The Expeditions (22 page)

They had spoken continually about Elisha, when she was ill. She’d lay beneath a log-cabin quilt in their bedroom, sipping milk steeped with hyssop and paging through old issues of the
North American Review
. The boy had been gone only a month yet she spoke as if she knew he would not return. She hoped he’d found work, in a timber camp or shop or even a dairy farm. She prayed that his new congregation was gracious and hospitable. She wondered if he’d met a girl, maybe a cheery Boston girl to balance his seriousness. Ellen’s eyes flickered with remembered joy, her fingers worrying a bloody rag. She took up a charcoal portrait of the boy and pressed it to her lips.

Reverend Stone stopped walking. He understood, suddenly, why his son had left home: because he had not wanted to see his mother die. Because he was too frightened to accept the fact of her absence. And so Ellen was yet alive, to the boy. She was alive in his memories, alive in his prayers and thoughts. Reverend Stone felt touched by grief and a strange, shameful envy. She would be alive to the boy until he learned of her death.

He sat heavily in the crusted sand. A familiar ache grew in him, anger tempered by guilt. Elisha had left his mother lying beneath a log-cabin quilt in a shut-up bedroom, her lips the color of ash; yet she had forgiven him. How could a person forgive such an act? Yet one must forgive, just as Christ forgave. One must. A father must place a robe about his son’s shoulders and a ring on his son’s finger, and forgive.

Yet he should be the one to ask forgiveness, of his son. Reverend Stone soberly recognized the truth of this notion. He had shut the boy away from Ellen as she lay on her sickbed. Why? For her health, he had told himself, as though he might preserve her in a room untouched by the world, untouched by time. He had not wanted to share his wife’s love with the boy. He’d wanted to focus it on himself as though through a lens. Greed, then, or gluttony, or a sin unnamed in Scripture. He had loved her so much that nothing remained for his son.

He woke sometime later. It was dawn; a cold mist lay along the beach. His skin was pebbled with gooseflesh. Reverend Stone rose and coughed roughly, spat between his feet. Ignace Morel was nowhere to be seen.

He waited until he guessed the time to be near eight o’clock, then returned to the Johnston Hotel and breakfasted on cheese biscuits and sausage and tea. He asked the sleepy proprietor for directions to Monsieur Morel’s house. The man shook his head, then said, “Oh—Morel. That one’s living in a shanty down along the pickets.”

Reverend Stone hurried past the saloon and leather goods shop and Baptist mission house, the road quiet, the buildings darkened and closed. The town seemed abandoned, as though by people fleeing an approaching army. Outside the mercantile a pair of filthy trappers sat hunched on flour barrels, smoking long clay pipes. Reverend Stone nodded to the men as a vision of Detroit’s empty alleyways rose in his mind. He quickened his pace toward the fort.

Two dozen pinewood shanties stood among a cluster of Native lodges along the pickets, some with their doors thrown open and smoke rising from a makeshift chimney. Chippewa women worked at racks of dried whitefish; beside them a throng of half-naked children was engaged in a game of tag. Their shouts broke the morning’s silence. Reverend Stone spotted a half-breed girl carrying a basket of clothes toward the straits; he approached her and repeated Ignace Morel’s name until she mumbled a string of rapid French, pointed at a tumbledown shanty near the water’s edge.

Reverend Stone approached the dwelling and tapped at the splintered door. He called, “Monsieur Ignace Morel?” He knocked again then paced around the shanty’s perimeter: it was a small, weather-grayed hut, the seams chinked with rabbit fur, the lone window hung with oiled parchment. The minister peered through a gap between the warped planks.

A man opened the door and Reverend Stone jerked upright. “My apologies! Ignace Morel?”

He stared at Reverend Stone.

“You are Monsieur Ignace Morel, correct?”

The man scratched his nose. “Oui. Yes.” The word slurred to a hiss.

“I am Reverend William Edward Stone of Newell, Massachusetts. I believe Mr. Edwin Colcroft, the Indian agent, has engaged you to escort me for the next several weeks.”

The man said nothing.

“We were to depart this morning at dawn. Yes? I have been awaiting your arrival on the beach.”

