Broken Field

by Jeff Hull

  “I don’t know, Tom. Some folks seem to think you’ve had a bit of a chip on your shoulder since you got here. Maybe you want to punish us all. Maybe we don’t measure up to what you expected. Or maybe we remind you too much of where you came from. Maybe you want to punish yourself for all the things that never happened the way you wanted them to.”

  Tom waved him off. Psychobabble was the last thing he expected from Hal Hartack. He wanted another drink, but he didn’t want to have to ask Hal for anything, not now.

  “Think long and hard about what you’re doing, Tommy,” Hal said. “A lot of people are going to care. Not just about whether our undefeated team has a coach—I’m talking about that other situation, too, with the Aarstad boy.” He glanced conspicuously down the bar at the two men who were in some way related to Wyatt. “Things like that, they get misinterpreted, they can tear things up.”

  “How would you define misinterpreted?” Tom asked. He kept trying to latch onto reasons to be angry at what Hal said, though Hal did not seem to be angry at him.

  “I’m just saying sometimes a thing can be two things at once. These little football games, they’re all stories about who we really are in this town. You man up and do what’s best for those boys. Right now they need guidance,” Hal said, then straightened, lifted his forearms from the bar, gestured at Tom’s beer and the twenty-dollar bill on the bar beside it. “This was all on me if you cut yourself off and go on home.”

  Hal backed away, careful not to appear abrupt, and wandered down to the other end where his other two patrons sat. Reverting to jovial form, Hal called out to the men, “You dumbfucks figure out which side of your asses you sit on yet?”

  Tom drove home. On his way out of town, he passed the Sportsman Motel, where he did a double take. Two news vans were parked in the driveway, one a Havre station and the other out of Great Falls. He’d never seen a news crew in Dumont before. Suddenly Tom felt blood in the streets of his heart.

  * * *

  “Gabriel Dumont was a Metis. Does anybody know what that means?”

  Silence. Tom never let that bother him.

  “The Metis were mixed-blood descendants of Canadian Indians and French fur trappers. Like most native people, they lived off the land, trapping, hunting buffalo and other animals. In the late 1800s, after a series of skirmishes and battles in which he and a ragtag army completely outmaneuvered and defeated Canadian government troops, Gabriel Dumont and Louis Riel, who were the first nationalistic leaders of the Metis people, formed a government that was recognized by the Canadian government in 1870,” Tom said.

  “Canada realized it was safer and beneficial to have peace on the frontier and a stable nation to deal with and so they ceded what is now most of Manitoba to the Metis people as sovereign territory.

  “Of course, in the way these things tended to go, nearly as soon as they gave the Metis Manitoba, they found reasons to take it back, and arrest warrant was issued for Riel. But Riel and Dumont were tough, clever men. Even with a likely death sentence hanging over him, Riel managed to disguise himself and sneak into a meeting of the Canadian Parliament and sign in as a representative of Manitoba. He had to flee immediately, never got to vote on any legislation. Meanwhile, Canada opened Manitoba for white settlers, who, of course, claimed all the most productive farmlands and relegated the Metis to poverty.”

  Tom could see that his reading of history had an effect on certain students. His version poisoned their cowboys and Indians childhoods, and nobody wanted to have to reimagine those memories of innocent slaughter. Some of the boys managed to create poses that transmitted their disgust, slouching and slinging their hips forward, legs sprawling, chins tucked down to chests, hands splayed so that their inactivity could hardly be missed. Waylon Edwards chose to appear obviously staring out the window, so dismissively thinking about something else that he occasionally smiled and frowned about whatever went on in his head.

  Some of the girls stared at him to let him know they were paying attention because this might be on the test, but they were holding it against him for making them know this stuff that they would never care about. Well, but people should know who their town was named after, was Tom’s thinking. And he noticed a few heads were turned up. Josie Frehse was trying to pay attention without appearing too eager, because that wouldn’t be cool.

  Mikie LaValle watched Tom talk in a way that made him know the boy had questions he wouldn’t ask out loud. But maybe he’d come around later. So Tom plowed ahead.

