Sign-Talker (11 page)

Now to add to their skin problems, these two, Collins and Hall, were about to be whipped raw with green switches. And the soldiers would whip them without mercy or restraint this time, in righteous anger:

The two had stolen from the corps liquor supply.

Drouillard knew how the men felt about the whiskey. To them it was one of the most precious parts of the cargo, equal in their minds and hearts to gunpowder and tobacco. They thought of it all day. The whiskey ration every evening was the high point of the day. It lifted their spirits and compensated for their physical
miseries. And there was too little of it as it was, without selfish blackguards taking more than their share. In their meticulous preparation of the cargo manifest, the captains had determined that there was room for just a little over a hundred gallons. The soldiers mulled their liquor calculations over and over: less than three gallons per man, on a voyage that was going to last two years or more. They had figured the number of drams in a gallon and knew there was probably not enough to last the way west. They feared some of it would be used medicinally or shared with Indians and would be depleted even sooner. There would be no way to get any more when this ran out.

The whiskey was their sacred reserve, but on guard duty last night Collins had sneaked an unauthorized drink from the keg, then another, and more as it made him more careless. Then Hall had caught him at it, so Collins offered him some, and they had got quietly drunk. The captains had convened a court-martial late this morning, with Sergeant Pryor presiding and Private John Potts acting as Judge Advocate. Collins had pleaded not guilty and was swiftly pronounced guilty, one hundred lashes well laid on as punishment. Perhaps expecting to be acquitted if truthful, Hall admitted his guilt and was sentenced to fifty strokes.

Orders were shouted. Despite himself, Drouillard watched Collins go down the line. Even over the whine of flies he could hear the fierce hissing of the switches. He heard one of the soldiers shout, “Collins, you flyblown turd, y’ need a flywhisk on ye! Take this!”
Shish! Shish!

“No commentaries needed,” Captain Lewis barked. “Just do your duty.” The switches hissed and whistled in the air, splitting and snapping with the force; splinters and blood mist filled the air in Collins’s wake, and he was grimacing and beginning to stagger. But as before, he made no outcry. When he was through, Captain Clark led him aside to anoint his tattered flesh. Then as Hall started through, Drouillard turned away, and was surprised to see the slave York squatting beside him, helping to smear the wet ash on one of the deer hides. York’s headkerchief was pulled down over one eye, which had been hurt a week
before when Collins, pretending to be playful, had thrown river sand in the slave’s face. Captain Clark had thought York would lose the eye, but after a few days of pain and infection, it was beginning to heal.

“Eh, York, you don’t have to do this bloody work. You’re the cap’n’s helper, not mine.”

York looked at him and chuckled. “I don’ mind, Mist’ Droor. Ra’r be a-puttin’ this treatment on a deerskin than medicine on that man’s skin. Heh!” He smeared the ashy paste, which grayed his thick black hands and wrists.

Drouillard nodded. So they worked together. Hall yelped a few times as he went through the gauntlet. Drouillard shook his head. “Mean!” he said softly. “Y’ know, my people never even switch a child. I can’t get used to this.”

York murmured deep and said, “’N’en you never been whipped?”

“I’d kill a man who ever tried it.”

York peered at him with his good eye, glanced around at the hides, bones, fly-covered guts, and bloodsoaked sand, nodded and said, “Reckon so.”

Drouillard had seen the whip scars on York’s broad back a few times, when the slave had stripped to swim ashore and gather cress and other greens to add to the captains’ diet. He and York ate with the captains, and the four of them were the only ones free of the skin problems. Drouillard asked, “You get whipped often?”

“Not often. I been a good boy.”

“Cap’n didn’t do the whippin’ himself, you said?”

“Had somebody c’d do it better who di’n like me. Cap’n beat the tar out o’ me when we play-fighted, though.”

Drouillard squinted at York. “You ever hit him?” The idea of the man and his slave fighting was a cheering notion.

York again chuckled deep, and shook his head. “Lucky a couple times, is all. ’Em Clark boys all, woo, watch out!”

Drouillard hadn’t considered whether there might be other Clark brothers besides the Town Burner. “How many brothers?”

“Four now. Was six, till the war.”

