Sign-Talker (7 page)

York rose, went and knelt to poke the fire and add wood, taking a long time about it. His hands were shaking. Outside, men were working in the sleety rain: ax blows, talk, laughter, saws
rasping through green wood. York said, as if speaking into the fire: “That all ’at story? What come of Caesar?”

Drouillard didn’t know the end of the story. That had been a quarter of a century ago, in a place long lost to him. He had seen Caesar no more than two or three times. But somehow the story seemed very important, both to York and himself.

As Drouillard rode south in the cold rain, he wished he had not drunk the whiskies. Liquor got into his blood too fast and upset his balance. Not just his physical balance, but that more delicate thing in his spirit that guided what he said and what he did. By keeping his inner balance, he could rely upon himself. If he could rely upon himself, anyone else could rely upon him. If he got off balance inside, he could go too dark, or he could go too light. If he went dark he could get morose or cruel. If he went too light he might be the sort of childish fool people were looking for a half-breed to be. Or he could say things from the heart without thinking how they would sound to people who were in their own worlds. He had almost said cruel things to the slave. He had wanted to taunt him about being owned, had wanted to dare him to run away. Then, on the other hand, he had started telling his story about Caesar, with a light-headed hope that it would inspire York to free himself, to run away.

Running away was an old matter down in Drouillard’s dark side. Far back in the war times he had to run away from the Town-Burning soldiers. Later he had run away from the Black Robes who tried to make him a Jesus Indian.

Most Indians believed that one’s spirit had to walk in balance. For a half-breed, balance was even more crucial, but it was harder.

He rode toward the mound-hills made by the ancients, noting game trails and hoof tracks. It was almost dark when he rode up to the top of the biggest mound. From the west, across the Mississippi, a few feeble points of yellow light twinkled, sometimes entirely lost in the rain and mist, probably outdoor slash fires and wharf lanterns at St. Louis. Closer below, on this side of the river, near the oxbow-shaped lake, a few glimmers: Cahokia
town, where Captain Lewis was buying provisions and trying to impress the merchants and the prominent citizens with his new authority in the territory. Nowhere else was there any light. He was alone in a world of darkness, high above the floodplain, in a place sacred to his people. The long, old songs were in the air around him but were as faint as the distant lights, and like them, they sometimes faded to nothing. Even when they were silent he could feel a hum through the soles of his feet. Long before whitemen had come to this continent there had stood here a great city of the ancient people, greater than any whiteman’s city anywhere, and all its people had gone suddenly when a great death had come through. All their houses, and the temple on this hill, had fallen and rotted away, all so long ago that this old forest had since covered the mounds and town site and plazas. The story of the old city had come down through more than twenty generations, and almost everything had been forgotten, except that they were ancestors. There was nothing to show what had been here, except these hills shaped as the Creator never shaped hills, and the bones and the old clay pots, the weapons, pearls, and the copper ornaments that sometimes emerged from the dirt when rain gullied the slopes. But the descendants had kept coming here to pray, and their boys came here to seek their Spirit Helpers.

Drouillard had come for that purpose at the age of thirteen, after escaping from the Black Robe mission. The Black Robes had tried to fill his soul with fears, and had exerted powers over him that only finding his Spirit Helper had finally wiped away. On his quest, Drouillard had sat four days and nights naked and without fire, when the weather was mild. Now he hunched down in the wind and rain with a blanket over his back, and with flint and steel he struck sparks into charcloth and wadding tinder, blew into the smoking wad in his palms until flame glowed, then set it on the ground in the lee of a fallen tree and fed it dry punk from inside a log, then twigs and sticks until a good fire crackled and fluttered. Smoke swirled away into the cold, dark, misting sky. He drew a leaf of dry tobacco from a bag and rubbed it into
fragments between his palms. These he sprinkled into the flames, a bit at a time, and each puff and tendril of smoke carried prayer into the heavens. He sat with the fire at his feet, his back leaning on the fallen tree, his blanket over his head and shoulders and held open to the fire, the wind from behind him.

The wind is always full of messages, he knew, but they cannot always be understood. Here the messages were under the wind, and it was not ears that heard them. They were the old songs, and they were inside him as well as outside, or they were through him as if he were but part of the wind itself.

