Читать книгу The Melancholy Fate of Capt. Lewis - Michael Pritchett - Страница 14

He poisons himself; Sgt. Floyd dies; Killing the first buffalo; A visit to a residence of tiny Christian devils; Geo. Shannon missing; York makes himself more terrible than they wish; A man confined for mutinous expression.

Reed lay without moving all the night long, for Lewis got up to check that he was breathing and not dead. For reasons he couldn’t fully fathom, he would not mention the carved ball to Clark or its 288 bumps, divisible by the twelve months or twelve disciples of Christ. Nor did Reed appear to recall finding it. And in a day or two, the private took up the old objects and implements of his former life as if by habit and was good and obedient as one might hope. Through a painful canal, he’d got new birth back into the tribe, and remember’d a purpose in the midst of his agonies there.

Days passed, and their visits to tribes along the way fell into a pattern of savage surprise at so many white faces and so much weaponry. One could scarce wish the situation reversed. Exchanging diplomatic half truths about aid on one side and obedience on the other, they kept on the move. He was never alone, but had the unlucky, rare gift for loneliness with a fellow human by his side. And wondered if God had a reason for making each mortal so singular and so painfully aware of the fact. And what’d become of his wounded French mistress? Where was she and did she touch her scar and think of him?

As he looked about, he seemed to see his life had already happened. He’d no great love like what lay before Clark, simple, easy for the taking. This job was prearranged before his birth, for the president was already his relative. He then stumbled on a grassy outcrop of what looked to be purest cobalt, weathered to a delicate creamy orange—and broke off a morsel. Having suddenly an awful hunger for that element, he thrust it into his mouth, while some distant part of him exclaimed, Poison! Poison! Spit it out! Like his mother shaking him the time he’d swallowed that one-cent piece.

His eyes and nose now burning, he stumbled toward the river, throat convulsed shut, tears scalding his face. With stung and puffy lips and swollen tongue, he could not even cry for help, and fell face first into the water and gurgled and sucked down mud and weeds. Somehow, Clark was now upon him and shaking him, asking not just what he’d ingested, but why. The grappling felt angry, and Lewis could not tell whether Clark was trying to push him deeper into the water or haul him up out of it. Clark spluttered and started into questions he could not finish. “Why did you—? What on earth were you—? What is the meaning—?” But the pure mineral had burned out his faculties and, as Clark dunked him, up seemed down, the sky was under him, the river above. What was more, he wished that it might never ever stop. Then abruptly he needed air and began to fight. He and Clark had each other by the neck and rose up each choking the other and the streaming drops appeared to fly sideways off their bodies. He let Clark go and was thrown or fell back into the water and there decided to rest. O, how lovely was a river! He would simply drift. Soon, though, his lungs missed the airy, chaotic world and he broke free again with the help of a multitude of male hands and voices. He waited to be pulled to pieces by those hands, but was lifted instead.

Later, it was night, and he lay alone in the grass. And then it was morning, and a mouse’s shadow jerked along the outside of the tent. He followed it as far as his eye could reach. God surely hated him because he was still alive, feeling bludgeoned, butchered, and skinned. Clark was talking to him. They’d been conversing and he’d dozed. “—as for what was in your mind, I cannot presume,” he said, and was waiting for Lewis’s answer.

“I wish to call it accident,” Lewis said.

“Lewis, you do not take careful care!” Clark snapped.

My, he sounded alarmed! But that was Clark, with a body full of reliable anger and outrage that broke out as easily as his sweat.

“Something’s amiss,” Lewis said, holding his head. “I want to eat a yard of earth. I could chew rocks or eat dung. Some element is lacking in me.”

“How are you now?” Clark asked. “And have you heard? Sergeant Floyd is dying.”

“Somehow, I knew that he was,” Lewis said. “I must see to him.” He tested a foot on the ground. He sat up, temples pounding.

“That seems hardly wise,” Clark said. “And useless, too, for he will not last the night.”

He was up already, and staggering off with Clark still talking, bursting out of the tent, finding a friendly tree to lean on while the rollicking earth settled. Going tree by tree, and not believing a thing was real ’til he’d touched it, he found the right tent and slipped in. Floyd, on his back, with that singular look of the dying, those thousand-mile eyes, greeted him and then said, “I am going away.”

