Sign-Talker (2 page)

The other thing that gave Drouillard a frisson was that word
had come that Captain Bissell at the fort wanted him to come and talk to the
américain
soldier officers when they arrived at Massac. Why would they want to talk to him?

Drouillard rode through the open gate into the fort. A sentry above the gate nodded to him, which was about as much greeting as an Indian could expect to get from a white soldier. Drouillard knew that particular soldier and sensed that if he weren’t employed in bringing meat, the man would be happy to shoot him, just to be shooting an Indian. Drouillard had hunted, interpreted and guided for the fort officers for years, but many of the soldiers just hated Indians.

The quartermaster, on the other hand, was always glad to see him because the meat he brought was always fresh and well-butchered. They worked together unloading and weighing the venison and bear, and the quartermaster wrote the weights on a slip of paper for Drouillard to give to the paymaster. “Thankee, Drouillard. And by the way, Cap’n Bissell wants to see you. Got some important gents in there he wants ye to meet.”

“So I hear.” Drouillard finished rolling and tying the deer and bear skins, which he would flense and cure to sell at his uncle’s trading post over at Cape Girardeau. He left the horse and mule hitched and took his long rifle off its saddle sling and walked across the parade ground toward Captain Bissell’s quarters. Soldiers were lined up outside the paymaster’s door. Soldiers were always lined up. There seemed to be something in soldier law that everybody had to do the same thing at the same time, which meant that they always had to line up and wait. Apparently, soldiers weren’t allowed to have a notion to go and do something alone and get it done while nobody was in the way. Instead they had to wait until they were all told to go to the same place at the same time so that they were all in each other’s way and had to wait. To Drouillard it seemed like a poor way of doing things, but it did make it possible for soldiers to stand around together complaining to each other, which seemed to be a favorite pastime of the whitemen.

Most of the fort soldiers knew Drouillard by sight as the Indian who brought in meat, and they didn’t pay much attention to
him. But today there were new soldiers here, the ones off the keelboat, and they watched him as he passed, and he could feel them watching him. Young men coming down the Ohio from Kentucky and Pennsylvania usually were from families that had been in the Indian troubles, and according to the rumors, the captains of this boat had been recruiting their men from those places.

The flag was stirring in the breeze at the top of its pole. One blue corner contained fifteen little pointed white designs which were said to be stars, and he understood that each star stood for a whiteman’s land called a state, and that as the whitemen kept coming on into the Indian country, they kept making more states. He had heard that the old homeland of his Shawnee people north of the Ohio River was now becoming a state, and he could scarcely imagine what that meant, except that all the woods and fields and hunting grounds were being marked with lines into squares, which whitemen bought for money, putting the Indians off into tight little places and making them live there. It was a faraway and ominous thing going on back there, and he always felt it like the coming of weather.

Most of his understanding of it came from his uncle, Lorimier, who as a trader heard news from everywhere and sometimes told him about it. Lorimier would shake his head with a sad smile and say that it was something that had been going on for many generations, and that many peoples were no longer where the Master of Life had put them. Lorimier, with Chief Kishkalwa’s Shawnees, had been given lands by the Spanish at Cape Girardeau near the mouth of the Ohio, many years ago, so they could stand as a buffer between the old river communities and the
américains
who kept coming down the Ohio and moving into land where they weren’t welcome. But they kept coming, and were now a large part of the population, and they had army bases on the Illinois side of the Mississippi: here at Massac, and at Cahokia, across the river from St. Louis. When the
américain
officers of those posts inquired after hunters to bring meat to their garrisons, Louis Lorimier had encouraged his nephew George Drouillard to apply. By passing in and out of the
américain
forts and getting to know their officers, Drouillard might now and then hear or see things that would be useful to Lorimier and, through him, useful to the Spanish authorities. For a while Drouillard had, in a very minor way, been a spy.

