From Sea to Shining Sea (120 page)

Sacajawea’s cold had evolved into something more serious.
She was moaning and had at last driven Charbonneau into a fury. He was disgusted and impatient with her and went to sit with the other Frenchmen at the bonfire, scowling, wishing he could have left her at the Minnetaree Village. William, hearing her four-month-old baby crying, came into the hide shelter late in the afternoon to find the squaw, naked, rolled into a ball on a buffalo robe with her fists jammed into her crotch, her face sweat-slick and contorted with pain, ignoring the squalling baby in its cradleboard. “York,” he called. Lord have pity, she must be
bad
sick if she can’t tend to that papoose, he thought.

He put York in charge of the infant, then conferred with Lewis about medication. “She needs a dose o’ salts,” Lewis said. “She’s got what I had on the river t’ other day, just intestinal cramps.” He went to his medicine chest and came back with a dose of the bitter salts in a cup. William had wrapped the naked shuddering girl in a woolen blanket and was squatting beside her, sponging her forehead with a wet cloth. She simply stared wild-eyed at Lewis and shook her head. “Here, Clark, you give it to ’er. She trusts you.”

She drank the bitter concoction when William held it for her, then, helpless and wordless, lay back in the blanket and shut her eyes and went into silent battle with her pain. Her black hair was a small dark blur in the evening gloom within the shelter. “If she’s no better tomorrow,” Lewis suggested, “better bleed her.” He was too busy now, getting his party outfitted for an earlymorning departure, to hover over her. Outside, York sat by the fire with the tiny swaddled baby encircled in one arm. “Don’t you eat
that
child, cannibal monster,” Lewis joked at him.

York rolled his eyes the way he had when frightening the Mandan and Arikara children, then opened his mouth wide as if he were going to gulp the baby down whole. “This’d be a sweet un, he would.” York grinned then, and began rocking it, looking for all the world, in his red headkerchief and gold earring, like some gigantic, muscular mammy. He rocked the baby and hummed while Cruzatte’s fiddle began squeaking at the big bonfire, and the laughter came over the river-hush, and the singing started, those big, raspy, resonant or leather-lunged voices, filling this timbered place in a fork of rivers, echoing a way along the bluffs, then vanishing in the cold air of the immense wilderness night.

W
ILLIAM RAN THE RAZOR-SHARP BLADE OF HIS PEN-KNIFE
through the smokeless flame of his alcohol lamp, then knelt beside Sacajawea’s pallet. “Now, the basin, York, if y’ please.”
Raindrops pelted the skin cover of the lodge, and the girl looked, frightened but trusting, too sick to protest, at the big, red-headed captain, then at his knife, then at his face. She had seen bleedings done and knew it was a part of the white men’s medicine, so she was resigned to it and believed it would make her well. She winced with another great spasm of pain and then waited, her brown-nippled little breasts barely rising and falling with her shallow breathing.

William placed the basin under her left elbow and told York to tighten a thong high on her arm. “Squeeze your hand tight, Janey,” he said, and, not knowing whether she knew the word “squeeze,” he showed her by making a fist. She balled her hand and clenched it till the knuckles whitened. Soon the veins on the inside of her forearm stood in relief. “Now, here we go, Janey.”

And with a swift, clean motion he made a slit through the brown skin and along the bluish vein and pulled back on the skin from the other side of her forearm so that the slit vein stood open and the dark blood welled out and began dripping, then running steadily, into the pan under her elbow. York loosened the thong and knelt looking thoughtfully at the shiny blood spreading over the pan’s tin bottom. The girl had shut her eyes and her head lay back and she seemed to be getting smaller as the blood ran out, smaller and more frail. God let this do it, William thought. Suddenly this little creature had come to be of supreme importance, her survival a hinge on which everything else hung.

If we hadn’t come along, William thought, her life would’ve been as inconsequential and anonymous as that of a doe in the thicket. But we need ’er.

He bent over and put his ear to her chest, and listened to the tiny bumpings of her heart. A life’s so fragile, he thought. He breathed the musky smell of her body, the gamey smoke-and-sweat smell of the sleeping robe with a trace of the Indian baby’s urine in it.
Bump
-bump.
Bump
-bump.
Bump
-bump. When he raised his head off her bare breast, he saw Charbonneau looming in the entrance. The Frenchman’s eyes were flashing and he was breathing hard.

Oh oh, William thought. He doesn’t like something, and I think I know what it is. “Ye want something?” he said, pulling the robe up to her shoulder. Charbonneau stood simmering for a moment, then said in a voice pinched by fury. “A word wees you, Capitaine.”

