Читать книгу The Melancholy Fate of Capt. Lewis - Michael Pritchett - Страница 11

A man is sun-struck; A catfish breathes out of water; The incident of the feathers; The passing of Great-Spirit-Is-Bad Creek; Reed returns with a curious object.

Within a few days, a man had fallen asleep on guard duty and needed disciplining. Pleading his innocence until sentencing, which was one hundred lashes, he confessed, and got fifty instead. A man was then sunstruck while poling and walked off the deck directly onto the water, and was hauled up, sputtering and raving. Lewis bent over him as he lay dripping on deck and blocked the sun from the private with his body. He peered closely at the wet red-and-white whiskers, the bloodshot whites of blue eyes, the green spider-veins in his cheeks, the pustules scattered over his skin in lines like volcanic eruptions.

“What year is it, Private?” he asked.

“Fi’ty-eight ought eight, sir?” the man said.

Lewis’s mouth fell stunned, open, at that answer. “Do you know where you are, sir?” he asked.

“I don’ know nothin’. Nothin’s familiar,” he said, gazing side to side, then looking Lewis in the eye. “But you I know, sir! I know you from that hell!”

“What hell would that be?” Lewis asked. The fellow shook his ragged red locks and blinked fiercely. Lewis went a few steps away and got the medical kit, taking out a tiny metal tin of niter and making the man swallow some. In a few moments, a door behind his eyes seemed to swing shut, and a plain light came back to them.

Which disappointed Lewis obscurely. In fact, he was suddenly quite low, and threw the niter back into the kit. He had loved that French girl with the wounded head, but would never ever see her again. She’d heal and marry and the brute could never properly love her—not the way he already did!

“Explain, please,” Clark said, “the business of the year. The fellow was not even close and yet wants to go back to his post.”

“He meant anno mundi. World year,” Lewis said. “He counts from the time of creation, reckoned as the year 4004 before Christ.”

“Peculiar,” Clark said.

Lewis shrugged, for the Indians believed that the world was all an illusion, a mere shadow cast by the real one, and that one must know how to dream with eyes wide open in order to enter into and live in it. There were other worlds, without a doubt, but his own experience of them was second-hand and anecdotal. Never had anyone managed to seize hold of the least thing while visiting in those nether realms and bring it back, not a unicorn hair, not an angel’s wing, not e’en a speck of fairy’s shite.

As for this world, his world, it was strange and often unhappy. For Clark already had his girl, his wife-to-be, and likelihood smiled on all these plans. Lewis awaited the woman who would pine and sulk, weep and yearn and die with his name on her lips, make a riot for worms, lie stiff and gaunt and mere bones still longing for his touch, become dust, feed a crop, and then be ruminated by livestock.

Past noon, dark clouds moved in and the wind rose and whipped the trees, and the sunlight was all sucked away with the air, as in a cataclysmic eclipse or some other doom. The sky got angry and purple and boiled, with a state approaching panic among the men on deck as the crafts bucked and thrashed in the swells, and barrels tossed like balloons up into the air. He felt strangely at home in this element, and stayed busy by saving the sextant and compass and writing desk from going overboard, though he was wet through and aching, with shivers and rattling teeth.

In a minute or two, the clouds moved on like arrows shot overhead, out of view, and the river became as smooth as glass.

Ashore the next day, walking, he saw wild plum and cherry, two kinds, and brown hazelnuts and green gooseberries. It grew stealthily quiet and quieter. He found himself in a deeper part of the woods than he’d realized. Slowly the quiet and the mildness and lack of weather made him pause, be still. He grew aware of an increasing need to turn around, to go in search of fellows, company. His heart fairly flooded with blood suddenly and his extremities drained empty, and dark places pounded in his vision. He turned carefully, on shaking legs. For should he break and run, should he even show haste, insanity would be upon him and he would fall off and down and down into the burning exploding chaos of the lunatic, the asylum inmate.

None knew how close he came at such moments, and his whole motive was to keep any from finding out, which meant a life in double harness, both suffering under it and never letting it show.

He did not sleep well that night, and during the day was asleep each place he paused to rest and indeed was never fully awake. Whenever they wanted to meet the tribes, they set the earth ablaze and made a great black smudge against the sky. The Pawnee and Otoe who came looked sorry they had, and gazed in alarm on so many “cloth men” marching through their territory.

