Centennial (58 page)

But there was no consolation for Levi in the possession of land, and as the winter deepened he grew even more depressed. Clay Basket did what she could to comfort him, but when she heard him ask McKeag, “Where’s the Chalk Cliff you told me about,” she encouraged Levi to seek it out and stay alone for a while, hoping that solitude would enable him to master his grief.

So he loaded a fair amount of gear on his back and walked for two days in a northwesterly direction till he came in sight of the cliffs at whose feet McKeag had once built his refuge. Some of the logs were still there, others could be cut, and he built himself a log-and-sod but on a spot that men had occupied for the past twelve thousand years.

He became a typical hermit, talking to ducks that settled on the little stream and watching antelope as if they were people. He castigated himself for having brought Elly to this desolate land, for having turned back when the elephant threatened. He convinced himself that if they had pursued their course to Oregon she would now be alive and her son would shortly be born, and he became half mad, with the risk that when the snows covered him, he might cower beneath them and perish.

The snows did come, much earlier than usual, and he spent most of December underground. February was a vicious month and he became a real animal, urinating in a corner of his but and allowing his excrement to accumulate there—never venturing out, never ceasing to blame himself for Elly’s death. If March were to bring blizzards, as it often did, he would soon be dead.

Clay Basket meanwhile was watching the weather, calculating the depth of snow at Chalk Cliff. She could imagine what the imprisoned Dutchman was doing, and when a thaw came in late February she told Lucinda, “You must take two horses and go to Chalk Cliff.”

“Why should she be the one to go?” McKeag asked.

“He will be ready to come back,” Clay Basket said.

“Then I’ll fetch him,” McKeag volunteered.

“He doesn’t need you,” she said. “Only Lucinda can save him.” Her words had the force of accumulated wisdom, for although Indian tradition required that a maiden remain a virgin till the day she took a husband, Clay Basket realized that a human life had to be rescued, and she was willing to send her daughter to a man who had seen no one for many months. Indeed, she suspected that two lives might be involved, for at Fort John she had watched with dismay as Lucinda shifted her attention from one useless trapper to the next. It had then seemed only a matter of time before the child must go off with some old lecher like Sam Purchas, and this she could not permit.

“Go to him,” she said, and Lucinda saddled up two pintos and rode westward.

When she came to the cliff, it took her some time to find where Zendt was holed up. Finally she discovered the hut at the north end of the cliff, and she stood at the entrance, calling, “Zendt! Zendt!”

It was some time before she got a response, then a bearded, bleary-eyed man appeared, blinking at the sun. “You are filthy,” she said, and although he tried weakly to stop her, she moved inside to witness the appalling conditions under which he lived.

“Zendt! How could you live like this!” She started to make the place habitable, and as she worked she saw that he was far too weak either to help or to mount a horse for the return trip. So she made him a new bed of clean branches cut from the little willows that the beaver no longer usurped for themselves. She built a fire and made some hot food, which he ate ravenously. Then she unloaded the pintos, and with two buffalo robes, fashioned herself a bed at his feet. He was asleep before she lay down.

In the morning he adjusted his weakened eyes and saw that she had stayed with him, and he asked in a faltering voice, “Why are you doing this?” and she replied, “My mother sent me. We love you, Zendt, and do not wish you to die.” And then the despair of recent months overwhelmed him and he hid his face and wept.

She nursed him back to strength, and one day in mid-March, forced him to ride for a short distance, and it was obvious that he was nearly ready for the trip back to the stockade. It was a beautiful day, and they rode some distance into the plains, where she showed him the little stone beaver climbing the mountain. That night when he went to bed, she lay down with him and for a moment he was confused and the memory of Elly Zahm came between them, but he was then only twenty-four and soon the passion of her body overcame him, and for one week, as spring came closer, he experienced untrammeled joy and found new strength.