“Stand out of my light, Charbonneau. I’ll see you when I’m through here.”

He bound the little wound when the pan was full of blood, and had York carry the pan away. “Now,” he said, rising to stand under the low shelter, before the puffed-up Frenchman. “What is it?”

Charbonneau was almost in a fighting crouch and his fingers were like claws. His lips were drawn thin across his yellow teeth, and William had a sudden premonition that he would whip out his skinning knife. William put his hand unobtrusively alongside his own sheath. “What, Charbonneau?” he demanded again.

The Frenchman thumped himself on the chest. “Charbonneau have decide: he will take his woman and go back. Char—”

“Stop right there!” snapped William. “So help me, I won’t hear it.”

“Charbonneau will take his woman—”

“Now hear this: Y’re contracted, remember?”

“Charbonneau does not like thees arrangement.” The Frenchman’s eyelids were hardened.

“What you like doesn’t weigh much with me right now. God damn it, I have to doctor your squaw; York has to coddle your baby. I’m damned if I’ll coddle you! If you weren’t stuffed as full of yourself as one o’ your own gut sausages, your family would fare just fine, and y’ might be happy enough with your arrangement. Now get out.”

Charbonneau crouched lower. His face was twisted with hatred; he was on the edge of his soul. William saw his hand moving back toward the antler handle of his knife, and so, conspicuously, put his hand on his own, and Charbonneau saw it.

“Try to cut me,” William said, “and I’ll have you fileted, even before York can get in here to mash your skull.”

The Frenchman froze, considering this even in his passion. And suddenly he seemed to crumble inside. His hands came around in front of him, palms up; his scowling thick eyebrows rose and his eyes brimmed.

“Please,
mon capitaine!
If you understood—”

“Cap’n Clark, sir!” It was Ordway’s voice outside.

“Aye, Sergeant?”

“Need your judgment on a matter, Sir.”

“I’m comin’. Now,” he said to Charbonneau. “I’d have you flogged for mutiny if you were a soldier. But if you’ll straighten y’rself up, and act a man, and pull your load like the rest of us, I’ll forget this tantrum. Is that a deal?”

Charbonneau nodded, slump-shouldered.

Later that day, William got Baptiste Le Page aside while the
boats were being loaded for the next morning’s departure. “Do you know,” he asked, “what goes on inside Charbonneau’s head?”

“Un peu.”
Le Page shrugged. “Can anyone know?”

“He’s sore as a boil. Any idea why? Trust me; this is in confidence. Only to keep the peace.”

Le Page’s eyes grew furtive. He looked around, pursed his lips and popped them with his index finger. Then he sighed. “Great delicacy,
mon capitaine.
I say this only because you ask. You yourself are a matter.” He rolled his eyes. “Oh, great delicacy.”

“How am I a matter?” William thought he knew.

“Charbonneau. You know him. His pride is here.” Le Page stroked his groin. “Ees a hard time for heem now. He no can … Ahm, ees the custom he no can make the
la la, la la
weeth hees squaw while the enfant ats her mammel. So …”

“But what—”

“You,
mon capitaine
, have make him
jalouse.”

“I give him no cause.”

“The squaw, M’sieu, not what
you
do. But the squaw: she see you highly; she see Charbonneau a fool. Oh,
mais non
, she not
say
thees to heem, but he, ah,
feel
it.”

Aye, William thought, remembering how Charbonneau had looked when he found him auditing her heartbeat. Le Page added:

“He see these merry mens laugh.
Alors
…” Le Page put his forefingers up beside his temples like horns and waggled them. “Een his brain.” Now Le Page grabbed his crotch, to show where Charbonneau’s brain was, and said, “Een his brain they laugh at heem.”

“Now I see. It is, as ye say, delicate. Then listen, Baptiste: if ye can—I mean, delicately—assure him it’s all in his head.”

“I do that,
mon capitaine.
Already I do.”

“Thankee. It
is
all in his head, ye know.”

Le Page tilted his head and closed his eyes, then turned with a half-skip and sauntered back toward the pirogue.

I’m not sure even
he
believes me, William thought. Now I’ll be damned. If this isn’t a silly brew o’ things.

He thought of the squaw-girl, of her little heart bumping against his ear, of her little brown breasts, of the musty, musky smells in the buffalo robe. Then he remembered other brown bosoms, other dense-smelling buffalo robes.

Then he brought Judy Hancock’s peach-colored face up behind his eyelids, and followed Le Page down to the shore.