The men caught some white catfish and threw them on the deck, where they lay, breathing outside the water, and croaking like a person suffering apoplexy or aphasia, like enchanted men trying to recall the rudiments of speech. It seemed that wherever he looked along the shore, some animal, deer, elk, beaver, possum, thrust forth its head and gazed with affronted, somber eye. Or a man went to chop wood only to have the trunk become like India-rubber and the ax rebound, blade sinking deep into his knee.

Throughout the next dark and rainy morning, the river sizzled as if boiling.

Around a bend, in all directions, trees four feet thick lay on the ground, snapped off as if by the detonation of a bomb. Then a fierce little lion, with striped fur and snout, and teeth like a wolf, fought them to the death with two balls in its back, and was called a blaireau by the French engagés. (And how odd that the men moved around Lewis and talked with each other, and yet sensed nothing amiss. Nor had anyone ever, except of course Mother, who knew him best.) Next, they brought out the airgun for the first time since the accident, and fired it. Which astonish’d the tribes, since it made no explosion and needed no powder, no flint or spark.

In the morning, it was discovered Reed hid his things outside camp the night before, collected them, and departed. Sergeant Floyd came to Lewis’s tent with the news, red-faced, in a fury, white spit in the corners of his mouth, and shaking.

“Take two men and locate him, and shoot him on the spot,” Lewis ordered, not meeting Floyd’s white-eyed gape.

Clark, standing nearby, said nothing in poignant disapproval. But if the policy lacked compassion for the souls of the flock, Lewis reasoned, it at least kept it together in one place. And since his own commanders had done thusly, so would he, too.

The next day, a white feather came tumbling and rolling over and over in the current. Lewis sighted it at a quarter mile, while talking to Clark about the desertion, and could not look away from it. It approached. He reached and snagged it, nearly going overboard, saved by Clark, who’d guessed his action a moment beforehand.

Clark’s man York came to see what prize, golden treasure, and Lewis gave it him, all unconcerned. And noted more feathers rocking on the flood, a dozen, no more. Then the river was white with feathers, shore to shore, the water turned to feathers and the boats pressed upward in a fast, rasping current of feathers. Sergeant Floyd, at the helm, turned. “Captain—!” His face was fevered and red, and an orange flume hung down from above his head, surrounding him. Lewis glimps’d it from the corner of his eye, but it vanished when looked at straight.

Clark allowed the feathers to tumble, rush, and bump under his submerged palm. Lewis didn’t try to estimate the number, because none could possibly believe him.

Then they passed out of it, blanket changing to a veil, then a loose-woven net, and at last the river again. Sergeant Floyd held his side at the place where they wounded Christ the Lord. And a sudden flush afflicted Lewis. An all-over blanching, a sinking of the organs, nauseated terror and blackness at the edges of his sight. For York’s hand no longer gripp’d the feather! But no, there it was in the other, which now made a gesture as if to discard it. Lewis’s dry voice, like wood ripping, broke out: “No, I will have that, York!” The men all looked at him, and at York. York looked into Lewis’s eyes, appraisingly. “If you do not mind, York, I will have that,” he said again, lowering his voice. “For the articles and specimens.” York, a remarkable example of his kind, noted something amiss in this (Lewis knew), but gave it over.

Later, Lewis would count this as the first day he was certain that the thing which gripped him in times past was laying hold once more. (And he would remember this event again, this incident of the feathers, when Floyd died.)

“What on earth—?” Clark said, turning to see the flood of feathers though it was already gone around the next bend.

“What, Clark? Have you not seen two miles of feathers before? How doth it compare, in your opinion, to the talking fish of day before yestiddy?”

But they were sent to find marvelous things: mastodons and sabertoothed lions, the ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and a river running deep and clear to the Pacific through a neat cleft in a tiny row of pebbles called the Rock Mountains. He was to look for Hebrew hieroglyphs and try out Yiddish words on the tribes. And one question in particular continued to revisit him: Was suicide (and especially suicide from love) as common among them as in white, polite society? His mind hung up on that inquiry. He examined it with vague and advancing dread.

His hand had still not lost the feel of Tom’s, of the president’s. O, why had he put himself in this absolutely gorgeous position to fail, and as publicly as one possibly could? Meanwhile, he continued to feel at odd moments the very thing he’d felt since early boyhood, powerful, wrenching, and inexplicable. He had a strange, malignant affliction: an inability to act in his own best interest. Sometimes, he behaved without right regard for his own safety and was called “brave,” and sometimes without caring for others, which was termed “passionate.”