Now Morel’s gaze drifted past Reverend Stone. He was a short, thick-chested voyageur with shaggy black hair and a stubbled jaw marked by a scar. He was dressed in deerskin leggings and a red cotton shirt, a purple sash tied about his waist. The shirt had been mended so many times that it resembled patchwork. He stank of whiskey. Behind the man a heel of bread sat on a table beside a fiddle’s bow and an overturned bottle. A wooden crucifix was nailed to the wall above. Typical Catholic, the minister thought, then immediately reprimanded himself.

“We go tomorrow.” Morel’s accent was thickly French. “Tomorrow is better to begin.”

He moved to push the door shut but Reverend Stone shoved his boot inside the frame. “I would like to depart now. That was the agreement arranged by Mr. Colcroft. So, if you please.”

“Twenty dollar.”

“Pardon?”

“My fee. To escort you. Twenty dollar, you pay me now and we go.”

Reverend Stone was momentarily speechless; then his confusion flared to anger. “The agreement was ten dollars—I have it in writing from Mr. Colcroft. Twenty dollars is an outrageous sum.”

The man rubbed his jaw theatrically, as if considering the argument. “Twenty dollar.”

“You must honor your word! You must escort me, as you promised.”

Morel said nothing.

Reverend Stone clenched his fists to still their trembling. A surge of heat rose to his face. “Listen to me, Monsieur Morel: I will pay you fifteen dollars, when we return. Let us go, now, immediately.”

“Twenty dollar, now. Before we go.”

“Fifteen. Half now, half when we return.”

Ignace Morel opened the door and moved beside Reverend Stone, his chest brushing the man’s arm. He was shorter than the minister but powerfully built, his neck and shoulders corded with muscle. A faint smile curled his lips. He said, “You are American, so you do not want to pay. You think I am a black nigger slave? No, I am white. You must pay.”

Reverend Stone said nothing. He turned away from the man and drew a fistful of coins from his pocket, counted out ten dollars. Morel stifled a yawn. A whistle sounded from the straits and the voyageur squinted, then raised both hands, laughing. He shouted, “Bonjour mon gros poulet! Bonjour!” Reverend Stone thrust the coins at the man and said, “There. Ten dollars. And ten more when we return.”

Ignace Morel shrugged. “So. We go.”

The minister waited as Morel stepped into moccasins and knotted a tobacco pouch to his sash, gathered a blanket and spare shirt and canvas fiddle case into a gunnysack. The voyageur made a circuit of the encampment, ducking into shanties and Native lodges, calling out farewells in French and slurred Chippewa. Reverend Stone felt anxious and confused, somehow distanced from himself. He followed the man toward town.

At the mercantile Morel stepped inside to a welcoming shout. A trio of chattering tourists strolled past, bearing picnic baskets and silk parasols; they greeted the minister with cheery smiles. A moment later two Natives emerged bearing large canvas packs, followed by Morel bearing a smaller pack and a five-gallon keg. Whiskey, no doubt. Reverend Stone thought to protest but held his tongue.

The voyageur’s canoe was nestled in a swath of beach grass at the straits’ western tip. It was a Chippewa craft, its birch-bark hull bound with roots and tarred with spruce gum. A red fiddle was painted on the hull. Morel dumped his pack and hoisted the vessel over his head, carried it to the water’s edge and set it gently afloat. He shouted a command to the Natives. They waded hip-deep into the straits, muttering as they arranged the packs in the canoe’s middle. Morel trudged up the beach and dropped to one knee beside the minister. He motioned toward his back. “Come. Now.”

Reverend Stone hesitated. The voyageur glanced up at him; then he circled behind the minister and with a huff bore the man up on his shoulders. Reverend Stone cried out. He clutched the man’s head for balance. Morel staggered into the shallows, then lowered the minister into the canoe’s bow, atop a slender birch thwart. Reverend Stone gasped, “Thank you. My goodness.” The craft jiggled like a cork in the current.

He is attempting to help me, the minister thought. The man is coarse but he will help me. He will protect me. He must protect me.

Ignace Morel boosted himself over the gunwale. He settled into the stern and took up a stubby wooden paddle, called to the Natives in Chippewa. The Natives laughed scornfully. Morel dug into the straits with a grunt. The canoe jerked forward as though tugged by a rope.

They set off.

