Snowbound and Eclipse (69 page)

I was so grieved and disquieted by the news that I didn't know what to do. There was in me a red-haired Clark itch to head south to the Natchez Trace and question all those at hand, rattle their teeth, bang heads together, and get to the bottom of it. Maybe they could tell me what had excited the governor's passion and caused this last desperate escape. But on reflection, I abandoned that course. The governor would have been in the company of his faithful manservant Pernia and others, and I would soon enough get the whole and true story.

I did alter my plans in one respect: I had planned to head directly to the City of Washington for talks with Secretary Eustis, with only the briefest pause in Albemarle County en route. Now I decided to sojourn with the governor's family and help any way I might. Meriwether had given me power of attorney to settle his debts and perhaps I might be of use even now.

In Shelbyville I wrote my brother Jonathan of the horrifying news, and said I thought the report was true. “I fear, Oh I fear the weight of his mind has overcome him, what will be the Consequence?” I concluded. Those last letters from Meriwether, posted en route, asking me to look after his affairs, persuaded me of the truth of it. I will destroy them.

Shannon and I started east again, sharing in all tenderness and simplicity our memories of the great captain who walked the banks of the Missouri while we poled and rowed our vessels into the unknown. There was Meriwether striding before us, pausing at a plant he had never seen, stopping to unlimber his instruments and give us our latitude
and longitude, sending Drouillard out to make meat, all of his hunters and fishers somehow feeding us off the land every day. There was Meriwether, bravely treating with glowering savages with arrows nocked in their bows, handing out gills of whiskey along with rebukes and encouragement, for he was always the taskmaster, exhorting us to do better even while commending our successes and rewarding the men any way he could.

I was grateful to have one of the Corps of Discovery with me that long, sad journey east. We comforted each other as we proceeded on, Shannon always on horse, which he managed well even lacking part of a limb. We were remembering a man of unquestioned genius and honor, a man of such rare ability that he took us to the western sea and back without disaster, and left behind him a record of it all.

That brought to mind my deepest concern: what of the journals? Were they safe? Had he finished the editing? The matter had become so tender with him that I ceased inquiring, and I was utterly in the dark about them. Were they too lost?

There were moments when Shannon and I doubted everything we had read: maybe Meriwether had been murdered in a most vicious manner.

“The Burr devils got him, plain got him,” he repeated, over and over.

Meriwether did not lack conniving enemies in St. Louis, the Burr conspirators as well as disappointed seekers of privileges and offices. Shannon in particular seethed with the idea that a foul deed had felled the governor. Suicide was improbable. Neither he nor I had ever seen the governor in any great state of melancholia; his nature was to fight on, through the worst of events, until he could see daylight again.

At times Shannon and I speculated: was the governor
simply murdered by the bandits infesting the Natchez Trace? Was this Neelly the instrument of an avenging cabal? Was this the work of the Burr conspirators, whose faltering scheme to detach Louisiana from the republic the governor had stoutly defused? Was the crafty General Wilkinson at the core of it? Might the governor's trusted manservant Pernia be a part of it? My mind seethed with possibilities, and yet, in the end, I believed the newspaper accounts were largely true. The governor took his own life.

I knew things about him I felt I could not share with my doughty friend: Meriwether had been overwhelmed by sickness, and he had all too generously dosed himself with anodynes, powders, snuff, draughts of spirits, whatever he felt might release him from the suffering of his mortal flesh. I had seen his accounts: of medicines he had purchased a plenitude. Of visits to the doctor, Antoine Saugrain in particular, he had accumulated an alarming number, and it was plain to me that something was radically amiss.

I thought of the unspoken thing, the
lues venerea,
which had afflicted him first on the Columbia and later at Fort Clatsop, and which he and I concealed from the corps and from the journal. I supposed he had the drips, but I was wrong. Had that vile affliction been his nemesis?

