Snowbound and Eclipse (46 page)

I completed my lengthy treatise on the West, which I presumed would form the foundation of Indian and fur-trade policy for the next twenty years, and fell into one of my moods again. I do not know why I was able to write ten thousand words with fierce discipline, yet am stymied every time I open my journals. Is it because the journals are mostly Will's? Or is it because the whole world awaits their publication?

It was then, nearing the end of November, that Mrs. Marks, the legendary healer of Albemarle County, called me into her drawing room, and into the aura of the tile-clad stove.

“You are still unwell,” she said. “Indisposed. Fevers.”

“It is only the ague.”

“Yes, the ague,” she said. “But the weather has turned.”

“I am in perfect health; just a little of the intermittent fever now and then.”

“You wander the plantation, doing nothing, writing nothing. Are you troubled, Meriwether?”

“Not a bit!”

“Thirty-five and a bachelor.”

Her candor shocked me. “I simply am unlucky,” I replied testily. I did not want her sympathy. Letitia Breckenridge had fled, for whatever reason, and I hadn't met another I cared about more than a day or two.

“When are you going to St. Louis?” she asked.

“When I am ready!”

“You were appointed in March; now the year has passed.”

“I have things to do here.”

She asked me to draw close, and ran her experienced hand over my face and neck, discovered some gummy thickening of the flesh on my forehead, and along the jawline, lumps so subtle I had not been aware of them myself until her fingers found them.

“Let me see your arms and hands, Meriwether.”

I undid my sleeves, and pushed them up. She examined my arms, her gaze pausing at the arciform red-stained scars there.

“Your hands?”

I extended them to her, filled with a nameless and terrible dread, a pit of horror whose jaws were opening wider and wider as the minutes fled by.

She studied the palms, turned them over and examined the backs. I saw nothing amiss with them. But she traced her finger over a discolored area.

“There, you see? I am fit as a fiddle.”

“Meriwether,” she said, “I am here only to help, not judge a son whose life has taken him so far from the comforts of civilization and religion. It is necessary to begin a course of mercury immediately, and I have some simples, my wandering Meriwether, that will relieve you. The venereal is far advanced.”

Tomorrow, January 8, 1808, will be my wedding day. I await that holy event with scarce-concealed anticipation. Tomorrow, before the Episcopalian parson from Roanoke, the Reverend Mr. Smith, my Julia and I will recite the vows. The colonel has turned his spacious home into a virtual hostelry, so many are the guests.

I arrived here in Fincastle, Virginia, from St. Louis in ample time for the Yuletide, and spent a most joyous Christmas at the hearth of my in-laws, who have treated me with grace and affection. There is merriment in their eyes. They permit me a while alone each day with Julia, and make much reference to the mistletoe once again hanging from the cut-glass chandelier in the parlor.

She has met me each day, her face flushed and bright, her lips soft and welcoming. She has been full of questions about St. Louis, and wild Indians, and the ruffians of the border, and the army. I assure her things will be terrible; we will live in a dirt-floor log cabin, she will slave at the hearth and garden and spinning wheel, I will shoot marauding redskins through the loopholes of our fortress house every hour or so, and we will lack beds, tables, chairs, windows, and privacy, and sleep on bearskin robes.

She laughs, but uneasily. I tell her that I am a general of the militia, and command an entire army of bedbugs. She thinks that is very merry, and I see panic in her eyes and kiss it away, enjoying the moment.

Guests are arriving at every hour; my brothers and sister and assorted relatives are staying with friends in the area. Colonel Hancock has put me in one of the bedrooms, and
York out with the darkies, and that offends him. I will let him taste the whip if he remains in such a mood for long.

Ah, tomorrow! For too long have I dreamed of this. I will sweep my bride away to a bower that is prepared for us, and there we shall know each other in tenderness and joy. It is for this heaven that I have returned from St. Louis; it was for this heaven that I sustained my courage and resolution on that long journey into the unknown West. A wedding is a little like a voyage of exploration. We do not know what land we are piercing, or what we may find there; but I do not doubt it will be full of wonders and sunshine.