Three

The image stones were plum-sized nuggets of flint scattered across the hilltop like windfall fruit. A lone black spruce stood at the hill’s summit, near a crumpled lodge frame and a cookfire’s charred remnants. Beside the fire pit lay a heap of animal bones. It was an old Chippewa campsite, Elisha realized, just as Susette had claimed. He took up a stone and rubbed it to a greasy luster, brought it near his face. A ghost of his own image appeared.

“This is the site?” Professor Tiffin asked. He was stalking around the fire pit, hands steepled at his chest. “These are the image stones—this is the site’s entirety, here on this hilltop?”

“This is the site my husband described,” Susette said. “It is not large.”

“And where, pray tell, are the image stones themselves?” He took up a specimen of flint and thrust it at the woman. “Are these the image stones?
Yes?
”

“This is where Chippewas gather flints for their muskets. The flints become shiny when you polish them—that is why they are called image stones.”

Tiffin flung the stone away. “But where is the pictography? Where are the Midewiwin narratives etched on stone tablets, as your husband described? Where are
they
?”

“The tablets with picture writing are buried nearby. I don’t know where. The Midewiwin bury them, then dig them up when there is a ceremony.”

Tiffin closed his eyes and sighed, an expression of supreme relief. “Of course! Of course that is precisely what they do, my dear madame! We are standing atop the tablets at this very moment!” He hugged Susette about the shoulders as the woman stiffened; then Tiffin turned an exhausted smile on Mr. Brush. “The image stones are buried nearby! Did you hear that, my skeptical friend?”

“Buried treasure. I am only surprised there was no yellowed map to plot our route. Perhaps a one-eyed crone to ferry us across a river.”

Professor Tiffin laughed. “You shall be part of history, my friend! Despite your best efforts to the contrary, you shall be remembered as a member of the Tiffin expedition!”

Brush ignored the man and turned to Susette. “I expect you would like your pay. Half due now, half due upon return was the agreement, I believe.”

The woman nodded.

“Then come with me.” Mr. Brush offered Professor Tiffin a sarcastic tip of the hat then started down the hillside.

But Susette hesitated, and Elisha realized she was frozen with fear. She met the boy’s gaze and he understood her expression as a plea for help. He offered the woman a barely perceptible nod. Her fear seemed to dissipate. She started after Mr. Brush, and as she passed Elisha he touched her hand.

She said softly, “My sweet boy.”

They made camp beside a gnarled old hemlock at the hill’s base, Susette fetching water while Elisha staked the tents and gathered firewood. Mr. Brush stood with his arms folded, watching the boy work. He said gruffly, “That wood is filled with sap. And those tent lines are loose as whores. Stake the damned things tighter. We may be here a few days.” Elisha knew better than to respond. At last Brush snatched up his fieldbook and compasses. The boy said, “Do you need my assistance?” but without responding Brush started southward into the forest.

Susette fried some pork belly with wild onions and lamb’s-quarter, added water and rice and set the cookpot on to simmer. A rich, gamy aroma rose from the stew. A short while later Professor Tiffin appeared, his hands coated with soot. He dipped a mugful of stew and puffed over it as he untied his pack. He withdrew three oilcloth-wrapped parcels.

Elisha recognized the parcels: Sault Ste. Marie, the Johnston Hotel. He had seen the parcels when he’d entered Tiffin’s hotel room and investigated the contents of his steamer trunk. Now the man opened an oilcloth to reveal a tiny, gleaming rock hammer, a hand spade, a paint-brush and set of calipers and heap of silk specimen bags. Professor Tiffin laid the tools on the grass before him, arranging and rearranging them like a child with toy soldiers. Finally he gathered them into his arms and started up the hill.

“Do you need my assistance?” Elisha called. The man did not respond.

And so it was the two of them alone at camp. The boy busied himself with cutting pine boughs and banking the fire, gathering a second load of firewood, restaking the tents. Susette sat silently beside the cookfire. When at last he paused in his labors she stood and said, “Elisha.”

“Well! I suppose it’s time for you to think about departing.”

He was disgusted by the false cheerfulness in his tone. Susette had laid out a trout net and knife and tin of matches, a spare mug and rice and lump of grease: the barest necessities for an afternoon’s fishing. The remainder of her pack lay undisturbed in her tent. She tied the stores in a bundle and hoisted it to her shoulder, surveyed the camp dispassionately. Then she motioned for Elisha to follow her.