I perused more newspapers along the way. The fragmented and incoherent story had created a sensation everywhere. I learned that two balls had penetrated the governor, and that murder was a distinct possibility. All this aggrieved and disturbed me to the bone. I hoped the answers would come clear in Virginia, at least if Meriwether's manservant, or this man unknown to me, Major Neelly, had carried his possessions and information to the governor's family and to Monticello as I knew the governor intended. I could only hope, and hasten east as fast as Shannon and I could manage in nippy and often wet weather.

When we arrived at Locust Hill, on Ivy Creek, on December 3, Mrs. Marks and John greeted us tenderly, and swiftly brought from the servants' quarters the man I most wanted to see: John Pernia.

“Mr. Pernia's helping us with the estate. He's visited Mr. Jefferson and delivered the journals there,” John Marks explained. “He's eager to talk to you, and has tarried here for your coming, just so he could deliver himself of an account of the governor's last hours.”

That, indeed, was good news. While the servants hurried some hot viands to us, Shannon and I settled ourselves in the cream-enameled parlor, along with our hosts. In a moment, Pernia appeared.

“Oh, General, General,” he said, clasping my hand. “What a painful matter this is! I have stayed here just so that you may learn of everything.”

The mottled face of this Creole black man crumpled with feeling. Mrs. Marks and her son settled themselves on settees, all of us in that sun-drenched parlor, our sole focus the witness to Meriwether's death.

There unrolled, tentatively then more confidently, the account of the governor's horrendous last days, madness and delusion plaguing him, fever and sickness felling him, spirits and opium pills and snuff addling him. I listened to the story, believing it all. I already knew most of it.

“He says over and over to the major, to me, you are coming along right behind, and you are going to fix everything,” he said.

“Was he … mad?”

Pernia sighed. “Ah, my general … Sometimes he was raging at the secretary of war for protesting his drafts. He says to Captain Russell that the journals were all written up and ready to publish. General, he never did write a word.”

“Tell me about Major Neelly, Mr. Pernia.”

“The major, he was no friend of the governor, and had certain failings, sir, but he saw his duty, and he respected the flag. He took care of everything afterward, doing it right and proper. Because of him, the journals are safe.”

“Why wasn't he present at Grinder's Stand?”

“Now that be a strange thing, General. Two horses get loose of their hobbles the night previous; we hobbled them up for certain. The major did it himself, he being something of a horse fancier, and next morning two horses had strayed, one of the major's and one of the governor's. That's when the governor is pretty cheerful; he said he would go on ahead and stop for the night at the first stand he came to.”

“Someone let the horses loose?”

“Someone did, sir. It was no mishap.”

“Who, Mr. Pernia?”

The man looked reluctant to talk, glancing fearfully at Meriwether's mother. “The governor,
pauvre homme,
he had tried to throw away his life several times, and he be carefully watched for his own sake. I kept the vigil, the major watched, back at Fort Pickering there was a regular vigil, and that day, when the governor went ahead and the major stayed back to find the missing horses, that was the first time the governor wasn't watched. He got free.”

“But you were with him, watching.”

He looked discomfited. “I couldn't. The woman, Mrs. Grinder, she put us in the barn, sir, the people of color.”

I nodded. “Was the governor murdered?”

Slowly Pernia shook his head. “All this that happened, it was the most plain thing, after his trying so much, so many times.”

“Why didn't you come to him when you heard shots?”

“The barn was
très
distant, General. We didn't hear. I think the governor's powder was damp.”

“Why didn't Mrs. Grinder go to him when he cried out?”

“General, she thinks him a lunatic, him arguing with himself and shouting half the night. She thinks only of protecting her children. Her man was away. She didn't unbar that door until the morning.”

“How could a man shoot himself twice?”

“The first ball, it creased his temple and tore out bone and exposed the brain, not taking effect, and after a while he found the other pistol and put that ball into his chest. And still he lingered.”

“Do you believe a man could do that?”

Pernia nodded. “In his condition, General, he would do anything he had to do.”

“Where was Major Neelly?”

