From Sea to Shining Sea (119 page)

George understood everything those words meant. He put an arm over Edmund’s shoulders and wished he could make him feel better. “Why, hell, Eddie, what for? He’s probably got it so tamed out there by now it wouldn’t be any fun.”

T
HE
A
RIKARA
P
OCASSE COULD NOT SEEM TO TAKE HIS EYES
off George that evening. He studied him in the candlelight over the table almost constantly, and whenever George would turn to find himself being so studied, the Indian’s broad, pleasant face would suffuse into a smile like a sunrise.

Gravelin explained.

“He now sees the man called ‘Long Knife,’ of whom he has heard legends since he was a very young man. It is a great joy to him to be in parley with you, General Clark, in your lodge.”

George nodded and smiled at the chief. “Tell him Long Knife remembers. In the treaty at Cahokia there was an emissary from the Arikaras, who came with a body of the Sioux. The name of that Arikara was, I remember, Horn Bow.”

Gravelin was astonished at General Clark’s power of memory; the Arikara perhaps was a little less so, because he would have expected the white leader to remember an Arikara who had gone so far to see a treaty; nonetheless, he was impressed, because that had been long ago. George said now:

“Tell him Long Knife is pleased with the Arikara, who were friendly with my people when they went up the Missouri, and especially with my young brother, the one he calls Chief Red Hair.”

Gravelin translated that, and the chief talked long in reply, beaming.

“He says,” Gravelin interpreted, “that he has seen many great things since the Americans come to his village last year, but the greatest thing he has seen is two red hair chiefs who are both brave men, and great fathers to the tribes, and brothers to each other.”

George smiled and nodded. He ran his hand up his forehead and onto his balding dome, then tugged at the silvering red hair at his temple. “Things being as they are on my crown,” he said, “that gentleman is some flatterer.” Edmund and Jonathan and most of the others at the table chuckled. “But you can tell him, M’sieu Gravelin, that he will see in Washington City the chiefest red hair chief of ’em all. What say to a toast, friends and honored guests, to that man who’s got us all into whatever situations we’re in: Tom Jefferson.”

“Hear, hear!”

They were having a merry time. They had talked for hours, about the powerful and capricious Missouri, and about Fort Mandan, about the British traders, about William’s cool defiance of the Teton Sioux; they had speculated long and deep about the legend of the Welsh Indians. They had mused about gloomy Captain Lewis and his sagacious dog Scannon, and about the Shoshoni girl-squaw and her papoose; they had laughed about the capture of the waterlogged prairie dog; they had talked about the amazing half-blind Cruzatte, and about Drouillard. They had gone solemn in talking of the untimely death of Sergeant Floyd; and then to cheer themselves up they had swung over to the topic of York the black monster and Great Medicine Stud, and had slapped their knees over the account of his frostbite. “Last winter is known among the Mandans,” Gravelin
had squealed with laughter, “as The-Year-the-Black-Man-Froze-His-Man-Part!” George had looked up then—the clock by the wall was striking two A.M. at the moment—and seen old Cupid lounging in the kitchen doorway listening, shaking his head and beaming.

“Dat Yawk,” Cupid murmured, wagging his head on his long wrinkled neck. “Sayin’ he eat chillums! Gaw, I never seen such a boy!”

It was a fine night. George felt as if William sat here at his elbow. Everyone was getting a fine, sentimental hum in his head.

But there was one face in the room that sometimes looked melancholy. When the grand spirit and goal of the expedition were being extolled and toasted, that one rugged, pugnacious face would look utterly abject. Edmund Clark perceived it, and so he turned to John Newman. “Soldier,” he said, “you’re a quiet one.”

“Sir, there’s two generals here, and an Indian chief, and you a cap’n, and various civilians of substance. I do feel some ‘at over-ranked, Sir.”

“I do myself,” Edmund said. “I understand you’re on your way home to a furlough, in Pennsylvania, eh?”

“Aye, sir. But I wish I was goin’t’ other way, sir.”

“With them, you mean.”

