The High Missouri by Win Blevins Read Free Book Online Page B

operas? Where her sweet arias? A father? Where his paternal advice? A son? A mother? A daughter? What difference now?”
    He held the jawbone over his head and knelt in the dirt. “What if a man of power, who made lesser beings tremble with his commands?” He looked up at Dylan. “Who is afraid of what may clack out of this fragment of bone now?”
    He jumped up and threw the jawbone into the soft dirt. Slowly he spaded up a shovelful of dirt, looked Dylan in the eyes, and dumped the dirt on the bone.
    Suddenly the Druid spoke in a new tone, soft, intimate. “Your mam was the last good woman. Do you know she’s buried here?”
    “My father would never talk about her,” said Dylan.
    “Do you want to see her grave?”
    Dylan nodded somberly.
    Dru hopped agilely out of the grave and reached a hand to Dylan. Dylan climbed out on his own.
    “Hey!” exclaimed the sexton.
    “We’ll be back soon enough,” said Dru, marching away. Dylan followed. “We mean to get paid.” He didn’t look back. He called over one shoulder, “And there’s plenty of time before the angelus.”
    Dylan followed. Why am I wasting this day?
    Why not? All is lost.
    “You take after her, laddo.” He looked Dylan in the eye. “She wanted you. She gave you life, and gave her life for you, and willingly. You are what she wanted above all things.”
    He sat down beside the gravestone. Carved on it was, GWYNETH DAVIS CAMPBELL, 1774–1798, REQUIESCAT IN PACE . Only those few bare and lonely words to tell him about his mother. Until now he hadn’t even known how old she was when she died. His father had been too grieved, too angry at fate, too enraged to tell him even the essentials, or to bring him to St. Anthony’s to see his mother’s resting place.
    “I have only this left of her,” said Dylan. He slipped off the slender chain he always wore around his neck and handed Dru a gold ring with a stone. Dru fingered it. “A fire opal,” Dylan said. “When she knew how sick she was, she asked that it be mine.”
    “It’s beautiful, lad.” He put it back in Dylan’s hand. Dylan looked into the strange glow of its depths. “What was she like?” he asked.
    “Comely, graceful, and full of verve. She had an effect on me like no other woman I ever met. I was a ruffian in those days, living it up. I would come around to her father’s house and she would fix us tea and we would talk. That was all our courtship ever came to, a score of cups of tea.”
    He looked sideways at Dylan and smiled ruefully. “In those days I was not yet a hivernant , I didn’t stay the winter in the wilds, but just went to the depot in spring and came back with the furs in fall.
    “The winter of ’ninety-seven I spent here in town, like always, and I met her down at the river. They swept a spot for skating. My mates and I were skidding about on the ice on our boots and falling all over ourselves and acting the fool and having a grand time. Your mother and a few others were skating. Your mother skated alone, with great poise and very beautifully. Serene, something from another world. The way she skated—I imagined ballet would look like that.” He chuckled. “She was a swan among ugly ducklings, there is a memory there is.
    “My mates and I laughed about the silk stocking that thought she was better than the rest of us. I didn’t know much about living, those days. Over thirty years old and had learned naught.
    “Well, I couldn’t admit to them that I was enchanted with her. So I begged off somehow and waited for her and approached her on the street. A right ragamuffin I must have looked, my clothes all patched and me looking like I slept in a barn, because I did, same as now. But your mother was a grand-hearted woman, an original, and she let me walk her home, and brought me inside and introduced me to her mother, God rest her soul, and fixed us a cup of tea.
    “I discovered right off, that first afternoon, what moored me to her. To my mates I would say