Around the next bend, they met a tribe wearing coyote pelts, all afraid of what had just transpired across the river: four hundred Mahar wiped out by the smallpox. Clark listened to the account with his intelligent scowl, in skins newly fitted from head to foot, soft deer hide with fringe, tailored to his form, with red beard, and his large red head all woolly and topped by a beaver-skin chapeau. Clark leaned on his rifle barrel, with a no-nonsense set to his mouth, and worked his eyes about. “What is that place called now?” he asked.

“They call it The-Great-Spirit-Is-Bad Town, roughly,” the French engagé said.

“And a good name for it,” Clark said. “Did you hear that, Commander?”

Lewis, carefully separate by several yards, nodded. “Indeed. But why not call it There-Is-No-Great-Spirit Town? Why not catch the sentiment closer to the head?”

“A savage is not so quickly made an atheist,” the engagé said.

Clark wore a badge, like a little flag, turned up on the brim of his cap with a royal-red center and plumes, fanning straight up into the sky, of green, blue, and yellow, giving him the look of a rustic sergeant major.

“Why insist? In the face of tangled wilds stretching over the whole earth, why say that an order exists tho ’tis invisible?” Lewis asked. “Is it not cowardice to demand that a thing be thus-and-so simply because ’twould be lovely if it were?”

The engagé doffed his hat and withdrew and Clark watched him departing and set and reset his lips in various shapes. “Is everything all right, Lewis?” he asked.

“How could everything not be all right?” he asked. “I am on the excursion of a lifetime. If I am not loved by those I command, I am at least obeyed by them. I am healthy, fit, and in the prime of life, don’t you know?”

“You rarely have a rough word for these people, that is all.”

“I find their faith childish today. I lack patience for it when we are thus far behind in our own programme,” he said.

“I thought you were happy with our pace. I had no idea.” He angled the regal head in a dubious way to see Lewis better, and to register concern and doubt.

“How can I be happy with this pace when we are ten years late?” Lewis asked. “We are finished before we’ve begun!”

Moreover, the whole nation saw how tardy they were, and that the prize itself, left languishing thus long on the rocky Pacific coast, was of doubtful value by now. And though he was only midway through life’s journey, as the saying went, the chance in his hands to make up for it seemed blown apart, lost, which gave his heart a pain and relentless desperation.

Just then, cries went up, and the search party issued in a body from the woods, pulling Reed, the deserter, along by a rope wound ’round his wrists. They all looked sore and beat, but the hunters were grinning and not contrite at having ignored his orders to put Reed to death.

“O, for God’s sake!” he cried. “What is that man doing back?” For all knew about the order—it was all they talked about since its issue.

“Are you stupid?” he asked them, coming up. “Are you really so dull as this? You spare this criminal?”

The men made no answer but simply stood ’round with smiles and averted faces, like bad boys ashamed of their species.

“O! Tie him to a tree! Only do not make me look at him.”

And so Reed sat on the ground in hobbles just within the trees and looked at no one and said nothing, eating furiously of anything thrown near him, for all the day and late into evening. Finally, when he was all but hidden in the shadows, the firelight reaching only one part of his face, a single eye, Lewis came into the thicket to talk to him. Reed breathed rather hard and showed his ordeal in his sunken eye and cheek. He stank powerfully and gave off a heat and humidity and seemed to faintly steam and tremble in the night air.

“Ugh! You stink!” Lewis said, to which Reed made no sign, as if deaf or sleepwalking. “Come, let’s hear your reasons, man. I want to know them.”

“Don’ have none, Cap’n,” he said, though his jaw hadn’t actually seemed to move. His eyes were wide, surprised, as if unable to contain something they’d seen. He rocked slightly and even grunted, sotto voce.

“What is the trouble, Reed?”

“Ah’m sick and need ta shit!”

He was holding his hands tightly together, and seemed to have an object concealed.

“Reed, what do you have there?” he asked.

“Dunno what ’tis,” he said. “I foun’ it!”

“Let me have a look at it or I’ll keep you from the latrine,” Lewis said. Squinting, biting his lip, the man was suffering and not trusting him. Then he opened his hand and let the object roll down the little incline onto a patch of sand, where it stopped.