The boy felt as though he were carved from wood. He trudged behind the woman on an eastward bearing that dipped into a damp, leafy swale. She turned northward, pausing for Elisha to mark a blaze, then continued for some time until they arrived at a river. It was a narrow channel rushing over jagged rocks, twigs swirling in the current, a fallen maple lodged at the water’s edge. Elisha could not gauge the river’s depth. Deep enough, he thought numbly, to carry a woman away. They hiked downstream until he noticed a dull thrum that quickly grew to a roar: the waterfall. Ten yards ahead the river disappeared. It was as though the water simply vanished into the hazy sky. Susette dropped her bundle on a spit of sand and turned to Elisha.

Her jaw was clenched but her eyes were wide and bright, her expression that of a woman on a steamer deck awaiting a ship’s departure. She’s excited to leave but does not want to show it, the boy thought. She does not want to hurt me.

“I feel how I did the morning I left my mother’s house in St. Catharines. I am afraid to go.”

“I was afraid when I left my father’s house. Sometimes I’m still afraid. Sometimes I wish I were still there, in my bed with the quilt pulled up.” Elisha turned away, embarrassed by his admission. “It’s not easy to start anew. But you will be fine. A beautiful woman is always fine.”

Susette smiled tightly. A breeze rose from the river and she shivered as if against a winter chill. “I hope you will forgive me.”

“Professor Tiffin is the one who should forgive you, not me. He’s the one injured in all this.”

She nodded. “He will be disappointed. I know that. I feel awful for the man.”

“But not awful enough to stay, and tell him the truth.”

“No. Not awful enough to stay.”

Elisha watched the woman draw a breath then slowly exhale. He knew how she was feeling, fear and exhilaration and guilt twisting a knot in her stomach. She had likely lain awake the previous night, struggling to draw comfort from the night’s calm. Convincing herself yet again that she would be safe on her journey, that she would succeed in a new town. That she would be forgiven by those she was leaving.

“You shouldn’t feel guilty for leaving,” Elisha said. “You shouldn’t let those feelings follow you. And you shouldn’t feel guilty for what happened with us—that was my fault and mine alone.”

She shook her head. “You say that because you are young. When you are young you believe everything is your fault. But you will not be young forever.”

“Well. I don’t believe you.”

Susette blinked as though fighting tears. “I have never been farther than Fond du Lac. I have never been to Milwaukee. I have heard the town is mostly white people—is this true? I have never lived in a town with mostly white people.”

“Fond du Lac is nearly as far as Milwaukee—if you’ve been to one you’ve practically been to the other. And don’t worry about white people. They are like Chippewas, only less honest.”

She laughed, and the boy heard a note of relief in her voice. He said, “American cities are everywhere the same. There are masses of people and everyone in a hurry. The smells are terrible strong. The streets are dust in summer and mud in winter. The carriages are loud and the rooming houses are filthy and on every street corner there are ladies in silk dresses standing beside the poorest rag peddlers. There are Irish and Chinese and Italians and Negroes and nobody knows one another and nobody cares. There is everything imaginable in the world, except clean air.”

Susette nodded. “That is what I want.”

“Then you shall be happy.”

She moved close to Elisha, and the woman smelled of smoke and hair grease. He was struck by the fineness of her form, the bones no sturdier than a bird’s, the tendons as fine as string. A delicate creature yet a marvel of strength, one of nature’s beautiful mysteries. Susette took Elisha’s hand, and then he recognized what would happen. A shiver passed through the boy. He laid a hand against her neck, felt her skin’s warmth beneath his fingers.

She whispered, “My sweet boy.”

Her eyes, which Elisha had thought to be dark brown, were deep hazel-green flecked with gold. When the sun clouded over they became greener yet, the color of a forest pond, and as Elisha leaned close his reflection grew as if on a pond’s surface. Her palms were smooth and calloused, veined with fine cracks, and he traced them with his thumb as though following rivers on a map. Two Hearted River, Miner’s River, Yellow River, Train River. A vanished country. Elisha was filled with reverent pleasure.

When he figured enough time had passed he moved atop her again, but Susette placed a hand against his chest. Elisha sensed in the woman a shiver of regret. He closed his eyes and nudged forward, and at last she relaxed beneath him. He was clumsy with excitement but could not slow himself. Susette watched him, mouth open, her breathing rising to jagged gasps. Elisha kissed her ear, her temple, her nose, her jaw, sweat dripping from his chin into the hollow of her throat. Pleasure billowed through him. Susette touched his stomach and the boy heard himself whimper like a pup. She giggled wickedly.