“Are you, then? Are you sure that’s a sound idea?” he asked.

“Please write me a letter,” Floyd said, through wet mutton-chop whiskers. Lewis smiled, and nearly made a joke about letters of reference to Saint Peter. He felt they were brothers at this moment, sharing their nearness to death. For Lewis felt his own life would end any moment, though it was curious how it persisted and hung on. A little after he took the letter down, Floyd died.

At dawn was a solemn little ceremony, a yawning shallow trench, prayers, a lively pitching of fresh earth into a hole, onto Floyd. The men looked to Lewis to say something. Finally he knelt and put a hand on Floyd’s cold forehead and said, “Ah, Floyd, you whom we invited with us on our expedition. And now you go and leave us out of yours!”

That task done, Floyd entombed, enshrined in limestone, all desire abandoned him. He felt trumped by death. The men waited on him in dismay, with searching looks, until at last he gave an order to load boats.

Later on, they saw the first buffalo and Private Fields shot and killed it. Lewis walked out and stood by, his mouth yet aching from the mineral, burnt lips stinging, tongue still thick and hard to work. Was there any hope of getting to the Pacific without some slight desire to do so? Clark joined him, to toe the cooling animal.

“This before us is the first buffalo, Clark,” Lewis said, with difficulty. “The very first one.”

“And a very grand fellow indeed,” Clark said. “A tasty-looking morsel.”

“I am not making myself clear,” Lewis continued, and wiped his eyes, which cried tears, for some reason. “I must not be well. I simply wish to say that here at our feet lies the first buffalo. I cannot say more than that, though I apparently feel a great deal about it.”

But O, feeling! What a nuisance, bubbling up so suddenly and irresistibly. Why was it so excessive, so contradictory? He must be going out of his mind, or perhaps he already had, years ago.

Farther on, a group of Sioux came up on foot and bade them pay a visit to their town, using signs. Later, they escorted Lewis to a large hill that appeared man-made. He was told, through interpreters, that it was the home of little Christian devils, eighteen inches high, with freakish large heads, whose blowguns could kill at great distances.

He burst out laughing, certain the interpreters had got it wrong. The Indians, blankets on their shoulders, feathers tied in their hair, scowled, and their chief made a sign, a single finger drawn away sharply from the mouth, twisting and turning, for an untrustworthy person. Lewis choked back the untimely mirth, which only doubled its intensity, finally biting his tongue ’til he tasted blood. Then they soberly investigated the hill, but no little demons were about.

Nevertheless, the place had an airless, doomed, and motionless sense, and was gusted with dry, hot winds, the grasshoppers singing at a steep infernal pitch. Its chest-high grasses were full of currents and whisperings, making it palpably a region of spirits and bad medicine.

“Something awful occurred here once,” he said to Clark. “Certain places on earth have this about them, this dark sort of dread.”

He’d seen it all before, he was sure of it, as if he were repeating this same journey over and over, endlessly, like an inward-turning circle, as though his life had got loose from the mainstream and was caught in an eddy. They walked down from this “spirit mound.” There would be a road up to it one day, just there. He traced the path with his finger. One day, he’d come up it. In fact, he’d already done so.

The next day, he and Clark walked out ahead and found, in ev’ry hollow and thicket, ev’ry knoll and copse—ready for the picking and eating with wild juices running down chins and fingers stained red—grapes, plums, and blue currants. Each thing that was new, they named, and with the naming of each lark, wren, and blackbird, he could see a time coming when all things would be named, and none cared about the natural world disappearing, because new methods of valuing, unimaginable now, would arise and determine what was good or ill.

When they made camp, Shannon was missing. This man, with the poorest sense of direction ever, was forever losing his way, even going to the latrine. This time, he’d utterly vanished with two U.S. government horses, as though he’d stumbled off that plane of existence. But the man had a genius for finding hidden places, doors in hillsides, folds in the garment of time. And was never far off, for they found signs of him all over, a warm ash pile, a half-gnawed rabbit skull, a hastily buried turd. But he remained hidden. Did God so love George Shannon? And could there truly be a bearded old man in the sky? Or was He only a scapegoat for all man could not answer? If so, then enormous lies were being told, and defended with torture by black-clad tonsured craven bullies. Now and then, the tribes caught one of these, these missionaries, covered him in soot, pulled off his skin, lashed him to a tree, then put the tree in some rapids.

