Snowbound and Eclipse (60 page)

I turned to Mrs. Tolliver. “Have his relatives been notified?”

“I think the colonel is seeing to it, Gin'ral.”

“All right. I will do anything in my power to help. Please extend my apologies to Colonel Hunt, but I must return.”

“Yes, sir.”

We paid our respects a few moments more, and then left.

“Mastuh, what's he got taken him?” York asked.

“Perhaps Doctor Saugrain will tell me.”

“You say he walked to the ocean, and he done all things right, and he help the corps, and he give all he got, and he don't need orders but just do it all without asking, and he be the best of men.”

I nodded.

“I done that, too,” York said.

We buried John Shields today, Friday, July 21, 1809. I wore my blue and white captain's uniform in honor of the man who served in my command. I looked dashing in it and my servant, Pernia, took pains to freshen it and black my boots and brush my tricorne.

They wanted me to do a eulogy and I agreed, though I would not have chosen to do so. There are things a man is
required to do, and I do them without cavil. I rode to the post in Chouteau's carriage and took Will Clark with me.

All those from the Corps of Discovery round about St. Louis, save for York, were present to pay our respects to Private Shields, blacksmith, gunsmith, and carpenter, whose skills repeatedly saved us from disaster and starvation during that journey into the unknown.

Last night I went to my journals to refresh my memory. The man was our salvation. We had bartered Shields's skills for corn or other provender in the villages. He repaired the broken rifles and muskets of the tribesmen, or fashioned battle-axes and lance points out of sheet metal from a burnt-out stove, and in return we got what we needed to subsist ourselves. He had made nails and hinges for our winter posts, and carpentered tables and chairs and beds as well. He had been a fine soldier, swift to obey any command and eager to go the extra mile. A hunter too, and a gifted woodsman, comfortable in the wilds.

All this came back to me in a flood as I examined my entries. I turned finally to those of August 1805, when Shields, MacNeal, Drouillard, and I, in advance of the main party working up the Jefferson River, had ascended the eastern foothills of the Bitterroot Mountains and discovered the Shoshones, the Indians we wanted most of all to meet so we could barter for horses. They were shy as deer, and it took all our wiles to persuade them that we meant no harm. But at last we did meet Chief Cameahwaite and his hungry band, and boundless was our joy.

Their joy matched ours because Shields and Drouillard shot deer and pronghorn and fed them all. We all rejoiced in the lavender August twilight. They danced for us around a spark-shooting fire and offered us their tawny young squaws, and I well remember that night, though I have wished a thousand times since then that I had remained steadfast in
my resolve. Only Drouillard stayed apart, for whatever reasons only that silent French and Shawnee scout and translator could say. And only Drouillard was spared what followed.

If I could take back that evening, blot away that eager, smiling, raven-haired, yellow-fleshed Shoshone girl with whom I could not speak a single word, repeal the eager smiles and caresses, purge every voluptuous second of it from my life, I would not hesitate to do so no matter the cost. From that moment onward, even though I ascended from triumph to triumph, I sank further and further into a hell beyond mortal reckoning.

My entry of August 18, 1805, caught my eye:

“I was anxious to learn whether these people had the venereal, and made the inquiry through the interpreter and his wife; the information was that they sometimes had it but I could not learn their remedy; they most usually die with its effects …”

I remembered why I had inquired so anxiously.

I sighed and put away the journals. I had garnered enough to offer the assembled veterans a glistening catalogue of John Shields's worth as a man. And I would do so boldly, concealing morbidity of my own soul from them all.

We assembled at the grave on a blistering afternoon.

There was the old corps, or some small portion of it. George Shannon, leaning into a crutch; John Ordway, third in command and a gifted sergeant, and now farming outside of St. Louis; Robert Frazier, private, living in St. Louis; Ensign Pryor, still in the army, a career soldier and skilled noncommissioned officer; William Werner, now one of Will Clark's subagents; and Will Clark, erect and commanding as ever. Of those in Louisiana, only York was absent, and I regretted that Will had excluded him.

