Across the Endless River (35 page)

By crossing the room, Baptiste could look down on the castle's much smaller inner courtyard, an expanse of paving stones surrounded by three-story whitewashed buildings capped by a steep-pitched roof of black tiles. One side of the inner court was dominated by the fanciful curved facade of the castle's tall Baroque chapel, its yellow stucco, carved gray stone, and twin steeples the only relief from the precision of black and white forms that closed the circle.

He walked back to the shelves, picked up the jar that held the dismembered owl, and carried it to the examining table. As he unpinned the two cowbirds and wiped the wooden block clean, he spoke to the owl in regretful tones.

“You, little one, are in a sorry state. Somebody dealt you a rough blow on your long trip from the Missouri to Mergentheim.”

“You've come to
Otus asio.
Excellent progress!” Paul's voice resonated from behind him. Baptiste nodded as he removed the owl's head from the jar. “I was hoping to join you earlier,” Paul continued, “but instead I've come to take you away to celebrate.”

Baptiste turned around. “What is the occasion?”

“I have some momentous news,” Paul said, and rose up on the balls of his feet. His tone was ebullient, and a smile spread across his features. “I am going to be a father!”

“Let me be the first to congratulate you,” Baptiste said. He wiped his hands clean and grasped Paul's hand in both of his. “May your sons follow the buffalo, vanquish their enemies, and prosper for generations to come.” Then he added, “Of course, your wife may be carrying a daughter.”

Paul's features clouded. “Say a prayer that it be a son! Once I produce an heir, my duty is accomplished.” Then he said, “I have other news that is equally important in its way. Herr Thomm has replied. If I give him the completed text and illustrations by the end of August, he can prepare one hundred copies by November. We can look forward to two births this autumn!”

At the end of the afternoon, Baptiste left the festivities that Paul had organized in one of the summer pavilions in the hills surrounding Mergentheim. Outdoors, light and stillness prevailed, and he breathed deeply. The weather was unseasonably warm for April. He left word with Paul's coachman that he was returning by foot, then set off through the forest.

Quickly the sound of his footsteps through the new growth of bracken came to the fore and transformed the party noises into a faint and distant tinkling that fast receded. Baptiste considered how different he felt when he walked in the woods here. The European countryside did not draw him in as the forests at home did. It did not awaken the place where his spirit bird lived and watched the world through his eyes. Every part of the land he had seen had been changed by man and every place had its owner. Nothing was untouched. Baptiste recalled the one time in Europe he had felt something akin to what he had left behind.

He and Paul had been visiting Naples a few months before Paul's wedding. One of their hosts, a passionate disciple of von Humboldt's theories of geology, took them up the slopes of Mount Vesuvius on a clear February morning. Baptiste had seen prints and drawings of volcanoes in Captain Clark's study in St. Louis, but the experience of walking on the lightly trembling slopes of a mountain had touched something deep and unexpected in him, as if the earth beneath their feet were alive. Fumaroles of steam rose on all sides, whipped across the slopes by a piercing cold wind, and the odor of sulfur was heavy when the smoke blew their way.

They passed several large steam vents and crossed flows of cooled lava. The black trails were rivers turned to stone. Finally they came to a small crater on the side of the mountain that, their host told them, had been the site of eruptions less than six months before. It looked like the spent furnace of an unseen giant, a heap of ash and lava built up in powdery layers of gray, black, and brown. Paul was disappointed that no lava flow could be observed, though he did praise the view of Capri, the bay, and Naples.

Baptiste vividly remembered the sense of delight that he had felt on that February morning in the thin, freezing air.
No one can claim to
own this!
he had shouted inwardly. As they made their slow descent, the sere and savage landscape reminded him of what he had been missing. Today he felt that same sense of loss, and it troubled him deeply.

T
HIRTY-FIVE

M
AY 17, 1828
B
AD
M
ERGENTHEIM

Dear Maura,

I am relieved to be able to address you in a letter by your given name at last, though I have enjoyed being your cousin these many months. Now that you and your family are in Geneva, I can be sure that your friends will place this directly into your hands.

I did not understand that your father's expulsion from France when he was last in Sicily applied to you and your mother as well. I thought that the two of you would be allowed to return to the Gironde, but your latest letter tells me otherwise, and I worry for you. It must be very hard to have left everything and not know when you can return.

Paul has had word from friends in Stuttgart and elsewhere that the French king is fast losing support, and that he has grown ever more defensive with those he sees as enemies. He says that until he is gone, though, you cannot return to France. Will Geneva be your home now? Or Ireland? I would be sorry to see you go. Geneva is close by and Ireland is very far away. I want to know when we will see each other. Your memory is vivid in my mind, and I had looked forward with the greatest anticipation to seeing you this summer. If there is a way for our paths to cross, please let me know.

Increasingly I think of returning home. These years have taught me many things, and I have absorbed them like a good student. Each day has been a new adventure, where all that was required of me was to pay attention and take in as much as possible. But there comes a time when one wants to stop learning and start doing. Captain Clark often said that the staff officers and personal secretaries who accompanied important visitors in St. Louis “live their lives looking through someone else's eyes, or trying to.” It was not a compliment. I have begun to be one of them.

My time here has helped me to think about my life in St. Louis differently. You know how attached I am to my guardian, and that I have always trusted his judgment, and yet consider this: Captain Clark has been a slave owner all his adult life. He even took a slave along as part of the Corps of Discovery, a Negro by the name of York, then kept him in St. Louis as his servant. So, you see, I will not be returning to some perfect place; far from it.

