From Sea to Shining Sea (112 page)

He found the specimen and took it in to Jessaume. The Frenchman separated a segment of the rattle. York watched distrustfully from the bedside, where he knelt gently sponging the girl’s face and neck with a wet cotton cloth. To York, a rattlesnake was nothing good, and from what he had seen, a French Canadian was no better, so he was fearful for his suffering young friend. “Seem to me,” he ventured, “if a crittur’s p’ison at one end he be p’ison at the other.”

“No,” said Lewis. “Let’s just try it. Anything!”

Jessaume was now breaking the rattle into a tin cup with his strong, dirty thumbs; it looked rather like pie dough being crumbled. Then, whistling tunelessly through the gap between his yellow teeth, he lifted a kettle off the fire and poured hot water into the cup, then picked up a dirty spoon and stirred it, looking as insouciant as if he were merely fixing himself a cup of sweet tea.

“Now,” he said, squatting close to the pallet, “one must tell the woman what it do.” He clucked and gurgled a statement in the Minnetaree tongue, and she stopped groaning and lay panting through an open mouth, listening to what he said. Apparently it was convincing; the girl reached out to touch the cup as Jessaume lifted her and brought it toward her lips. She sipped at the cup’s edge.

Lewis watched. He saw the skinny brown squaw child lying swollen in the musty buffalo robe, her eyes sunken, hair uncombed, watched her drink the disgusting potion; he smelled the body smells and old woodsmoke and the tangy rough-hewn raw wood of the hut walls, saw the smoke-and-grease-blackened leather leggings stretched over the thick thighs of the squatting
Jessaume, saw Jessaume scratching lice or fleas under his arm with his free hand, saw his black-bearded uncivilized face, heard Jessaume’s wife break wind loudly up in the loft, heard the prairie wind howl around the eaves of the hut; and he suddenly felt a profound depression over the squalor of this little Indian girl’s life, her pained struggle to deliver an ignominous life into the world, all as a result of the apparently insatiable lust of that arrogant pig of a man Charbonneau; it was all so totally and unexpectedly sordid, so savage, so lacking in meaning or human hope or dignity, that Lewis despaired over the absence of glory in most human lives. He had always had his own dream of glory, this great exploration of the Northwest, and somehow now, this wretched scene, the genesis of a savage life, was like a profanation of his dream. Dear God, he thought, would it were in a man’s power somehow to ease the human condition!

Now the girl had swallowed the concoction; Jessaume had put the cup on the dirt floor and gotten up and was hanging up his gun and powder horn, apparently through with his ministration and unconcerned with its results. Sacajawea lay back on the robe now, and did indeed seem to be going tranquil. Either it’s just a placebo, Lewis thought, or she’s lying back to die. He felt her pulse, that regular little blood-beat under sweaty skin next to the small wrist bones. It was fine. He laid his hand on her forehead; she was not overly feverish. Jessaume’s potion had not done her any harm that he could perceive. She was still conscious; she was still laboring; she was still hurting and bewildered; he could see all that in her face. But now at least she did not seem to be dying of it. Lewis looked at Jessaume and said, “What does it do? How does it work?”

The Frenchman shrugged. “Jessaume he is no doctor. Only I know the
enfant
will be here soon.”

“York,” Lewis said, rising, “watch after her. I’ll be next door if ye need me.”

Back at his desk, he sat with a piece of the purple blotting paper in his hands, looking at the showy pink flower pressed on it, a new flower discovered last summer near the mouth of the Platte River; he sat looking at the flower and trying to shake off that odd pall of despair, sometimes thinking of his friend Clark, wishing he could hear the shout of his return at the gate.

But the shouts he heard then were not William’s. York’s joyful whoop rolled through the wall, followed immediately by Jessaume’s throaty laughter and then the glorious angry wail of a newborn baby.

“Yo! Cap’m Lewis!” York’s voice thundered. “We got us ‘nother man for our army! He, he!”

Lewis heard the sentry and several other soldiers beyond the walls laugh and cheer. He rose from the bench, a smile spreading over his narrow mouth, the gloom suddenly blown off his soul, and headed for the door.

“Well, well,” he was saying to himself. “Well, well. Damn me, wait till Mister Jefferson hears o’ this! Everybody’ll want a rattlesnake!”

