The Expeditions (20 page)

Elisha was suspended between confusion and disbelief. For an instant he wondered whether he was the butt of a strange prank; then he saw tears rimming Susette’s eyes. “Then where are we going?” His voice tightened to a nervous hiss. “Why are you guiding us to a place that doesn’t exist?”

“We will arrive soon at a hill. This is the place my husband described to Professor Tiffin—but there are no buried tablets or scrolls, nothing from Midewiwin. It is where Chippewas collect flint for their muskets. Near the hill there is a waterfall. The river above is very narrow and quick.”

Dread stirred inside Elisha. He said nothing.

“When we reach the hill I will receive payment. We will make camp. Then I will go alone to the waterfall, with only a fishnet and some food, and I will depart. You will say that I went over the waterfall and was carried away. That I died.”

“You don’t need to do that. Mr. Brush and Professor Tiffin won’t care a whit if you leave.”

“It is not them you must tell. It is my husband.”

Elisha squatted at the stream’s edge. He wondered if the woman’s every action during the past weeks had been inspired by this single request. The thought sickened him. He said, “I have to tell Professor Tiffin.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I have to tell Professor Tiffin that he’s wasting his time! That this entire expedition is a danged ruse!”

Susette clutched the boy’s hand but he pulled away. He said, “You shouldn’t do this! You shouldn’t cause your husband to mourn a death that never occurred! No matter the circumstance, you shouldn’t injure a man that way!”

“My husband will not mourn me if I die.” Susette’s voice quavered hysterically. “But if he knows I am alive he will track me. He will track me like a dog to the end of the country.”

“How do you know?”

“He has promised me this many times.
Please!
He will track me like a dog and he will hurt me.”

Susette laid a hand on Elisha’s neck and liquid warmth flowed through his body. She knelt beside the boy and hugged him tightly about the chest. “You must help me, Elisha. Please, you must help me. You are the only one who can help me.”

He sat silently as the woman wept against him. He wanted to ask her, Who will believe your story? Who will believe you were carried away by a rushing current? Not your husband. Nor Mr. Brush, nor Professor Tiffin. And when you arrive in a new town, who will believe you are who you claim to be? It was a story from a fable, or a myth: the woman borne away on a wave’s crest, set down among strangers in a distant land. Yet in the fable she returned home after years of travel.

It doesn’t matter, Elisha realized, if no one believes her story. She needs only to believe it herself. If she believes she has died, she can begin a new life.

“I believed you. I believed you about the image stones.” Elisha shook his head. “I wanted Professor Tiffin to make a great discovery. I prayed he would.”

Susette moved to touch the boy’s face but he turned away. He said, “Where will you go now? Back to your mother in Canada?”

She paused, as if scrutinizing the meaning of his words; then her expression softened in relief. “There is a town I have heard of—Milwaukee, in Wisconsin Territory. I have been told that the land is free and the soil is good, and there is fishing and hunting and the winters are not so cold. And the streets are dry and broad, and there are apple trees all through town, and there is work for anyone who wants, man or woman. I will go there. I will find work as a hired woman or laundress and I will live there.”

“I expect you might even find a theater in Milwaukee.”

She laughed, a sharp sob. Tears spilled down her cheeks.

“Well. In another world I might have joined you.”

Susette nodded. “In a better world.”

The party came the next morning into a burned-out region of gray, limbless pines, the ground humped with charred logs, the air flecked with ash. The landscape was drained of color save for shoots of pink fireweed. They continued without pause, finally cresting a rise to see white pine rolled out before them like a rich green carpet. A river cut through the forest then abruptly disappeared near a low hill. They made camp in a stand of blackened saplings, and when the fire was kindled and the cookpot set on to simmer Susette said, “It is there, that hill near the waterfall. The image stones.”

Silence; then Professor Tiffin turned to Susette. “My dear woman. What are you saying?”

“Atop the hill, where there are few trees. That is our destination.”

Tiffin scrambled to his feet. “My jay! Why didn’t you tell me we were so near?”

“I did tell you, yesterday. I said we were near.”

“Near!” The man fumbled with his pack, jammed on his ragged hat. “Good gracious, near indeed!”

Tiffin stumbled down the slope, startling a flock of sparrows into flight. “We have arrived!” he shouted. “By the grace of God we have arrived!”

They watched the man disappear among the pines. At last Mr. Brush tossed his tea into the fire and shouldered his pack. Elisha struck the tents and kicked dirt over the cookfire, and they started after the man, toward the hill.