Here the situation is not much different, though it takes other forms. I have seen African servants here in Europe. In some ways they seem to me even more miserable than the slaves of America, since they are so few and regarded as if they were exotic animals. When I arrived in Europe, I was an object of wonder and fascination. Only gradually did I come to realize that this sort of curiosity is rarely accompanied by respect. You will laugh when you read that, but please remember that I was nineteen years old when “civilization” opened its door to me, and now I have reached the ripe and cynical age of twenty-three. I tell myself that if I stay in Europe, I will end up like them, cut off from those who know who I am.

I am beginning to understand the sense of your father's remark that for those of us who live on the edges of different worlds, history has wounded us and love must save us. He was thinking of the Irish, but there are many of us who have more than one home. You and I both know what it is to pass from one world to another, and back again.

Captain Clark tells me that there are more visitors than ever going up the river, and I could find work guiding Europeans on their expeditions. It will be good for me to use my know-how on the frontier, where it is valued. I long for a companion who could make her way there. Will you consider it? You see, Maura, when I am with you, I forget that I am of mixed blood or an American or a Mandan or from the frontier. I am Baptiste, and it is enough.

I have written more a book than a letter, but I hope you will indulge me. I cannot hide my thoughts from you. When I write to you, I think of your voice, your laugh, your eyes, your strong opinions. You are more present in my mind than ever.
What would Maura think of
this?
I ask myself many times each day.

Together we will find a way if you are willing. Until then, I am your most affectionate,

Baptiste

P.S. I must add one detail that I know will make you laugh. This
Schloss
is now to be called “Bad” Mergentheim, since “curative springs” have been found in the environs. A local shepherd found two of his sheep in a swampy area containing a salt lick and a few small sulfur pools—the sort of place you see a dozen times in a week in the land I grew up on. The “discovery” has excited Paul. He has taken samples of the water to analyze its mineral content, and has great plans to exploit the healing waters of “Bad Mergentheim” in the name of science.

T
HIRTY-SIX

D
UKE
P
AUL, FROM HIS PRIVATE JOURNAL
M
AY 20, 1828
B
AD
M
ERGENTHEIM

This should be a happy time, and yet I find myself in a dark mood day after day. The elation I felt over Sophie's pregnancy has transformed into foreboding. Daily my wife is full of demands on my time, each more pressing and each justified by the approaching birth of our child. I cannot imagine putting up with Sophie's growing needs until October, when the child will come. She talks of going to Regensburg to visit her mother; the day of her departure cannot come soon enough. I suppose her behavior is typical of the caprices of an expectant mother, but she becomes more insistent, more irascible, and more shrill as the weeks pass.

Before now, I have known Sophie to be sweet, a little dull, and inclined to be accommodating toward others. Prospective motherhood has unleashed a dragon whose fiery blasts are directed at me. Increasingly I see that in her mind this baby will turn us into a family with shared responsibilities, ambitions, and activities. I must participate in the deliberations of the Chamber of Nobles in Stuttgart on a regular basis, I must hold a weekly audience for the good citizens of Mergentheim, I must draw closer to my dear cousin the king, I must put away my silly specimens and transform Castle Mergentheim into a home worthy of children: the list is an endless catalog of all the things I am not.

Theresa warned me that Sophie would overlook all that came before the marriage but would see it as her duty to reform my ways. If Theresa is right—and I fear that she is—this ship is headed for a rocky shore.

The prospect of my book's publication fills me with more joyful anticipation than does the birth of my child. Sophie does not yet suspect that Baptiste and I will have to spend even longer hours on it now. How she will complain! But there is nothing for it but to lower my head and attend to my real work.

The thread of my narrative has brought me to my adventure in the wilderness separating the Ponca tribe from the White River. Last night as I fashioned my account of the difficulties on this part of the expedition, I was nevertheless overcome by the strongest sense of longing for those days of discovery, daring, and unsurpassed beauty. Today, Baptiste and I examined
Tetrao phasianellus,
a native grouse that I collected in that region, and its distinctive tail feathers again surprised me.

This afternoon we also visited Herr Kreis, the local taxidermist, to whom I consigned nine of the larger animals I collected. We inspected his handiwork with the wolves and coyotes I had entrusted to his care. The results were superb: Their bared fangs looked truly menacing, and the raised hackles of one specimen gave the impression of imminent attack. While Baptiste is untroubled by the flat pelts of trapped animals, so familiar to him from his work on the frontier, he does not appreciate the illusion of life restored by the taxidermist with the animals' bodies stuffed and their heads still attached.

Baptiste is tiring of the scientific component of our work. He eagerly learned the Linnaean system, always looking for differences that separate one specimen from its apparent twin. But increasingly he questions this process and points out common traits. His own considerable expertise derives, of course, from the close observation of animals in the wild. It is natural that the structural distinctions, not necessarily apparent in an animal's appearance or behavior, should cease to satisfy him after a time. Too, it may be an expression of the degree to which he misses the direct experience of nature that is his birthright. For different reasons, we share a longing to return to the American frontier.

He is traveling on his own to Vienna at month's end, with my knowledge if not my blessing. Theresa is expected there next week at the Palace of Württemberg, and she plans to travel in the environs with friends until July. The rest is easy enough to imagine. If she influences Baptiste to remain with me, how can I object to his absence of two weeks?

Theresa seems to understand Baptiste, while I often have to guess his thoughts. Yet we are not so very different from any two men between whom words are sparse. Still, we share something that only the two of us have experienced. No one else here has been on the frontier, and no one can understand the sacred bond that unites us. In these past several months, that bond has deepened as we have revisited the trip in minute detail. The specimens are a constant reminder of a wild world that stretches beyond the fringes of civilization to the far horizon. General Clark told me he felt the same way in the company of the other members of his Corps of Discovery, who occasionally visited him. “Others think they understand what you have seen when you return,” he said, “but they do not; they cannot. Only your fellow expedition member knows what you have experienced.” Here at home, I feel that incomprehension keenly.