  “Riel fled to the US, and Dumont moved westward to Saskatchewan with a large group of Metis. Riel wound up living not far from here for a while, while Dumont and his people scattered and settled across the Saskatchewan territory. They lived there for years, believing they had outrun their troubles, until—white settlers started encroaching again, with the tacit approval of the Canadian government.

  “By then, some people think that Riel had begun to lose his mind a little. He began to speak of himself in messianic terms. You know what that means?” Tom asked.

  “Like he was a chosen one, or something?” Josie answered.

  “Yeah. He started to talk about himself like he was a messiah, come to save the Metis people. Like he was almost godlike. But people still believed in him and they sure believed in Gabriel Dumont’s ability to fight. So Dumont left his peaceful farming life and came to Montana to talk Riel into leading the people again. Together they went to the plains of Alberta and Saskatchewan and started organizing another resistance.

  “In Canada, this movement was called the Northwest Rebellion. Gabriel Dumont was brilliant again as a military strategist. They fought a battle at a place called Duck Lake and they crushed the Canadian forces against them, even though they were completely out-armed and outnumbered. In Manitoba and in the Northwest Rebellion, Dumont just beat the federal forces time and again.”

  “Kind of like us and Drummond.” The voice startled Tom. It was Waylon Edwards, who apparently had been listening enough to draw a parallel.

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, Drummond has more guys on their team, and they have better facilities and more money in their school. They always win state. And when we play them, we’re going to have fewer warriors, but we’re going to beat them in battle after battle until we win the game,” Waylon said. He was proud of himself.

  Whereas Tom felt patronized. He knew exactly how smart Waylon was, knew Waylon was comparing the football team to an underdog army as a suck-up to the football coach/teacher. But his tone had a “cool story, bro” condescension to it. Too, Tom knew how the parallel went askew.

  “You might want to rethink that when you hear what happened in a battle at a town in Saskatchewan called Batoche. That’s where the rebel army was completely overrun by the Royal Canadian Mounties. The Metis fought well for three days, but were finally outmanned. Riel was captured and hanged.”

  “What happened to Dumont?” Waylon asked.

  “Well, Gabriel Dumont managed to slip away with a few other rebels and escape. They crossed back over the border and came here, settled right in this area. The Metis rebellion ended at Batoche. Dumont ended up in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, traveling to New York City and Paris. His family put down roots in our place. And at least one Montana town was named for him. The town of Dumont was originally part of the Fort Miles reservation. Although later, the reservation shrank as settlers and homesteaders wanted the rich bottomlands around here, so the town eventually slipped outside the reservation borders.”

  * * *

  Later, when she went home, Josie would consider how fascinated she must truly have been, to be at all distracted on a day that the sheriff and the school attorney had been parked in the principal’s office, interviewing students—not coincidentally her boyfriend—all day long. There was a tension in the house when she came in, her mother sitting at the table with her brother, neither speaking. Her dad’s truck was in the yard, so he was around and likely the source of what nobody seemed t
o be talking about. Tension was the last thing she wanted to dive into. Jared lifted his glance to catch her eye and hold it for a moment.

  Josie looked a question at him, but he gave her nothing. She went right to her room and closed the door. Why had nobody ever told her that her town was named after a mixed-blood rebel? She had, of course, never bothered to ask anybody how Dumont got its name, but this was, to her, the kind of surprise that left you misunderstanding everything. She knew several of the Hi-Line towns were allegedly named back when the Great Northern railroad was laying out towns and its hucksters were shilling real estate. The story went that a company employee spun a globe and stuck his finger on it to produce town names like Malta, Havre and Glasgow.

  Every other town she knew was named for military or government officials—Fort Peck, Fort Miles, Fort Benton—or trappers, settlers, or railroad officials—Wibaux, Shelby, Jordan, Sidney, Scobey—all, she had long ago noted, white people. In fact, in a region famous for its Indian inhabitants, every town she knew was named for or by a white person.