Two

He had paced the steamer’s foredeck since their sunup departure, drinking coffee and watching Detroit’s wharfs and storehouses and church steeples slide away. The city dwindled to muddy flats dotted with rude plank shanties, a few solitary figures casting for trout. As Reverend Stone stared, one of the fishermen staked his pole and trotted down the riverbank apace with the ship, then raised both hands as the steamer slipped behind Hog Island. Reverend Stone returned the wave, his chest tight with excitement. The
Queen Sofia’
s signal cannon fired, a flat blast that brought a cheer from the steerage deck. Ring-billed gulls wheeled and shrieked along the ship’s bow.

But as they entered Lake Huron a scurf of sooty clouds skated overhead and the waves thickened to a chop. Reverend Stone stood at the railing, bent against the wind. Ahead, the lake rolled to the horizon, as boundless and menacing as the Atlantic. Cows belowdecks lowed above the shouts of Irish deckhands. The air smelled richly of loam.

He remained on deck until he felt the first cold pellets of rain, then stepped into the gentlemen’s cabin and ordered a glass of cider, took a seat beside a grimed porthole. Behind him, a trio of soldiers argued the merits of various beer halls in Detroit. Waves crushed against the steamer’s hull. The wind gathered itself, then rushed forward in huge, soft buffets. Like a child puffing on a milkweed pod to keep it aloft, Reverend Stone thought. The soldiers hooted raucously.

He understood, suddenly, why some sailors loved the sea. It was the embrace of helplessness, the temporary surrender of will. And with it a grateful shucking of responsibility. Reverend Stone recalled a sermon he’d once delivered, directed toward the congregation’s worldlier members: that a life of sin was like a solo sail into an endless ocean, rootless and undirected. Now he sensed the comparison’s truth. The
Queen Sofia
hovered, then bottomed sickeningly into a trough. The soldiers’ laughter hushed.

Reverend Stone drew a tin from his trouser pocket and thumbed out three tablets, swallowed them with the last of the cider. Then he set the glass on the bar and yanked open the foredeck door. The barman said “Hey” as Reverend Stone stepped out into the wind.

Rain stung his face and neck. He clutched his hat and hurried beneath an awning, braced himself against a pair of stanchions. The ship pitched, riding a swell down and then up in a twisting lurch. Reverend Stone thought he might be sick. The awning snapped like a carriage whip. It seemed impossible that they were sailing on a mere lake.

He swallowed two more tablets then closed his eyes and waited for warmth to melt over him. His fingers began to itch, the sensation accompanied by a hint of familiarity, an odd tang of childhood. He opened his eyes: the lake was gathered into slaty, frothing peaks. The ship’s timbers howled. Had his father ever taken him on a sailing ship? Certainly not. In his memories the man was a tiny, stooped figure in a distant tobacco field, or a wrinkled old gentleman scowling at a thirty-cent Bible. Or a steep black shadow on the minister’s bedroom wall. Reverend Stone felt touched by the anxiety that had forever accompanied his father’s image. He’d been a silent man, spending words like they were gold dollars, repeating a few favorite expressions throughout Reverend Stone’s childhood. Now the minister heard his faded Surrey accent, clear as yesterday:
You know who you are when you know what you fear.

The old fellow would be proud of me today, Reverend Stone thought.

He shrank against the stanchions as the steamer rolled. He felt enveloped by dense, coarse fur. That was why he’d entered the ministry, he knew: to escape his father’s dour stare. He had never been drawn to preaching and counseling, weddings and baptisms and funerals. He had lacked the necessary patience. As a young man, though, he had possessed a talent for prayer. Praying, his thoughts would slow to a crawl, the physical world falling away; then he would feel himself rising into calm joy. He felt humbled, bodiless. Over time the sensation had faded, until lately he’d had to convince himself that it was not a dream. And now, what? Reverend Stone wondered. Where did he find calm? In a tin of tablets. His backdoor entrance to ecstasy. His sinner’s version of grace.

A deckhand staggered past, gripping the railing for support. His glance lit on Reverend Stone and the man cackled. “Shite day for sightseeing, friend-o!” The minister smiled weakly. He was struck by the absurdity of their endeavor: a few planks of oak nailed together against a roiling lake. Forgive us, he thought. We mean no offense, certainly none at all.

