The Expeditions (26 page)

Professor Tiffin heaved to his hands and knees, gasping; then Elisha realized the man was laughing. A wheezy chuckle shook his shoulders.

“You have won!” He shuffled to his feet, grinning. Blood seeped in rivulets down his cheek. “You are an expert pugilist! That I concede!”

Mr. Brush spat, pacing in a tight circle. The man’s hair was disheveled, veins throbbing on his sweaty brow. The sight terrified Elisha.

“Please accept my apology,” Tiffin said. “It matters little, all of this matters little. Please.” He dribbled a string of blood, then wiped his mouth and offered a hand to Mr. Brush. The man regarded it warily.

“Come now,” Tiffin said. “Behave as a gentleman.”

“I am a gentleman.” Brush stepped forward and took the man’s hand, shook it roughly. “And you are a son of a bitch.”

Tiffin gingerly touched his brow. “Swelling already. A souvenir of my discovery, I suppose.”

Mr. Brush hissed disgustedly and turned away.

Professor Tiffin dove at the man and wrenched his head down in a clinch. With his free hand he hammered Brush’s face, his fist moving like a piston as Brush’s hand searched for Tiffin’s neck, twisted the man’s collar. Professor Tiffin grunted, his face gone crimson. Mr. Brush scrabbled between the man’s legs and Tiffin screamed, a sound like a wounded fowl.

Elisha shied sideways toward the pair then grabbed Tiffin’s arm and pried it from Brush’s neck. Tiffin shrieked
Elisha!
as Brush stumbled free. Blood flooded from the man’s nose. Tiffin faced Elisha, his eyes wild; then Mr. Brush was upon him. He jabbed the man twice in the face and Tiffin stumbled. Brush yanked the man’s collar and struck him across the nose with a sound like crumpling paper. Tiffin fell again, covering his face with his bloody hands. Brush drove a punch along his ear and he curled into a ball.

Elisha pointed the rifle skyward and pulled the trigger. A flat blast echoed against the hillside. Mr. Brush jerked backward.

“You shit of a boy!” Brush stalked toward Elisha and wrenched the rifle from his grip, threw it aside. “Are you with him, or with me? Tell me now, you worthless shit of a boy! Are you with the nigger kisser, or with me?”

Elisha staggered backward. “Please, Mr. Brush!”

Professor Tiffin rolled to his side with a groan. Brush dragged a hand across his bloody mouth and pointed at Elisha; then he turned to Tiffin. “This expedition will depart the day after tomorrow! So help me God!”

Night came on but no one moved to retire. Professor Tiffin sat beside the cookfire poring over Elisha’s drawing, scribbling notes by the dim firelight. The man’s eye was swollen, his ear like a loaf stuck against his head. Mr. Brush sat in darkness, an occasional shift in position betraying his wakefulness. It was as though neither man wanted to sleep in the other’s presence.

At last Elisha grew exhausted by the standoff, mumbled his good nights and stretched out on his bedroll. He fell asleep listening to a screech owl’s distant call; then immediately he was awakened by a shake. Professor Tiffin was kneeling beside him, his hand over the boy’s mouth. The man’s breath smelled of whiskey. He whispered, “Do not say a word, not one. You must come with me.”

Elisha was struck by a sense of familiarity that quickly gave way to dread. Tiffin pulled at his shoulder. “Come, now. At once.”

The boy dragged himself upright and followed Tiffin along the river trail. The night was cool and cloudless, birch bark glowing white in the moonlight, a hint of rain in the air. Tiffin stumbled through the shadows. Some fifty yards from camp he turned to the boy and placed a finger against his lips. They were near enough to camp for Mr. Brush to hear their conversation, Elisha thought, were the man awake.

“I must apologize,” Professor Tiffin whispered, “for the behavior of Mr. Brush and myself. I pray you will forgive us. Our conduct has been inexcusable and entirely ungentlemanly.”

“That’s why you woke me? To apologize?”

The man leaned close to Elisha. “You must remain with me, my boy. You gave your word at the Chippewa village. You must keep your word! We shall complete the excavations, together, no matter Brush’s efforts against us.”