“What on earth?” he said. “Is it a ball? It appears to be a made thing.”

“Never seen nothin’ like it,” Reed gasped. “Foun’ it in a creek bottom!”

At first touch, its pebbled, desiccated, dimpled surface felt like bone. It had lain underwater for a positive age, it appeared, for its outside dented under thumbnail pressure, but sprang back when let go. Its curious chevron marking was of India ink, mostly worn away.

“Two hunnerd an’ eighty-eight,” Reed said. “I counted ’em.”

“It ’pears to have suffered a pox epidemic,” Lewis said, nodding. “May-be ’tis ivory. Sometimes ivory will develop such pits as these.”

“They was more,” Reed said. “I jest grabbed the one.”

“Could you find the spot again?” Lewis asked. My, but it had an uncanny feel, like nothing he’d put a hand to before.

“Might could,” Reed said, grimacing.

“I can have you shot for your crime, Reed,” he said.

Reed shook his head. “I don’ care, Cap’n, I surely don’.”

“What do you mean you don’t care? You want to live don’t you?”

“I don’ know,” he said, eyes tearing, getting a very long, hangdog face. “I might jest run off again. I might throw myself in the river and drown. I don’ think I want no more o’ this. Even if I do get to the Pacific, when I get back home, I won’ be nobody else but me and have to go right back to plowin’ or detasselin’. It makes you sore and sick jest thinkin’ of a twelve hour day in the sun, breakin’ your back, and for what? So you can make jest enough for next year’s seed! I tell ya, it ain’ worth it! I wish those boys’d shot me. I told ’em to go ahead and do it, but they wouldn’! This here’s hard work jest to get back someplace where more work’s waitin’! I jest a-soon you killed me, Cap’n.”

Reed chewed his way through this lengthy sermon like he was eating a cord-load of firewood.

“No, I’ve seen this, Private,” Lewis said. “This sorrow you purport to suffer is nothing but a fever, and I have a touch of it myself lately. And here is the cure! The guard will take you to the latrine, and then we shall see to you!”

Reed was led away, hobbling in his deer-hide shackles. With the air rather improved, Lewis sat examining the ball of bone. He tried it with his teeth and made a respectable gouge. It tasted of nothing, the river. He started up suddenly and called out for Sergeant Floyd and instead got Sergeant Pryor, as Floyd was on sick call with pain in the lower gut.

“Sergeant, I want a rather gorgeous beating for this man,” he said. “He is not only guilty but disaffected in spirit. I want him to forget his former self and the woman who gave him birth. Make it sudden and cruel and have it duly repeated until we achieve some measure of correction. D’you understand me?”

The sergeant saluted and rushed off, shouting out names and giving orders to take arms with green switches, nine to a man, or tamping rods, and a gauntlet was duly assembled, toward which Reed was herded and his ankle hobbles cut. In double line, the men stood jostling each other for room, and grinning at Reed and slapping switch bundles on the palm or a meaty thigh, and calling out to him in brute tones, in apt mockery of the Sirens calling sailors to join them below, for a frolic, and to be cut to ribbons amidst the coral. Driven by a kick to his posterior, Reed waded among them and greeted a hail of blows that almost turned him around. The blood sprang out from his skin and in amazement he discovered pain, and fled forward down the line and out, on his face in the grass. And was made to rise, whence it happened again, with more violence and a blow that all but broke his nose, the men applying blows of fatal force if done with a medium stick of kindling. Reed’s skin turned from red to black as the wounds gathered dirt and grime. He fell out the far end of the tunnel on one knee, and was picked up and tossed back in, and at last made sounds, and his eyes flew open wide as they could go, and he cried out with all the amazement of Caesar stabbed by Brutus, that any world no matter how dread could invent such agony. He lay panting on his face and was bodily raised up and turned about, the men now worked into a rather awful furor, their cheeks and eyes blazing like those of fiends, and their bodies slick with sweat and flecked with Reed’s blood and other filth. Reed, enraged but crying out in pain too, gave a bellow and rushed headlong in, and was met by four square walls of brutal punishment that had no other aim but to end his life, to batter the soul free of the body or else pound it deeper into hiding. He ended on his naked back on the bank of cocklebur and, unconscious, was examined by the sergeant, who pronounced it at last sufficient.