Afterward they lay on the riverbank beneath a white sky. Elisha felt deliciously attuned to the world’s sensations, a whiff of pitch and the current’s soft clap, a tickle of wood lice beneath his bare legs. This is what I require, he thought indulgently. Regular treatments to invigorate my senses. An image from a dream rose in the boy’s mind, of himself in a Victorian house before a food-laden table, consumed by hunger. In an instant he grasped the dream’s true meaning: his hunger was for thrill and desire and pleasure, for a woman’s damp warmth. Of course.

Susette began to speak about her mother. The woman’s name was Marie Beauchamp. She had been to Boston once as a young woman and forever after repeated an account of the visit until it was as legend, or prayer. The visit was in August of aught-three. She’d bought a Chinese silk shawl with a faint yellow print on Summer Street, a pair of Italian leather gloves from a vendor on Kingston. She had eaten the sweetest blueberry tart from a bakery on Tremont Street. On Milk Street she’d seen a gentleman wade into a fountain to fetch a lady’s parasol; then he’d presented it to the woman with a deep bow, his trousers dripping. Summer Street, Kingston Street, Tremont Street, Milk Street. The mayor’s wife’s handmaid had smiled at Marie Beauchamp. There were Negroes wearing silk hats. A Chinaman owned the city’s biggest tanning works and a half-blood Native owned the Cameron Hotel.

Susette stopped speaking and it was very quiet. Elisha felt touched by melancholy joy, the way he imagined old lovers must feel. He moved to kiss the woman, but she rose and slowly donned her skirts and leggings and moccasins, hoisted her bundle to her shoulder.

“I love you,” Elisha said suddenly. “My dear. I love you more than I can express. I will always love you,
always
. My dear Susette.”

She knelt and brushed a lock of hair from the boy’s forehead, kissed his cheek. She laid a finger against his lips. Susette said, “Tell my husband I have died.” Then she rose and started upstream along the riverbank. Birch limbs shivered as she passed, then fell still.

He let the cookpot remain empty through the afternoon, then finally Elisha poured in a pail of water, added handfuls of peas and lyed corn and a thick chunk of pork belly. It was the same stew he’d watched Susette prepare countless times. Toward dusk Mr. Brush emerged from the forest and nodded a greeting, pulled off his boots and set to copying notes in his fieldbook. A short while later Professor Tiffin shambled into camp. His shirt was unbuttoned, his chest and arms streaked with dirt. He lay down on his bedroll and tipped his hat over his face.

Mr. Brush set down his pen. “So? The scientific world awaits your pronouncement.”

“I wish I had a whiskey cocktail.”

“Come now! Surely you’ve unearthed a mislaid gospel. At the very least a few spare psalms?”

Tiffin’s flat voice emanated from the hat. “I have excavated nearly half of that damned hilltop. Susette offered no hint of where to concentrate my search.” He sat up and the hat tumbled away. “Madame Morel!”

“She’s gone fishing up near a waterfall, some ways east,” Elisha said. “I expect she’ll return soon.”

A brittle silence lengthened; then Elisha said quickly, “Her pack is here. There’s no food missing. No cooking gear or matches, either.”

“The deceitful scut,” Tiffin said. “She has abandoned me again!”

“Mind your language,” Brush said sharply. “You will not speak of a lady in that manner.”

“She is not a lady!” Tiffin scratched up a fistful of dirt and threw it into the cookfire. “Look for yourself—there is nothing here! She has deceived me, just as her husband deceived me. I will reach Peking before I unearth a buried tablet!”

“She’s gone fishing for trout at a waterfall,” Elisha said. “She said she’d return before dusk. I fear she may have come to an accident.”

Mr. Brush scoffed. “More likely she is five miles distant, counting her coins like a merry Jewess! It is no coincidence that she vanished immediately after being paid.”

Elisha said nothing.

“Nonetheless. If she has not emerged by tomorrow noon we will conduct a search.”

Professor Tiffin slumped forward with his face in his hands. “The deceitful scut. I have excavated nearly half of that hilltop. The damned deceitful scut.”