Soon after my arrival I met with Meriwether about the condition of the territory he governs, and found him in a peculiar mood, taut and irritable but papering it over with vast bonhomie. Something is troubling him.

He ventured here from Ivy a few days after I had arrived, knowing how much I wished to be with Julia. I greeted him, noted that he seemed unsettled as we exchanged news, and then we closeted ourselves in the front room to discuss affairs of state.

“Secretary Bates begs for you,” I said. “You are certainly needed.”

“What sort of man is he?”

“An able one, I think, but a handwringer.”

Meriwether laughed, a brittle, strange cackle that was entirely new to me. “Not used to command, I take it.”

“No, and brimming with anxieties.”

“That is not a kind assessment.”

I sighed. “I am a plainspoken man,” I replied, and let it stand. Frederick Bates had rubbed me wrong, and I could not fathom why Thomas Jefferson had entrusted him with so weighty a position.

“What about the militia? And Burr?”

There I was on better ground. “I inherited a paper militia that could not muster a hundred true men. It was shot through with Burrite officers, too. Frazier got me a list of them. I did some interviewing and cashiered most of 'em. Now I'm rebuilding. It's hard to turn border men into a force, and the only hold I have on 'em is Indian dangers. I've been working with some loyal noncoms, good stouthearted men, and building around them rather than the officers, who are mostly sunshine soldiers. When I get a militia I can trust, we'll have a grip on the territory.”

Lewis nodded. “You got Big White back to the Mandans?”

“What? I thought you knew!” I said.

He shook his head. I had sent the news by post, but that was a slow and unreliable means, often two months between St. Louis and Washington this time of year.

I told him about Ensign Pryor's trip up the Missouri to take the Mandan chief home, in the company of Pierre Chouteau and twenty-two trappers. It had come a cropper at the Arikara villages, where the tribe we supposed to be our friends savagely assaulted the party on September ninth, killing three of Chouteau's traders, wounding ten men including our old friend from the Corps of Discovery, Private Shannon, whose leg had to be amputated. Pryor had fled down the river, reaching St. Louis not long before I headed east. She-He-Ke, Big White, and his family remained in St. Louis, his way home barred by the suddenly ferocious Rees.

Meriwether absorbed that, his gaze darting about, his brow furrowed. “We will have to try again with a stronger party. The president will be distressed. He takes it as an obligation of honor to get Big White safely back … and now this.”

“We'll try again,” I said. “A stronger party. Meriwether,
I can't properly govern, and Secretary Bates is, well, ineffectual, and Upper Louisiana can't be governed from Virginia. We need you.”

He glared at me, as if I had affronted him. “I will come when I am ready. I am pursuing important matters here.”

“The editing?”

“The work is proceeding. Pursh is drawing the plants. Hassler's astronomy calculations are almost done. Peale is sketching the animals. I have an artist on the birds.”

“Soon, then. You promised the first edition by year's end.”

He looked horrified. “Well, not so immediately.”

“I would welcome the profit, Meriwether. The burdens of marriage and office tax me and the salary of an Indian superintendent doesn't cover.”

“Well, I can help you. When are you returning to St. Louis?”

“We will honeymoon a few weeks in Virginia, visiting relatives. I hope to be in St. Louis early in the spring.”

“Count on the army,” Lewis said. “I will move you.”

That sounded like a good offer, and I chuckled. “I think you ought to find some lady and follow suit.”

He laughed almost boisterously. “I'm just an old bachelor, too fusty and musty for 'em,” he said.

“No, Meriwether, you are the most eligible man in the United States.”

He cackled happily. “Then they'll give me a good chase,” he said. “I will let one catch me.”

His laugh was as brittle as old parchment. He was hiding his sorrows, and I knew at once that his disappointment at the hands of Letitia Breckenridge had afflicted his spirits.

“Governor, let me tell you, in St. Louis the belles will flock to the balls, and if you know a few words of French, such as
oui, oui, oui,
you will captivate more hearts than you'll ever know.”