“Aye, sir. Up that bedamned Missouri. It’s cold, it’s wicked, it’s a hard go, sir. I got sick of it. But by the Eternal, Cap’n, I ought to be with them boys, and I hate what I done.” He was pouring it out, now that he had found an ear for it. Gravelin was now listening obliquely, too. “I done all I could to right myself,” Newman went on, his voice breaking. “I took my stripes without cryin’, though it broke my heart to feel how hard they whipped me, my own friends. That’s what’ll surprise ye, sir. You expect your own messmates, at least, to flog easy, but they swing meaner than th’ rest. I didn’t understand that at th’ moment, but I did, soon as I’d thought on ’t. Anyhow, I tried to make myself right. After that, I made myself worth two men.”

“This is true,” said Gravelin. “Many times this man saves the barge coming down, by strong arm and heart.”

“Cap’n Lewis himself told me I was worth two,” Newman went on, “but said sorry as he was, he couldn’t take me back. He’s a stiff man, he is. Now sir, I ’spect if it had been left to Cap’n Clark, he’d have took me back on. Your brother is a forgivin’ man, sir, most fair, most fair.” He sighed now and shook
his head. “Well, I’m a marked man, I am. But it’s my own fault, I reckon. Me and my temper.”

Edmund poured more brandy in Newman’s glass. “Well, soldier,” he said, trying to console, “ye’ll make it all up somewhere else along the way. Don’t be too severe with yourself, that’s all I’ll say.”

“Right y’ are, Cap’n. Sure. But a man don’t get many special chances like that in his life. Oh, Cap’n! To be ‘mongst them people! Bone tired, by a big fire, a gut full o’ buffalo hump, St. Peter playin’ his fiddle, everybody joshin’ an’ singin’, and a million miles o’ black space around ye, and tomorrow just one big question! An’ I’ve thought, why, I’d cheerfully take a beating every day if I could be where they are now.”

Edmund nodded emphatically and took a sip from his glass. “I hear ye, soldier. Oh, I do hear ye!”

J
ONATHAN AND
E
DMUND SAT ON THE PORCH THE NEXT
morning after Gravelin’s party had left, and drank strong coffee with George in the fresh morning light before starting down for the river and their homes. They were all thoughtful, less talkative than usual. Their minds and souls had been stretched by what they had seen and heard and felt, and words sounded feeble in their new inner spaciousness. They gazed down over the meadow and the locust trees and cottonwoods at the Falls and watched boats move on the wide gray-green surface below, and remembered, each in his own way, their impressions of yesterday and last night.

Jonathan at the moment was considering what the new Western Territory would mean in terms of trade along the Ohio if the expedition did indeed find a water route to the Pacific. Much of the China trade that now went around Cape Horn likely would come right through Louisville. He thought of something he had been wanting to get for Sarah: a carved elephant of jade. Think of all the fine things that would pass through Louisville on their way east, he thought. Then he looked at George, and wished the Clarksville Canal and the upstream boat patent had materialized for him. With just one such commercial advantage, he thought, he could turn his fortunes around and gain something of what he deserves in this country.

Edmund was still remembering Private Newman’s sad story and ingesting it into his own discontent.

And George was thinking of William, remembering their long walks and rides and talks together, remembering their long-ago surveying and hunting and exploring trips together back when
George could ride, remembering the day when William had ridden up here with his letter from Meriwether Lewis and asked for advice; George remembered that day, and remembered how he and William and Fanny had stayed up the whole night long, talking, and then how they had sat out here the next morning—a morning so much like this, it had been—drinking the coffee that William so loved, the strong, strong coffee, black as ink, with blackstrap molasses and chicory in it, and had foreplanned the greater part of the Voyage of Discovery between them, right here on this same porch on just such a morning as this. George shook his head, remembering this. It was a fine memory. He filled a pipe and lit it.

“I wonder me,” said Edmund now, “when we’ll hear next from Billy.”

George answered. “His letter to me said a party o’ men will be detached and sent back in a canoe when they’ve found th’ Great Falls of the Missouri. They place those falls some six hundred miles upriver from Fort Mandan; it wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve got there by now. And so, God willing, we might hear from ’im again in another two months or thereabouts.” He puffed and then pointed down at the Falls of the Ohio with his pipestem. “Think of it,” he said. “Here we sit at this falls, the only one blocking the Ohio. And Billy likely at the Falls o’ the Missouri, nigh three thousand water-miles out yonder. And all the way ’twixt these falls and those, it’s all boating water, nay, not one solitary portage. That is a marvel to think on, is it not?”

