The True Account (2 page)

“None of this is your fault, Ti,” my terrified sire cried from the other side of the barricaded woodshed door. “Above all, remember that none of this is your fault.”

Well. I had never supposed that my uncle's little ways and stays
were
my fault, or anyone else's, including his. Nor did I for a single moment believe that he meant the least harm to my father or any other creature in the universe. Though as my uncle's own history amply illustrated, accidents
would
happen; and perhaps it was as well for my father that he had the presence of mind to retreat until our version of the
Odyssey
had ended with the hero's return to Ithaca and his loving Penelope. Penelope was my mother's cat.

My uncle's favorite play, however, was his own. I shall come to that drama very soon. But first, a few words about the appearance of the playwright himself.

P
RIVATE TRUE
T
EAGUE
K
INNESON
—I refer to him by his full title because my uncle set great store by his military rank—was very tall and very lanky, with sloping, rugged shoulders, a trim, soldierly mustache, and keen yellow eyes that appeared to be as pitiless as a hawk's, though in fact he was the most sympathetic man I have ever known. He wore, over his scout's buckskins, Jacques Cartier's chain-mail vest, which had been handed down in our family from Tumkin Tumkin and which he believed had saved his life in battle a dozen times over; a copper dome, which had been screwed to the crown of his head by the regimental surgeon who operated on him after his fall at Fort Ti; a loose-fitting pair of galoshes, whose tops he rolled up to his bony knees for winter and down around his ankles for summer; a red sash about his middle somewhat resembling an Elizabethan codpiece; and, to cover the shining metal crown of his head, a red woolen night-stocking with a harness bell on the end, like the bell of a fool's cap, to remind himself where he was at all times, and also that “compared to the Almighty Jehovah, all men are fools.”

My uncle was somewhat hard of hearing from being so much subjected to cannon fire over the course of his military expeditions, so he carried at all times a tin ear trumpet as long as my mother's yard measure. On those expeditions he went armed with a homemade wooden sword; an arquebus with a great bell-like mouth, of such incredible antiquity that even he was uncertain of its origin, though family tradition had it that this ancient firelock had been used by his Kinneson grandfather on the field of battle at Culloden just before the clan moved from Scotland to Vermont; and a large black umbrella to keep off the sun and rain, embellished on top with the family coat of arms—a crossed pen and sword, signifying that from time immemorial Kinnesons had “lived by the one and died by the other.”

 

When not off adventuring, my uncle divided his time between his playwriting, his angling, his books, my education, his garden, and his inventions. To begin with the play. He had been working on his
Tragical History of Ethan Allen, or The Fall of Fort Ticonderoga
for twenty years and more. He styled it a tragedy because he believed Colonel Allen to have been much undervalued, and indeed thought that the old Vermonter should have been our first president. It was a long play, running well over three hours. And on the occasions when he had arranged for it to be performed, it had not met with a very kindly reception, even in our own state. From certain hints my uncle himself had let drop, I feared that it had been roundly hissed off the stage. But he had the greatest faith in the world in his
Tragical History,
and pegged away at it year after year, firmly believing it to be nothing short of a masterpiece-in-progress. What pleased him most about the play was that it violated none of Aristotle's dramatic unities. Aristotle the Greek philosopher, pupil of Plato, and chronicler of all branches of human knowledge known to his time? No, sir. Scholia Scholasticus Aristotle—my uncle's great tutor during his time at Oxford University—of whom you will soon hear more.

When it came to angling, my uncle loved to cast flies, like our Scottish ancestors. In fact, he and my father were both avid fly-casters and had taught me this noble art when I was very young. We three enjoyed many a fine May morning on our little river, enticing native brook trout to the lovely feathered creations that my uncle tied during winter evenings. He fashioned long, limber rods from elm and ash poles, wove fine horsehair leaders, and was the neatest hand in all Kingdom County at laying his high-floating colored artifices deftly over rising fish. There was just one difficulty. Private True Teague Kinneson was so tenderhearted that he could not bear to kill his catch, and so released every last trout he caught unharmed to the cold waters from which it had come. Yet no man ever enjoyed the art of fly-fishing more or took more pains to match his flies to the natural insects emerging on the water; and the sight of my copper-crowned uncle, rod held high and bent, playing a fine splashing trout, and crying, for all the world to hear, “Hi, hi, fish on!” was a most splendid spectacle.