But if Levi Zendt was a lusty twenty-four, he was also a strictly reared Mennonite—that a pagan Indian girl should share his bed confounded his moral sense. One morning before dawn, as he lay beside her pondering this problem, he chanced to recall the sermon about Ruth which the minister at the church in St. Louis had delivered:

And it shall be when he lieth down ... thou shalt go in and uncover his feet
...

and he judged that if it was permissible for Naomi to commit her daughter-in-law, the great-grandmother of King David, to such a mission, it was permissible for Clay Basket to do the same, and the first half of his dilemma was resolved. Gently passing his arm under her sleeping head, he kissed her, thus acknowledging that she had been sent, perhaps by God Himself, to save him.

The time had come when they must return, so they saddled the horses and loaded them with gear, and started the long journey home. Since there had been much snow this year, there was moisture in the ground, and from it sprang a million flowers, gold and blue and brown and red. The prairie was a carpet of buds, a more beautiful face of nature than Levi had ever seen before, more to be cherished than his groves of trees in Lancaster, for the trees endured whereas the flowers flourished for only a few days and would wither as soon as the hot sun struck them in June and July.

Occasionally Levi placed Lucinda on one of the horses and led her along the pathless route; at other times they set both horses free to wander as they wished and in time the animals smelled the Platte and headed south for water, and then the little caravan followed the river until it reached the stockade.

“You’re back,” McKeag said, proceeding immediately to show Zendt the improvements he had made during the winter.

“You’re thin,” Clay Basket said, and no further comments were made, but Levi Zendt, still wrestling with the second half of his dilemma, asked the McKeag family to sit with him in the sun outside the palisade, and when they were gathered he said, “Alexander, I want to marry your daughter.”

“High time,” McKeag said.

“But I cannot do so unless she’s a Christian.”

“All right, she’s a Christian.”

“She must be confirmed ... and able to read the Bible.”

“I can’t teach her. Neither can Clay Basket. Looks like it’s your job, Levi.”

“I am not a teacher, Alexander.” This led them to an impasse, which Zendt broke with a remarkable proposal: “So I have been thinking that when you go to St. Louis to buy our goods, you ought to take her along and put her in school.”

As soon as this was said, everyone listening recognized its merit. Clay Basket wanted her daughter to learn to read. Lucinda had always wanted to see St. Louis. And Alexander McKeag knew that a life as valuable as his daughter’s ought not be wasted. It was he who proposed an improvement on the plan. “I have a room in St. Louis ... with Pasquinel’s St. Louis wife. Clay Basket will take the girl there, and they can live in my room until she learns to read the Bible.”

Within two days they were packed and ready for the long trip to the Missouri. McKeag viewed the trip with pleasure, for he wanted to show his daughter the city that had played such a prominent part in Pasquinel’s life. “And while I’m there, we’ll file our claims to the land.”

“Where?” Levi asked.

“I don’t know where. But believe me, it’s important to have ’em on record ... with stamps and seals on ’em.”

The idea appealed to Zendt, and he said, “Before you go I want to stake out a claim at Chalk Cliff.”

“Why do you want that forsaken spot?”

“It was important to me.” So he and Lucinda saddled the best pintos and galloped west to the cliff, where they cut saplings and staked out a square facing the cliff, and when they reviewed their land a great passion overcame them and they made love as they had never done before, wildly, like the primitives who had once inhabited this spot, and without knowing it, they became one with the buffalo bones that lay buried here, and the campfires of ancient people who tipped their spears with Clovis points, and the bones-made-stone of diplodocus, dead more than a hundred and forty million years, and they were part of the flowers that grew during one wet year and lay hidden during ten arid ones, part of the unfathomable mystery of this land and these mountains and this turbulent river. It was love in its perpetual significance, something quite different from what he had known with Elly, and he whispered, “Be sure to come back from St. Louis. I need you.”

“I need you,” she replied, and at that moment she loved more than he, because she knew by what a narrow margin she had escaped becoming the property of some tobacco-stained lout in search of beaver that no longer existed or gold that remained hidden.

