Charbonneau

by Win Blevins

  He set up a boarding school in St. Louis for Indian boys, Indian boys whose only white language was French. At forty-five he remarried, and his wife—a young Frenchwoman—knew a woman’s ways and a woman’s work. He was selected now—by himself, it was true—for even the eminent William Clark had sent him an Indian boy, Jean-Baptiste, for schooling. But somehow the coals still burned in him. J.E. Welch had three hatreds in this world—the sound of Latin in God’s house, the smell of tobacco in leaf, and the snort of a hog.

  He was, nearly enough, what he thought himself—a good man, by his own lights. He was saving the heathen; he liked and understood heathen boys better than most of his contemporaries, though he knew that his temper was a failing. He meant to teach them to read and write, to wash and dress like civilized men, and then—if their heathen nature didn’t reassert itself—to till the land. He had no higher hopes for them: After all, they were what they were. But if they could not become merchants, teachers, and lawyers, or even carpenters and mechanics, they could learn obedience to civil and divine authority; they could learn to grow crops and stay put in one place. If their understanding of divine will was limited, that was as it must be. Perhaps their children could be taught to be white men. In the meantime, the key to their temporal and spiritual salvation was discipline, the fear of the Lord, and the fear of the Lord’s representative, J.E. Welch. Welch held onto hope for them: he remembered, always, that his God was a God of miracles.

  He was reading Scripture aloud after dinner to the boys—the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac—when he heard Benjamin’s step. Welch looked as though that step had turned loose a spring in him. He jumped up, knocking his high-backed wooden chair flat, and bolted through the door to the parlor where Benjamin was creeping toward the room he shared with James. Baptiste heard Benjamin’s back crash against the wall.

  “It’s divil whisky on your breath, is it?” screamed Welch. He took a hand off the boy to slap his face. But Benjamin, who was sixteen, and half a foot taller than his father, shoved and sent Welch sprawling backwards over a table. Benjamin shot out the door and back toward the riverfront. Before he got ten yards down the muddy street, Welch was within two strides of him.

  “Ye’ve been drinking,” shouted Welch. Boot slaps while he caught his breath. “I kin smell it.” Slaps again. “And I’m gonna smell”—pause—“for your other evils.” Pause. “Been to the harlots, have ye?”

  Benjamin’s groin, recently warmed, ran cold. Welch’s two big hands hit him flat on the shoulder blades and sent him headlong into the mud.

  Welch dragged him into the house with mud all over his hands and face and back, his pants half off, and a big strawberry on one cheekbone. Mrs. Welch and the boys were gathered around the front door.

  “He’s drunk and he’s been to the Frenchy whore,” Welch bellowed at no one in particular, and disappeared into the bedroom with Benjamin.

  He was apoplectic. Baptiste had never seen so fine a rage before. He knew enough to stay out of Welch’s way at times like this: In his first five years he had caught some of Welch’s anger. Now he grinned at Yves. That night the boys swore that they would find a way to get out of Welch’s school before they started with whisky. Before they started with French whores, too, though they weren’t sure what you did with whores.

  Baptiste didn’t mind Welch. He had been scared of him at first, less because he was violent than because he was strange. A six-year-old cannot understand the terrors of hell-fire-and-damnation as rendered in full plumage by a Baptist preacher, but he has easy access to terror. Baptiste, in the first couple of years, had been terrified of something, he didn’t know what. His mother hadn’t been able to help. She was in town sometimes, but she only told him that the white man’s god was most powerful and the re-vealer of the white man’s great medicine and that Baptiste must know this god and learn his medicine. She had taught him about the gods of the four winds, and he had seen the Thunder-being come from the west and unleash its power, so he knew that gods were awesome.

  He had quickly learned how to pacify Welch. He memorized Scriptures easily and repeated them back. “The wages of sin is death,” he would enunciate carefully to Welch after dinner by the fire, getting his English and his Bible right at once. “Repent, O ye of little faith.” “For God so loved the world that he sent His only begotten son.…” He could remember the words with no effort, and he discovered that he only had to parrot them. He had nothing he could connect any of it to, but he knew that his diligence, his quick grasp, and his smile pleased Welch.