That next morning, the object was to shoot one of the gazelles or antelopes they’d seen, like an animal of the Serengeti. They ambushed him, and Lewis sat stroking the coat of bright yellowish silver, reddish-brown and a leaden gray, and looked into the emptied eye, of a deep sea green. Then they wanted a female for comparison, but too late—those animals moved over the plain more like flighted birds than quadrupeds. Clark killed a prairie wolf, lean, distant figure loping forever on the edge of life. It gave Lewis a strange pain to watch it fall and lie still.

Often and often, he had to pause and wonder whether honour, glory, dominion, and renown could still be his. The plain they skirted was as close-trimmed and neatly cultivated as a beautiful bowling green and bore the appearance of man’s handiwork. But what purpose to mow broad swaths up and down the prairie, and then lay them head to head? He counted eighteen of these features, all carefully arranged on a piece of land.

Several miles above them, Drouillard was riding upriver as hard and fast as he could go. And though he nearly killed a horse in the bargain, he’d at last overtake Shannon and bring another of his insane flights to a close. George had been quite crazy for days, trying to catch a party that was not there. And afterward insisted he’d heard their voices ahead, and smelt their horses, cooking, and latrines, but could find them nowhere. Shaking, clothed in rags, peppered with cockles, he rubbed one eye, then the other, deranged by lack of sleep. Nature played such sport with this man, making him think north was south and up was down.

That night, the men came ’round to be stabbed, cunningly wounded, by Lewis. And Lewis was only too happy to oblige, for few things did he hate more than a festering boil. A poultice of sugar and soap might suffice for some, but give him the lancet and the needle, white-hot from the flame. His readiness to pierce and puncture elevated him in the men’s eyes to a place not far from godhead, for they respected only agony and copious bleeding.

A day or so after, they met a party of Sioux and went ashore to palaver. But within a very few minutes a horse had gone missing, and then sundry small articles as well. Lewis, standing under a huge, leafless tree, shielded his eyes to look up from the river at the chiefs on the ridge with the sun behind their feathery heads.

“I’ll have you know we are not afraid of Indians!” he shouted up to them, knowing that the words meant nothing, that his tone carried all his meaning. “When Indians steal from us, we kill them! Isn’t that so, Commander?”

“O, yes!” Clark said, standing in the sun, a hand on his sword, a second tiny figure they looked down at. “We have possession of your country! And we only deal fairly with those who are fair to us!”

The chiefs, blanketed, thin, squinting, and as wrinkled as raisins, expressed consternation and shock, anger, and outrage with a long retort, and so Lewis had his answer. He and Clark turned and walked down the hill, and with them flowed a body of two hundred warriors, and women and children, the entire village. He wondered, with a bitter curiosity, if it was almost over, if his slaughter would be next. Some young men got to the bateau and seized its line. Clark drew his sword. Lewis cried, “Men, take arms!” And then waited for the Almighty. But a doddering old chief limped into the shallows and took the rope from the young men, and indicated that taking him on board would avert a massacre. So they were allowed to escape, and put the old sinner ashore a few miles above.

That night had everyone in bad spirits. At the next village, they were skittish, and every sparrow’s fall was possibly a slaughter commencing. Those women, decorated with the scalps of defeated enemies, danced. Many had flint- and iron-pointed arrows run through their arms in grief for loved ones recently fallen in battle. So, apparently, did love hold sway with those people. But hatred did, too.

Lewis, reflecting on what had almost happened, had a bitter night. His sorrow acted like claws curved backward, and the more he struggled in its grasp and tried to escape, the deeper it dug and faster it held. His sentiments were crafted like a thousand tiny gold fishhooks into which he’d blundered, and now he attempt’d not to panic or resist. He got down and prayed with his head to the earth for it to be lifted, and was surprised there by Clark. “Are you ill, Lewis? What’s the matter?”

