The True Account (20 page)

“For the Great Republic of Vermont and Ethan Allen!” roared my uncle. Brandishing his prehistoric bison bone like another Samson, he rode into the mob of Anasazis and renegades and drove them back down the canyon. Franklin felled a fleeing enemy with each shaft from his ivory bow. The remnants of the Force leaped into the Little Missouri, where they were easy prey for the Hidatsas.

In the midst of this melee, Bishop Stephanos Nacogdoches sat on his palanquin, still holding the albino dwarf on his knee and smiling benignly. With supreme impiety he lifted his hand and bestowed a benediction upon my uncle, who raised his ancient arquebus and shot him directly between his serene brown eyes, tumbling him and the dwarf into the river. The bishop promptly sank, and the Whore of Babylon was swept by the current around a bend and out of our sight forever.

Soon enough our enemies were all dead or being hunted down one by one, so Franklin and my uncle and I started back up the steep trail leading out of the canyon. Partway to the top, we paused briefly to regard the scene below. By now the Hidatsas had regrouped, and were beginning to look in a meaningful way toward the Anasazis' former captives—who wisely chose that moment to head south on the Force of Terror's horses, one man wearing on his head the bishop's miter, another the dancer's red dress. As the emancipated slaves proceeded up the Little Missouri to the reverberations of Polyphemus's great drum, I was very concerned for the welfare of any people they met on their way. For they seemed, all caparisoned in the bloody tattered raiment of their vanquished tormentors, to have taken up their mission as well.

“Look,” Franklin said as we emerged from the gorge onto the scorched prairie. “The buffalo are moving north again. Nothing stops them.”

He was right. But when I remarked to the savant that their numbers seemed inexhaustible, he shook his head and said he doubted not that within the span of one man's lifetime Louisiana would be all but empty of them, and of free Indians as well, and I had better paint both now while I could, for few others would ever have the chance. This I resolved to do, regardless of what else might befall us as we adventured our way west.

L
ATER THAT DAY,
having left our Hidatsa friends behind to prepare the slaughtered buffalo, we began to encounter many bison with eyes swollen shut and most of the hair singed off their bodies. These were the sad survivors of the herd trapped by the fire, which had managed to burst through the wall of flames but were so badly burned that all they could do was stagger sightlessly over the prairie, bellowing in anguish, stumbling into gullies, and crashing into one another. This piteous scene brought tears to my uncle's eyes, but he insisted that I sketch it to show “the horrors of unfeeling and indifferent nature in the West, as well as her beauties.” Then we spent several hours hunting down the burned buffalo and putting them out of their misery, after which he declared, “Oh, Ti. From this moment onward, I eat no more bison meat forever.”

But that night, famished and with the savory fragrance of the buffalo back-steaks and tongues that Franklin was cooking wafting past his long nose, the private said that however it might be in other worlds, in this one every Jack and Jill, and every True Teague, too, must feed his body to preserve his soul. And he consumed his usual five or six pounds of meat with good relish, declaring afterward, over his half pipeful of hemp, “All's vanity in the end, Ti. What can we do in this short life but try to make our fellow creatures' paths as smooth and comfortable as possible, and leave the rest to Providence?”

This seemed like wise counsel. But later, as we sat by our campfire, I could not rid my mind of the hideous cruelties we had witnessed in the canyon on the Little Missouri. Finally I said, “Uncle, I believe there is much wickedness in Louisiana.”

“Yes, Ti. And in the world at large as well.”

“And yet Louisiana and the world at large were made by a good Creator, were they not?”

“They were, Ti. Very good indeed.”

“And the evil in His creation is the handiwork of a certain Gentleman?”

“I have told you so many times. And told you true, Ti. And—ha ha—I am True as well. I have told you true and True I am.”

“But here is the problem,” I continued. “Do not some do evil in the name of doing good?”

“I fear they do, nephew.”

“And others love evil for its own wicked sake? Like the Harpes and Bishop Stephanos Nacogdoches.”

“Aye.”

“Then how do we discern true good from evil?”

