Snowbound and Eclipse (65 page)

He must have regarded me as the equivalent of a pirate, but he pointed at a tired, whitewashed affair a block inland. I walked. Pernia followed silently, his disapproval manifest in his conduct.

The hand-printed sign announced a market whose proprietor was one F. S. Trinchard. I reeled in, unsteady on my feet and no less fevered.

A sallow young man rose from a stool behind the counter.

“Writing paper?” I asked.

He surveyed me, probably wondering if I were literate, and opened a glass case behind him. From within he extracted a sheet.

“Pen and ink bottle?” I asked.

He shuffled around, and placed the items before me, along with a blotter. “Half a bit,” he said.

I was too weary to protest the inflated price, so I dug into my small coin purse and extracted a one-bit piece. I uncorked the black bottle, dipped the split quill into the bottle, shook it gently, and began my inscription:

Then I signed it, blotted it, and handed it to the young man. “Please witness this,” I said. He read it swiftly and signed his name.

“Thank you, Mr. Trinchard. I am fevered,” I said. “It's a precaution.”

“Glad to be of service, my good sir. Help availeth.”

I patrolled his emporium looking for certain comforts of the flesh, found nothing helpful except some cinchona extract, and headed outside.

“Keep this safe,” I said to Pernia. “It favors my mother. If anything happens, get this to her at all cost. Do not fail me in this.”

Pernia took it. He could read a little, which was good. I watched him struggle through the text.

The whole business had wearied me, so that my sole desire was to return to the plank bunk and collapse there upon the splinters.

“You help me to the scow, and then you are free to go for the evening, John,” I said.

“No, Governor, I'm right here looking after you.”

He annoyed me. “I am quite safe.”

He grunted something unpleasant that I took for rebuke.

The boys had vanished, but a pair of dowdy women in bonnets surveyed the flatboat. Then they, too, hastened away, leaving only a bullfrog for company.

Pernia opened the leather trunk that contained my journals, folded the will, and placed it within the leaf of the top journal, readily available. I watched.

“All right. Go have a mug of stout,” I said. “Here's a bit.”

“Master, this is a strange place and we don't know who'll steal. I'm staying here to keep an eye on things.”

That was my Pernia, a man so loyal he shamed me. But he was also dissembling. He was really there to keep an eye on me, not my chattel. The Creole crew had vanished into a public house off a way that spilled light into the mucky street, leaving only Pernia to see to it that I … did not disturb the peace.

“Are you hungry? Thirsty, Governor?” he asked.

I wasn't hungry. “You could find some fresh water.”

“There's a spring running from a pipe,” he said.

He eyed me, left the flatboat, which was bumping softly against the bank, and in short order returned with a pot of fresh water. It felt cool down my parched throat. I sipped the chill water again, feeling fever slide out of me and my ruined body improve.

“Pernia, go buy me a quart,” I said. “There's a public house over there.” I pressed six bits into his hand, watching his face writhe in protest. But he did what he was paid to do, trudged through a somnolent twilight in an unpeopled village, and then he disappeared within. I tried hard to remember the name of this place, but it eluded me.

He returned wordlessly with a brown ceramic vessel in hand.

“They were fixing to throw me out,” he said. “But I tell them it's for the master. He says it's a dollar a quart, so I says to him, fill it six bits' worth, and he does.”

“You are a true and faithful man, Pernia.”

I reached for the bottle. He seemed reluctant to surrender it.

“Maybe you should go to sleep, Governor.”

“This will help me. I need it for pain.”

He handed my bottle to me and shook his head. “I'll be here, outside, so if you're looking I'm right here.”

That was both a jailor's warning and a servant's promise of service. He was too faithful, and I would need to devise some other path to gain my ends.

I uncorked the brown bottle, mixed the spirits with the cool spring water, and sipped regularly into the hazy night, slapping at mosquitoes when they whined close to my face. Sometime or other, the Creoles returned and settled on the deck outside the cabin, where my whiskey breath and the close air wouldn't afflict them. I wished I could remember the name of this place, but it did no good to think about it. The only reality was the fever which consumed me.