“N
OW
, N
ICKY
, C
HARLIE
,” L
UCY SAID TO THE TWO RED-HAIRED
toddlers whom the nursery mammy had led into the parlor, “would you say how d’ye to your Auntie Fanny?”

Both little round identical faces broke into elfin, nose-wrinkling grins. Both of the twins had always liked Fanny, even before they had known her name. And now as she bent forward in her chair and tilted her head and spread her arms toward them, they both at once let loose of the servant’s hands and hurried toward her, their eyes fastened on her smiling mouth. Males of every age were entranced by Fanny’s lovely white smile, even age two. They came into her embrace, one in each arm, murmuring, “Huwwo” and other words less comprehensible. She kissed one on the cheek and asked:

“And who are you?”

“Jaws,” Charles pronounced his name.

And she kissed the other one and said, “And who are you, sir?”

“Neckwuss,” Nicholas said.

She laughed her plangent laugh and held them at arm’s length to look at them, one hand on each of their identical white yoke collars. “Well, I don’t know how you know which of you is which,” she said. “Did anyone ever tell you you look as like as two buttons on a shirt?”

“I biggo,” said Charles. He was a little stockier. This was Lucy’s second son named Charles. Her first Charles had lived only ten months.

The twins were Lucy’s seventh and eighth children. Now forty, she was still strong and erect, regal and red-haired as her mother had been, with the same fair, sensitive skin now showing
the tiny squint-wrinkles. But she was not a beautiful woman, as her mother had been at this age. She looked, rather, with her long Clark nose and thin, firm mouth, more like her brothers than her sisters. It was as if the tomboy of old had passed through her two decades as a vivacious belle and then emerged looking like a handsome, not very effete, good fellow. To Bill Croghan, though, she was still beauteous. And to those who knew her well, she was still vivacious. To outsiders, who usually saw her only in the back of Colonel Croghan’s gleaming black carriage, or in the family church pew, or passing in and out of shops, she was only the matronly sister of General Clark, sharp-eyed, impassive, confident of herself and her position, looking rather like him.

Her face reflected displeasure in the same way as his: a flashing of the dark blue eyes, a visible clenching of the jaw muscles. And that expression hardened her visage now. Something was displeasing her at this moment, just as the twins were being led out of the panelled room. It was George’s voice, loud and arrogant and liquory in its inflections, coming across the hall from the drawing room, where he was smoking and drinking with William Croghan and Judge Fitzhugh, Fanny’s fiancé.

“… bedamned Webster didn’t know what he was talking of!
Dam-NATION!
Any one o’ those mounds would’ve taken De-Soto
ten years
to build, and he was only in these parts for—”

The door shut, and George’s words became indistinct, but the rumble of his voice went on. Lucy’s lips were in a thin line. With an exasperated hiss of a sigh, she asked:

“What in heaven’s name is he ranting about now? And why must he be so
profane
in my house?”

Fanny knew from the few words what his topic was. She had heard him go on about it many times while she was living at Point o’ Rock. “It’s that about the Indian mounds,” she said. George had written a treatise debunking the prevailing theories about the mounds: that they had been built by a great Indian race like the Incas, now extinct, or that they had been built by the Spanish explorer DeSoto. George’s own research into the mounds and interviews with Indian chiefs had convinced him that the great network of mounds had been built by none other than the ancestors of tribes still inhabiting the Mississippi watershed. And now, in the room across the hall, he was pontificating on his old theory for a new set of ears, those of Dennis Fitzhugh.

“That again?” Lucy snapped. “I swear I don’t know how a man can stay so riled over a lot of Indians that’s been dead a thousand years! I mean so riled as to
cuss.
Why, when my boys Georgie
and Johnny go visit him, it takes me a month and ten balls o’ soap apiece to wash th’ stain of impiety out o’ their mouths!” She was tapping her foot angrily and shaking her head.

“They worship him,” Fanny explained. “They just try to be like him. Surely you know that, Lucy dear.”

