Snowbound and Eclipse (57 page)

Reluctantly, I have offered him an additional draft for five hundred dollars payable on the account of the secretary of war, and another for four hundred fifty, with which to purchase additional powder and lead. I have no choice. The allegiance of the Plains tribes will tilt one way or another, depending on the success of this venture.

I have given Pierre explicit instructions regarding the conduct of the venture, but I have left the field commanders room enough to use their own judgment. I toiled long over this set of instructions, wanting it to be a paternal guide from the seat of government yet not so binding as to defeat the purposes and judgments of the officers, including my brother Reuben.

I see them inviting Big White and his entourage to board the second keelboat, so I know the moment has arrived. It is a fine, breezy morning that promises to make the rowing and poling cool and easy for the horde of boatmen and riflemen and trappers crowding the keelboats.

A great crowd has gathered. St. Louis loves mighty events, and nothing mightier than this army has ever pushed off from its levee. What a sight! Thirteen keelboats and barges in all will head upriver, and seven of them leave today.
One last boat, carrying Lisa, will leave in a few days after he has completed some last-minute purchases.

I have already said my goodbyes to Reuben; he is on the riverbank, in charge of two keelboats, directing the last flow of materiel. He has, on one of those boats, a formidable medical chest and I do not doubt that the ailments and wounds of so large a force will tax his supply of powders and his skills to the utmost. I am rather glad he is not my physician; he does not approve of the courses I choose for myself.

What a city this is! Ebony carriages have drawn up to the levee, and ivory-skinned Frenchwomen in silks watch events from behind their folding fans, while sooty slaves hoist the last of the casks and crates aboard. Rough men in tan buckskins jostle powdered men in black beaver hats, and riflemen in blue chambray shirts and slouch hats stand aboard the planked hulls of the keelboats. Many of them are Delawares.

Oarsmen have settled on the cross benches, preparing to flex their muscles against the mighty flow of the Father of Waters, while other Creole water men hold poles in readiness. Red men, white men, blacks, French, Spanish, Yanks, gentlemen and ruffians have all congregated on this mucky bank, not only to see the armada off but to pray for its success, because all of St. Louis will profit—or suffer—from what is starting on this day.

I find Will standing beside me. He and one or two other partners are not going; his duties are in St. Louis. Lisa and Menard are below, at water's edge, directing the stream of casks to the keelboats. Sweating Creole boatmen are balancing the loads in the holds, shouting in volleys of explosive French.

Sunlight glints from brass swivel guns mounted on the
bows of some of the keelboats. There is muscle here, lead and gunpowder, lance and staff. Snugged into the holds are thousands of pounds of Missouri lead and many barrels of good Missouri gunpowder, the finest that the partners could buy.

In spite of all the hubbub, there is no cacophony, just a quiet hum of activity, and the low murmur of the spectators. Every shop has emptied; every parlor and kitchen in St. Louis is vacant. I see, standing back a way, my namesake, Meriwether Lewis Clark, and his lovely mother, and half a dozen servants attending her and the baby.

It is so bedazzling, so clear, so bright to the eye, that I marvel at the sight that burns into my head.

Then, suddenly, everything is ready, and a pregnant hush settles over the crowd.

“Au revoir, mes amis,”
Chouteau cries.

Lisa waves from the shore. A river man touches a fuse to a brass swivel gun. The explosion startles us all, violence in a peaceful moment. Then the hoarse cries erupt from every quarter, the shouts of the Creoles whip across the wind, and the first of the keelboats lumbers painfully away from the levee, jabbed forward upon the poles of the river men, while the oars bite the brown water.

Now there is a great cheer, and hats sail. Another boat sucks free of the levee and lumbers outward, the men straining every muscle against the current. And another and another, until at last this formidable force, close to three hundred men, is loosed from the nurture of St. Louis and is toiling northward to the confluence, and then into the mighty wilds a thousand eagle flights from this last outpost of civilization.

I watch the Mandan, standing like a statue on the second boat, all the mysterious forces of national power and prestige gathered about his person like some halo. Yes, truly a halo. A great yellow glow radiates from him.