“Why, it's as simple as A Apple Pie. Our hearts tell us the difference.”

“Is the heart never wrong, then?”

“No, never. Is it, Franklin?”

“No, sir, it is not,” said the savant.

“But uncle,” I exclaimed, “what must we do, then, with the evildoers?”

“Why,” said he, with the greatest good will, inhaling the mild fumes of his cannabis, “we must chop off their heads!”

And with a wink at me and a tip of his stocking cap to Franklin, my uncle rang his bell, lay down, and fell soundly asleep. But I dreamed that night of devils in bishops' miters, and flaming buffaloes, and myself taking Little Warrior's scalp, and woke up wishing with all my heart that I was a small boy again and home in my own bed in Vermont.

 

 

 

 

A
FEW DAYS LATER
we reached the place where the lovely River of Yellow Stones falls into the Missouri. At the junction of these two great waterways we stopped for a few days to rest. My uncle reworked his play and fished, I painted our battle with the Force of Terror, and Franklin rendered the same scene with bright-colored stick figures on a buffalo hide.

Franklin was delighted with my uncle's fly-casting, which he admired from the riverbank for hours on end. Expert angler though he was, the private had been unable to entice a single fish to rise to his lures since setting out from Fort Mandan. But fish or no fish, he said, angling with the fly was good for the soul, for it connected the angler through rod, line, and leader to rivers and the wonderful countryside they flowed through in an intimate way that no other endeavor did. He declared that flyfishing was the most hopeful of all sports, and that hope, more than any other quality, was what distinguished us from the lower orders of life, such as fish themselves. Though he assured us that if he ever
caught
another fish, he would promptly release it, thereby giving it cause to hope that the next time it was hooked it might again be set free. And since hope was all he had to show for his angling thus far, he was more sanguine still, and he executed every cast—hundreds upon hundreds a day—as if he expected a hard strike momentarily and a great speckled beauty leaping at the end of his line. Franklin, in the meantime, had taken up the sport and had become as avid in its pursuit as my uncle.

One evening I offered to show the savant the art of perspective in painting. To my astonishment, he casually took up my brush and added to my picture of the battle a perfect representation of himself, bow at the ready, riding down on the Spanish force. The famous portraitist Ben West, I thought, could scarcely have done it better. “All great art is simple, Ti,” Franklin told me with a superior gesture at his buffalo-hide painting. “But you must not suppose that we Indians do not understand perspective. Of course we do.”

Heading west along the Missouri once more, we entered a land so vast, wild, and broken that it seemed to defy being painted from any perspective whatsoever. It was an incredibly harsh place of twisting draws leading nowhere, dry canyons, endless sweeping wind, no trees—Franklin said there was not enough rainfall here to support them—and barren red rock. Only the hardiest creatures survived in this hostile country. One evening I watched a pack of gray wolves decoy a yearling antelope away from the herd by flattening themselves out and creeping along on their bellies, then dashing off a few yards, then creeping again, until the antelope could not resist drifting away from the safety of the others to discover what these interesting animals might be. When they had cut it off from the rest, they chased it into the river, where they easily killed it by slitting its throat with their fangs, then dragged it onto a sandbar to devour. But before the wolves could begin to dine on their prey, a huge grizzled bear descended upon them and dispossessed them of their spoils without so much as a by-your-leave. So fierce was this monster that the magpies, which had already begun to feed on the lights of the antelope as the wolves disemboweled it, flew off in a panic at its first approach. I sketched the bear standing on its hind legs, looking east down the river as if guarding all upper Louisiana from interlopers. Franklin said that his Blackfoot relatives were as much fiercer than the grizzled bear as the bear was fiercer than the wolves and the wolves than the antelope. This I found very sobering. But as day succeeded day and week followed week, we saw no Blackfeet, and no other people in that desert of a landscape, which seemed as empty of humans and habitation as the moon.

