Old Kaskaskia Part 1

Old Kaskaskia.

by Mary Hartwell Catherwood.

PART FIRST.

THE BONFIRE OF ST. JOHN.

Early in the century, on a summer evening, Jean Lozier stood on the bluff looking at Kaskaskia. He loved it with the homesick longing of one who is born for towns and condemned to the fields. Moses looking into the promised land had such visions and ideals as this old lad cherished.

Jean was old in feeling, though not yet out of his teens. The training-masters of life had got him early, and found under his red sunburn and k.n.o.bby joints, his black eyes and bushy eyebrows, the nature that pa.s.sionately aspires. The town of Kaskaskia was his sweetheart. It tantalized him with advantage and growth while he had to turn the clods of the upland. The long peninsula on which Kaskaskia stood, between the Okaw and the Mississippi rivers, lay below him in the glory of sunset.

Southward to the point spread lands owned by the parish, and known as the common pasture. Jean could see the church of the Immaculate Conception and the tower built for its ancient bell, the convent northward, and all the pleasant streets bowered in trees. The wharf was crowded with vessels from New Orleans and Cahokia, and the arched stone bridge across the Okaw was a thoroughfare of hurrying carriages.

The road at the foot of the bluff, more than a hundred feet below Jean, showed its white flint belt in distant laps and stretches through northern foliage. It led to the territorial governor's country-seat of Elvirade; thence to Fort Chartres and Prairie du Rocher; so on to Cahokia, where it met the great trails of the far north. The road also swarmed with carriages and riders on horses, all moving toward Colonel Pierre Menard's house. Jean could not see his seignior's chimneys for the trees and the dismantled and deserted earthworks of Fort Gage. The fort had once protected Kaskaskia, but in these early peaceful times of the Illinois Territory it no longer maintained a garrison.

The lad guessed what was going on; those happy Kaskaskians, the fine world, were having a ball at Colonel Menard's. Summer and winter they danced, they made fetes, they enjoyed life. When the territorial a.s.sembly met in this capital of the West, he had often frosted himself late into the winter night, watching the lights and listening to the music in Kaskaskia. Jean Lozier knew every bit of its history. The parish priest, Father Olivier, who came to hear him confess because he could not leave his grandfather, had told it to him. There was a record book transmitted from priest to priest from the earliest settlement of Cascasquia of the Illinois. Jean loved the story of young D'Artaguette, whom the boatmen yet celebrated in song. On moonlight nights, when the Mississippi showed its broad sheet four miles away across the level plain, he sometimes fooled himself with thinking he could see the fleet of young soldiers pa.s.sing down the river, bearing the French flag; phantoms proceeding again to their tragedy and the Indian stake.

He admired the seat where his seignior lived in comfort and great hospitality, but all the crowds pressing to Pierre Menard's house seemed to him to have less wisdom than the single man who met and pa.s.sed them and crossed the bridge into Kaskaskia. The vesper bell rung, breaking its music in echoes against the sandstone bosom of the bluff. Red splendors faded from the sky, leaving a pearl-gray bank heaped over the farther river. Still Jean watched Kaskaskia.

"But the glory remains when the light fades away,"

he sung to himself. He had caught the line from some English boatmen.

"Ye dog, ye dog, where are you, ye dog?" called a voice from the woods behind him.

"Here, grandfather," answered Jean, starting like a whipped dog. He took his red cap from under his arm, sighing, and slouched away from the bluff edge, the coa.r.s.e homespun which he wore revealing knots and joints in his work-hardened frame.

"Ye dog, am I to have my supper to-night?"

"Yes, grandfather."

But Jean took one more look at the capital of his love, which he had never entered, and for which he was unceasingly homesick. The governor's carriage dashed along the road beneath him, with a military escort from Fort Chartres. He felt no envy of such state. He would have used the carriage to cross the bridge.

"If I but lived in Kaskaskia!" whispered Jean.

The man on horseback, who met and pa.s.sed the ball-goers, rode through Kaskaskia's twinkling streets in the pleasant glow of twilight. Trade had not reached its day's end. The crack of long whips could be heard, flourished over oxen yoked by the horns, or three or four ponies. .h.i.tched tandem, all driven without reins, and drawing huge bales of merchandise.

Few of the houses were more than one story high, but they had a sumptuous spread, each in its own square of lawn, orchard, and garden.

They were built of stone, or of timbers filled in with stone and mortar.

The rider turned several corners, and stopped in front of a small house which displayed the wares of a penny-trader in its window.