Doctor Saugrain was there, enduring the heat in his black
suit, a tiny white-bearded presence at the head of the coffin, which rested on poles over the yawning grave. He had removed his top hat, his gaze sometimes shifting to me.

I saw, as well, one of the Creoles who had come with us, and had a troubled moment trying to remember his name. François Labiche? Jean Baptiste LePage, Pierre Cruzatte, who had put a ball through my buttocks? I think it was Labiche. I cursed my bad memory.

We are dwindling.

Potts is dead, killed last year by the Blackfeet though his partner, Colter, had miraculously escaped and I hear from traders returning to St. Louis that he is alive in the West, at Lisa's post. Gibson is dead, succumbing this year, like Shields, of the
lues venerea.
I remember dosing him heavily at Fort Clatsop. I heard of his death too late to attend the service, and I knew his relatives had hidden his sordid sickness from the world and hastened him into his grave. MacNeal has vanished, MacNeal, who was with me in the Shoshone village. I suspect he too has perished of the mortal disease that stalks us. We sought horses among the Shoshones, and instead bought death.

Bratton remains in the army, and so do Willard and Windsor. Joseph Field died in 1807 but his brother Reubin lives in Kentucky. I know nothing of Goodrich. Sergeant Patrick Gass is in the East, enriching himself with his journal and blackening me with every letter he writes to the press. Hugh Hall, Thomas Howard, Peter Weiser, Joseph Whitehouse, all gone from view, some dead I am certain.

I was sweating by the time the preacher summoned me to give the eulogy, and my damp hands blurred the notes I had scribbled, so I couldn't remember what I wanted to say about John Shields. Inside my blue tunic, I was drenched with sweat and I ached to tear it off and let some breezes cool my fevered flesh.

I felt my sweat gather at my brow under my tricorne, and traverse my cheeks, and drip relentlessly into my stock. I felt my armpits leak moisture, and knew it was sliding down my sides, dampening my linens. I felt as if I was standing on the brow of hell, feeling the heat, watching that fine old soldier John Shields slide into the eternal pit.

I gave him a good soldier's eulogy; he was brave, resourceful, obedient, courageous, honorable, an asset to our command. There were no parents and no widow and no children to receive my words; only a few old corpsmen with better memories than I have. So I didn't dwell on Shields's achievements for long; the words were more for us than for his family.

I spoke of what we had done, the odds we faced, the way we came together into an indomitable and well-knit force bonded by danger and brotherhood and sheer joy. I told those privates and sergeants and my officer colleague that we had done something grand, something that would shine forever in the eyes of the people of the United States, and John Shields had marched with us from the first step to the last.

Will spoke a few words, too, plainspoken and true, remembering the good soldier in John Shields and the brave companion of a thousand days of danger. Will looked grand in his Missouri militia uniform, a faint scatter of gray at his temples, his demeanor dignified and serious, his gaze welcoming each man present and acknowledging the gift of that man's attendance at the last.

We saluted. A trumpeter borrowed from Fort Bellefontaine played the dirge. Colonel Hunt and a few regulars stood at a distance, sharing the moment with us.

“Dust to dust,” the preacher said, tossing some sand upon that plain plank coffin, the yellow shellac of the pine glowing in the hot sun. And then we lowered it into that yawning
hole, a pit that looked all too familiar to me as I peered into its gloom. Who would the Stalker stalk next?

Will and I headed back together in the carriage.

“You look done in,” he said.

“Hot in this uniform.”

“You sure it's not fever?”

I didn't reply. For years I had blamed the ague, and now I could not.

“Why don't you stop for some refreshment?” he said. “I'll put Julia and the servants to it.”

“I'll get to see my namesake?”

Will smiled. “Governor, the baby's fat and happy, and we're calling him Meriwether and he's old enough to respond to his name, and fixing to walk, and before we know it, he'll be walking to the Pacific Ocean and back.”

Somehow, all that good news only deepened my morbidity.

I halted the dray horse before Will's house, tied up at the hitching post, and we escaped from the furnace of the sun into a close but cooler climate within.