* * *

“R
ECKON
I
KNOW WHY THE CAP’NS PICKED THIS RIVER
,” groaned Private Windsor, up to his knees in mud, the pirogue’s tow rope rubbing his shoulder raw. “’Cause the other’n looked too easy!”

“I heard that, Windsor!” William’s voice came unexpectedly from the bluff just above. “And y’re absolutely right, lad. It seemed to us this little voyage’s been too much a lark, and time you boys earned y’r pay!”

Windsor cringed, looked up into the smiling face above the willows, and replied:

“Right y’ are, sir! And we’re much obliged, as we all been apinin’ for some exercise!”

Laughter rippled along the line of gasping, straining, stumbling, fly-bitten laborers.

“Sacré du diable,”
muttered Charbonneau. “Laugh and laugh.
Toujours le comédie.”

L
EWIS AND HIS SCOUTS HAD BEEN GONE FOR THREE DAYS
now. For William and the rest of the following party, the haul up the river had become a hell of toil and pain. The current grew more and more swift and turbulent as they ascended the south fork. Poling, rowing, or sailing were useless now; the men could move the boats only with tow ropes, stumbling along the muddy, rocky banks, which squirmed with rattlesnakes, or, in those long reaches where there were no banks at all, by floundering in the frigid river, twisting their ankles on slippery round stones or gashing their feet on sharp-edged rocks. Every minute or so one man or another would fall and go under completely, then rise, spitting and gasping, to resume his place on the towline. Now and then the whole line of men on a tow rope would drag each other down, and the canoe they were pulling would lurch and ship water, get away, or grate against rock so violently that it would have to be hauled out and patched.

Sacajawea was gravely ill. She had been declining steadily, and in her sleepless sufferings had made sleep impossible for William and for York and Charbonneau. She was listless and feverish, attacked by violent pains in her abdomen and groin, and was incoherent much of the time, lying in the shade under the awning of the pirogue, unable to tend to little Pompey. York was becoming almost sick with worry. “Get well, Janey,” he told her, stooping over her pathetic, wasting little figure one evening. “Now, I love this yea ’poose o’ yours, but I ain’ made to be ’is perm’nent mammy.” He was beginning to realize that such was a distinct possibility.

Collins joked that evening, trying to ease the worried look on York’s face: “I don’t blame ye, boy. I can see why ye wouldn’t want t’ be th’ mammy of a child that Charbonneau was th’ daddy of!” York frowned at Collins for a moment and then laughed for the first time in two days.

William had come to consider himself as good a stomach doctor as any layman could be. But the remedies that worked unfailingly on the men had no effect on her. Lord God, he thought suddenly this evening, what if this is no gut matter, but the female region?

“York,” he said, “will you kindly take th’ papoose outside and sit with ’im, and all I want ye t’ do is make sure that hysterical husband o’ hers doesn’t walk in. I mean, make
damn
sure.”

If that blamed jealous fool knew I was a-doin’ this, William thought, I’d have to fight ’im a duel sure. “Janey,” he said softly, peeling the robe down off her skinny, naked body, “I must look at your woman-part now. Do ye say yes?”

She opened her legs listlessly, uncaring, thinking only how strange that he should ask. Neither Charbonneau nor any of the Indian men who had owned her before Charbonneau would have bothered to ask.

William reached down into the dark place, hesitant, uncertain, self-conscious. How’m I going to know what I do find? he thought as his finger spread the labia and a strong, disagreeable odor came up. I don’t know anything about the womanly region.

No, reckon not, he replied to himself. But I’ve dealt with enough infection lately t’ know corruption when I see it, no matter where I find it, he thought.

She lay still and let him look and feel and probe. She knew that Chief Red Hair was the best of medicine men and that he was as gentle as one’s own mother. She believed that he could make her well if anyone could do it, and she had reached the place in her soul where all was equal, and if she could not be made well now, she would choose to die and go beyond this misery.

For a moment as he looked into the glistening pinkness he thought this surely was the strangest moment in his eventful life. Here he was three thousand miles from civilization, down on his knees and elbows in a tepee on a riverbank, looking into the bottom end of a dying Indian girl, while his black man sat outside crooning lullabies to a papoose and stood sentinel against her husband. But there was no time to dwell on the absurdity of it. He palpated the inner labia and then slipped his forefinger up into the snug vagina, to find, he presumed, lesions or pus or
some other clue to her disorder. He withdrew his finger and there was nothing. He inserted his finger again and touched gently around the mouth of the uterus, pressing harder then against the grisdy firmness of it and now watching her face for signs of pain. Suddenly she had a spasm and he saw the flash of white as she bared her teeth in a grimace.