It is a sight so brilliant that I close my eyes against it.

I shake hands with Auguste, and then with Will.

“Gentlemen, luck,” I say.

“Luck is the last thing to count on,” Auguste says somberly.

“Powder and lead, then!”

“Ah! Now you talk business,” Chouteau says amiably.

“I hope She-He-Ke has the gift of gab,” Will says.

“Who?” I ask. The name puzzles me.

“Big White.”

“Oh, yes,” I say. “Big White.” Somehow, I had forgotten the Mandan version of his name.

Will is staring at me. I smile. He is looking at my mouth, so I wipe my lips. What a bright world, everything etched so sharply in the clear air. The crowd lingers, watching the keelboats grow small and finally vanish into pinpricks on the blue water.

I need to escape from the sun. I am feeling feverish again.

I see Bates; he turns to avoid me.

The Chouteaus excuse themselves; they and Lisa must fill one more boat and set out within a day or two. It bobs there below, a forlorn remnant of the flotilla.

I catch up with Will, who has joined his wife and child.

“Ah! There's my namesake!” I say cheerfully. “And how are you, Maria?” I ask.

She eyes me oddly.

“Maria! Did I call you Maria? Forgive me. Julia, how do you fare this May day? I must have been thinking of my old sweetheart.”

She edges apart from me.

In truth, I have been thinking much about Maria Wood, for whom I named Maria's River far up the Missouri. I don't know why. By the time I returned she had married, and there went my hopes and dreams, and that is why I am a musty
old bachelor now. I never courted her in the first place, though I thought of it long before the expedition. She didn't know I cared. She had been a dreamy, peach-fleshed young thing who caught my eye before the trip, and I kept her virgin image before me, like an icon. Now she is an excuse I use to explain everything.

Never was woman more pure and virtuous than Maria Wood, and that is what I said in my journal. I am quite sure I said it, anyway. I would have to go back and look at the entry for that day in 1805 when we were advancing toward the mountains. I have an altar in my heart, and it is dedicated to her, the bride I shall never have.

I look at the journals these days and marvel at them; that Meriwether and this Meriwether are different people. Someday, I will figure them out and send my material to Conrad, and they will be published. But now I need a pill.

York returned this Saturday, May 20, in the nick of time. A day or two more, and I would have posted runaway notices and a reward. But he appeared at my office door one afternoon, and I let him in.

“You're late,” I said.

“Got took here by a keelboat,” he said. “They stopped lot of places on the way.”

“You have a letter for me?”

He dug into his duffel and produced a battered envelope. It contained his travel papers and a letter from my brother Jonathan, saying that he was sending York to me on the
Charles Brothers boat, passage for his hire. He enclosed a draft for $36.50, York's hire in Louisville while visiting his wife, minus one dollar for food on his return. He had been hired out to his wife's owners, the Chartres family, for $2.50 a week plus subsistence. My brother said that York had performed his service in the tobacco fields faithfully, but his mind seemed elsewhere and his attention was not on his work.

“I earn you some money, mastuh?”

“A little. Did you have a good visit?”

He smiled for the first time. “Emily, she wasn't so happy to see me. She tired of babies.”

“You make one?”

“I sho' try.”

“How is my brother?”

“Mastuh Jonathan? He looking good to me.”

“And the general?”

“I don't see the general. They don't take me there. They tell me he got the gout.”

“Do you bring any news?”

He shrugged. “Not much rain in Louisville. That tobacca not coming up proper.”

“Did you see my sister?”

“No, boss. I be taken right to the Chartres place and they put a hoe in my hand before I even get to see Emily.” He smiled a little. “They gave me next day off, and her, too. We go out into the woods and have us a picnic.”

“All right, York. You go on to my house and report to your mistress. Then I want you to find Manuel Lisa on the levee and help him. He's still loading supplies in the last keelboat.”

“Last keelboat, mastuh?”

“A company's gone up the river. They're taking Big White home.”

