Snowbound and Eclipse (50 page)

I could see the fear in Julia when she asked me the question she had obviously been working toward for weeks: would I ask Meriwether to find other quarters? I listened carefully, keeping my own wishes hidden, and reluctantly agreed. In fact, the governor's presence in our household allows us to proceed seamlessly in public affairs, because we hash things through at supper each evening, and come to a meeting of minds.

But Julia has a point, and as loath as I am to change the arrangement, I know I must.

There is something more about this that has concerned me. My young bride does not like Meriwether. She has not told me so and never will, but it is plain to me. She curtsies when he enters the house, addresses him stiffly, turns from an effusive and chattering young woman into a starchy one at the table, and avoids him whenever possible, pleading the press of household duties.

I have watched this odd behavior for months and last night, when she again broached the subject of evicting our boarder, I questioned her gently about it.

“Is there something about Meriwether that troubles you, Julia?” I asked.

“General, he is a most esteemed man.”

I laughed, spotting the evasion. I took her hands and clasped them. “I think you are not at ease with him.”

She stared at me a moment, like a doe caught in lamplight. “The very opposite, General. He is not at ease with me. His voice rises, and he becomes, well, very strange and polite. So I am not at ease with him. He is not comfortable with anyone of my sex, sir.”

“You don't say!”

She wouldn't say more, just shook her head, even though I probed further. I did not want discord in my household and knew I would be forced to act.

“Very well, Julia, I'll ask the governor to find other quarters. But I will urge him to partake of our suppers, as always, because we have much to discuss. It is an arrangement very satisfactory to me.”

“Oh, would you?” She beamed at me as if I had conferred a great honor upon her. “Alice will be so happy! And once we have the bedroom back, I'll …”

I chuckled heartily. I enjoy pleasing her whenever I can.

“Oh! I'll have a place to wash the baby and change the diapers,” she said. “Oh, General!” She clasped me to her bosom and gave me a great hug, so tenderly that the clocks stopped.

She was so ecstatic over that small change in our lives that I marveled. And yet I should not have marveled at all.

Julia's conduct affirmed something that was becoming more and more obvious to me: Meriwether has an oddly negative effect on women. Alice Anderson flees him just as much as Julia does, and he has made no headway with her. Something about him falters at the doorstep of the fair sex. I am too dumb in that department to fathom why. But it is
plain to me. I have watched it at balls and banquets. I have seen it in his banter: he rattles on about women almost obsessively, as if he was trying to make a point. Of his manhood I have no doubt at all, but his defeats have disarrayed him and women flee from him.

“You will need another laundress, maybe two,” I said, alluding to the burden of diapers, in addition to the bed and table linens and towels and clothing the household dirtied in abundance.

“Yes, General, I will.”

“I will send to Kentucky for some of my slaves,” I said. “I need one myself. How about Khaki, Truman, and Mousy? I've leased them to my brother, and I can get them back. This is October fourth; we should have them before Christmas.”

“Oh! I'd feel pampered!”

“Consider it done.”

I had not seen Julia so happy since we arrived here. She beamed, pressed her hands to her stomach, and sighed.

I will have my slaves shipped from Kentucky. I need another houseboy. Public service requires every moment of my time and I cannot devote it to the mundane management of my dwelling. I am beset by impending war with Great Britain, and war with the Sauks, Fox, Potawatomis, Sioux, Osages, and maybe other tribes, and I've a half-trained, half-armed militia.

So I will put them all under York's supervision, and make space in the attic. It will be crowded up there, but they should be grateful to be out of the cold. The alternative would be to build a slave shack in the back lot, next to the slaves' privy.

This evening I will tell Meriwether our family is growing and we need the space. He will understand, being a sensitive man and affectionate friend. He has already told me that he can have a room with Chouteau until he finds rooms.

I hunted for York, and found him carrying stove wood into the parlor, his black muscles rippling.

“You lookin' for me, mastuh?”

“I'm bringing three more slaves into this household, and placing them under you. Two laundresses and a houseboy.”