“Nothing at all. Merely resting.”

Clark stared and angled his head in that interrogative Irish way, and frowned as he did when a thing was irrational.

“Lewis, what was in your heart, making that call to arms?” he asked.

“Nothing. Curiosity to see how it would fall out,” he said, standing and feeling foolish about the dirt on his knees and his brow, making him appear like some sort of Catholic.

“But to fight rather than to bargain—?” Clark said.

“But Clark, I didn’t choose it!” Lewis protested. “I never choose a thing to do or say but what is thrust on me by my station, rank, training, situation, time of day, even the position of the sun. In effect, no choices appear to me at all but always the one course as though it were already writ somewhere. As though all this were occurring in God’s head, and He were setting it down, and rapidly, with no hesitation or crossing out.”

“Would you prefer some crossing out?” Clark asked with a worried smile, slapping dust out of his beaver hat.

“I do not prefer at all,” Lewis said. “I cannot resist a bit in these traces. They are snug and double.”

Clark plainly didn’t care for his answers and didn’t pursue them. The tribe later walked them out to see two large boulders with a third smaller, purported to be star-crossed lovers turned by the gods to stone, side by side for eternity. And their dog. “Romeo and Juliet,” Clark said.

“Though I can’t help but think of the Gorgon, Medusa,” Lewis said. “And of Lot’s wife, also.”

That evening, they confined a man (Newman) for mutinous expression, and sentenced him to seventy-five lashes. Lewis was curious to see an actual mutineer and visited him where he was shackled, finding a character with long blond hair and a rosy face, a regular cherub, but sunk into sullen study of his right shoe.

“What’s the game, Cap’n?” he asked.

“What? There’s no game, Private.”

“Sure, this here, the whole thing, is it. I’m just askin’, what’s the rules so we can all play and that’d make it fair.”

“I’m sorry you think so, for it will make the thrashing useless unless you see we are not about play and sport,” Lewis said, wincing at some shooting pains in his skull.

“Once more, sir. What game are ya playing on me? For I on’y said, to a few fellas, we should refuse to man-haul these boats above ten hour a day.”

“Aye, the men might listen to such a young, devilishly handsome fellow, and that is why, as of this moment, you are disbarred,” he said.

“Whuh! O, no, sir,” Newman said, casting forward onto his knees and trying to rise in the hobbles.

“O, yes. You are disbarred, Newman, and stripped of rank, and are now an ordinary teamster,” he said, rather relishing the blood rising in the fellow’s face, soaking his skin to the roots of his hair, the outrage, the sputtering shock at such a punishment.

“I’ll desert!” he said.

“Yes, do. And then I can hang you outright, you stupid upstart,” Lewis said.

Newman’s lip trembled and his color went as he saw it was no jest. “Wha’d I ever—why, Cap’n? I never done harm. I on’y made idle chat about the hauling!”

“I know what you are, man, better than you know yourself, and here is how to deal with you,” Lewis said, grinning. “I simply came to see if you are what I suspected, and you are.”

“I ain’t no harm, Cap’n. I on’y shot off my mouth to the others. They’re against me, is all, and have been all along! Don’tcha see?”

Lewis walked off, away from the bereft, hysteric voice, the pleas. Poor, handsome, craven creature. Though he’d enjoy the lashing of such a man.

Walking out, he noted that this nation’s houses were eight-sided, eight being the number of candles in a menorah and the days of Hanukkah. But he could espy no other Hebrew features that might identify one of the ten tribes. In an hour, just at sunset, the beating commenced and the stroke and Newman’s cry rang across the prairie. Suddenly, it stopped in the middle, the chief coming forth and staying the whip, crying out at such cruel treatment.

“Tell him we are making an example of this man for challenging my authority,” Lewis said to the interpreter. “Tell him that, if there are kindnesses at all between white people, it is lashing that makes them possible.”

The chief listened to the explanation and then, showing himself a sensible man, said examples were useful from time to time, and withdrew to let the beating resume. Newman at last fell on the ground, overcome by his wounds, and was beaten there to the count of twenty-five, then left.