“This is not my affair. You and Mr. Brush must come to an agreement—I’ll abide by whatever’s agreed. This is your quarrel, not mine.”

Tiffin attempted to smile but the effort seemed to pain him. “If you remain with me you will share in the discovery’s glory! Do you recognize what that means, my boy? You will be welcomed in Boston and New Haven and Philadelphia and Charleston—your name will be known to Gray and Silliman and Morton. Elisha Stone! Your name will be on volumes for sale at every print shop!”

“I want no part of your conflict with Mr. Brush,” Elisha said. “I want nothing to do with any of it. Please just leave me be.”

Tiffin grasped the boy’s arm, and Elisha tried to pull away but the man tightened his grip. “You must keep your word! I will complete the excavations with your assistance, and then we will return to Detroit! We will share in the discovery’s glo—”

“There is nothing to discover!” Elisha twisted away from the man. “Susette told me the truth before she vanished. The hilltop is not a sacred site! There is nothing there, at all!”

Professor Tiffin leaned away, his face veiled in darkness. He chuckled haltingly. “But of course it is a sacred site—it contains the image stones! We have unearthed a sacred Midewiwin tablet, my boy! Madame Morel was confused!”

“There are no image stones. Ignace Morel deceived you. He planned to drag you into the forest then abandon you, but he missed you at the Sault and Susette took his place. Ignace Morel only wanted your money. There are no image stones.”

“My dear boy,” Tiffin said gravely. “It is you who have been deceived. The Midewiwin tablet is proof. As the scientific world will soon recognize, this tablet—”

“I saw that tablet in your room at the hotel, in Sault Ste. Marie. Before we departed.”

Professor Tiffin was silent for a moment; then he shook his head vigorously. “No.
No.
You are mistaken!”

“I am not mistaken. I entered your room when you were out, and I saw your belongings laid out on the bed, and the tablet was among them. I’m very sorry for that.”

Tiffin stared at Elisha with pained incomprehension. “You entered my room at the Johnston Hotel?”

“I did. I’m very sorry.”

He said miserably, “But why ever would you
do
such a thing?”

“I’m truly sorry. I wish I had never done it.”

Professor Tiffin appeared suddenly exhausted, nodding to himself, and Elisha sensed that the man was no stranger to disappointment. The boy felt an impulse toward charity. He’s a charlatan, Elisha reminded himself. A fraud and a sinner against science. He said again, “I’m truly sorry.”

“You must listen to me now,” Tiffin said calmly. “There are certain theories that we know to be true, but cannot prove. We see the truth as clearly as the noon sun, but we lack physical evidence of its veracity—and so we must
create
evidence, create
facts,
in service of the truth. The truth is more valuable than any individual fact!”

“You’re justifying a lie, is all. A lie is not a fact.”

“Elisha, my boy, my dear boy.” Professor Tiffin’s breathing wavered, then convulsed in a sob. “We were stripped of our church pew, do you understand? We cannot enter a church together. We cannot dine at a restaurant together. She is a nigger, and I am a nigger kisser. That is what we are, do you understand? Do you
understand
?”

He took the boy’s hand and Elisha pulled away, then Tiffin grabbed his shoulders and shook him roughly. “You must help me! You
must
! The truth is more important than any fact—facts are like rocks, Elisha, but ideas can grow! They can grow to be greater than any of us!”

Elisha jerked free and stumbled toward camp. Wildness surged through him. “Your consumption cure,” he said, “the one you sold in your pamphlet in Detroit. Was that fact?”

Professor Tiffin paused, bewildered. “My boy—why, that was a mere root remedy! It was folly! This is the
truth
! The two are as distinct as sun and moon!”

“Your cure was not folly to those who tried it, and found it false. They prayed it was the truth. It wasn’t.”

“But it was! It was! My
boy
—”

“Listen to me now. I will not say a word against you, to anyone. But neither will I help you. Do whatever you’re planning to do, but do not ask for my assistance. Do not ask for my assistance at all, ever again.”

The man nodded. He moved to speak then touched a hand to his mouth.