  Mrs. Welch—the Reverend always called her Mrs. Welch as far as Baptiste could tell—had taken him under her wing when he first arrived. He had been too young to help out around the farm, so she kept him in the kitchen. And she sang as she worked—sang the songs of Aix-en-Provence, where she had been born. In a good mood and out of earshot of Welch she would throw in a saucy Creole song or two that she had heard in New Orleans; Baptiste didn’t get them entirely, but he loved the jaunty tone. While she did the lunch dishes, she would sing rounds, getting Baptiste started on the first round, then carrying the second while the boy sounded out his in a small, brave unsteady voice. When he would get lost, he would stamp out the rhythm with his feet while she finished. One afternoon the two of them were dancing in a circle in the kitchen to “Frère Jacques,” Mrs. Welch with broom in hand and her skirts picked up, when Welch walked in. The Reverend sent Baptiste to bed without any supper and scolded Mrs. Welch roundly in front of him. He didn’t expect his own wife to teach Indian boys, who had the divil in ’em anyway, the divil’s recreation of dancing. The next day they were dancing again in the kitchen anyway. Mrs. Welch was a French Protestant and had become a Baptist by marriage; this she didn’t understand, so they defied her husband on the sly.

  Days on the school-farm were long and strictly regimented. Everyone got up in the pre-dawn light and ate a big country breakfast, eggs from the henhouse, pork they had slaughtered, milk from one of their two cows. First the boys of ten or older, including Welch’s sons, did chores until mid-morning, then had lessons until lunch, each boy working on his own level. Welch drilled them in reading and writing both English and French, read aloud to them in French the history of the world, told them stories of great men, and infused them with American patriotism. Mrs. Welch, who had a knack for figures, took over for arithmetic. It was a program, Welch reminded them constantly, remarkably advanced. A lot of whites didn’t read and write, and almost no Indians did. They were getting a headstart in life, for which they should thank the Lord.

  After lunch came more chores and, at mid-afternoon, more lessons. After dinner he read the Scriptures to them—always in English—and told them the great Bible stories, Daniel in the lion’s den, Jonah and the whale, Jesus walking on the water and changing the water to wine (which was really grape juice, he explained), Paul being struck down on the road to Damascus. Baptiste loved these stories. And after an hour or so of Bible, they would sing hymns. Mrs. Welch played on one of her prize possessions, a clavichord. Her family had crated it over from France before they lost their modest fortune, and she had brought it to her marriage. It marked the Welch home, she thought, with a gentility rare to St. Louis, even if the Welches didn’t have any money. She didn’t know the hymns of the American Protestant backwoods, but she had a quick ear. And so “Amazing Grace” and “Nearer My God to Thee” resounded through the dusk of the Welch parlor. every evening. Baptiste loved the singing. And to bed at sunset, as there was no sense in wasting candles.

  FEBRUARY, 1815: Baptiste fretted all day on February 5. It was a warm winter’s day with ragged clouds and fitful, spitting rain, and it was his tenth birhday. He smelled something special in the air. He mooned about, hanging around the kitchen with Mrs. Welch, dawdling through his lessons, looking at Mrs. Welch with big eyes. He had to wait all the day through dinner and through the Scripture readings.

  When Baptiste heard the rapping on the door, Welch was praying aloud. Mrs. Welch c
rept away to let their guest in. William Clark stood in the doorway while Welch continued his conversation with God for some ten minutes, for the blessing of more funds to expand his work on the Lord’s behalf. Reverend Welch wanted the Brigadier General to know that he didn’t come before the Lord, or an American citizen’s right to talk with the Lord. Baptiste slipped to his feet when he saw Clark, but Clark solemnly lowered his head and Baptiste stood fidgeting the whole time, looking at Clark from under his eyebrows. At the words “In the name of our saviour, amen,” he sprinted across the room, coolly stopped, and stuck out his hand. Clark shook it with a smile. He had two packages in the other hand.

  Mrs. Welch introduced Clark to the other boys, who were duly impressed by the large, robust man in the resplendent dress uniform. He had a friendly face and a smile that said he liked to have fun too. Welch was polite but not deferential. The first package opened, the big one, held a birthday cake, and Clark produced ten candles from a coat pocket. The second he handed to Baptiste.