Sometimes the songs seemed to draw the smoke of his fire into song-shapes, seemed to draw sparks up into spirals. The ancestor spirits were present and strong, but they were not fearsome. Whitemen were afraid of their ghosts; Indians invited theirs, calling on them for help and wisdom and foresight.

After midnight the drizzle stopped. Drouillard slept leaning back against the log. Two forms came to him. First was a man form with a dull-glinting ornament in the middle of his forehead. This one rose and floated over him and flew away over the Mississippi.

The other was the form of a woman. Her eyes were intense with generosity; she was holding forth something in her hands and imploring that it be taken. But there was blood pouring down her arms.

When the cry of an owl woke him, it was raining again, not a drizzle now but a blowing rain that had soaked his blanket until it was heavy. Even in the rain the little fire was still burning. On these places water did not quench fires. The sky was fading to gray in the east. Behind him the last murmur of the old songs was fading into the dark beyond the great river as if retreating from dawn.

Under his blanket he filled the bowl of his pipe with kinnikinnick and lit it with a twig from the fire. He smoked to the four winds and asked the Keeper of the Game for a good day of hunting. When he rose to get his horse, his limbs were so cold he was stumbling, but in his center he was glowing with heat.

A private named John Colter was assigned to go out with a packhorse and help Drouillard bring in the venison. Colter was said to be a very good hunter, but he admitted that he had brought in nothing but turkeys and rabbits, and had thought the bigger game had long since been killed off in the vicinity. Drouillard told him there were more deer than one would think, and that furthermore he had seen bear sign.

Colter was compact and square-jawed, with narrow lips, a tight, mocking smile, and deceptively sleepy-looking eyes. He was one of those whom Drouillard had seen at Fort Massac on the day he met the captains. This was the one who had stepped out of Captain Bissell’s door and called him “chief.” As they skinned out and butchered the deer, Drouillard noted that this Colter must indeed be a hunter because he was as swift and sure with a knife as any whiteman he had ever seen. Drouillard thought the man could probably be very dangerous, but he gave off good humor and did not seem to resent helping an Indian. He wasn’t jealous that Drouillard had found deer when he couldn’t. Instead he went on about how good Christmas would be with all this venison. When they started cutting up the third deer, a buck with ten antler points, Colter noticed that part of the heart had been sliced away, but he didn’t ask about it, so he either knew or something kept him from asking.

Instead Colter asked him, “I been a-wonderin’. How in the hell did Indians celebrate Christmas before we came?”

Drouillard looked up blank-faced from the flesh he was slicing. He couldn’t believe he had just heard such a question. Colter was looking at him with that sly, mocking smile.

Then Colter started laughing. And after a while he said, “Eh, I actually made ye smile, chief!”

*     *     *

Drouillard could feel that snow would come before daybreak, and he was so tired that he accepted a bunk in one of the log huts. The soldiers had their Christmas Eve whiskey rations. Then more whiskey mysteriously kept coming in, and it soon became apparent to Drouillard that he could have slept better under a brush shelter out in a snowstorm. The soldiers boasted, smoked, sang, toasted the newborn Savior, gave each other tobacco, belt buckles, and scrimshaw pieces, stomp-danced to Jew’s harp music, and arm-wrestled on the small puncheon table in the middle of the cabin. Some of the revelers began drifting from cabin to cabin, challenging each other to wrestling contests, their voices louder and louder. Some began bitching about being stuck in this bleak place all winter just a few hours’ journey from the women and saloons of St. Louis with no freedom to go there. Drouillard had accepted a few shots of the bootleg that the men had offered in honor of his great contribution to the larder, and he was half drunk and half asleep when the inevitable fight erupted. It started when a soldier named Frazier objected to being called for guard duty by a corporal named Whitehouse, and called the corporal a pride-swollen pimple. Soon, stools and bodies were bouncing off the walls so hard that clay chinking was falling out from between the logs. Drouillard had seen hundreds of fights along the river in which rivermen, soldiers, wagoneers, and hunters broke fingers and bit off noses, and had been drawn into a few himself, but it was his policy to avoid them because too many people looked for excuses to kill an Indian or a half-breed.