“Time for me to saddle up and go home,” Jonathan said, rising, putting a hand on George’s shoulder. “All this distance is stretchin’ my head all out o’ shape. Either that, or I drank intemperate last night.”

“I seem to remember you did,” Edmund said. “I’ll ride out with you. I want to stop in town and tell the newlyweds the news. As it is, we’re prob’ly all in deep trouble for not fetching Fanny up here for last night’s confabulation!”

“H
ERE’S WHAT
I’
VE BEEN THINKING
,” L
EWIS SAID, HOLDING A
morsel of roasted elk on his knife point to cool before putting it in his mouth. “If indeed this south fork is our river—as only you and I and the squaw seem to believe—the boys’ll be convinced only when they see the Great Falls. So I’ll take a party ahead to find the Falls and you follow on with the boats. Now, we don’t know what we’re in for above the Falls. If we do manage to find the Shoshonis, we can’t be sure they’ll treat us friendly, since they’ve never seen a white man before. And we don’t know what kind o’ muscle will be required to cross the mountains. So what I’m getting at is this …”

He put the meat in his mouth now and chewed it, his eyes reflecting long thoughts. William swallowed his own mouthful of elk roast and waited, feeling fireglow on his face and night chill on his damnable rheumatic neck. Lewis went on.

“I don’t think we can spare—” He winced and killed a mosquito on his temple. “I thought these pests couldn’t fly when it was cold. Anyway, I don’t think we can spare any men to take news back to the States, as we’d intended from here.”

William raised his eyebrows in surprise and considered this. “I see your point, but …”

“Since we hadn’t told the boys we’d intended to anyways, nobody’ll be let down.”

“They
won’t, that’s true. But Mister Jefferson and everybody back east will be. We wrote ’em to expect more maps and more news by this fall.”

“I know we did. But it seems to me we’ll just have to disappoint ’em. We can’t spare anyone, I really believe that.”

“When no word comes as promised, y’know, they’re goin’ to take us for dead.”

Lewis chewed on another bite of elk and his eyes were deep. “Aye,” he said after a while, “likely they will. But I reckon it’s better to be
thought
dead than to
be
dead, eh? And meseems that having those few boys with us could make it so or not.”

“It could,” William admitted. He could see that, and he could see that his friend had his priorities straight. But William could
remember how it had been at home during the war when nobody had known for a year at a stretch whether George was alive or dead, or Jonathan, or Edmund, or Johnny, and how they had never really learned it for sure about Dickie but over the years had just had to let the hope die and the emptiness become permanent. He wouldn’t want his brothers and sisters to have to go through that kind of thing over himself, but it appeared they would have to.

Lewis was studying him now, and he said, “Y’ look so wistful, my friend. Oh, I know! You’re afeared that pretty Judy Hancock o’ yours might marry up somebody else if she doesn’t hear from you.” He laughed, and William laughed weakly.

“Wrong,” he said. “I hadn’t thought that at all.”

But he was thinking it now, and knew he would be from now on.

A
ND SO THEY DECIDED TO DEPOSIT HERE THE RED PIROGUE
and all the heavy baggage they could afford to leave behind, and proceed up the south fork. Lewis named the north fork Maria’s River, in honor of a fair cousin, Maria Wood, and took sightings to mark the location for their return trip. Some of the men were put to work under Cruzatte’s direction digging a cache of the sort used by the French
coureurs de bois.
It was a sort of cellar dug in dry ground, wider at the bottom than at the top, floored with boughs and hides, its narrow mouth to be sealed with its original piece of sod so that an Indian might stand nearly upon it without seeing it. Dirt from the hole was thrown onto hides to be carried away, and thus show no signs of digging.

Into this cache were to be put some provisions, salt, some tools, gunpowder, and lead, Captain Lewis’s writing desk, tinware, beaver traps, most of the botanical specimens collected since Fort Mandan, and William’s revised map. As the blacksmith’s bellows and some of his tools were to be secured here too, Shields was first put to work repairing any damaged weapons, including the air gun, whose mainspring had been broken.

Now that the load was lightened, the red pirogue could be left behind. She was drawn up on a small island in Maria’s River, tied to trees, and covered with bushes. Captain Lewis then named Drouillard, Gibson, Joseph Fields, and Private Goodrich to accompany him on his search for the Falls. William was to bring the canoes, the white pirogue, and the remaining tons of baggage up the swift rocky river, which they still presumed to call the Missouri.