My uncle's books, of which he had many hundreds in several languages, he kept in his snug little schoolhouse-dwelling behind our farmhouse, which dwelling he called the Library at Alexandria. He spared no expense when it came to purchasing these volumes, and he supported his scholarly avocation with the proceeds from his garden in my mother's loamy water meadow near the river. There he tended half an acre of the tall, forest-green plants known as cannabis, whose fragrant leaves and flower buds he ground into a mildly euphoric smoking tobacco very popular in Vermont and of which he himself faithfully smoked half a pipeful each evening after supper.

Of all his books, my uncle loved best a hefty old tome bound in red buckram called
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de La Mancha
—of which he believed every last syllable to be the revealed gospel truth. In fact, it was partly in honor of this same ingenious gentleman that my uncle wore his chain mail and polished his copper crown until it shone like the top of a cathedral. For ever since his accident, he had fancied himself something of a modern-day knight-errant. Yet it was not giants disguised as windmills that he sought to fight but the Devil himself—until he cast that homed fellow out of the Green Mountains in a tow sack, in consequence of which expulsion he feared that “the Gentleman from Vermont,” as he termed Old Scratch, might be doing great mischief elsewhere.

 

Being a kind of perpetual boy himself, though a big one, my uncle was a great favorite with all the boys and girls in the village, for whom he invented huge kites, spinning whirligigs, velocipedes with sails, magic lanterns, catapults, wheeled siegetowers, fire-ships, rockets, and I don't know what else—none of which ever, to the best of my knowledge, had the slightest practical application. Besides his vast fund of classical stories and poems, he knew a thousand tales of witches, ghouls, and ghosties, in the telling of which he terrified no one so much as himself. He was deathly afraid of large dogs, small serpents, lightning—he had been struck eight times since the installation of his copper crown, and it was said in the village that, like a tall ash tree in a Vermont hedgerow, he “drew electricity"—and of nearly all women, though he had the greatest respect for and confidence in my mother, as did my father and I.

One of my uncle's most curious inventions was a wooden, Dutch-style shelf dock, about a foot and a half tall, without any works or innards but with a very passable painting he had done on it of his hero Quixote, that Knight of the Woeful Countenance, doing combat with a windmill. The painted hands of this clock were set forever at twenty minutes past twelve, which hour had a triple significance to my uncle. First, he was utterly certain that this was perpetually the correct time at Greenwich, England, so that by knowing the hour where he was, and the altitude of the sun, he could always calculate his correct longitude and divine where he was in the universe. And it distressed him not in the least that no matter how many times he made these calculations, his position never came out the same twice but varied wildly, from the longitude of Calcutta to that of Venice.

The second point of significance concerned a saying in our family, which was that whenever a lull fell over the conversation, it must be twenty after the hour. Admittedly, between my uncle the ex-schoolmaster and my father the editor, one or both of whom seemed always to be discoursing from dawn straight through until midnight, there were not many such lapses of silence in our household. But when by chance no one happened to be talking, my uncle would leap up and dash out to his Library at Alexandria to check the time on the Dutch clock and confirm that it was indeed twenty past the hour, which was a great relief to him. And though the clock was less reliable as a timepiece than was entirely convenient to one wishing to know the
actual
hour, it was so reliable as a conversation piece that it never failed to set the talk in motion again.

Third, and finally, it was inside the hollow case of this remarkable clock that my uncle stored his hemp tobacco.