But then just a few weeks ago there had come news that would affect this part of the country in ways that Drouillard, and even his uncle, could hardly comprehend yet: the United States had made a treaty by which all the lands west of the Mississippi would be under its control and governance. The treaty had been made with the ruler of France, whose name rolled like a legend up and down the rivers: Napoleon.

Drouillard, occupied with traces and tracks and streams, and the movements and seasons of game animals, with his gun and his traps, thought little of the doings of men. But there were names that came in news and rumors by the long river courses, a few names, that engaged his thought and made him wonder. Two of those names were Napoleon and Jefferson. They were in every newspaper and every rumor that came from afar. Drouillard had no image of either man, no face or figure to see in his mind when he heard their names. He could no more easily envision them than he could Nanabusho the Trickster Helper, or Kohkumthena the Grandmother Spirit. When he thought of Napoleon, what came to his mind was the French flag of red and blue separated by white; when he thought of Jefferson he thought of this more intricate flag on its pole in the center of the fort: the blue corner with fifteen white star-shapes, and its fifteen stripes, alternately red and white. Often in the last few months, while waiting to see Captain Bissell or to collect his hunter’s pay, he had stood musing on the design and the meaning of the rippling, flapping flag of these
américains
. As far as he could understand it, it was the
dodam
, or totem, of their nation, as the redtail hawk was the totem of his people’s nation, the Shawnee.

Now as he glanced up at their fluttering flag, he saw that the eagle that had led him along the bluff had not gone on westward, but was spiraling on the air above the fort. He stood outside the door of Captain Bissell’s house for a moment and gazed beyond
the flag to watch the eagle moving upward into the low, gray clouds. Sometimes Drouillard’s spirit could reach that high and bring the eagle’s spirit into a sameness with his own, and see as far as it could see from up there. He had done that sometimes in his life, or had dreamed that he had done it, which was the same.

Through the door he could hear the two officers who were talking with Captain Bissell. One had a hard-edged voice, one of those voices that seem to come from a place in the speaker’s head right behind the nose, like the bugle horn the fort soldiers blew at certain times of day. The other was a deep-drum voice without edges, a rumble like summer thunder. Drouillard wondered which voice belonged to the officer Clark, and he was reluctant to go in and meet face-to-face an old enemy of his people, if indeed this was that same Clark. Yet he was curious to see him too. He hesitated, and watched the eagle soar higher above the flag, and heard the officers’ voices.

He felt that their coming here had very much to do with Napoleon and Jefferson and the
américains
’ new power over this country. When Lorimier first heard of that treaty, he had gone red in the face and clenched his teeth and fists, and cried angrily that he had grown too old to move out of the way of
américains
again, but that he probably would have to, one more time. Lorimier loved this place where all the rivers of the Middle Ground flowed together: the Missouri, the Mississippi, the Ohio, and all their tributaries; because where rivers flowed together, all their peoples came together to trade. For a trader, where could there be a better place than this? The Spaniards had given Lorimier many exclusive privileges and advantages, and he had rebuilt his fortune, and was once again a great man among the tribes. Lorimier knew about the treaty with Napoleon and the coming of the power of the United States, but surely he did not know that his old enemy Clark had arrived here in person. If it was so, he would let his uncle know it. That was the kind of spying his uncle would have hoped for.

In dreams, or in waking dreams, Drouillard had seen down from that eagle’s height the coming-together place of these rivers, and all the lands around. He knew it all close down too; he
had walked, ridden, run, and paddled over all of it as a hunter and a trapper, a trader and messenger, for Lorimier. He knew all its creatures and plants, and the animal paths, and where lead and salt could be found, where the medicine herbs grew. His mother, Asoondequis, Straight Head, had taught him how to use the plants of the earth to heal his wounds and cure his illnesses, and she had told him: “I am only your walking mother. You only came
through
me, from your true mother, who is Earth.” She had been called Straight Head because, in the old Shawnee way, she had been kept as a baby in a flat-backed cradleboard which shaped her with an erect posture and the back of her head flat. She had raised her son likewise, so that he stood straighter, even when relaxed, than soldiers stood in rigid attention. Some whitemen resented the sight of an Indian half-breed standing so proud, and so it had become his habit to stand back and attract as little attention as possible.

