Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont: A Short Play Read online

and advances the clock, then stands behind Gabe.].

  Gabe : Four of us rode to Montana, where Louis was teaching school.

  Saddle-sore and dry when we arrived.

  It had been a long ride

  And a hard trail.

  Riel came out of the schoolhouse

  I recognized him from the description -

  He had a prophet’s eyes

  We wondered if we were doing the right thing

  Even in a dry climate

  There are many wrong paths

  But, far to the north, a prairie fire was burning

  And behind me, dust devils were

  Erasing our old road.

  Louis: [to the audience] I think he’s almost done the history part.

  Gabe : I am. Mr. John A. McDonald sent in the troops. We fought. We lost.

  In a little place called Batoche we Métis lost forever. [He points to Louis] Dickhead here was still telling us not to fight, to negotiate. But them troops weren’t in a negotiating mood, you know.

  Louis: A slight miscalculation, possibly.

  Gabe : I escaped. They caught Louis, and put him on trial for a few petty infractions. End of the history lesson. [he walks to the clock, moves the hand back.] What were the charges, my crazy friend?

  Louis: Treason, for one, and murder. Nothing serious

  Gabe : He tried to give the west to the United States. How’s that?

  [Audience member comes out, displays sign, “Hang the Bastard!”, returns to stands.]

  Louis: I hate that sign. Anyway, I wasn’t serious. And I’m not crazy!

  Gabe : [to audience] Oh no, not crazy, not my friend Louis Riel! On our way back from Montana we had meal breaks twice a day, pee stops three times a day, and prayer stops every ten miles.

  Louis: God found me. He hasn’t found you yet, but that’s not my problem.

  Gabe : The hero of the Métis. After his first success he’d gone to Montreal. He got off the train bellowing like a bull and shouting “I’m a prophet, I’m a prophet. He spent the next two years in a nuthouse in Montreal.

  Louis: Now they’ve got a Louis Riel trail and a Louis Riel statue. I’m a hero to the Métis and practically a father of confederation. Not to mention top billing in this play of yours.

  And you, the wily Gabriel Dumont, are forgotten. [he picks up the buffalo skull, contemplates it]. Alas, poor bison. Dumont knew you well…. [turns to Gabe]

  You grew old, my friend.

  I wish I had. Tell me this:

  When the savage wind came down the Missouri

  Thundering in the night, carrying

  Boxcars of Canadian snow,

  When you sat beside the fire, gray and nodding,

  Did you dream of the time when you were young

  And the most famous of buffalo hunters?

  Did you remember the man with fiery eyes

  And his impossible, crazy dream?

  As you drifted off to sleep, did you imagine

  In the corner of the shack, you could see

  Moving shadows, crazy eyes.

  Gabe : Fame everlasting. And a noose. Was it worth it,

  Louis Riel?

  You always sought walls, Louis -

  I was after paths,

  Trails, highways, the faint mark of the last buffalo,

  The keen edge of the October wind, while

  Making my own free trail across the shortgrass land.

  This Métis was born to step over surveyor’s chain and

  Thick sisal rope

  On the day they hanged you,

  With walls and walls around you

  I rode out of the valley

  To a high grassy knoll

  Where I could sit in a medicine wheel

  And watch all the suns go down..

  They could wall in Gabriel Dumont

  Only by mountains and sky.

  After dark that day, I watched the stars

  Making their own trail across the free and endless dark.

  Louis : What can I say? Some talk to the wind, some talk to eternal fire. [looks significantly at Gabe. Looks at the audience] Who’s ever heard of Gabriel Dumont?

  Gabe : You’re trying to tell me something.

  Louis : I was chosen. God and I may have had our disagreements, but, all in all, I was chosen. I started my own church.

  Gabe: Not many remember that.

  It’s not that founding a church

  Wasn’t one of your better ideas

  But you had only the Mother Church

  As an example.

  Yes, Louis, your own church, but you couldn’t compete

  With Big Mama from Rome.

  A bit more foresight and we

  Could have had the donut franchise.

  We could have had Louis Riel’s instead of

  That damn hockey player

  And more branch parishes than the pope

  Could ever dream of.

  You were probably dropped on your head as a kid. Remember Fish Creek? The battle?

  A bullet creased my skull, tearing off

  A slab of my hair and spraying blood onto

  The grass at Fish Creek

  I looked around. The Métis were still firing

  And the laughter of the Gatling still mocked

  Our desperate petition.

  I had a sudden desire for the morning

  Along the river, the fog clearing out.

  I have a tough skull, Louis. Think: A slight

  Change in the angle of a piece of lead

  And I could have leapt up yelling,

  “Shoot me, hang me;

  God wants me!”.

  Louis: What God asked of me, I tried to do. What the people see in me, they see in me.

  There are three Riels, you know:

  The crazy prophet torching buildings

  Till he gets to jig a bit

  At the end of a rope

  The quiet boy just out of school

  Who said, “Yes, Lord, I will

  If you ask.”

