by Win Blevins
Welch did beat him that night. He took off his heavy leather belt and strapped Baptiste on the legs with it. He did it in front of Mrs. Welch and the eight other boys, them just gawking. Baptiste felt himself hating Welch as the strap cut into his calves, but he just stared at the Reverend coldly. Welch turned the belt end for end and hit him with the cinch, which hurt deeply. Baptiste thought of hitting the bastard back, but he felt humiliated at being watched, so he couldn’t hate completely.
He went straight to bed and lay there rubbing the welts on his legs. He made up his mind that next time Welch beat him, he would lambast the bastard.
Baptiste was surprised the next morning that Welch did not send him to Clark. Welch intended to show that he could handle discipline by himself. Baptiste was glad he meant to try.
JULY, 1821: The next time Baptiste saw Blue, she was with Mike and Bill, and Baptiste felt uncomfortable around them. He drank some whisky sociably, to show that he knew how and to let them see something of a mysterious new air in him. He left before long. Blue had given no hint of what had happened, or what might yet happen.
He went down to the levee with Jim and Winney a couple of times and watched the keelboats being unloaded, joshing with the boatmen. Winney was as relaxed and easy as if they had never made it together. A couple of weeks later, though, he found her alone late in the afternoon. They screwed in the dark on the deck of one of the boats. Winney told him that she had done it on the deck of a boat before, but she wouldn’t say with whom. She hinted that she had done it more than once.
He did take Blue again when Mike and Bill were gone up the Ohio, twice. The second time she said she didn’t reckon he had any money. He answered that he didn’t, so she said to bring her some whisky, or some’p’n anyway, next time he came.
SEPTEMBER, 1821: Welch had been sniping at Baptiste for a week: He was loafing, Welch muttered, or he was dawdling, or he was hanging out with low people. No telling what all he was up to, or rather he would stoop to. Baptiste knew perfectly well that “what all” meant boozing and whoring, which were so evil that Welch could only bring himself to hint darkly at them. Welch angled these grumblings at him obliquely. Baptiste turned a deaf ear.
On Thursday he was late for dinner—he’d been down to the levee. “It be disrespectful, boy,” Welch said loudly, “not to show up here when you’re supposed to.” (En famille the language had by now switched from French to English, since St. Louis was, increasingly, an American city.) Baptiste just circled the table and took his accustomed place; he avoided Welch’s eyes, and was careful to sit properly and not slouch. He doubted it would work this time.
Welch glared at him. “I’ll see ye in private after dinner.” Baptiste nodded; he didn’t want to throw fuel on the fire.
“Why don’t ye mind me when I speak, boy?” Welch said in the kitchen when the others had left. He was already starting to unhitch his leather belt.
Baptiste held up one hand pacifyingly. He held Welch’s eyes for a moment. “I’d like to tell you,” he said in his most adult tone. Welch was taken aback.
“Ordinarily I would listen to someone with more experience of the world than I have,” Baptiste went on. “But I have good reason not to. You have told me fairy stories since I was small. You have misrepresented the world to me.” He was surprised at how easily the words came out, and how measured they sounded. “You told me fairy stories about a God, Mr. Welch. Fairy stories about heaven and hell. About me being born sinful and rotten. About my mother being damned to hell.”
He felt that he might explode with exhilaration: He was getting away with it. “You taught me to see things that aren’t there. You taught me guilt and fear. When I wasn’t old enough to question you, much less know better. That’s a crime against a child, Mr. Welch. And I resent the hell out of it.”
Welch looked stupefied. Baptiste wheeled and marched out of the house. Safe on the street, he started running. He walked evenly into Clark’s house and asked permission to stay a couple of days.
Clark judged the situation shrewdly. From Welch he got hints of Baptiste’s debauchery; from Baptiste he got exaggerated, passionate stories about Welch’s tyranny. So Clark offered Baptiste a proposition: Paump could go to live with Honoré again; after all, he was nearly seventeen and didn’t need chaperoning, and Clark wanted him out about the town to learn its ways. In return, Paump was to apply himself to lessons from Father Neil every morning, and was to start learning the fur trade in the afternoons. Clark would secure a position for him, and Paump might even get some pocket change from the job. Agreed.
The position, apprentice clerk, was with Berthold & Chouteau, merchants and fur traders. The company had three buildings—the Berthold house, which was a store on the first floor and a dwelling on the second, and two storage sheds east of the house close to the levee. Sometimes Baptiste would spend the afternoon bundling deerskins or beaver pelts (called “plews”) for storage, or counting furs brought in and issuing warehouse receipts for them, or taking care of the stock at the rear of the store, or clerking for the buyers of linen, flour, clothes, nails, and other miscellaneous goods. He much preferred working in the front of the store. He found it easy and pleasant to chat with the ladies who came in, and to banter with their children. They seemed to like him: He was affable, quick with a quip, charming, and nice-looking—altogether a curiosity for an Indian.