  Except Chinook, which was named for the wind. When she had been very young and played cowboys and Indians with her brother and the boys, she was always an Indian. The boys—Jared and Alex and her cousins—thought it was because she was a girl and they, as boys, got to be the cowboys. But she would have chosen to be an Indian anyway. Josie hated the way people treated the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine people from the Fort Miles reservation who sometimes came to town. If they weren’t overly friendly to white people, Josie thought, well, it wasn’t as if we hadn’t given them two hundred years’ worth of reasons.

  And now come to find out, she was living in the only town in the northern Montana named after a man most noted for his Indian blood and his anti-government leanings. She felt particularly outraged by Coach Warner’s eventual assertion—voiced in the exchange that followed with Waylon—that, had he lived today, Gabriel Dumont would have been labeled a terrorist. She found herself aswim in the history. Batoche. The word repeated in her head, obsessively. Batoche. It all fell apart in Batoche. Gabriel Dumont sounded like an angel’s name, and she imagined him at the battle of Batoche, playing a shining brass trumpet to signal a charge, smoke and dust swirling around him. And they had almost won.

  They had almost pulled it off. Josie had never heard of the Northwest Rebellion, Gabriel Dumont, Louis Riel, the Metis, none of it. She knew about Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. She knew some stories about the Blackfeet, Sioux, Cheyenne, and Nez Perce because she’d read about them on her own. She knew about the Fort Baker massacre, whiskey and the blankets full of smallpox. She knew a lot about the fur trappers, the railroad, the homesteaders, the Dust Bowl, but she’d never, in eleven years of education, read a word about the Metis. That seemed criminal.

  Her sense of outrage kept her engaged in the subject even while Coach Warner and Waylon jabbed back and forth. She wondered if the Metis people looked like Mikie LaValle. She wondered what tribe Mikie’s Indian side came from, and thought to ask him, but then worried that it might be impolite. Mikie was not a polite boy, but Josie thought he was edgy and mean sheerly as a reflexive mechanism. She felt at all moments coming from him a palpable fear of being hurt. She doubted he’d trust anybody anytime soon, but she’d bet she could teach him to trust her.

  If that’s what she chose to do. Josie had never bothered to censor her thoughts about boys who weren’t Matt. This wasn’t the first time she’d had them, and it wouldn’t be the last. She’d never cheated on Matt, but she often thought about boys she saw fleetingly when she traveled to other towns for basketball or football games, remembered the way they stood, the cut of their hair, how jeans hung on their hips. She thought about the nameless, faceless college boys to come, wondering how they would be different than Matt, what things she would talk about with them, how they would hold her in a way that made her feel more loved than desired. It did occur to her that Mikie was not one of her usual types.

  He was odd, dark and sharp. She wouldn’t call him handsome in any of the usual ways. Fierce maybe, but that was something he was trying to show. Fierce and so afraid. Behind it, she was starting to realize, lived a mind consumed with dreamy escapist things he’d never done and probably would always be too afraid to try.

  Or maybe he would. Maybe he’d be one of those rare kids who leave Dumont after graduation and never come back. You heard stories of them, going off to New York City, or joining the army and living in Germany. She had been at the grocery store with her dad once, a year ago, when a young man who had joined the military walked out of Pep’s and recognized her father. They had talked briefly and the young man told her father where he had been. Guam, he said. Korea. Panama. Those were ones she remembered.

  She had looked them up in the atlas when she got home to see where they were. Standing there, on the sidewalk outside the IGA, she could almost smell the faraway places on that guy. He wore different jeans than everybody she knew, and a shirt that looked Italian, or like Italians she had seen in movies like the Godfather or the Sopranos might wear. His skin was weathered, bronze, as if he had been tanned by a different sun than theirs. Maybe Mikie would be like that one day, coming home confident and full of views from the world. For a moment she entertained the notion of imagining herself heading abroad with him, but then thought, no.

