also kept mentioning some “extra reward,” and smiling at each other.
    It was nasty labor, for a fact. Dylan’s hands were blistered, some of the blisters had burst, and his hands were wet with blood and juice. His back ached right between the shoulder blades. And his lower back pained him. His calves hurt in the lower center. It irked him that a man as old as the Druid, at least as old as his father, could shovel for a couple of hours comfortably while he, young and presumably more fit, suffered from manual labor.
    “Being used to it,” said Dru, reading Dylan’s thoughts. “I’m used to paddling all day— Envoyons de l’avant, nos gens!
    “That’s worse, paddling, because you can barely change the way you’re sitting.”
    He looked Dylan merrily in the eye and lifted a