Читать книгу The Melancholy Fate of Capt. Lewis - Michael Pritchett - Страница 15

A half-white boy survives a wildfire; Sacagawea and her husband join the party; A man stabs his wife three times; Sgt. Pryor’s shoulder replaced; York with frostbite on his p—; A visit from men dressed as women; S. gives birth.

The next day, they were under way early, the tribe anxious to consult a prophetic boulder about an impending war with their enemies. The men parted company with those tawny damsels, of marked esteem, and agreeable in nature. Lewis wondered briefly about a Miss G— H— and a Miss J— L— back at home, but could not believe in their existence. Surely those ladies had already lived, been loved, died, and were now remember’d on headstones under spreading shade trees. The clouds steamed like ships on a harbor, casting shadows on herds of buffalo streaming in rivulets o’er the plain.

Then several days and nights of relentless freezing drizzle, during which the romance was all expunged and the real expedition got under way.

In the next village, the chief had two little fingers off in grief for a dead son, and the old men were sitting and talking with a miraculous half-white boy, recently spared horrible death in a wildfire that burned straight over him. His mixed ancestry, particularly the lightness of his skin, was credited for his salvation (never mind his quick-thinking mother who threw a wet hide over him). So the president’s dream of one nation, united sea to sea, was being born, coming into real vitality all around them. Yet Lewis was in quite as gloomy a frame of mind as ever, and wondered whether humans were really better than the previous drowned race, of which Noah was the last. It hardly took a prophet to guess the shape of this landscape one or two hundred years hence. Unease found him every few instants and his heart was tight. The pleasant evening mysteriously excluded him; he could not experience its joys.

Later, a man came into camp, quite French, traveling with two wives, and petitioned to join the party as interpreter, a Snake-talker no less. He was the very thing they needed to get over the Rock Mountains, which grew in size with each passing day, throwing their long shadows on the surface of every eye. They talked with him, and he kept referring to their “mysterious journey” ahead. Clark spoke to him first on the matter, and Lewis stood glancing across the ravine toward the littler of the two women, one who plainly didn’t belong to her station in life, and was estranged, and showed no fear or hope. She awaited her fate at a distance of three dozen paces, which was just near enough. He couldn’t see her well, but well enough.

Suddenly taking Clark aside, Lewis said, “My impression is of a man but ill-suited for his occupation. Methinks the smaller wife is somehow key in his employment and is the real translator.”

Clark did not look at the fellow, nodding. Direct, easy, red-headed, and military, Clark was suspicious of words when acts were possible, and trusted Lewis as more intuitive than he.

Lewis walked up to the fellow, in his red Flemish cap, with a nose, prodigious organ, all pox’d and pimpl’d, that had apparently been made slapdash by a blind artisan who was missing several fingers. With short legs, a concave chest, long arms, simian hands, and crude, blocky feet, he hunched rather than stood. Rough strips of cloud above them had spread apart, showing the stars. Mr. Charbonneau, or “Mr. Charcoal,” as he was called, crooked forth a dirty little paw to shake. Here was one more foreigner who could not do it properly, and was not manly.

“As to terms,” Lewis said. Which instantly made hatred boil in the hollows of the piggy eyes. Lewis stated a handsome price, twice what that fellow was worth, and yet the rage only seemed to double. Such crude hands as those had surely poisoned out of revenge, had bludgeoned a sleeping enemy to death. He breathed a miasma of indigestion through broken teeth and, in utter and complete disgust, gave his hand anyway. Lewis dared to glance again. The neatness of her outfit. The eyes illumined from behind and blazing into the growing night.

“It is good to at last meet a Snake-talker,” Lewis said.

“Where is the fucking pig who says otherwise?” the fellow demanded, then laughed. In the lowest of rustic scenes, such creatures were made, Lewis knew, and for the rest of their lives sought relief for their crude condition, and ultimately found none.

But she! She was daughter to the God who incinerated Sodom. He looked to find her once more, and saw only where she had been. The fellow turned quickly to see where Lewis’s eyes had gone, but Lewis shut them and ducked away.

Later, he lay unable to sleep, eyes open, feeling immured in the cracks in time, watching floating columns of apparitions—Northern Lights—dancing on the tent. When he closed them, her face glinted in the dark, self-evident, essential, perfect. Then suddenly, the oxish stare of the husband intruded, divining all, observing his observing, and he was wide awake again.

. . .