“Hm. They all play-fought you?”

He chuckled. “Oh, only Mas’ Billy. Only my own boy.”

My own boy
, Drouillard thought. Like he owns the cap’n, rather than the way it really is.

It had taken them a month and a half to reach this river, the Kanzas. Captain Clark said they had come 366 miles in that time. The captains were always measuring and writing down. With compasses and other instruments they measured every turn in the river. Clark seemed to be able to measure miles in his mind, whether he was in the keelboat or walking on shore. Almost every day he drew little map sketches and wrote down numbers. At every river mouth, if the sky was clear, the captains measured sun and moon and stars with their strange look-through devices, and determined just where it was in the world by numbers. They seemed to see everything in lines and numbers, and they wrote something down about every living creature they saw. Lewis would kill a bird and measure its wings and legs and count its feathers and write all that down for his president. He pressed plants and flowers between papers, skinned animals, stuffed birds, and wrote everything down. It all looked like so much trouble. It seemed to Drouillard it would have been easier for Jefferson just to have come out and looked the country over himself.

Drouillard had been more hunter than interpreter so far. Five days out of St. Charles, they had met the Kickapoo hunters with whom Lorimier had counciled, and Drouillard had talked for them to the captains. The Kickapoo tongue was almost exactly like Shawnee, and the tribal name so similar to Kithkopo, the Shawnee war clan, that Drouillard suspected they must have splintered off from the Shawnees long ago. At any rate, his skill in talking with them had delighted the captains. The Kickapoos had brought three fresh-killed deer for the soldiers, explaining that Lorimier had told them to have meat ready when the whitemen’s boats came up. That had of course increased the captains’ appreciation of Lorimier.

All had gone so well that day that the captains gave the
Kickapoos two quarts of whiskey, and the troops had looked on, aghast, at the sight of their precious liquor passing into the hands and down the throats of mere savages. Maybe Collins and Hall had just decided to drink theirs before the captains gave it all away to the numerous Indians ahead.

But since those Kickapoos, there had been no Indians at all, and when Drouillard found their trails while hunting, they showed no recent use. For about a month now, in fact, the expedition had met no one along the river, except a fur trader named Loisel, old M’sieur Dorion’s boss, returning from a winter of trading with the Sioux, some four hundred miles above. Here Drouillard had served well as interpreter, this time of the French of Dorion and Loisel. The two had given the captains much recent information about Indians, trade, and traders, which would be useful ahead, or so they hoped. Then Loisel had gone on down.

Drouillard spent his days hunting, his evenings evaluating the officers and men, or occasionally serving as intermediary between the voyageurs and the officers—a frustrating and distasteful task. Captain Lewis in particular was contemptuous of the French boatmen, whom he found disorderly and frivolous, a bad example to the soldiers he was trying to discipline. Drouillard kept encouraging Private Cruzatte to assume more responsibility for that, since he was now both a voyageur and a soldier.

Clark was easy to like and admire, but Lewis seemed a man out of balance. The energies he had expended on manipulating and flattering the leading families around St. Louis, and in buying goods for the journey, he now expended on scampering and snooping along the riverbanks after anything that might interest Jefferson. Climbing a cliff one day, he had fallen off the edge, barely saving himself by wedging his knife into a crack, giving himself and Clark a good scare. When not giddy with excitement, he was a stickler and a fretter.