“This is not my affair,” Elisha said, then turned and started through the forest toward the darkened camp.

Part Four

One

The two men came into a region of skeletal black trees and charred brush and parched, airless heat. Reverend Stone shuffled through mounded cinders, head bowed, his throat clogged with ash. The sun was a dim glow against the white sky. Near noon they paused to rest, and when the minister leaned against a tree bough it crumbled in his grasp, left his hands streaked with soot. The air smelled bitterly of smoke.

He had begun to doubt the reality of the scene around him: the spidery trees, the air aswirl with ash, the cinders. The absence of color and sound. The heat. It was a fatigue-addled vision of heaven, he thought, or a delirious image of hell. He was hallucinating or he had died.

“There. Over that hill, then another hill, then we are arrived.”

Ignace Morel’s voice seemed to rise from a great depth. Reverend Stone turned to the man: his moccasins and leggings were gray-white, his face coated with ash. It was as though he was being consumed by the forest, slowly transforming into one of the burned trees. Tendrils of hair curled like twigs around his face.

“Arrived in hell, you mean.”

“Not to hell. To the place of your son.” The voyageur moved before Reverend Stone and peered into his eyes. “Drop your pack.”

“Of course not. Let us continue.”

Morel moved behind the minister and hoisted the pack, slid the portage strap from his forehead. Reverend Stone staggered under the weight’s absence. “You are a gentleman,” he said weakly. “I am indebted.”

They encamped for lunch beside a stony river, Morel raising a fire and staking the tents then stepping into the stream with a trout net. Reverend Stone reclined on a quilt of cinders, dazed by exhaustion. He jerked awake to the voyageur’s fiddle: “La Belle Susette.” He was suddenly, sharply aware of the branches bowed over him, the wind sighing through the canopy, the particles of ash tickling his brow. It was all very beautiful, like a blind man’s dream of a forest. Ropelike cramps gripped Reverend Stone’s legs. He wished he had a single tablet.

The forest’s colors warmed from black to gray to green as they trudged through the afternoon. Woodpeckers rattled and songbirds fluted in chorus. Reverend Stone focused his thoughts on an image of his son’s face: the frightened eyes and tousled hair, the slender neck shadowed by dirt. Elisha smelled of a child’s tart sweat. He possessed his mother’s voice, her blue eyes, her chin. Ellen will be alive in the boy, Reverend Stone thought, when I see him. The notion disturbed and excited him. It was as if, he realized, he was trying to resuscitate the past, if only its faintest pulse.

A rhythmic scuffing invaded the minister’s thoughts. He stood very still. Where was he? In Michigan, in the state’s northern peninsula, in a strange, endless forest. The scuffing paused, then resumed. It was the sound of hoeing, of stony dirt being disturbed. Or the sound of a fox scratching beneath a chicken house. I am in Newell, Reverend Stone thought, and his heart swooned. I am at the parsonage, listening to my old friend mister fox. The scuffing paused.

He surveyed the surrounding forest: some ways eastward was an opening atop a low, treeless hill. At the hill’s base a strand of smoke rose from a fire. A cookfire, Reverend Stone realized. He hurried forward, eyes trained on the site. Around the cookfire a trio of wedge tents stood like drab flags. Then a flicker of motion: a figure moving among the tents.

Reverend Stone began to run.

Professor Tiffin and Mr. Brush had departed camp that afternoon after lunch, Tiffin to the hilltop and Brush to the stream to bathe, so Elisha gathered a load of firewood and fetched a kettle of water, then lay beside the cookfire and tipped his hat over his eyes. He had no desire to do anything at all, except return to Sault Ste. Marie and collect his pay. A catbird called, then a shovel’s faint chuff: Professor Tiffin continuing his false excavations. Elisha tried to sleep but could not.

At last he rose and heated a scrap of leftover panbread. As he ate it occurred to the boy that he had not seen his own image in weeks. He ducked into Mr. Brush’s tent, rooted through the man’s pack for a pocket mirror. The face in the glass was suntanned and lean, the cheeks marked with fine black whiskers. He recognized himself but there was another man present: a wiry stranger with a questioning gaze. The sight pleased Elisha.