He settled the wood carefully, unsmiling. I had thought he might enjoy having more of the darkies around.

“You gonna stick them up the attic, too?” he asked.

“There's room enough.”

“Room enough, yassuh, so there is, lying side by side.”

“You have objections?”

He fidgeted a moment, his yellow eyes peering at the floor. “I've been meaning to ask, boss. You maybe hire me out in Louisville for some little while? You gets the money for me workin'?”

“Why?”

“Ah sure wanna see my wife, mastuh.”

“No, I need you here,” I said.

He looked so crestfallen that I regretted my tone. “Maybe a visit. I can send you back there for a few weeks, but not now. Next year.”

His cheerfulness deserted him entirely. “You mind if I ask something? You let me speak some?”

I nodded. He was my old friend. We had grown up together from childhood and he had been my personal servant for as long as I could remember.

“I goes out on that big trip, and I's as good as any man you got there. I cooks the food just as good, and I hunts good, and I lifts and totes just as good, and I paddles hard, and I guards you like a soldier. I gets just as hungry as them white men, and I gets colder because I's the last to get some skins to wear. But I never do no complaining, not like some white men. You nevah hear a word of anger out of me all
them days. You pay them, but you don't pay me because you own me.”

He was raising my bile but I pushed it back. I knew where this was heading and didn't like it. He was virtually a free man out West, welcomed into the company of my men. He had the same liberty as they; wooed the dusky maidens as they did. Carried a rifle and hunted, dressed the meat, cooked and walked and paddled and starved. It was like schooling. Once they learn their ABCs, they're ruined. You can't make a slave out of them if they get their learning, and the only use is to sell them for field hands and let them taste the whip. Now, suddenly, York is remembering how it was, and he's little good around here anymore.

“Get it out of your head, and don't ever let me hear it again,” I said. “I'm not going to let you go. I'm not going to let you buy your way out, either. You're worth fifteen hundred dollars, and I can't afford to replace you. You are going to keep on right here, and do it cheerfully, or I'll sell you to someone who's a lot harsher than I am. Count yourself lucky.”

He seemed to pull deep into himself.

“You can see your woman next spring,” I said, intending to soften the decision a little.

He said nothing, but he lifted his gaze from the floor, and stared directly into my face, and I could see those yellowbrown eyes examine me, as if I was on trial. He radiated pain, a hurt so strong and dark that I almost recoiled.

“Yes, General,” was all he said.

I stalked away, itching to whip him for his insolence. But I am a man of slow temper and I checked myself. I do not fathom why he irked me almost beyond my limits.

This evening, while Meriwether and I sipped some New Orleans amontillado while we waited for the mammies to finish cooking the supper, I braced him.

“We've a child coming, Meriwether, and my wife would like to commandeer the rest of the house.” I smiled. “She is a woman of great determination, and has taken to ordering the general of militia around.”

“A child! I might have guessed! Congratulations, old friend!” Lewis exclaimed, the brittleness of it odd in him. I had never heard this tone during the whole expedition.

“I shall be the gallant and remove myself forthwith,” he said.

“Meriwether, I salvaged a little from her onslaught: we hope you'll continue to sup with us.”

“General, how can I resist, with so fair a young lady as Miss Anderson to grace our table?”

There it was again, this banter about women. “We always have certain matters to discuss, and it seems a very good time to do it,” I said.

“I fear we just bore your beauteous niece with our business,” he said.

I had no answer to that.

Almost every day I open the journals and read them. Most entries are in Will's hand, and are brief. He was faithful to the task, and recorded the day's events without fail, save only for a brief hunting trip, and even then summarized what had happened during that one lapse.

I planned to keep a full journal myself, but found myself otherwise occupied, so that I did not live up to my good intentions. I wish to excel in everything I do. But it had been
a matter of indifference to me whether the events of a dull day were recorded. I always had a higher task in mind, which was to record anything of
importance:
plants, animals, geographical features, oddities, weather, and always, the savages. This I did as faithfully as steady old Will kept the daily accounts of mundane matters.