Drouillard imagined the vastness of the horizons the eagle could see as it rose higher, above the clouds. From up there now it surely could see most of the great hill-mounds built by the Ancient People, far up the Mississippi near Cahokia, and far up the Ohio above the Wabash. The river valleys were full of them, square ones, cone-shaped ones, circular walls, all made of earth and vibrant with old spirits. In his hunting he had come upon hundreds of them, some huge, some smaller than cabins, overgrown with grass and brush and old trees, silent to the ear but haunted with spirit music that his heart could hear. The names of the people who had built them were long forgotten, but his mother had told him they were built by peoples who were ancestors of the Shawnees. He had seen those men in dreams and once in a vision: not clearly, but well enough to know that upon the middle of their foreheads they wore something round and polished. Even in his boyhood homeland, the place called Ohio, there had been many of those hill-mounds. In those ancient times there must have been so many more Indian people than remained now, because those mounds would have required hundreds or thousands of people to build. Whitemen believed the great mounds must have been built by other whitemen who had
been here long ago and then vanished, because they believed that only whitemen could do big things.

The Shawnee way was in the education his mother had given him. He had been given another education by Black Robes when he was a boy, but he had been glad to forget most of that. The Black Robes had taught him that there were many things to fear in the world, but his mother and her people had taught him that there was nothing to be feared. And in living to become thirty years old, the only fears he experienced were those that came in certain dark dreams, which returned now and then, and they were so unlike anything in his real world that he thought they were left over from the Black Robes. He had run away from them as soon as he could.

Drouillard, looking up, now saw the eagle again, so high it was a speck, and then it disappeared as if it had been only a spirit of an eagle. He had watched it as long as he could and now it was time to go in and see what Captain Bissell and the boat officers wanted of him. He was not eager, but he was curious, and maybe he would learn something that would be useful to his uncle.

As he reached up to knock on Captain Bissell’s door, the latch clicked and the hinges groaned. The door swung inward and a lean soldier stepped out, paused, and turned to speak into the room. “Man out here, sir.”

“Who is it?” Captain Bissell’s voice asked.

“Drouillard, Cap’n,” he called in.

“Ah, come in, George.”

The departing soldier, not one of the fort’s men, stepped out of his way, saying, “Going with us, chief?”

“I haven’t been asked.” So. Another one of those who call you “chief” to show they’ve noticed you’re Indian, Drouillard thought, stepping inside. He shut the door and sidestepped to stand with his back to a wall, as he always did in a room full of whitemen.

The familiar room was hot and close, rank with tobacco smoke, overboiled coffee, and body smells, and seemed smaller because of the several big men in it. What appeared to be a black bear rose from the floor under the room’s one window and came
toward him. His hand tightened on his rifle in reflex, before his nose identified the animal as dog, not bear. It came with clicking toenails and sniffed his hand with a cold nose, plumed tail stirring the smoke. One of the voices, the one with a bugle edge to it, said, “Seaman, no,” and the huge dog went back under the window.

The room was dim, lit from the right by gray daylight through waxed-paper window panes, from the left by burning logs in the stone fireplace, and by one candle in a glassed lantern on the plank table in the middle of the room. Much of the table was covered with sheets of paper, maps, and leather-covered books. What Drouillard noticed most keenly was not what he saw, but what he felt: the force of presences. It made his nape prickle. In the center of the force were the eyes of two big men, looking at him.

Captain Bissell sat near the fireplace. Another huge, thick-bodied man, in a pale cloth shirt, was by the back wall, hands and face as black as charcoal: a Negro. But the force was all coming from the two whitemen standing by the table in the center of the room. Both were tall, erect, broad-shouldered, and looked solid as oak trees. Their hands and faces were weathered and ruddy, their foreheads white from always wearing hats, as soldiers do.