Mr. Brush’s fieldbook lay beside his pack. Its leather cover was scratched, its pages thickened by rain. Elisha took up the fieldbook, listening for sounds of movement from the forest. He turned to the entry for June 26, the party’s first day at the abandoned fur post. Brush’s field notes were scrawled in shorthand on the left-hand pages, translated as terse narratives on the facing pages.

June 26, 1844

Site loc apprx 0.6 mi upstr Muddy River (Bayfield). 46º 29'. Abandoned fur post, six dwell.

Slate in knobs, highly argill (27). Sparse white, gray quartz, slaty hornblende (28). Silic pebbles. No comp defl.

Soil clayey with sandy loam. Poor.

Timber primly wht. pine apprx 6,000 bf per ac. Rec fire, cut. Poor. Unsuitable Ry.

There was no mention of iron ore. Elisha recalled Mr. Brush’s breathless account of the compass needle skittering like a beetle, the windfall pine with ore clinging to its roots. The shaly mineral specimen shot with reddish veins of hematite. He read the narrative on the facing page.

June 26, 1844

We ascended the Muddy River some 0.6 miles this evening in a thunderstorm. This river is broad and sluggish, and copper-colored due to the presence of pine resin. We came to an abandoned fur post of six dwellings, around which significant quantities of white pine (
Pinus strobus
) have been cut. The rock formations here are principally slate forming in low knobs, mixed sparsely with white and gray quartz, and slaty hornblende. The soil is poor and clayey with traces of sandy loam. There is evidence of recent fire.

Elisha reread the entry, trying to square his own memories to Brush’s descriptions. He turned to narratives from later days at the fur post: the timber surveys seemed accurate, but apart from two mentions of bog iron there was no report of ore. By Mr. Brush’s account the region was worthless cutover land.

So it was as he’d suspected, and as Brush had denied: the man planned to declare the iron-rich lots worthless, then buy them for a dollar an acre. A seed of anger grew inside Elisha. He fetched his own fieldbook and pens, set to copying entries from dates he recalled Brush locating ore. I will buy this danged land myself, he thought. I will borrow money and buy this land, then sell it so dearly that Brush won’t be able to afford his own swindle. The boy’s fist trembled around the pen.

A rustle issued from the forest and Elisha froze. He shoved Brush’s journal beside the pack and replaced the pocket mirror, scrambled from the tent. A man was running through the forest toward camp. He was dressed in a black jacket and trousers, a black round-brim hat. Elisha fetched a rifle and tore open a cartridge then stepped forward, squinting: it was a white man, neither Brush nor Tiffin, wearing city clothes and brogans and carrying no pack. The man lurched to his knees and the hat tumbled away.

Later Elisha would remember the light in the forest at that moment: long, slender sunbeams surrounding the man’s body, as though he was being delivered down from the heavens. The breath emptied from the boy’s lungs. For an instant he stood motionless, waiting for the vision to vanish; then he set the rifle down and raised a hand. The man shouted with joy. Elisha raised his hand higher, then started into the forest toward his father.

He helped the man down to a litter of balsam boughs. Was he dreaming? His father was stiff and upright, chin shaved smooth and breath smelling of licorice; yet here was a man with a sparse, ragged beard, cheeks drawn down to hollows, fingers like brittle twigs. His jacket was frayed and his trouser cuffs torn to shreds. Like a scarecrow, the boy thought numbly, staked in a farmer’s garden. The man before Elisha was not his father; yet he could be no one else.

“You are surprised,” Reverend Stone said, struggling for breath. “Of course you are surprised. I would have written ahead but I did not have an address.”

Elisha was stricken by the weakness of his father’s voice. “You are exhausted,” he said. “You must rest now, lie down. Let me brew some tea.”

“On the contrary, I feel better than I’ve felt in weeks. The forest air is a tonic. The lake air I found less salubrious.”

Elisha could not look away from the man’s face. He wanted to touch his brow, to confirm that he was not a feverish vision. His cheeks were marked with pale brown spots, his lips wrinkled and split. An old man’s mask on his father’s face. “You’re alone,” Elisha said. “Did you come here alone, without a guide?”