“Big White!” York grinned. “Taking the old chief back. Ah wish you'd hired me out.”

“I need you here,” I said.

Immediately a curtain fell and he was a stranger again. I knew that he had changed in some unfathomable way. We had been boyhood companions, protective of each other, and now that was gone. The bond could not survive childhood, but until the trip west there had been some old and continuing understandings.

“Yes, suh,” he said, as if talking to a stranger.

“York, the letter from my brother says you were not attentive to your work.”

“I work hard in them fields, hoeing all them weeds.” There was heat in his response.

“But your work was not satisfactory.”

He retreated deep into himself again.

“York, you do my bidding. And be quick about it.” I didn't like disciplining the man who had been my servant from birth, and so I softened. “I'm glad you're back safely. And in good health.”

“Yes, suh, you get nothing outa no sick slave,” he retorted.

Before the Corps of Discovery, he never would have said that to me. I let it pass. He probably would settle into routine. But if not, I would not hesitate to auction him at the New Orleans market, and then he would find out what defiance would bring to his unmarked black back.

I knew somehow that soon he would beg again for his liberty, and I knew I would again turn him down. I could not afford to release a fifteen-hundred-dollar slave; not with my finances in precarious condition. And in any case, I had too few hands for my household. Julia and her baby required four, and I needed two, so that I might escape such sundries as getting stove wood.

I knew, right down to my bones, that York was not fit for
freedom; that without the succor I provided him he would careen from one crisis to another and starve himself. He was not competent to handle his affairs or run a business. He was not able to do sums or read and could be gulled by any white man who wanted his labor and didn't feel like paying for it.

I intended to tell him so when his petition came, as I knew it would just as soon as he had gotten back into his daily routine. I again rued the day I had taken him with me; it had put ideas in his head I could never rout out. I hated the idea of auctioning him. I hated the idea of freeing him. I hated his increasing uselessness. He was aggravating me, and my thoughts ran from whipping to manumission. Let the wretch go and just see how he fares in a mean and tricky world.

Had I discovered a cockiness in him? I sprang to the window, hoping to see his sauntering figure in the street, but he was gone. I intended to ask Lisa about him after York had put in a few days loading the boat.

It wasn't too late to send York up the river on Lisa's keelboat. He was an experienced mountaineer and river man, and would be valuable. It certainly would have pleased York, and I could hire him out to the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company for twenty a month. That would be less than it was paying freemen, thus benefitting the company. But the thought roiled my mind. He was half ruined already and another trip would destroy his usefulness. No! He would stay in St. Louis and I would have plenty for him to do.

I stretched, and then, unaccountably, I laughed. It was good to have old York back, safe and sound. I decided to go tell Meriwether. He had counseled patience and he was right.

I stepped into a splendid spring day, bright with promise and the fragrance of lilacs in the air. It wasn't far to the governor's office, and I wished it were longer, so I might stretch my legs.

I was in luck. The usual gaggle of petitioners was nowhere in sight, perhaps because it was noon, and Meriwether was alone.

“Governor, I have momentous and urgent and entirely amazing news,” I said.

He looked alarmed.

“York's back.”

He grimaced, and finally laughed in syncopation with my own gusts of delight. I sat myself in a chair without his invitation.

“And how is he?” Meriwether asked.

“Exhausted. He spent the whole of his visit manufacturing.”

“Manufacturing?”

“Manufacturing labor, my friend. Labor.”

Meriwether smiled crookedly. His pearly teeth were as white as ever, and I had long since dismissed Bates's vile accusations as the remark of a venomous man.

“Labor! Labor! Ah, that does exhaust a man,” he said.

“He did quite a bit of manufacturing with the Corps of Discovery, but it didn't seem to wear him down any,” I said.

No man on the voyage had found his way into so many lodges as York, and I was of the belief that he had singlehandedly darkened the hue of every tribe we encountered.

“Remember how the Mandan ladies bid for him?” he asked. “They put their husbands to it: come visit my wife, they said, and old York was only too happy to comply.” Meriwether laughed, and it sounded like old paper rattling in the breezes.