River men carried us across the river to Cahokia on September 18, and York and I proceeded eastward through the Indiana Territory at once on two saddlers and with two packhorses. I gave York a rifle and powder flask, and we set off through forested wilderness that invited ambush from renegade Shawnee.

Up in Vincennes, Governor William Henry Harrison was negotiating a treaty with the tribes, but there were dissidents itching to fight the incursions of white men to the death, like the prophet Tecumseh. So we progressed cautiously, our gazes examining every sign of nature, from the sudden flight of birds to unnatural silences.

Both York and I were garbed in buckskins, which turned wind and weather well, and lasted better than fabrics. The trace was well traveled and there were shelters along the
way, but there were also long stretches of thick hardwood forest that hid the sun and plunged us into gloomy cautiousness. The whir of an arrow would tell us we were too late and too few.

In spite of the danger, I knew York was enjoying himself. All this reminded him of the Corps of Discovery and his carefree days on the long trail. And of the years when the distinction between his estate and ours blurred in his mind, until he was simply part of the company.

I was thinking about it, too, and though neither of us spoke, we were well aware of the other's thoughts. I enjoyed the road, the acrid smell of a horse, the feel of a good mount under me, and the occasional moments when we dismounted, stretched our legs, checked the packs, watered and grazed the horses, or surveyed the ever-changing skies.

In fact that afternoon we scarcely said a word; nothing passed between us but my directions to him, which he acknowledged with a brief nod of his head, his dark face granitic and wary.

I have been irritated with him for months, in fact years, but now, as he rode beside me, my anger washed away in the soft September breezes. It was a fine time of year to travel, and the forests veiled the sun and kept us cool though the midday heat was oppressive.

The companion of my childhood and youth had experienced things unknown to most slaves, and had shown himself to be a worthy and hardworking member of our band of explorers.

Yet he spoke not a word.

Late that day I ventured to converse with him. “It is much like our trip west,” I said.

He caught me in his gaze, his yellow eyes awaiting my direction.

“That was a good trip, and you were a part of it,” I said lamely, not wanting to compliment him or inflate him. Why was I having such trouble talking to a slave?

He nodded as if it was all of no account, but I knew he was listening.

We paused a moment, when some mallards burst from a slough, and then proceeded silently until we had passed the place. He had lowered his longrifle, checked the priming, and was just as ready to defend us as any private in the army.

“We'll quit at the settlements,” I said. About nine miles ahead were some farms clustered together for protection. They had been hacked out of forest land, but in between the stumps grew a rich harvest of wheat and corn, melons and squash. We would eat well this night.

He nodded.

I wanted to talk to the man but every time I tried, I stumbled into silence. He pretended not to notice my agitation, but I knew exactly what was going through his mind.

An hour later I fell into a familiar mode of dealing with him: “When we get there, you take care of the horses, rub 'em down and check the frogs and look for heat in the pasterns. I want a bait of oats if they have it, and plenty of good timothy. If any horse of mine lames up, you'll be sorry. Get our truck under roof, and find yourself a place to bunk.”

His response was a sigh and a whispered “Yassuh.” He kept his nag one step behind mine, which irritated me. I had to turn my head back to address him.

“You'll be wanting to see your wife in Louisville, but there won't be time. I need you. So put it out of your head,” I said with a curt edge to my voice.

He didn't respond, but I could feel the hope leak out of him even as he slumped in his battered saddle. He had been counting on it; a swift trip to the tobacco fields south of
Louisville while I visited my brother and family at Mulberry Hill.

We traversed another three miles in total silence.

“Now, damn it, you know nothing about freedom,” I said abruptly. We were crossing a broad meadow, the browning grasses waving gently in the low sun, the liberty of the place exhilarating after the imprisonment of the dark oaks and walnuts and hickory trees lining the trace like a prison wall.