“He came up in the morning, sir. Maybe an hour or two after dawn.”

“That's a strange hour. Was he present when the governor died?”

“Yes, sir. But it be too late. The governor is breathing his last.”

“Did he have the missing horses?”

Pernia nodded. “He found one, his own, but not the other, and came up.”

“How could he travel at night?”

“I didn't ask him, sir. It wasn't so dark. He maybe rode early, by moon, to catch up and press on.”

“Then he was not far off at dawn. Is there the slightest chance that the major shot the governor?”

“No, sir, not as I know. The governor cut his arms to finish the dying. He lay there, bloody arms, sometimes aware of us, but he didn't accuse anyone from his deathbed. He didn't point a finger, he didn't say you or you or you did it. He didn't curse the major from his bed for all of us to hear. He could be doing that. He is aware enough. His eyes open.”

“After he died, then what?” I asked.

Pernia looked uncomfortable. “The major set about digging a grave and getting a coffin. He put his slave to the digging, and me to get nails and all. There was no box, not in a hundred mile, and we got a few nails from a smithy and planks from a farm long ways away and a man there made a box from oak plank nailed up by himself. It be not much, but it's all we got. We buried the governor there, at Grinder's Stand the next day, all of us standing there, hats off to the governor, and the major saying the words.”

“Then?”

“Then the major got the trunks and made an account of everything in them, the journals, disputed vouchers, clothing, weapons, and all, and we all set off for Nashville carrying the bad news inside us. The governor's purse was missing, and someone took it, maybe it got lost on the trail, the governor being so out of his mind, so there was no money for me.

“In Nashville the major gave me fifteen dollars to get here, for I had none, and sent the two trunks with me on the horse. And then he wrote the president—I mean Mr. Jefferson, and I brought the letter with me. He and I got the journals safe to Monticello, just as the governor wanted.”

“And Mr. Jefferson has the letter from Major Neelly?”

Pernia nodded. “He read it while I waited, and then he brought me in and asked me things for a long time, and I answered everything for the president, best I knew how. I give the journals to him, just as my master wanted, and then I went to Washington and talked to the president about it, and came here with the horse and the other trunk, and Mrs. Marks kindly takes me in and bids me to stay.”

There were strange circumstances. Missing money. Major Neelly a checkered man of dubious repute. The odd reappearance of Major Neelly soon after dawn. No one helping Meriwether all night. Two shots and yet a suicide.
But as I probed Pernia's story the rest of the day, and talked with Lucy Marks and her son, my mind kept returning to the overwhelming truth of it all: the disease whose name no one spoke had killed him.

That December evening, beside the cold hearth at Locust Hill, Lucy Marks, John Marks, and I sat quietly, our hearts in Tennessee.

I would leave for Monticello in the morning.

“Are you satisfied?” I asked them. “I can ask for an investigation.”

“Satisfied, General? Oh, no,” Meriwether's mother said. “We'll never be satisfied, not with the reports so sketchy, and the accounts so jumbled, and so many self-serving stories.”

“One word from Thomas Jefferson and the matter will be opened,” I said. “The administration could scarcely refuse him. There's a good prospect that we can find out exactly what happened.”

John Marks raised a hand. “We'd like to let it rest,” he said. “Just let it be. My mother and I have come to that. It would be best for us, best for Meriwether, best for Mister Jefferson.”

I nodded. I had come to that, too. Meriwether had done what he had to do, caught between terrible scourges, trying to salvage what he could for our sakes.

I had only eulogy to offer them, but eulogy was what each of us craved.

“He was a great man, a great American,” I said, my soul
reaching out to these desolated friends. “I remember that great heart, that great mind, that great will, leading us through the unknown with all its perils. I remember his bright curiosity, his wonder at the world and everything in it; the way he marveled at a new bird, or a cloud, or a waterfall, or the way an Indian drew his bow. No man on earth was better fitted to lead, no man alive could have taken us to the ends of the earth and brought us back safely, save for Meriwether.”

They smiled.