  And the one they made out of me

  Ashes starting to stir

  On every wind.

  Gabe : And the husband. Or did you forget that, again.

  Louis: Heresy, treason, and madness:

  Oh, Marguerite

  My only sin.

  Was in the leaving

  Marguerite

  I left you my wool coat.

  For me

  Plant a flower

  Walk away

  Don’t look back:

  Heresy, treason, and madness

  Make fine fertilizer

  But the memory of a fire

  Brings little warmth.

  Gabe: [To audience] Louis left his wife his wool coat, and memories. It was all he had. Neither kept Marguerite warm enough; she died a few months after him.

  Louis: [Tapping Gabe on the shoulder.] Hey, did you leave Madeline any more than that? I left her my fame. Which is more than you could do.

  Gabe: Madeline. A daughter of the prairies.

  She was born in a Red River Cart, of a Scottish trader

  And an Cree woman, somewhere on the wide lands

  As the last great buffalo hunt came home

  From Montana. Twelve hundred carts, Louis,

  Of dried meat, and hides. One priest.

  I was three, then, and rode with my parents

  In another cart.

  When I was twenty-one, I was a Dumont

  There were none like us, on the prairie, but

  The buffalo were gone.

  Madeline, that young man would have hauled

  A thousand carts for you, but all you asked

  Was for a strong hand as a world rolled over us.

  Louis : You outlived your wife. You took her into exile

  in Montana.

  Gabe: After we Métis lost the war, I hid Madeline

  on an island. Then we made our way into Monta
na.

  Early that November I looked out the window

  To see our world had become white with snow.

  I was newly an exile

  You were in the ground, Louis

  I was long ago, far away

  Madeline was reading poetry in English, by the fire

  She had the cough then

  We both knew what that meant.

  She read some Shelley, and Wordsworth

  Trying to translate it into Cree and French for me

  It made little sense

  I sang her a Blackfoot song

  She smiled at me, then we watched

  Our last winter coming in.

  Madeline died within a year of leaving Canada, of tuberculosis. She was gone. The buffalo were gone. The world didn’t need Métis any more. The white people had their eyes on the prairies. The Indians were all being herded onto the reserves. Us half-breeds - well, we were half-breeds.

  Louis : We lost. I became history. You became a footnote. I hear you joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Circus. The one and only Gabriel Dumont, forgotten revolutionary of the plains.

  Gabe: It was a job.

  I remember the shooting. A lot of shooting.

  There were horses galloping around and

  Dust clouds rising and

  Indians falling over

  Kerplop. Kerplop.

  Mostly Indians, of course,

  Or anybody who looked enough like one

  To qualify to be shot.

  After a year, the excitement wore off

  And I figured the good folks had had enough

  Of the wild and wily Métis Gabriel Dumont.

  I left Buffalo Bill’s show in Pennsylvania

  Riding back west

  Into my own sunset.

  Frenzy and dust. Dead natives.

  That was the problem;

  It was just too much like my first

  Wild West melodrama.

  Louis: [Points to the clock] Time’s up. Play’s over. One parting thought?

  If the soil heaves and we

  Crawl out of the crypt

  Covered in cobwebs and dust

  Dazed in the sunlight…

  Two good ol’ halfbreeds

  Planning revolutions…

  Put us back.

  Put prairie willow through our hearts,

  Duct tape over our mouths.

  Gabe: Remember this

  The prairies were made for love

  Its days for humming of bees and laughter

  In the coulees.

  On long August days

  Life is short, and every day

  Is one less day for bumblebees and love.

  Louis: If we do not offer love and laughter,

  Put us back.

  Gabe: And lock the door

  More securely this time.

  Louis: God calls. [Starts to leave.]

  Gabe : One more song for my little play. Before you go.

  They sing, to the tune of “Red River Valley”

  There are ghosts in the winds of the prairies

  There are bones in the black prairie loam

  There’s a cry in the hearts of the Métis

  For the loss of their wild prairie home

  Sing the songs that are lost now forever

  Sing songs that are over and done

  We were the hope of the Métis

  And the fire in the bright prairie sun

  We are the bones in the soil of the prairies

  We are ghosts in the winds of the night

  We’re the song that is lost now forever

  We’re the fire that once burned so bright

  Sing the songs that are lost now forever

  Sing songs that are over and done

  We were the hope of the Métis

  And the fire in the bright prairie sun

  Louis bows to audience, leaves, spotlight stays on his exit point

  Dim light on Gabe

  Gabe : [removes hat]. One day, we were revolutionaries. The next, we were only history.

  Suddenly the stage was empty

  The audience filed out, leaving

  One lone spotlight on the magician’s trapdoor

  Behind the curtain

  In the cobweb darkness

  The stage hand, hat in hand, exits.

  [Gabe exits. Fade to dark]

  End

  Write [email protected] or just Google “Lenny Everson”.