He studied me. “Are you sure you are well?”

“No, I'm not.”

He nodded, and soon was rousting out servants and Julia, making the whole house clatter to life just when it was lost in siesta to the heat.

I waited until I was bidden to the nursery, where Julia curtsied. She wore a shapeless white cotton dress that hid her from an old bachelor's admiration. I wondered if she might be expecting another child.

“Your Excellency,” she said tonelessly.

The boy dozed restlessly in the moist closeness, a loose-knit coverlet over him. Meriwether Lewis Clark. New life following death, the endless cycle repeated. This child was as close as I would ever come to a son.

“He is a fine healthy boy,” I said politely.

“We'll raise him up to be the image of you, Governor.” Julia looked uncomfortable, and her fingers played with the muslin of her dress.

“Please forgive me, but I think I will forgo your lunch,” I said.

“Why, Meriwether …”

I retreated as swiftly as courtesy permitted, under the concerned and tender gaze of General Clark.

PART

III

I stared at the letter from Washington, absorbing the bad news that had reached me this Friday, August 4, 1809. It came from a clerk in the State Department, one R. S. Smith, and with it came a voucher for eighteen dollars and fifty cents that I had submitted in February. The department, the letter explained, was returning the voucher because it lacked the authority to pay it.

The sum was to pay a translator, Pierre Provenchere, to render certain laws into French, something entirely necessary in a bilingual dominion. How could the Creoles know the law if it were not comprehensible to them? But here was this voucher and a note that blandly said I had gone beyond my authority.

Heat built in me. Clerks! They have no more vision than an earthworm. I fumed, reread the letter, and then began to worry about what else might befall me. I had signed hundreds of vouchers for necessary services. My signature as governor was all that any merchant or supplier required to ensure payment. And up to this moment everything I had signed, including the scores of vouchers for the Corps of Discovery, had been honored in Washington.

When I had submitted the voucher for Provenchere last February, I made a point of explaining the purpose of the expenditure. The French translations of the law were published and distributed for a felony trial. What could be more
essential to the course of justice? Any reasonable official, any clerk in any bureau, would swiftly understand the need, the legitimacy. But not Smith.

I sighed, knowing that I would have to compensate Provenchere out of my own purse, and I would have to borrow again to do it. I did not even have enough to pay my manservant, John Pernia. The family estate in Virginia had not found a buyer and I was heavily in debt.

And was this the first? Would more come floating back to me? Was this the work of some conspiracy whose design was to ruin me? Was this Bates's spidery hand at work? He had threatened to protest my expenditures, and I knew he had done just that, appending little notes to each item announcing that it had been submitted over his protests. It doesn't take much of that sort of footnoting of a man's vouchers to ruin his credibility.

I slumped at my desk. If this was the first skidding snow in an avalanche, I was in grave trouble. And so were the merchants who had until now trusted me. What could I say to them?

I plucked up the letter and braved the heat, walking slowly toward Will's office. We had shared everything for years; now I would share this.

I waited in his antechamber while he heard out the petition of a Creole who wanted to go upriver to the Iowa country and trade with the Sauk and Fox tribes. I suspected that Will would turn the man down; the British had been stirring up the two tribes against us and that area was dangerous.

Then at last we were alone.

“Governor?” he said.

I handed him the letter. He frowned, studied it closely, and set it down. “Everything boils down to money,” he said at last. He stood slowly, lumbered to a black iron strongbox,
which was not locked, and extracted some national bank bills and some coin.

“I haven't asked,” I said.

He grinned. “You were working up to it.”

I withdrew my pocket ledger, borrowed Will's pen, and entered the debt. There were too many such entries in my ledger.

“What are you going to do about this?” he asked.

“I can't keep it a secret. Bates opens my official mail, and he knows about it, and it's probably all over the city by now.”

“It's his doing.”

“Yes, and I fear there will be many more of these.”

Will nodded. He didn't try to comfort me or pretend that this would be an isolated incident. We both knew it wouldn't be. Not with the malevolent secretary appending his florid objections to my vouchers.