The account of Clay Basket’s leading her daughter Lucinda McKeag off the river boat became part of the chronicles of St. Louis. Following McKeag up the hill to Fourth Street, they presented themselves at seven in the morning at the brass-knobbed door of Lise Bockweiss Pasquinel’s redbrick mansion. “I’ve come for my room,” McKeag announced when Lise recovered from her surprise. “Not for myself. For Clay Basket and my daughter Lucinda.”

There could have been few people in the world that morning less welcome at the mansion, for Lise Pasquinel was in the midst of the spring social season and was involved with numerous parties relating to her prominent son and daughter. This sudden arrival of people from a distant past could not have been pleasing to her, but when she saw how beautiful Lucinda was and how stately Clay Basket looked in morning sunlight, her heart went out to them and she cried, “What a splendid family you have, McKeag,” and he, without embarrassment, replied, “They’re Pasquinel’s, but I look after them.”

“The room is waiting,” she said with infectious enthusiasm, embracing Lucinda and telling her, “You’re a beautiful child. St. Louis will be kind to you.” She took the trio to a suite of four rooms, but McKeag said he’d lodge along the waterfront while he bought his trade goods. This Lise would not permit. “You earned much of the money that went into this house,” she said half in jest, “and you stay here.”

The afternoon she introduced the two women as “Mrs. Alexander McKeag, wife of my late husband’s partner, and her lovely daughter Lucinda,” and she continued this procedure throughout the spring and summer, until St. Louis society had to accept the two Indian women.

She knew what gossips were saying: “The older woman is really Pasquinel’s left-hand wife, which makes Lucinda the half sister of Captain Mercy’s wife! I wonder how he feels preparing for the war in Mexico and knowing that his sister-in-law is an Indian.” Lise Pasquinel spoke for her son-in-law when she said, “It’s an honor to have such a beautiful child living with us.

“I consider her my daughter,” she told everyone, “and she’s attending our convent to learn to read.” If eyebrows were raised over the fact that the girl was illiterate, Lise said with disarming frankness, “She was raised a savage, you know.”

When she was alone with Clay Basket she spoke easily of her life with Pasquinel and relished hearing of how the little trapper had lived on the prairies. She said jokingly that she and Clay Basket were half wives just as Lucinda and Lisette were half sisters: “There ought to be a name for our relationship.”

One day as they were talking she broke into laughter, crying impulsively, “The little bastard was fun, though, wasn’t he?”

“He was a good husband,” Clay Basket replied. “My father told me he would be.”

“Your father must have been a wonderful man,” Lise said. “Mine was, too, you know. It wasn’t easy to leave Munich with two daughters ... come to a place like St. Louis.” She reflected on this for a moment, then added, “I loved him very much.”

“I loved Lame Beaver the same way,” Clay Basket said, and without voicing their conclusions, the two women reflected on the fact that loving one person completely makes it much easier to love others.

“I know that people here in St. Louis look at me with pity,” Lise confided. “I can hear them whispering, ‘Poor Lise. She married a no-good French trapper who deserted her.’ But out of it I got two wonderful children. Cyprian’s married to an excellent girl who helps him in politics, and you met Captain Mercy at the fort.”

“The Indians trust him,” Clay Basket said.

Now Lise frowned and spoke with hesitation. “Your sons ... we hear such bad reports of them.” Before Clay Basket could respond, she added, “I’m sure they’re going to bring our name into disgrace, and I’m sure there’s nothing you and I can do about it.”

“It’s not easy to be half-Indian, half-white,” Clay Basket said.

The conversation was interrupted by a black boy who ran in to report that Captain Mercy had returned on the steamer from Fort Leavenworth. When the child departed, Lise felt required to explain, “We don’t keep slaves, of course. My father wouldn’t allow it. But we do hire the boy from next door. He’s a slave, so we pay his owners.”

For Clay Basket such explanation was unnecessary. Indians had always kept slaves of one kind or another, most often braves captured from another tribe, but sometimes women, too. These days many tribes traded for black slaves, who worked out rather well.