From the open one of the two front doors a black boy came directly out to take the bridle; and behind him skipped a wiry shaven person, whose sleek crown was partly covered by a Madras handkerchief, the common headgear of humble Kaskaskians. His feet clogged their lightness with a pair of the wooden shoes manufactured for slaves. A sleeved blanket, made with a hood which lay back on his shoulders, almost covered him, and was girdled at the waist by a knotted cord.

"Here I am again, Father Baby," hailed the rider, alighting.

"Welcome home, doctor. What news from Fort Chartres?"

"No news. My friend the surgeon is doing well. He need not have sent for me; but your carving doctor is a great coward when it comes to physicking himself."

They entered the shop, while the slave led the horse away; and no customers demanding the trading friar's attention, he followed his lodger to an inner room, having first lighted candles in his wooden sconces. Their yellow l.u.s.tre showed the tidiness of the shop, and the penny merchandise arranged on shelves with that exactness which has been thought peculiar to unmarried women. Father Baby was a scandal to the established confessor of the parish, and the joke of the unG.o.dly. Some said he had been a dancing-master before he entered the cloister, and it was no wonder he turned out a renegade and took to trading. Others declared that he had no right to the gray capote, and his tonsure was a natural loss of hair; in fact, that he never had been a friar at all.

But in Kaskaskia n.o.body took him seriously, and Father Olivier was not severe upon him. Custom made his harlequin antics a matter of course; though Indians still paused opposite his shop and grinned at sight of a long-gown peddling. His religious practices were regular and severe, and he laid penance on himself for all the cheating he was able to accomplish.

"I rode down from Elvirade with Governor Edwards," said the doctor. "He and all Kaskaskia appear to be going to Colonel Menard's to-night."

"Yes, I stood and counted the carriages: the Bonds, the Morrisons, the Vigos, the Sauciers, the Edgars, the Joneses"--

"Has anything happened these three days past?" inquired the doctor, breaking off this list of notable Kaskaskians.

"Oh, many things have happened. But first here is your billet."

The young man broke the wafer of his invitation and unfolded the paper.

"It is a dancing-party," he remarked. His nose took an aquiline curve peculiar to him. The open sheet, as he held it, showed the name of "Dr.

Dunlap" written on the outside. He leaned against a high black mantel.

"You will want hot shaving-water and your best ruffled shirt," urged the friar.

"I never dance," said the other indifferently.

"And you do well not to," declared Father Baby, with some contemptuous impatience. "A man who shakes like a load of hay should never dance. If I had carried your weight, I could have been a holier man."

Dr. Dunlap laughed, and struck his boot with his riding-whip.

"Don't deceive yourself, worthy father. The making of an abbot was not in you. You old rascal, I am scarcely in the house, and there you stand all of a tremble for your jig."

Father Baby's death's-head face wrinkled itself with expectant smiles.

He shook off his wooden shoes and whirled upon one toe.

The doctor went into another room, his own apartment in the friar's small house. His office fronted this, and gave him a door to the street.

Its bottles and jars and iron mortar and the vitreous slab on which he rolled pills were all lost in twilight now. There were many other doctors' offices in Kaskaskia, but this was the best equipped one, and was the lair of a man who had not only been trained in Europe, but had sailed around the entire world. Dr. Dunlap's books, some of them in board covers, made a show on his shelves. He had an articulated skeleton, and ignorant Kaskaskians would declare that they had seen it whirl past his windows many a night to the music of his violin.

"What did you say had happened since I went away?" he inquired, sauntering back and tuning his fiddle as he came.

"There's plenty of news," responded Father Baby. "Antoine Lamarche's cow fell into the Mississippi."

Dr. Dunlap uttered a note of contempt.

"It would go wandering off where the land crumbles daily with that current setting down from the northwest against us; and Antoine was far from sneering in your cold-blooded English manner when he got the news."

"He tore his hair and screamed in your warm-blooded French manner?"

"That he did."

The doctor stood in the bar of candle-light which one of the shop sconces extended across the room, and lifted the violin to his neck. He was so large that all his gestures had a ponderous quality. His dress was disarranged by riding, and his blond skin was p.r.i.c.ked through by the untidy growth of a three-days' beard, yet he looked very handsome.

Dr. Dunlap stood in the light, but Father Baby chose the dark for those ecstatic antics into which the fiddle threw him. He leaped high from the floor at the first note, and came down into a jig of the most perfect execution. The pat of his bare soles was exquisitely true. He raised the gown above his ankles, and would have seemed to float but for his response in sound. Yet through his most rapturous action he never ceased to be conscious of the shop. A step on the sill would break the violin's charm in the centre of a measure.

But this time no step broke it, and the doctor kept his puppet friar going until his own arm began to weary. The tune ended, and Father Baby paused, deprived of the ether in which he had been floating.