After a while the rain softened to a patter. Reverend Stone shifted against the stanchion, and as he did he felt a knot against his chest. He fished in his vest pocket and withdrew a tarnished chain linked to a loop of scored leather. Adele Crawley’s talisman. He murmured, “‘The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in, from this time forth and for evermore.’” The familiar cadence soothed him. Reverend Stone pressed the leather scrap to his lips, then moved to the railing and dropped it over the side, watched it disappear without a sound into the dark lake.

The
Queen Sofia
was a ramshackle side-wheel steamer, its railings warped and brass fittings dulled, its carpets scuffed down to shiny brown mats. Built to haul pine timber around the lakes, Reverend Stone figured, a homely cousin of the pleasure steamers on Lake Erie. Whey-colored paint bubbled over the tin ceiling. In the gentlemen’s cabin, groups of soldiers and businessmen sat in quiet conversation around copper-topped tables, below a film of steel-blue smoke. The cabin smelled bitterly of vomit.

He sat at the bar until his stomach had settled, then walked a circuit of the steamer in the sour-tasting air. From the steerage deck, fiddle strains skirted above an accordion’s chords, the pair harmonizing in a fast, droning reel. Germans, Reverend Stone suspected, in good spirits despite the squall. He was ravenously hungry. In the dining room he lunched on broiled trout with white gravy and applesauce, then retired to his stateroom and lay straight-armed on the narrow bunk, his joints aching, his swollen cheek tight and warm. He closed his eyes but sleep eluded him. Instead he lay listening to the steam engine’s thrum.

He rose near dusk and stepped into a quiet corridor. The gentlemen’s cabin was empty save for a pair of Irish deckhands. A hand-lettered notice was tacked beside the bar.

FOR THE EDIFICATION AND DIVERSION OF ALL PASSENGERS AN ADDRESS BY JOHN SUNDAY (OR, O-KON-DI-KAN) ENTITLED

TRUE NARRATIVE OF THE CONVERSION TO CHRISTIANITY OF THE SPEAKER, A FULL-BLOOD OJIBWAY INDIAN

TO BE DELIVERED IN THE DINING ROOM AT 8:00 PM ~ ADMISSION GRATIS ~

Reverend Stone passed through the cabin into the dining room. The tables had been pushed to the room’s rear, and two dozen men and women sat in rows of straight-backed chairs, staring at a man behind a low pine lectern. He was dressed in a store-bought gray suit and twill shirt but his hair was long and blue-black, his skin the color of weak coffee. John Sunday, the minister assumed. The man’s voice was an insistent whine.

“This was at a camp meeting near Saline. I went to sell my liquor to the many people. A preacher named Josiah Stevens spoke, and I listened. He spoke of the dark place, the underworld, and I felt like I would die. I felt sick in my heart. I knelt by the roots of a very large pine tree. I did not understand how to pray, you see? I thought God was too great to listen to a red Indian. Presently I saw a light like a small torch. It appeared to come through the pine tree. My heart trembled. The light came upon my head and spread all through me. How happy I felt! I was as light as a feather. I called in English,
Glory to Jesus!
I felt as strong as a lion yet as humble as a poor Indian boy. That night I did not sleep. The world was new to me, and exciting. That was the beginning.”

The man seemed astonished by his own words. His fervor gave rise to an embarrassed silence in the room. A woman coughed dryly.

“The next morning I began my work. I went to the Stony Creek tribe. I told them,
Jesus, my all, to heaven is gone.
Jesus ish pe ming kah e zhod. I told them,
Oh, how hard is my fate.
Tyau gitche sunnahgud. This they understood. They understood the language of loss. But it was difficult. For a smoke of tobacco they would be baptized. For a meal they would come to a prayer meeting. They said if I brought them whiskey, they would become preachers. Yet I continued for now eleven years, in Michigan and Ohio and Canada. I will never tire.” John Sunday paused. “Every day thousands of white souls are saved, but how many Indian souls? How many Indians will be risen up on the last day?”

It was true, Reverend Stone realized. His own vision of salvation was that of a great crowd assembled in a rolling valley, white men and Negroes and Chinese and Irish with their faces turned to heaven, rapturous, their varied names for God a mere detail of translation. The idea was near to heresy but there it was. Yet where were the red Indians? The minister recalled reading in Catlin that Natives imagined the afterlife to be similar to life on earth, though with more plentiful hunting and fishing. The idea had struck him as pitiful: it had seemed a fundamental failing of the race.