  The boy didn’t know what it was. It was made of shiny tin and nickel and polished wood, half a foot long, shaped like a tiny box, with a lot of square holes on one side. Baptiste looked at it a long time, then up at Clark.

  “Paump, my boy, it’s a mouth organ.” He took it and blew through the holes. It made a clash of unmusical tones. “Mrs. Welch, maybe you can operate this thing better than I,” and he handed it over. She toyed with it tentatively for a few minutes, then produced something that Baptiste could recognize as a not-quite-right melody.

  Clark handed her a piece of paper with a name and address on it. “This gentleman will call before the end of the week,” he said, “to show Paump how it makes music. I have no skill at such things, though I like a good tune. If you want him to,” he nodded at Mrs. Welch, “I’m sure he would come by from time to time to give instructions.” Mrs. Welch was pleased. It had been her idea.

  Clark stayed after the boys had eaten their cake and been sent to bed. “And how is Paump progressing?” he asked Welch.

  “Baptiste applies himself, and he’s a quick learner,” answered Welch. The Reverend didn’t like to hear Clark using the boy’s heathen name. “He’s a bit of an unbroken colt, though. Could cause trouble later if he doesn’t learn discipline.”

  “Spirit is troublesome in a boy, but helpful in a man,” Clark observed. He was fond of saying such things.

  “I hope this machine,” meaning the mouth organ, “doesn’t encourage his waywardness.” Welch considered a moment and put it diplomatically. “I think Indian boys should be at what’s useful.”

  “But he loves music so,” his wife put in boldly. Welch ignored her.

  Clark didn’t want to be party to a domestic disagreement, so he stood to take his leave. It was not his custom to involve himself in matters of strong feeling—they made him feel unclean. “You’ll let me know, I’m sure, if Paump needs anything.”

  Welch shook his hand. “Baptiste don’t need but what the other boys have,” he said. He thought better of it “But we’ll let ye know if he needs a doctor or some such.” Clark nodded gravely.

  Baptiste’s aptitude for that mouth organ amazed them all. In a couple of months the boy was playing the hymn melodies that he heard every night; in a couple of months more he was adding simple harmony to them. Mrs. Welch, impressed, asked Welch for permission to give him some musical tutoring. “He can learn to play the music,” Welch said, “that praises the Lord.” So she taught him the names of the notes and what the black spots on the lines meant, and the rests, and the differences between the clefs, and other musical paraphernalia. Quickly he was playing with both hands—one note for each hand—on the little clavichord, and before he was eleven he could play the simple four-part harmony of the hymns. When he learned a hymn well, Mrs. Welch even let him play accompaniment for the nightly singing.

  But Welch predicted that the thing would lead to trouble, and it did. Baptiste picked up by ear the French provincial songs that Mrs. Welch sang and danced with him. Then he added the music of the streets. When he went to market with Mrs. Welch—the large open-air carnival of cart peddlers that focused the city’s commerce—he heard all sorts of fascinating sounds. The Americans had their robust backwoods songs; the Negroes, who were French-speaking, had their exotic, rhythm-driven songs; the French-Canadian riverboatmen had their lusty, bawdy working songs. Baptiste would beg the peddlers to sing for him, holding back the marketing, and the peddlers were amused by the little Indian boy who could imitate their tunes on the mouth organ with scarcely a mistake. As they walked to and from the market Baptiste played the mouth organ all the way, sounding out the song he thought he remembered from the last time or the new one he had just heard. Mrs. Welch indulged him, but warned Baptiste not to try that music on the clavichord. Reverend Welch might not like it.

  “Baptiste,” said Mrs. Welch, “go tell Reverend Welch that a letter has come.” Welch and the older boys were slaughtering, out behind the barn. Baptiste couldn’t resist playing a tune as he walked. It was a Spanish fandango, a lively thing, and it made him lilt as he moved. He deliberately didn’t quit playing until after he was within Welch’s hearing range.

  The Reverend glared at him. “There’s a letter for you,” Baptiste said, growing afraid. Welch didn’t answer. He ripped the instrument out of the boy’s hands and stuck it in a hip pocket. Then he marched off toward the house. Welch was not a man to beat boys; he thought that punishment should be mental and emotional because that counted for more. He took the mouth organ away for a month, and called off Baptiste’s keyboard lessons for a week. When he let the lessons start again, he told Baptiste bluntly that he was to play only hymns, and no music for dancing or the divil’s other fancies.