Near the end of May we passed a vast palisade of white rock towering hundreds of feet above the river in the likeness of ancient ruins. Immediately my uncle claimed that we had discovered the lost city of Troy; and he showed us with great exactitude where the Greek army had camped, where the colossal wooden horse had been dragged into the city and poor Hector dragged around it by Achilles. I painted a quick impression of the hollow equine atop the gleaming white cliffs, with my uncle himself astride it in his knight-errant's gear, and both the horse and him eating one of my mother's cartwheel cookies.

 

One morning as we rode along the south bank of the river, we heard the distant roar of falling water. Around noon we came to a two-hundred-foot bluff over which spilled a thundering falls bigger and louder than any I had ever dreamed of. This was the Great Falls of the Missouri. We could feel its spray on our faces hundreds of feet away; my uncle calculated that it discharged upward of twice the volume of water of fabled Niagara, which we had “visited” several years earlier on a trip of exploration to celebrate my tenth birthday.

While making his hydraulic estimations, he was busy assembling his jointed fly-rod and tying a Pedagogicus fly onto his leader. On his first cast he hooked, played, and duly released a large, hard-fighting trout entirely new to us, with pinkish sides and orange slashes under its gills, which he named
Salmo secure jugulum,
or “cutthroat.” This he did with great nonchalance, as though he had been landing and naming new fish by the dozen since St. Louis.

I set up my easel on a small island just below the falls and began to work on a picture that pleased me more than any I had done to date. Almost as if it had a will of its own, this painting seemed to solve a problem I had been wrestling mightily with of late, which was how to compress our journey, and Louisiana itself, into the finite space of my canvas. The solution was found in a technique that Franklin called the “tableau.” Indeed, he told me that Indian artists had been using the method for centuries. With the falls as a centerpiece, I included many of the events and scenes of the past several weeks, since our battle with the Force of Terror, as follows. Far downriver I painted the River of Yellow Stones, merging with the Missouri from the southwest. Between the junction of the rivers and the Great Falls I inserted the soaring white cliffs my uncle believed to be the remains of ancient Troy. In the pool at the foot of the falls I painted my uncle a-fishing, and far off to the west, our next destination—the Rocky Mountains, white on top with everlasting snow.

This picture took me three days to complete. When it was finished, Franklin studied it from several angles. Then he made this pronouncement. “Ti, onto this sheet of canvas you have incorporated many miles and several weeks of experience. I congratulate you. Also, as we have progressed westward, your colors have become bolder and brighter, to match the hues of the landscape. They have more
value,
by which I mean they glow, as with an inner intensity. This rainbow thrown up by the spray of the falls is very fine, the colors blend from pink to peach to green. But here”—he took my brush—“you must catch some of the reflected light off those white cliffs, thusly, and for God's sake fill in your foreground. A prickly pear would do well here, here a sagebrush, there a bison skull—thus and thus and thus. Do you see?”

I did. But I feared that my uncle, with his devotion to Scholia Aristotle's unities, would scowl and hem and haw and wonder over my foreshortenings, not only of the perspective above and below the falls, but of time and action. To the contrary, he praised the picture highly. “I can see, Ti,” he declared, “that for the whole of the painting, a strict faithfulness to what is real is not precisely what you aim for. Rather, you strive toward a realness imbued by the
imagination.
And is not this Louisiana an imaginative, mythical realm? Aye, even to the flying lizards and monsters that once dwelt here, and the ruins of antique cities. But—ha ha—is that old Odysseus I spy coming toward us? Sir”—he called out to the man he'd spotted across the river—“you are a long way from Ithaca yet.”

In fact it was Captain Lewis, scouting out ahead of the rest of his party and quite astonished to find us here before him. But when my uncle said that we would bide with the expedition for a few days and help them ferry their belongings around the falls, the captain did not protest much, and even seemed glad to have a Blackfoot Indian with his party in this region. For all of the reports he had heard of that tribe indicated that they were the fiercest and most warlike people in Louisiana. And if the expedition could not avoid them altogether, at least it might have a helpful ally in Franklin—though the savant said he very much doubted that his presence would cut much ice with his relations, who would promptly kill us all if they caught us unawares. A warning which, you may be sure, we took very seriously indeed.