“And this is why I now ask for subscriptions. So I might continue to work among Natives. So I might continue to bring light into darkness. It is through your subscriptions that I eat and clothe myself.”

A man in the front row removed his bowler and with a flourish dropped a banknote into the crown. A twinge of dread rose in Reverend Stone as the hat passed among the chairs. “I thank you sincerely,” John Sunday said. “Now I might be as Jonah and go unto Nineveh, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee.” The minister rummaged in his trouser pocket, extracted a half-dime. When the bowler arrived he dipped his fist into the crown, and at the same time gave the hat a jingling shake. A ruse learned from his own congregation, from the skinflints in the rearmost pews.

He looked up to find John Sunday fixing him with a grim stare. Reverend Stone reddened. He nodded to the man then rose quickly, passed out into the gentlemen’s cabin then onto the foredeck.

Outside it was warm, a breeze unfurling the steamer’s flags, the sky pebbled with pewter-colored clouds. Reverend Stone leaned over the railing and watched foam ribbon past the
Queen Sofia’
s bow. He drew a deep, calming breath. Where were they? Twelve hours north of Detroit. Nowhere. Yet he was certain they had crossed into a blank space on the map, into a shared unknown with his son. The thought was vaguely comforting.

The gentlemen’s cabin door opened, and four soldiers stepped onto the deck holding tumblers of flip. As one they began a round of “Oh, What a Charming City,” motioning for the minister to join the chorus. The door opened again and John Sunday appeared. He removed his hat and rubbed his forehead, unbuttoned his collar with a grimace. Reverend Stone moved beside the man and offered a conciliatory smile.

“I am sorry I couldn’t aid you further. I’ve a wealth of admiration for your labors.”

John Sunday shrugged. “I was in London in August. I spoke on the need for Christianity among the Natives. I was received at the summer home of the earl of Essex, given many gifts and much money. And when I return to America I must beg like a pauper.”

“The British are a pious people. They feel the injury of every lost soul, even those in faraway lands. They are also quite rich.”

“There is greed in this country.”

“I have begged myself, of late. It is the nature of our vocation.”

John Sunday appraised him wearily, his gaze lingering on Reverend Stone’s bruised cheek; then his expression softened. “I am sorry. I am very tired. I become tired and open myself to unkind thoughts. It is a weakness.” He rubbed his forehead again and sighed. “What is your work in the north?”

Reverend Stone thought to explain, then said, “A pleasure tour. And I shall visit the Indian agent, a man called Edwin Colcroft.”

“Colcroft.” John Sunday spat over the railing. “Chippewa scratch all day at Colcroft’s door, they say, Kittemaugizze showainemin—I am poor, show me pity. They rub onion beneath their noses to bring tears. They call him Nosa, my father. I tell them God is their father.”

“There are white men in my own congregation who would make quick use of that onion trick.”

“I wish for the day that Natives are like whites. I have much work to do.”

“This country—” Reverend Stone paused. “There is a strange desperation among white men these days. A great thirst for meaning, in any form. They live together in colonies and phalanxes, they invest faith in charlatans and wild-eyed zealots. They change denominations like they are changing their hats. They prepare for the last day as if for a Sabbath-day picnic. It is as though Natives possess too little faith, and white men possess too much.”

“An abundance of faith can be channeled. But it is hard to quicken faith when the talent for it does not exist.”

“Both problems are symptoms of confusion. Of turmoil.”

John Sunday grunted. Beside them, the soldiers’ song dissolved into laughter, a solo voice stubbornly holding the melody. Then it, too, fell into silence as the soldiers drank. Night had arrived as a starry black sky, salt crystals on a scrap of velvet. To the west: a forest’s bristly silhouette. To the north: an invisible horizon, a border between nothings.

After some time John Sunday said, “Do you know what is the saddest phrase of the Bible?”

Reverend Stone shook his head. “‘Jesus wept.’”

“It is from John, chapter one. ‘And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.’”

They reached Mackinac Island at dawn, the
Queen Sofia’
s signal cannon echoed by a blast from a gun at Fort Michilimackinac. Deckhands’ shouts merged with a clang of bells and hoot of whistles as the ship angled toward the pier. Reverend Stone shaved and prayed, then sipped a cup of weak tea in the gentlemen’s cabin as the steamer tied up and a dozen soldiers trudged down the gangplank. Twenty minutes later the ship cast off, and at three they arrived at Sault Ste. Marie.