“You know what it means? You'd have to take care of yourself. I make sure you're fed every day. I keep you in clothing. I put a roof over your head. I do that whether you're busy or idle or sick. Whether you're accomplishing my ends, or fallow. I do that in the winter and summer. I do that on days when I have no need for you.”

His response was to tap the flanks of his nag with his heels and pull up beside me so he could hear all this better.

“If you were freed, what would you do?” I asked.

He said nothing, afraid to talk about such a dangerous subject.

“Go ahead, say what you are thinking,” I said.

“Mastuh, I'd get me a horse and wagon and be taking goods from one place to another for hire.”

“How would you do that? You can't read. You can't sign a contract. You can't do numbers. You'd be cheated. They'd say they'd pay you ten dollars and give you three and you couldn't do anything about it. They'd claim you spilled something, and try to take your horse and wagon from you.”

He nodded. “Maybe I just do it for black peoples, not white peoples.”

“You'd starve.”

“Might be worth the starvin',” he mused.

“You'd be worse off than with me.”

He didn't answer that, and suddenly I laughed. He carefully refrained from laughing, too, but I saw the corners of his mouth rise a little, and I reached across and clapped his shoulder.

What I saw then shocked me: there was more pain in his eyes than I had ever seen in him. Pain fit only for the dying.

I hated myself for it, but I knew what I would do, and I knew that I had to tell him then and there, walking across that lonely valley in wooded hills, in a land as dangerous as the one we traversed en route to the Pacific.

“I'll need you this trip and can't let you visit your woman. When I get back to St. Louis, I'll write the manumission papers. I'll do them in triplicate and file one, give you one, and put the other in the hands of Pierre Chouteau for safekeeping. I'll also publish it in the
Gazette
.”

He stared at me, unbelieving.

“York, I'm freeing you.”

He seemed bewildered. “You mean I don't have to work it off, the money?”

“I'm freeing you. When we get back.”

“You mean I don't owe you nothing?”

“You'll regret it. You'll wish you never asked.”

He sat there shaking his head back and forth, slowly, side to side, his lips parted, his eyes on some distant horizon.

I don't know what was impelling me, but I wasn't through. The farms were just ahead; I saw light spill from a cabin a mile away. I saw cattle in the field, with a belled cow announcing her presence.

“When we get back to St. Louis, I'll write your papers, and I'll give you a wagon and a dray. You can go into business. It won't be easy. You'll be competing with plenty of others and they might charge less. Hay and feed and pasture and oats cost money. Wagons break down; you'll need a wheelwright now and then. All of that costs money. You'll
have to find a place to live, and that costs money. It's called ‘rent.' You can own a house or rent one. You try to raise a family, and there's food to pay for, clothing to buy, furniture, cribs, blankets, diapers, coats, and all of it you'll pay for. I won't be providing it. And if you can't pay, someone will come and take it all away and leave you in the ditch looking for wild asparagus or maybe a mallard or catfish to live on or stuck in a shanty, chattering and cold when the snow flies.”

I finally wound down as we penetrated the hamlet, and two curs set up a clamor.

“Mastuh Clark,” he said. “You gone and make me a man.”

“No, York,” I said, remembering those years with the corps, “you made yourself a man.”

On September 15 they put me off here at Fort Pickering along with Pernia and my trunks. It didn't matter much. For days they had stood guard over me; Pernia and the Creoles took turns as warders. The air on the river had been so thick and moist that I could scarcely breathe; the sun so blinding I couldn't bear to abandon the cabin. White haze obscured the distant shores, and I felt myself being carried to the sea in the prison of my body, detached from the world.

Sweet oblivion. To be aware was to suffer. I numbed the pain as best I could, blotted out the horror with powders, and the ghastly ruin of my body with spirits. They didn't
stop me inside the cabin; they arrested my trajectory only at the gunnels of the bobbing flatboat, where one or another hung onto my shirt while I performed my ablutions. I lay drenched in my filthy cottons during the midday heat; lay chilled at night even though the air was sultry. My heart beat relentlessly, pumping life into the ruin of my flesh.