Baptiste was learning something of the nature of power with Berthold & Chouteau. Bartholomew Berthold was an immigrant merchant. Born in the Italian Tyrol, he had made his way to St. Louis with some salable provision which the isolated frontier town needed and put himself into business. A few years later he married the daughter of Pierre Chouteau, Sr., a member of the landed French family headed by the patriarchal Auguste Chouteau. A little later, Berthold formed a partnership with Pierre Chouteau, Jr., and expanded into fur-trading.
The fur trade was the nerve center of St. Louis commerce. It provided the goods that the town traded to New Orleans (and to the eastern United States) for cloth, hemp, tobacco, whisky, screws, nails, molasses—everything needed for daily consumption. And it supplied the money for St. Louis and all of the Missouri Territory. Coined U.S. currency was scarce in the territory. Spanish reales and French livres were common, and had been accepted means of exchange for years. But that still left money, a commodity you could carry in your pocket and trade for goods, altogether short. Some banks had issued paper money, but it was of dubious value; merchants had, on their own, issued pieces of paper valid for exchange at the stores—but some of them took the liberty of handing out far more than they could redeem. So the fur companies issued “money” that gained wide circulation and confidence in the Territory—deerskin notes, or bons. When a trapper or hunter brought his skins to the warehouse, the clerk gave him a receipt for so many bons, good at St. Louis for so many reales or livres or piastres, and the trapper traded the receipts for goods. The fur merchants became the community’s bankers.
Besides, the U.S. government intended to encourage the fur trade. Fur-trading in the great area of the Louisiana Purchase would secure the claim of the U.S. to the vast territory, it would establish relations with the Indians—the hope was for peaceful relations—it would diminish British influence in the area and keep John Bull on his own side of the 49th parallel. So the names of the most influential men in St. Louis attached themselves to the trade: Chouteau, Berthold, Pratte, Lisa, Clark, Lewis (Meriwether’s brother Reuben), Labbadie, Henry. Within two years General William Ashley would launch a major fur-trading enterprise, and not long after, Pratte, Berthold, and Chouteau would join hands with the biggest name of all, John Jacob Astor and his American Fur Company. The trade was patriotic, it was profitable, and, most of all, it was powerful.
Baptiste assembled hints and glimmerings during his afternoons with Berthold & Chouteau into a shadowy but large picture of power and influence in the world of the white men. His mother wanted him to discover the secret of the white man’s big medicine. The fir
st secret was knowledge; the second was enterprise; the third, subordinate but crucial, seemed to be social influence.
Baptiste was pleased one afternoon when he overheard one of the customers, the wife of a prominent American merchant, remark of him to another woman, “I wish more of our own young men had as much decorum.” He was taking care to make himself charming to his customers, asking about their children, telling them what Mrs. So-and-so had said, and what the Such-and-such boy was doing. He dressed smartly, though he had to press Clark for money from the Bureau of Indian Affairs for his clothes. He was aware that he carried himself well and had certain social poise. He bided his time.
Baptiste still dropped around to see his friends—lazing with Jim and Winney, drinking with Mike, Bill, and Blue. He was popular among the trappers and the boatmen, and a welcome figure on occasion at the Green Tree Tavern, where he entertained everyone with dance music from his mouth organ. Sometimes, when Mike and Bill were away, he went to see Blue for the night on the Row, but his welcome there was unpredictable. Winney grew a little cold; she talked scornfully about his dalliance with the fashionable white world. Besides, she let him know she was mostly interested in putting out for pay. He and Jim also made a new friend—a tall, muscular, shy, awkward boy who was apprenticed to another blacksmith, Jim Bridger. They liked him, but he was slow and oddly serious, so not much fun.
Baptiste cleaved this part of his life cleanly away from the other part. He would work late at the store and then accept an invitation to dinner with the Bertholds upstairs before wandering over to the tavern for a late-hour drink. He contrived a couple of times to be invited to call, with the Bertholds, on Auguste Chouteau on Sunday afternoon. Chouteau claimed to remember their meeting at Clark’s house some years ago, and complimented the young man expansively on his self-cultivation. Baptiste paid attention primarily to the men at these gatherings, because he felt a touch of frost when he attended the women and the girls. When he went to a few dances—dancing was the favorite pastime of the French community—he was careful to dance amiably and courteously with as many women as he could, including women old enough to be his mother. They invariably remarked on his politeness and deportment. But he scrupulously showed no personal interest in any eligible young woman. Sometimes, after dances, he went to the Row to sleep with Blue, or with Blue’s friend Kiki.