In the morning, he witnessed a serious farewell between the old wife and the new, looking long and earnestly in each other’s faces, for this was maybe the last time they’d set eyes on each other, this side of death. Then the old wife was gone, and without so much as a backward glance at her husband.

Lewis felt it had happened before, yet everything had changed. Now he had someone, one whom he was able to watch without needing his eyes. He saw her with his mind’s seeing-organ, and noted so many things about her: her sportive willingness to journey, the wry silent witness she was to a large party of men. Also, formed last by God, her labours were now heavier after the departure of the old wife, even though her belly showed that she was far gone with child.

In the following days, he knew her proximity, direction, and activity every moment. If ever asked her whereabouts, he could answer without looking up—but never dar’d.

That night, near 10 P.M., the dark erupted into shouts of anger and a woman’s cries of pain. He and Clark forced a way through the mob and found a lady bleeding on the ground from three deep knife gouges, and her husband, smeared with the warm life of his beloved, with three privates sitting on him. It seemed she engaged in sport with the men, and the husband caught her, coming in late.

“You see, Clark?” Lewis asked. “This bedroom diplomacy does violence to souls unsuited to it.”

“’Tis puzzling,” Clark said, shaking his head. “To a savage, jealousy is generally thought impractical.”

“O, ’tis the least practical thing in the world,” Lewis said. “Please to tell the men to turn in.”

After Clark did, Lewis stayed a while and stood where he could not be seen and watched the bridegroom sitting half naked in the bloody snow, gasping and blowing and spitting red from having bitten his tongue in anguish. Behold, the angry forlorn cuckold. He seemed not to care whether he froze to death, lost in wonder. Why, little one? Why do you do this to me when you know I love you? Or words to that effect, while her blood dried on him. Ah, love. Lewis at last withdrew to his own bed, but lay too agitated to sleep, tossing and remembering his French mistress, being bathed in her gushing blood.

The next afternoon, Sergeant Pryor, a mere youth with twinkling blue eyes, curly locks, and smooth, high forehead, got his hand wrong in a rope, helping to raise a mast, and the violent wrench tore his shoulder from its socket, and he fell on the deck and writhed and kicked, and was sat upon by three of his fellows while a fourth tried to draw the arm out straight. The first try failing, Pryor all but bit his own tongue off and blood dribbled out of his mouth. “Goddamn you men! You butchers! You filthy, lazy, worthless wretches!” he cried. “You have been against me! I know you do not respect me! But I am . . . agh! . . . your sergeant, you stinking filth!”

On the second try, the joint ground in the socket, then jumped out again. Pryor kicked out and would have screamed could his jaws unclench, which they could not. With eyes squeezed, leaking tears, he espied Lewis, and blinked and made guttural growls and gnashed his teeth. “I see them! The lights about your head! Look above your head!” he said.

At the third try, Pryor seemed to go unconscious for a moment, and went limp as if dead, in a contorted, tortured pose. He slowly opened his eyes. “O, yellow pack of miscreants! You vile, disobedient demons! I at last see you! I see what ye really are!”

On the fourth attempt, at the pop of the shoulder going fully home, Pryor dropped dead away and was left where he was, the men walking off muttering about what a pip Sergeant Pryor could be at times, though not so bad, after all, as some officers.

Lewis waited nearby, curious, with never an inkling that the sergeant could be so wild and vindictive. Pryor opened his eyes and glanced about, seeming not to see him at first. He looked around expectantly, then his face dulled with disappointment. “Everything is . . . as before,” he said.

“And how should it be, Sergeant?” Lewis asked.

“A bright flame played about your head,” he said. “All this—” he gestured at the woods, “—was of the most variant hue and brilliance. Each blade of grass was a bit of fire.”

Lewis stared the sergeant in the face, for Floyd had actually emanated some sort of orange flare from the crown of his head, while the feathers came down the river. And then, very shortly after, expired from no certain cause.

“Never mind, Sergeant,” he said. “You will be your old self in a day or two.”

Pryor nodded, but didn’t look relieved at this news.

Over the long winter days, when she was in the hut, he was careful to be elsewhere, and worried he’d be discovered by his avoidance of her rather than the contrary. The temperature in the Mandan village fell and fell, until it seemed they had found a place on earth without limits. But it at last stopped, at 72 below. York went out hunting, and from dragging buffalo carcasses into the wind, got frostbite on his feet and p—.