  OCTOBER, 1815: One morning after Baptiste angered Welch—he was expecting a stern regimen of chores and an after-dinner lecture—Baptiste got pulled off duties to go see William Clark. Clark lived clear across town—from the outskirts on the southwest to the northeast corner near the river—but Baptiste was ten and could go alone. He took the mouth organ to play on the way; he wasn’t allowed out often, and could take the occasion to wander around without Welch’s knowing.

  Baptiste liked to visit Clark. Welch’s house was a primitive affair, made of posts that supported cross-ties, filled in with a paste of mud and straw, and covered with whitewash. It was only one story, had a big fireplace, and uneven slat floors. There were four rooms plus the detached, lean-to kitchen—the parlor, the dining room (which served as schoolroom and study as well), and two bedrooms, one shared by Welch’s sons and the student-boarders. In the winter it was drafty, dark, cold, and damp. But Clark’s place was handsome and elegant. The main house was of stone. It had joined walnut planks for floors, waxed and polished, with an immense center fireplace of stone in the parlor. Clark also had a separate building for the kitchen, a stable and yard, a blacksmith shop, a gunsmith shop, and a dram shop. Baptiste loved to watch Clark’s blacksmith work with the bellows and the fire, sparks flying and hammer clanging and the metal white turning to red. He also loved the parlor where Clark had collected memorabilia of the Lewis and Clark expedition—stretched hides, horns of elk and buffalo and bighorn sheep, Indian pipes, and the canoe that carried Baptiste, his mother and father, and Clark floating down the Yellowstone, When his mother and father came to St. Louis, Baptiste spent hours in that room, listening to stories of old times and the things he had done as a child.

  It was a clear October morning, cool, with a hint of autumn in the air. He could smell leaves burning somewhere, for the maples had turned to red and begun to shed. As Baptiste walked he played “All the Way to Shawnee Town Long Time Ago,” a tune he had picked up from a boatman. When he grew up, he thought he might be a boatman himself. He had seen them bring the keelboats up to the levee. The boatmen had long poles that they socketed under their shoulders and drove into the river bottom. Then they walked backwards, downriver, along a cleated running-board, pushing the boat up against the curren
t. It was hard work they did, and they sang all the while.

  A tall, solemn black man opened the door for Baptiste. “Brigadier-General Clark, please,” Baptiste said politely.

  “Governor Clark,” the black man answered without expression. Baptiste knew that, but he’d forgotten. “Governor Clark,” he said meekly. The black man led the way toward Clark’s office. Baptiste thought he looked strong just to be answering doors for someone. He knew that Clark owned the man, and wondered what it felt like to be owned. He couldn’t see anything in it.

  Clark stood up behind his big walnut desk and walked slowly toward Baptiste. He said nothing, and his face looked strangely solemn. Baptiste stuck out his hand. Clark ignored it, stepped close, and without bending over put his hands under the boy’s shoulders, lifted him, and hugged him. Pressed against Clark’s cheek, Baptiste could not see his face. He was puzzled, and a little frightened. Clark drew back a little, and Baptiste could see tears in his eyes.

  “Paump, my boy,” he said, “your mother is dead.” Baptiste looked straight into his eyes for a long time, but Clark said nothing more, and there was nothing more to see. Clark set him down. Baptiste slipped out of his encircling arm and sat down in front of the desk. Clark sat behind it.

  The boy would not look at Clark. The big man fingered a piece of paper for a while, waiting for the boy. “This letter,” he finally said, “came down from Fort Atkinson. It says that Charbonneau has sent word from west of the Arikara villages that your mother is dead. It says nothing else, nothing about how or why.”

  He pushed the letter across the desk to Baptiste. The boy didn’t pick it up, didn’t look at it, just kept staring at his knees.

  “She was a fine woman,” Clark said. “Christ, she was.” He grimaced.

  Baptiste kept looking down. At last he stood up, walked around the desk, and offered Clark his hand. Clark shook it. Baptiste turned and marched out of the office, through the parlor where the black man was polishing something, and out the front door. Then he slowed down and wandered along the street.