  She couldn’t, in fact, convince herself that her interest in Mikie was at all romantic. It certainly hadn’t started out that way. She had been protective of him, then curious about him, and now was curious about herself. He might, she realized, allow her to find some things out about herself. She had a note from him in her pocket, for instance, asking her to call him tonight. It was so charming, getting handwritten notes when everybody else sent texts. It reminded her of something her parents might have done when they were in high school.

  She wondered if she would call him. Josie felt hungry, wondered if the kitchen was a safe zone yet. She decided to pretend nothing was wrong, emerged from her room with a rattling of her door handle and a snippet of song coming from her mouth, then swung down the hall, humming. Jared sat at the table, bent over some homework. He saw her, looked toward the mudroom, where Josie could hear the washing machine running. When his eyes came back to her, she the sadness in them stopped her humming.

  “Dad wants me to slaughter the pigs,” Jared said.

  * * *

  Caroline Jensen had been in town late working her second job, the evening shift at the IGA, and came home after dark to the faint aroma of pot. She knew Mikie smoked, had caught him a couple of times and tried grounding him for it, but how could you ground a kid when you couldn’t be home to make sure he didn’t go anywhere? She didn’t want him to smoke pot, but was less enthusiastic in her protests than she could be, because she didn’t mind lighting up a spleef every now and then and found it less offensive and a better outlet for Mikie than the other teenage drug of choice, heavy drinking. Mikie’s father had succumbed to bouts of heroic alcohol indulgence that devolved into bouts of domestic violence.

  She’d ended that after a few severe beatings, but still lived with a tiny but steady enough trickle of fear that he might show up again one day out of the blue and kill her. It was easy to blame the booze. Caroline didn’t want Mikie to fall into drink. She felt his Indian genetics made him vulnerable to it. So she used that to excuse the pot as an acceptable way of taking the edge off the angst every teenager felt.

  But she also felt she couldn’t come off as too lenient, so she’d drawn a line at smoking in the house. Now Mikie sat at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of Captain Crunch and reading a book. Earbuds dripped black tentacles along his cheeks. His head bobbed to a rhythm in sync with his chewing. She signaled for him to turn the music down.

  “What’d you learn in school today?” she asked. This was a standard question, asked every day.

  “Nothing,” he said, the standard answer.

  “They ought a burn that school down and build a monster truck arena,” she said. “Nev
er teach the kids a thing. Total waste of my taxes.”

  Mikie cocked an eye her way as if to say, now you’re talking.

  “Seriously,” Caroline said. This, too, was rote. She asked, he said nothing, she pushed, he sometimes told her a thing or two about school. “Tell me one thing you learned.”

  Mikie pushed his lower lip out, obviously decided something. He sat up straighter in his chair, but shrugged lest she get the impression he was displaying enthusiasm. “I learned who this town is named after.”

  “Who’s that?” Caroline asked.

  “You don’t know?” Mikie asked, a bit smugly.

  “I guess I don’t. I guess I never thought about it.”

  “Gabriel Dumont,” Mikie said, nodding up a big deal.

  “And he is …”

  “Half-breed,” Mikie said, “Like me.”

  “Don’t use that word,” she said, but not with anything behind it, because she thought he was so damned cute when he thought he knew something. And Mikie was into this, moving his hands to represents nations and slabs of geography and, later, skirmish lines.

  “He was. Metis. There’s a whole nation of people who are half-breeds and they’re called Metis. They’re French and Indian, like in that war, and they’re from Canada, around Minnesota and they have, like, their own culture. Dumont, though. Dumont, though, was badass. He was the leader of the warriors. The Canadian army had more guns and more soldiers and better horses but Dumont, though. He was like, I got this. He was too fierce. And too smart. He’d lay ambushes and, like, pretend to be retreating but really he was just luring the army into a trap. He fought a whole rebellion and beat the army at first, though later they lost, but so Canada had to give the Metis a whole country to be all theirs. That’s what Manitoba is. But then they took it back.”

  “Who took it back?”

  “Canada,” Mikie said, his mood tripping toward annoyed by her lack of understanding.

  “OK, Mikie, just tell the story clearly. You know how. First things first, then the next thing. Don’t get impatient.”