Reverend Stone peered past the boy into the forest. “My boon companion—he is somewhere near. He is a petulant fellow but indispensable as a guide. We fairly flew across the lake.”

Reverend Stone’s breathing had not settled. Elisha said, “Hush now—let me fix you something to eat. You are surely starved.”

The minister did not object. Elisha set on a kettle of tea and pan of corn mush, moving quickly, his thoughts confused. Reverend Stone watched the boy work. As the food warmed Elisha gathered boughs for the man’s pallet, and to his horror realized he was busying himself needlessly. He did not know what to say to his father.

Reverend Stone spoke. He described his final service at the meetinghouse in Newell: the pews had been filled to the gallery, the windows lit with sunlight. He had told the congregation of his impending departure, and after the service he’d been showered with prayers for his journey and well-wishes for Elisha—from Herbert Weatherford and James Davidson and Asa Snow, from Corletta and Charles Edson. Reverend Stone told Elisha about his train ride to Buffalo, his encounter with Jonah Crawley; then the steamer to Detroit and the fine sermon by Reverend Howell. The storm’s waves like mallets against the
Queen Sofia
’s hull. At last he described his meeting with Edwin Colcroft and his departure from the Sault. “Such wild, beautiful territory,” Reverend Stone said. “I pray it is never joined to the civilized world.”

The minister took a long draft of tea. Elisha tried to imagine the man negotiating traffic on the Grand Circus, or haggling with a voyageur at Sault Ste. Marie. He could not form the images. His father was grave and deliberate, even-tempered to the point of solemnity; he had no use for passion or haste. The boy recalled his mother once mentioning that he had wept on their wedding day, and Elisha had been stunned. It had seemed a description of a different man entirely.

“I followed nearly the same route, though I traveled overland to Detroit from Buffalo. I worked as a specimen cataloger for a man named Alpheus Lenz on Woodward Avenue. It’s why I joined this expedition—because I wanted to discover a new species. A flower or fish or insect, anything.”

Reverend Stone offered his son a pensive smile. “You enjoy it—the tramping and paddling and collecting. You enjoyed it always, even as a child.”

“I thought I enjoyed it. I suppose my idea of the work didn’t precisely match the thing itself.”

“That is nearly always the case.”

Elisha returned the man’s smile. For years he had daydreamed of meeting his father, and had always imagined himself bitter, glaring at the minister while the man mumbled an apology. But here his father was, and Elisha did not feel bitter. Instead he felt a happiness near to tears.

“Professor Tiffin has a notion that all men are descended from Adam, black and white and red. That we’re all members of a single species, equal under the eyes of God. He is a fierce anti-slaver. He aims to prove the unity of races, to convince people to free the slaves.”

“The unity of races,” Reverend Stone said. “What a marvelous notion. It seems elementary yet perhaps it is not. I am no scientist.”

“He claims he’s found proof—this very week, in fact.”

“A wise man told me that the more profound the conjecture, the fainter the possibility of discovering proof of its truth. I suppose science and religion are similar in that regard.”

“Don’t tell Professor Tiffin that. He is convinced.”

Silence stretched between the men, and for a moment Elisha was at the supper table in Newell, as a child, gazing at his empty plate. He wanted desperately to speak but could not find the proper words. He said, “I’m so sorry, Father. For running away from you and Mother—I’m so very sorry. Please forgive me. I didn’t—”

“No,
no
—you mustn’t apologize. You were lost and now are found, my son.” Reverend Stone placed his hand atop the boy’s. “You were dead and now are alive. You must never apologize.”

A tremor moved through the boy, and Elisha took the man’s hand and brought it to his lips. Reverend Stone stared at his son.

“Why have you come here?” Elisha asked.

The minister closed his eyes, as if the question was more complex than it seemed. “Another wise man told me that the spring of all human activity is the unease that accompanies desire. I felt uneasy.”

His father’s opaque logic had frustrated Elisha as a child but now there was merely the memory of his frustration. “Mother,” he said. “She is gone.”