He wheezed out a laugh, and it was like hearing old paper crumple.

“You look to be in good health, Meriwether.”

“I'm in perfect health, brimming with life, ready to advance my fortunes in St. Louis. But I've been wrestling with the ague. It comes and goes, you know, but as soon as my dear mother gives the word, I'll head down the river.”

That sounded fine to me. We spent an hour talking about the politics of the territory, the innumerable trading licenses General Wilkinson had granted to cronies before he departed, the smoldering embers of the Burr conspiracy to peel the whole area away from the republic and build a new nation out of scoundrels and traitors. Lewis brought me up to date on a myriad of things; the Burr trial and acquittal in Richmond, Jefferson's struggles with the British, who were boldly provoking war by pressing American seamen and engaging in other calculated affronts. That worried me.

“Meriwether, if there is war, I command a hopeless rabble. Half don't have rifles. We need some steel—cannon, rifles, everything—and I'll count on you to apply for it from Congress.”

He nodded, unhappily. Again I had the deepening impression that Lewis was a troubled man, insecure, in pain of some sort.

That was the last I saw of him until today. He arrived for the wedding, looking fit and strong, and acting more like his old self, gorgeously accoutred in his gold braid and blue. I had little time other than to greet him and see to his quarters.

York greeted the old captain effusively. “Massah Lewis, Captain, is mighty nice you come to this heah wedding,” he exclaimed.

But Meriwether ignored the darkie, as if York had not traveled with us clear to the western sea. I watched York
closely, worried that the man's insolence would get the better of him, but York held his peace.

Lewis is much the center of attention today; men, women, children all press him to spin his anecdotes once again, but he does so reluctantly and by rote. He's worn down by the attention. There is a banquet tonight, and a ball tomorrow, and Colonel Hancock has kept the punch bowl filled for days.

Meriwether hangs about the punch, downing cup after cup along with port and porter and whatever other spirits the Hancocks provide.

It has been a long while since we returned from the West, and yet that expedition affects us both even now, and Lewis especially. I see it in the face of everyone I talk to; they see the explorer, and not the Clark. I am eager to turn a new leaf.

Tonight they will hide Julia from me and I will not see her until the sacred rites, when she will be an angel on the arm of her father. I will be waiting there, in the green parlor, when she waltzes down the stairs in rustling white silk and ivory lace, her hair aglow, her lips ruby, her eyes shining upon me like little suns … or slides down the banister with a whoop, if I know my Julia. I will be there, and so will the preacher, and so will a hundred guests, my brothers and their spouses, my sister and hers, assorted cousins and friends. And I will take my beloved to my bosom there, pledge myself to her there, hear her pledge herself to me there, and that will be the beginning, as well as an end.

I tarried this January of 1808 in the frail warmth of Locust Hill, but my heart is cold. Many were the dreams that had sustained me during my eventful life. I had dreamed of honor. I had dreamed of love. I had dreamed of devotion to our infant republic, that we might prove to the whole world that men may live free and equal. I had dreamed of accomplishment. I had wanted to make my widowed mother proud. I wanted the name Lewis to shine for a thousand years. I had hoped for children. I had hoped for an illustrious name that would echo through the generations, a name unstained and blameless.

Now, by terrible mischance—or was it my own folly?—everything that I dreamed of, everything that I was, everything that I might still be, lay in ruin, blackened by a shameful disease that evoked the loathing of the world, a disease whose name was not uttered.

I could not talk to my mother about it; not Lucy Marks, who had borne me, raised me up, educated me, and quietly nurtured me through the vicissitudes of youth. I could barely talk to my physician brother Reuben, either, but held it all in, mortified, desolated by the scourge that rotted my parts as well as my very soul. I told Reuben very little; only a date: August of 1805. He had remarked the speed at which the disorder had devastated my body, faster than usual. I had no reply other than that we were famished, eating poorly, and suffering the want of many necessaries in our diet, and maybe that had advanced the plague within me, which rolled like a black tide through my flesh and blood.

He held out a little hope, and I clung to it.