Drouillard loved getting away to hunt early every morning. He would take his horse out of the valley onto the open uplands to get a feel of the lie of the new land and the course of the great
river, watching the first sunlight gild the western cloud tops, then the hills, hearing the waking songbirds, watching for the smoke of Indian camps, scanning the ground for well-trodden animal paths that might lead to salt licks or watering places. Some days the game was so plentiful and tame that there was really no hunting to be done, just a leisurely, steady, long-range shot at a fully exposed deer, standing as if placed there as a gift from the Keeper of the Game. Sometimes a soldier would be sent out to hunt with him. The one named Colter was the best hunter. Others went out almost as if apprenticed to Drouillard. The good ones he could send out on tangents, to cover more ground. Far away his fellow hunter’s gun would crack and the echoes would roll, and they would meet at some preselected landmark, and if both had got kills they would take them down and hang them high and safe in trees near the river where they expected the boats to get to. The soldiers loved hunt duty, a day off from slaving on oars. It was a poor day if they came in with less than four deer, a good day with six. Drouillard would usually bag a seventh near day’s end, knowing that any day there was plenty of venison, the captains did not have to issue salt pork. Though there were fifty kegs of the pork, two tons of the boat’s cargo, the men’s appetites were such that all the pork would be gone in less than two weeks if they depended on it alone. Motivating him further to bring in fresh meat was his belief that pork, even from a fresh-butchered pig, was repugnant; salt pork from a keg was just grease—to him no better than eating from a latrine. When he brought fresh meat, the soldiers didn’t have to eat such slop. For all his thoughts of slaves and soldiers, he had never seen slaves work as hard as these soldiers did on the boats, and they needed and deserved fresh meat.

When the men could row with the oars in smooth water, it was hard enough; they sat on their benches and pulled, pulled, pulled, sweating in the sunshine, nipped by deerflies, suffering blisters and strained backs. But the Missouri was not usually a smooth stream. Sometimes it was swift and shallow, chutes of tricky water racing between sandbars, with no room for oars. In such places the soldiers used long setting-poles instead of oars. Each
would set the end of his pole in the mud, brace his shoulder against it, and walk toward the stern along one gunwale or the other, driving the boat forward by leg power. At the stern cabin he would have to yank the pole from the grip of the muddy bottom, carry it to the bow, turn, set it in the bottom again, trudge and push again, the boat creeping forward. In the worst shallows and the swiftest chutes, even poles would not work, and then the men would have to get out and wade in the mud or thrash through riverbank thickets while pulling the boat by ropes, as if they were canal-boat mules.

The Missouri was usually afloat or jammed with driftwood. As it undercut its meandering banks, trees, sometimes whole riverbanks of cottonwoods and willows, would slough off and cave in. Sometimes nearly the whole wide river would be choked shut with muddy piles of trees, splintered limbs, and gnarled root clumps. Although the keelboat and the two pirogues had masts and sails, seldom were conditions or winds right for such easy going. The keelboat’s tall mast, in fact, was jointed near the base so it could be lowered to lie parallel above the deck, with the sail spread over it as a canopy for shelter. This inventive feature had on occasion kept the mast from being entangled or broken in overhanging trees, when the only passable channels were close to shore.

A morning rain fell steadily, dribbling and hushing in the trees. Drouillard sat under the projecting rock of a cliff, watching a deer path that led onto a mud bank churned by deer tracks. The cliff overlooked a river bend, and below the bend the river was divided by a long sandbar, whose upper end was covered by a great, tangled pile of weathered driftwood. Now and then a tree, with or without leaves, would float, bobbing swiftly and silently, through the river channels, or hang up on the driftwood pile with a crackling of limbs. Early in the morning he had come out alone, to range a few miles ahead of the boats, and had already killed a deer, which hung gutted on a tree limb a few hundred yards upstream. When the rain started, he had taken shelter here.
It was likely he would get another deer, even without moving, if he kept a view of the path.

Some blackbirds flew up in the rain. Drouillard then began to hear voices through the rain-hush downstream, then some hollow, bumping sounds. The boats were coming up into the bend. They would scare off any deer. So in a little while he would leave the shelter and go up to the carcass above, and hail the boats to take it aboard when they got there. But there was no hurry, so he waited. He liked to watch the boats.

In a few minutes the dark prow of the keelboat emerged through the veil of pale willow foliage, nosing slowly against the swift current of the wider channel. The smaller boats, first the red pirogue rowed by voyageurs, then the white-hulled one manned by Corporal Warfington’s eight soldiers, appeared in the narrower channel on the other side of the sandbar.

In the bow of the keelboat stood Cruzatte and Labiche, his two métis friends who had surprised him by joining the army. Their rainsoaked clothes clung to their brawny torsos. Behind them were the twenty soldiers straining on their long oars, most shirtless and hatless. Cruzatte and Labiche each held a long, thick pike-pole with a sharp iron tip, their tools for fending off drift trees. Cruzatte ogled the river with his one good eye.