 

From what I have retailed to you thus far, you might well suppose that mine was a very odd and somber boyhood. Odd, I will grant you. But somber? Never in this world. For my uncle was ever a second father to me. In fact, it might be said that between my true father and my uncle True, the pair of brothers made one complete and perfect father. Or so I thought, at least. And no boy could
ever
have had a more complete education than I. When my interest first in sketching, then painting, birds and wildlife began to emerge, my uncle even took me on a tour of the great museums of England, France, Italy, and the Lowlands. By which I mean that we canoed across the “Atlantic Ocean”—our pond, that is—and on the far side he described the great paintings of the world so exactly that I all but saw them. Say what the village might, then, it was a splendid way to grow up. And to anyone who thought differently, Private True Teague Kinneson doffed his belled cap, bowed low, and said, “Why, bless you, too, sir. With a tooleree and a toolera and a tooleroo!”

O
F ALL MY UNCLE'S
many schemes and projections, the one nearest his heart was no more and no less than to discover the Northwest Passage. From my earliest visits to the Library at Alexandria, I remember him poring over the old histories of his mostly ill-fated fellow expeditionaries and visionaries who for more than three centuries had sailed in quest of that elusive route to the riches of Cathay. On a wall map of North America behind his writing desk, the blank territory to the north and west of the Missouri River was labeled
terra incognita;
and when my uncle's saffron-colored eyes grew weary during our school lessons or his interminable revisions of his play, he liked to pause and gaze at those intriguing words and muse about the great foray that he and I would someday make into that unknown land.

In the spring of 1803, when I turned fifteen, my uncle received, from his Boston bookseller, Alexander Mackenzie's
Voyages from Montreal, on the River St. Lawrence, Through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific Ocean.
The intrepid Mackenzie, it seemed, claimed to have done that which, above everything else in the world, my uncle himself had long wished to do—to have forged his way through the wilds of America to the Pacific. “‘With a mixture of bear grease and red vermilion,'” my uncle read aloud to me in his harsh, nasal, schoolmasterly voice, “‘I wrote on a rock above the western sea, Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada by land, the twenty-second of July, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three.'

“Oh,” he cried out, smiting his metal dome in a way that would have done credit to my father, “I am bested. It's already been done, Ti. And wouldn't you know, by a fellow Scotsman.”

My uncle could scarcely have been more distressed had Mackenzie's words “from Canada by land,” etc. been branded on his forehead with a sizzling hot iron. But then his eyes gleamed with a new light—for his spirits never flagged longer than a minute or two—and he said that to go overland in
Canada
was one thing; but to cross through the Territory of Louisiana, to Oregon and the River Columbia, was something else again.
“That
will be our route, Ti. Eureka! We leave tomorrow.

“What's more,” he continued, “to make sure we get to the Columbia and not some puny, less illustrious
Canadian
river, we will
start
there. We will make the trip backward. From the Pacific.”

“But, uncle,” I protested, “how will we get
to
the Pacific? How can we
start
from there until we
get
there?”

Whereupon he smiled and said, “We will go round the Horn by ship, Ti. You might ask Helen of Troy to put us up a lunch.”

Early the following morning we prepared to embark. We allotted an entire day for the journey, including our return trip overland. Besides his chain mail, the belled stocking cap over his copper crown, and his galoshes, my uncle carried a flagstaff and flag, his umbrella, his collapsible spyglass, his arquebus, and his homemade sextant and astrolabe for determining our latitude and longitude. Instead of sea biscuit and salt beef, we had laid in a stock of my mother's most delicious baked-bean sandwiches, a brown crock of her famous ginger cookies—which we called cartwheels because of their prodigious size—and a stone jug of switchel, the popular Vermont haymakers' drink distilled from pure mountain spring water slaked with a touch of molasses and a touch of vinegar; for we did not know where we would find our next supply of fresh drinking water.

We set sail at sunrise on my fishing raft, which my uncle had christened the
Samuel de Champlain,
he wiping his sleeve across his eyes at the thought of leaving his beloved Green Mountains for a whole day, my mother calling “Bon voyage, my brave expeditionaries”—and my father mouthing to me, “Not your fault, Ti.
Not your fault.
”