One night, above the wind, they suddenly heard a most terrific wailing, a concatenation of shrill female voices, lifted in a fever of ritual song. With lanterns raised, Lewis and a few privates ventured forth to peer out at a party of squaws just within the woods. Charbonneau somehow materialized at his elbow. “Berdachers,” he pronounced. “Do ya know what they are?”

“They are females,” Lewis said.

“Only in manner and appearance. Dem’re witches. Able to change form and fornicate with men. There’s nothink like a night with a berdacher, but a man kills hisself in the morning. Better keep an eye to your sodjers.”

He glanced at the flickering French eye beside him, the thick, wet lips, thrust tongue, and rolling white, like something atop a cathedral. Each night, she laid her small, perfect head beside that visage.

“These men are confined to quarters after dark,” he said. But as soon as he’d got it out, the husband crooked a finger forth with a laugh.

“Dere he goes! Catch him, boys, catch him! Tie him to a tree!”

In fact, a man had set out and was halfway to the woods, trying to reach that dark band of white-faced furies, when he was overtaken and tackled and forcibly retrieved.

“Shackle him,” Lewis said. “And if you must, sit on him all night, but keep him indoors!”

He watched that they did this, but when he turned back he no longer saw the husband, that face of the hell-born agoniste, or the berdaches.

The next night, the Nation got up a huge medicine dance to bring the buffalo back north in the spring, and they gave this man, the one who tried to run, a seat of honor at the feast and four maidens, for the good luck it would bring the tribe.

Then came a total eclipse of the moon, and much chanting and singing.

Lewis suddenly received Charbonneau, who came to his tent to show him a red rising on his tailbone. “Either you are sprouting a tail,” Lewis noted with some relish, “or you have an abscess forming. Let it rise ’til you cannot bear it, then summon me.”

And indeed ’twas strange, this general epidemic of boils and abscesses, so that every man suffered some such complaint, almost as tho they drew near to some invisible disruptive force, disord’ring their flesh.

“O, one other thing,” the husband said before departing. “It seems her time is nigh.”

Lewis gaped at the milky, insolent blue eyes, one and then the other, before the meaning at last dawned on him. “Sir, do you mean your wife is giving birth? This moment?”

“Aye, these twelve hour, ever since the moon come up,” he said blandly, and clumsily loaded a pipe.

As if at a signal her voice, in transports of agony, sounded high and clear above the songs of the dancers. “My God, you might’ve said something before! She is in distress.”

“She ’as me worried, ’at she ’as,” the fellow said.

Lewis went to the hut and found her there with a woman of the village, midwife, arriving just in time for a terrible sight of her gray skin, and to feel of her icy hands and feet, and to hear her scream instead of making the healthful grunt and bearing down of a successfully labouring woman. Her throat seemed to rip, to be torn in two. She continued this way for another hour, and he left her and attempted to go about business elsewhere. But her cries awakened ev’ry nerve he had and worked them like an iron file on harp strings, like a hurricane in a dry field of rye. He found no refuge anywhere, and heard it when it wasn’t there, while the sergeants queried him on various things. He was helpless inside it, like a child at the hands of a fiend. At last, he stumbled into the hut for the medicine kit, found dried rings of rattlesnake tail, crushed them fine, mixed with water, and ran. And though the midwife viewed ’t suspiciously, he held it to her lips and she drank with a tender awful trust in her eye, and fiery hands grasping his.

Within ten minutes of his departure, from the suffocating confines of the maternity ward, she delivered a healthy boy, whose cry he perceived from where he had fallen, face foremost, in the snow.

Then, a few days later, she walked out for the first time, mother and child rivaling each other for radiance in the spring light. He did not dare go near her nor dare to stay away and so glanced only a moment at her prize.

The husband, standing some distance from her and appearing heedless, was in fact very carefully observing this visitation (Lewis knew), devouring each detail of his expression and hers with starved attention. Lewis felt the moment, like ev’ry moment since Creation, was formed of iron and bolted on ev’ry side. And knew he had a dog at heel now, and a shade by his side, which was the husband, who was waiting and watching for some particular sign, some telltale glimmer in her eye or his to give him cause to act, to pounce.

But how? When had he made the slip and put that bloodhound on his scent? No, it wasn’t possible. He’d not made the least error, never an imprudent glance. No—the fellow awaited evidence. Lewis was sure of it, or almost certain, moving carefully away from the little gathering, out of the fellow’s sight.