It is a matter of temperament, that's all. I am inclined to scribble endlessly about a
new species;
he is content in his phlegmatic way to record the miles we traveled, the latitude and longitude, and the condition of the troops.

I room now with Pierre Chouteau in a spacious, sunny manse delicately appointed in all the latest fashion, with fabrics and furniture sometimes brought clear from Paris or England. The place suits me, though I will not abide here long for fear of their hospitality wearing thin. I am looking for rooms. I have rented an office not far from Will's house, to which I still repair after a day's toil to sup with him and his blossoming Julia. She seems more at ease now that I no longer intrude upon her nest.

The journals cast a spell over me and I cannot escape it. They seem heavy in my hand, like pigs of lead, crushing my fingers under their weight. And yet it is all illusion. The cold weight, really, is the expectations of the world and the growing impatience of Thomas Jefferson and the eagerness with which my colleagues in the American Philosophical Society await the detailed account of our great voyage. Here it is, mid-October of 1808, and I have not yet started.

Each day I open them intending to begin an edited version for my publisher, Conrad. Each day I read the entries and they release a flood of memories in me. Here Will describes the time Charbonneau almost sank the pirogue. There I describe the magical moment when I beheld the falls of the Missouri. And here is where we finally found the
Shoshones, shy as mice, and with them and their horses, our
salvation
…

I page through them: Will's hand is as familiar to me as my own. His want of learning shows; my schooling shows whenever I put nib to paper. His entries are strong, honest, and prosaic; mine extend beyond the ordinary realm, soaring into feeling, speculation, observation—especially observation, for I pride myself on a keen eye, and with that eye I discovered more new species of plant and bird and beast than I can name.

It is an odd thing, opening those journals and swiftly returning to that bright sweet land, never before seen by white men, the shining sun-baked prairies, the gloomy snowmantled mountains, the wary savages thinking unfathomable thoughts, the rolling river, the salt-scented breeze off the western sea. This flood of images trumps my best intentions. Why do I pen letters and long treatises on policy, but never put nib to paper when it comes to these journals? It is maddening.

I don't suppose mere words can adequately describe our great journey, the sight of men toiling up the river, the fear and pleasure as we set ashore at the Sioux or Arikara or Mandan villages, the dread with which I first sliced a gray morsel of roast dog and put it in my mouth, the rejoicing when we tasted the brine of the western sea. No, these are too private, too vivid, to convey to the world.

But my president grows restless. And underlying that restlessness is the simple fact that these journals are not really mine or Will's; they belong to the government. We recorded events as officers in the army, as a part of our public mission, expressly for the government.

Mr. Jefferson has graciously given us the priceless opportunity to profit from them, a gift so much larger than anything else he or Congress did for us that it chastens me.
There is a large profit to be had from it. Will and I have invested most of what we received in back pay from the voyage of discovery in the project, but after publication there will be money enough to keep us in fine style for years to come. And yet I have not begun. And daily, Tom Jefferson's disappointment in me deepens.

I tax myself with it. Why have I delayed? It is now two years since we set foot in St. Louis. I am stopped! My mind recoils! In the East I proceeded at once toward publication, getting an education in the printer's arts in the process. I hired various artists, even Charles Willson Peale; put a fine mathematician to work on our celestial observations, put draftsmen to work on the maps, got out an attractive prospectus, and all the rest. They have all been busy working with my drawings and specimens: Frederick Pursh, the botanist, has rendered the plants exquisitely. Everything progresses except me.

I offer myself excuses. I was ill and privately closeted at Locust Hill, I'm pressured by the chaotic territory with its catalogues of troubles, I am in great demand as a speaker and guest and civic leader, which consumes most every evening. My Masonic lodge consumes my time. But they all seem lame to me. I know only that each day I fail to write, I feel further squeezed by a terrible vise, and now I contemplate these journals with quiet desperation.