“Don’t I know it, though! Especially Georgie. Why, d’you know what that scamp was doing this week? He was a-ridin’ lickety-cut up the road and tryin’ to yank Johnny up onto the saddle behind of ’im, just like George used to do brother Johnny, rest his soul. Both my young fools like t’
killed
’emselves, fallin’ off, and draggin’ in the road.” Georgie, now a sinewy, tireless, reckless bump-around of thirteen, coppery-haired and good-looking, seemed determined to pattern himself after his namesake uncle, and Lucy was beginning to see the hazards of having a darling son emulate someone whose past was such a wild legend. “And the worst on’t is,” she continued, “a body can’t tell him anything. He thinks he’s always right, just as yon bellowing brother does. Just like this o’ the mound Indians! I swear, Fanny! Aren’t you afraid sometimes to bring that beau o’ yours around, for fear he’ll drive ’im off?”

Fanny’s mouth had dropped open, and a pink flush had tinged her ivory face. Now she faced her sister and said calmly:

“Lucy, Lucy, how you’ve changed.”

“What? I?”

“Yes. You. You act
ashamed
of George! Well, let me tell you, a body could do worse than try to be like him. Look what it made of Brother Billy. You, Lucy! Will you sit there in front of me who knows better, and pretend you yourself never tried to ride like Brother George, and fight like him? Why, the stories in this family about you and your slingshots, and your make-believe armies! General Lucy! Why, you’re more like George than he is himself, but you choose to pretend not!”

Lucy, the matron of Louisville society, was blinking and gaping at this harangue from her mild and sweet youngest sister. And though she worked her mouth and stared indignantly at Fanny for several seconds, all she could produce in reply was:

“I don’t drink and fall in the streets.”

“Nor did he, till he’d been treated in the spirit you’re in now. What would Mama have made of what you just said, Lucy?”

Lucy’s angry stare suddenly faltered, dropped. She looked at her hands for a moment. Fanny’s words had gone straight in and struck her at the heart. And it was such a revelation of herself to herself that she did not retort or deny.

And Fanny was saying now, in that rich, gentle voice of hers:

“Of course he goes on and on about being right when others are wrong. It’s because he always was, you know. And knowing
that
is all he’s got left.”

T
HE WIND WHISTLED FROM THE NORTH.
I
T SCOURED THE
plains, and blown snow all but blanked the features of the landscape. William Clark, Toussaint Charbonneau, and the two soldiers with them leaned into the wind, squinted, and trudged into the gale, high-stepping in the deep snow, their faces muffled to prevent frostbite.

“Look,
capitaine.
” Charbonneau pointed ahead. Five Indian horsemen, appearing and vanishing like ghosts in the shifting whiteness, were riding slowly toward them.

“Look to your pieces, boys,” William said. They checked the priming in their rifles while William plowed a few yards ahead and then stopped to wait with his right hand raised in salute. The Indians had seen them now and rode forward, ominous silhouettes in the flapping buffalo robes in which they were shrouded.

“By gah,” Charbonneau said, “that one is Le Borgne!”

“Eh? One-Eye? Y’ sure?”

“He is big man of my village.”

Well, well, thought William. Is the great bogey man finally weakening? Looks like he’s headed for the fort. The Minnetarees’ head chief, reputed to be a bloodthirsty tyrant and strongly partial to the British trading companies, had refused all winter to visit the Americans. There were several reasons why Lewis and Clark wanted to talk with him; the most important one was to try to persuade him to stop his annual spring raids on the Shoshonis in the Rocky Mountains.

One-Eye had halted his horse twenty feet away now, and a good look at his face satisfied William that this chief was as ugly on the outside as he was said to be on the inside. His empty eyesocket was black and scarred and hideous; it looked as if a hole had been punched in his face by a burning stake. His good eye, as if straining to do the work of two, bulged like a fish’s eye. He had tossed back the cowl of his robe to show himself at his most formidable. His long hair was tied in a knot at the top of his head, revealing a strong neck and long-lobed ears hung with
brass rings. His mouth was his cruelest feature: thin-lipped, hard-bitten, surrounded by deep, black, downturned scars and creases. I’d say this one’s maybe even meaner than Partizan, William thought.

The chief’s eye passed over Charbonneau as if the Frenchman were not there, then fell on William, who gave the chief a friendly smile and said aside to Charbonneau:

“Well, Big Tess, introduce us, and ask if I can be o’ service.”

Charbonneau talked volubly, waving his big mittened hands around like bear paws. The chief kept looking at William’s eyes and spoke short, throaty syllables in a voice that gurgled in its own depths.