So he snatched up his bedroll and rifle and slipped out of the thundering hut. A snowfall had begun. Every cabin but the captain’s was alive with muffled noise. Maybe Captain Clark had drunk himself to sleep; it was hard to imagine that he couldn’t hear the whooping drunks and thumping objects. Light seeped through cracks, and now and then a door would creak open and a soldier would step out to pass water, belch, hum tunes, and fart proudly into the darkness. He wanted a place to lie down and sleep. So he slipped down toward the keelboat, past a sentry who leaned dark and motionless under a corner of the tarpaulin that
covered a stack of crates and kegs near the vessel. He climbed up the chocks and pry-poles onto the deck of the keelboat. In the stern cabin he found bunks built along the bulkhead, evidently to be the captains’ onboard quarters. Though not furnished yet with bedding, they were strung with rope webbing. It was the quietest place in camp. He wrapped himself in his blanket, eased back onto the creaking ropes, and fell at once into a dreamless sleep.

He was jarred awake by gunfire, a crashing volley nearby, followed by whooping, hallooing, manly voices. He thrashed out of his twisted blanket, heart pounding, thinking he was a boy at Lorimier’s trading town in Ohio and the Long Knife Town Burners were attacking. But then he heard what the voices were yelling:

“Good Christmas morn, Cap’n Clark!”

“Cheers, Cap’n!”

“It’s the Savior’s day!”

“Hip, hip, hooray!”

Stooping out through the low hatch onto the snowy deck, head aching, Drouillard stood in the early gray daylight and peered up toward the camp, which looked like a small, shabby town, smoke drifting away over it through the falling snow. About two dozen soldiers were in front of Captain Clark’s cabin, bellowing and laughing and reloading their weapons. From the tones of their voices he thought some of them were still drunk. At a hoarse command, the guns were discharged skyward, with more shouts. He smelled the drifting gun smoke, smelled coffee, roasting meat, pone baking, all through the chill, dank smells of mud, river, and latrines. The flag fluttered in the falling snow. Captain Clark stood in the doorway of his cabin, in linen breeches and loose shirt, face long and pale, eyes blinking, his nose as red as his tousled hair, obviously just awakened, sleep-stupefied. Then he grinned at his men.

“Thankee kindly for your good cheer, boys. And a good Christmas day to you too.” He looked up at the falling snow. “Holiday. No duties today but the guard. Big feast, thanks to our hunter. Drouillard around?”

“Here, sir.” He raised a hand, annoyed at having attention directed to him. The captain stared at him, and the troops turned to look, and someone yelled:

“Ee-yay, Nimrod!” and more cheers and laughter went up.

“Extra whiskey ration today,” the captain announced, and another cheer erupted. “Anyone may go out hunting, but sign out with Sergeant Ordway, and don’t be shooting any of the neighbors’ hogs. And, damn it, hunting doesn’t mean hunting up the bootleggers! You do, and you know the penalty.” There was more laughter.

Then Sergeant Ordway called out: “Sir, I need a word with you. And some of the men have presents for you.”

“Why, thank you all. Give me five minutes, and I’ll see you then. And I want to see Mr. Drouillard. Have a jolly Christmas, boys. Company’s dismissed.”

When the soldiers Frazier and Whitehouse slumped out of the captain’s cabin, hands bandaged, faces bruised and pain evident in every move, Drouillard stepped aside to let them by and rapped on the plank door.

Captain Clark called him in, looking at him with coolness. York served him coffee without meeting his eyes, and Drouillard presumed he had upset the slave with his talk of freedom. He wondered if this grave meeting was about that.

“First, now,” Clark said, “I want to know why you were on that keelboat. It’s under guard because it is out of bounds except to those working on it.”

“I didn’t know that, sir. I was just finding a quiet place to sleep. I was in the cabin where, uhm, that happened.” He inclined his head toward the departing combatants.

“Oh.” The captain’s expression softened. “Well, I can understand that. But now ye know. The boat and cargo are off bounds. So. Then did you witness the fight between those two?”