Читать книгу The Melancholy Fate of Capt. Lewis - Michael Pritchett - Страница 10

Shoving off from St. Charles, Missouri, May 1804; Observing the Manitou figure-painting on a rock; York nearly losing an eye by having sand thrown in it; Seeing the gilded clouds; A snake dances on its tail in the river; Recalling the woman shot the first day.

In fact, he never rested, and even now crawled on hands and knees through a tunnel of redbud branches. He looked around for the river, relying on it to guide him. The foliage was thick and lush, the height of summer. Squirrels dropped things or plummeted to earth themselves. A French engagé fired a gun at some game on shore.

Amid shouts and cheers, they’d shoved off. Now they made their wavering way, having left behind just everything, all of their loved ones. Somewhere, young women were tearful. He felt the hard fact of forty days’ provisions with no place to replenish anything but water, meat, and firewood for three years. An unlimited letter of credit meant very little now; there was nobody up here to honor it. No Indians either, the wise ones having cleared out, having vanished in a half instant into the shade of towering immense black or green trees.

They’d met one Daniel Boone, and dined on deer brisket and yams at his large rustic French-style house, and received a book from him on loan, which was his fireside reading while blazing the Kentucky trail: Gulliver’s Travels. Lewis was grateful to have it, but more so to be quickly on their way.

Because he was very, very late. Possibly too late to reach the Pacific in time to seize the continent from the British. A Canadian had etched his name on a rock above a bay on the Pacific, then somehow a decade had got by. Lewis was just thirty, but already ten years too late, it seemed. He was in a bad patch.

At the next rise, he stood a moment, thinking of Pierre Chouteau’s half- breed daughter a few stops back, a most decent-looking female. And he was already keeping a secret from the men: Captain Clark’s commission was not that of a captain at all, but of a lieutenant. Which gave him an awkward edge on his older friend, who’d been dying in domestic comfort when the fateful letter had arrived.

He felt observed. When commander, somebody was always watching, even watching you think. The president had tried very, very hard to turn up someone better. But nobody with the right qualifications, in botany, anthropology, astronomy, geology, zoology, and medical science, ever appeared.

The mission was almost certain to fail on account of weather, illness, starvation, and Indian attack. Also, he suffered desp’rate bouts of anger at God, for making him fatherless, and the eldest male child, and his family’s only hope. Sometimes he even hated Him, and resented being left down here in the dark in so many ways. Why couldn’t God just love him, as he seemed so freely to love and bless so many who didn’t deserve it? He even enjoyed defeating God, in little ways, like pressing down a trigger to end the life of some dumb, beautiful creature He had made. And then destroying and ripping it, with strong white teeth, God’s handiwork.

That morning, they’d met a tribe who gave them watermelons for roast meat and did not believe it when he said the U.S. had possession of their lands. It made him very cross, their cool insolence. He saw red. He saw stars. For some reason, he recalled his empurpled rage in the schoolyard, at six, when a mentally-defective boy tore the picture he’d drawn for his mother’s birthday, when he’d tried to kill the boy with a rock.

In the river the day before, he saw, on a rock projecting out over the water, a painting of a strange figure, the Manitou, their Zeus, and Michimanitou, their Hera. The Nations were, in their polytheism, strangely touching and backward. But he had his own backwardness, his own clumsy wrongness. For instance, something about the crudeness of the men made him very dull and ugly inside, festering and impure. He was not happy among them, and sometimes felt a stinking misery. That was the sadness again. And yet he loved to see the little “kids” in the villages. If only they need not become adult men and women. And many would be dead when they came back, so where was the point in liking them? Yes, today he was in a bad patch.

By evening, he’d found his way back to camp, following smells of corn cooked in grease, and pan-bread, boiled salt pork, and Indian meal cakes which gusted down the channel into his nostrils, tender and red from hay fever.

At sunset, the clouds suddenly caught flame all along their bottoms, and burned like a wildfire turned upside down. O, what madness the sky could display! Its violence and lurid feeling never lasted, though. It was turning gilded and innocent again, the last ember going out. Each day, something in him flared up and wanted to cry out to those colours, as tho to a parent, “No, don’t leave! Don’t go! Don’t leave me here among these awful people! O, take me with you, for they want to undo me, and harm me to death, and ruin me!” Though what exactly was being done to him, and by whom, he could not name. A game of some sort was being played against him. In truth, he wasn’t deemed worthy to command this expedition, but only available for the trip.

As he stood ’neath those clouds, facing the prairie, he felt the pressure and presence in those meadows and woods and fields of the ones who were coming. Though not yet born in haylofts in Europe, though not yet landed, still puking over the gunwales in the middle of the Atlantic, he saw all around him their ghostly houses and livestock and fences, privies and gardens.

Some of the things he’d already seen were beyond the pale. Nobody would believe it if he reported ten thousand pelicans carpeting an island. No, he could only report the plainer facts, like Clark’s negro York nearly losing an eye from having sand thrown in it. Yes, how plain, how very straightforward human behavior was, after all, and never any surprises. But what about the snake who’d swum up under a deer hung over the river to drain of blood, the one who wouldn’t stop dancing on his tail in the water and leaping at the fresh meat? The one he’d had to kill.

What was the use in telling the truth, though, since none could hear it?

What about the swimming swans and their whiteness? What a joy they brought, a joy so boundless. Then they’d shot one, and the corpse looked just like a bride killed on her wedding day in her white wedding clothes.

What was more, on the way down the Ohio, he’d shot a woman in the head. No, he hadn’t actually aimed and pulled the trigger, but he’d let the airgun, primed and ready, out of his hands for a moment, and a green French engagé had touched her in the wrong place, and the ball felled an innocent woman who’d been out strolling along the shore. The scalp wound gushed blood in vivid helpless warm gouts and he tried not to touch it but her blood got on his shirt and soaked through to his skin, and was hot like pissing oneself and gave an unspeakable tender horror as it made the fabric heavy. But he had no other. So he wore her blood, hot at first, then warm and very wet. It was terribly intimate, like holding a dying lover and having her blood splash onto you from her consumptive lung, from her abruption in childbirth. And the smell, even now, made him lightheaded to recall, how raw, like beef.

Maybe he fell in love with her. She struggled up out of his arms babbling, then looked at him as if he’d been indecent. Maybe a desire was in her eyes to slap at or hit him, though she held her bloody scalp instead and got clear of him, muttering in French. He loved her. It sometimes happened to him like that, stunningly. She seemed suddenly beautiful. But her mouth twisted in insult: he was wrong, unnatural. And there was God again for you! God and His jokes! I will make you handsome, but also somehow offensive to women. He never had the remark ready on his tongue, to cloy and soothe and entice their interest. How he loved a moment of their company, while his own was treated as clumsy, stupid. How dare he show up at their side! His very presence made blood pour from their heads.

He needed to withdraw, with apologies, though he should have stayed, to care for her poor head, to help her through her delirium and drain the swelling from the infection, her head grown pregnant from his penetration. He should have found a way to make her love him, and etc. But no, he had the mission and must depart. He never saw her again.