JANUARY, 1822. On New Year’s day, Baptiste made several resolves, among them to keep a diary. Father Neil had insisted that he keep a daily record of his moral progress for a long time—a log of achievements and lapses after the model of Ben Franklin—and Father had inspected it regularly. Now Baptiste started his own private record of progress by his own standards, which were social and material:
JANUARY 2: “Madame Berthold, having found me late at work in the store, invited me to accompany her upstairs to dinner, as indeed I hoped she would. However, made no headway with M. Berthold’s reserve, but some with Mme. Berthold. by an effort (subtle, I hope and believe) to be entertaining.”
JANUARY 5: “Worked late to no avail; found Kiki at the Green Tree. I told her (falsely) it was my birthday and she afforded me an unmentionable present. Drank too much and stayed too late; was listless all day at the warehouse; must maintaine caution.”
JANUARY 7: “To the Bertholds again for dinner, a good evening: Talked at length with Coco, naturally under the eye of Mme. Berthold. Coco has the promise of a splended woman at 17—a full head of flambouyantly red hair, a slight but attractive figure, and a face that, if not beautiful, is always full of impishness and fun. Laughs rather too heavily; Mme. Berthold, I believe, would like to refine away that laugh and touch of the hoyden which remains in her character. She has a quick mind and is widely read, for a girl, and talks avidly about books. I wonder.”
JANUARY 12: “At dinner with the Bertholds again (also on the 9th) which I hope and I believe will be an on-going event. Coco was pleased, I had almost finished the Plutarch’s Lives which she lent me, and we had a lively discussion about the models it presents. Mme. Berthold was surprised, charmed, and amused that I had actually read it; I think she cannot quite believe that half-breeds can read, or else she takes their reading as an engaging parlor trick. Coco otherwise.”
JANUARY 16: “General Clark comended me on my deportment today, and gave me $12 for new clothing of which I find myself truly in need.”
JANUARY 16: “Told Coco that Paradise Lost was not to my liking; a declaration which may have marked me as somewhat barbarrous. Had not the courage to admit that I had even less regard for Pilgrim’s Progress. This connection seems to be working out. If I succeed here, I believe it will prove an entrée to St. Louis’s social world. A grand opportunity which I must not muff.”
JANUARY 18: “We read Racine’s Phèdre aloud tonight, Coco as Phèdre, myself and Francine the rest in some confusion. Mme. Berthold, kniting as she attended, was much amused by our performance, but complimented me on my French, perhaps condescendingly. I cannot sleep now for remembering what transpired during the evening, and perhaps more for dreaming of what may yet transpire between myself and Coco. Am I falling in love with her? I fear that. If I am to approach her, I must maintain complete poise. The ramifications could be most dangerous, and I must not permit myself to be transported on these waves of strong feelings, like a love-sick fool.”
JANUARY 21: “Took The Tempest, which was not familiar to Coco, to read tonight. Hearing her quaint English reciting the bard’s Ariel and Miranda was most droll; I myself rendered a vociferous Caliban which made Francine laugh.”
JANUARY 22: “Rummed the plews in the warehouse today and got somewhat inebriated. The others rummers chuckled at my expense: They had not informed me that in ramming plews, as an antitoxin one must first rum oneself. Went to the Row in the evening for the first time in a long while.”
JANUARY 24: “May have made an arse of myself at the Berthold’s last night. After dinner. Coco and I converssing on the sofa, and I kept breathing the smell of her (some fine parfum no doubt bought from a Paris house, light, delicate, and sweet). She was most coquettish. I lost my tongue to the fool smell. I fear that Mme. Berthold may have opined that I comported myself like a doltish boy. Berthold always is down stairs at his ledgers. I am enamored of Coco. Would she lead me on just to spurn me? She appears to be too good-hearted for that. I cannot be sure, though; a breed cannot be sure.”
JANUARY 25: “Fr. Neil reprimmanded me today that I have not applied myself ‘accidously’ (sp.?) to my lessons at the clavichord and the organ and to my studies. A just charge. I have the ability to go far, to be as cultured as any Frenchman in these parts, and I must not neglect the advantage.”
JANUARY 27, 1822: His eye caught Coco through the window, heading into the store instead of going upstairs to the family apartment. “Call Louis from the back and come to the bookstore with me. It will be all right.” He slipped his apron off and she gave him a big smile. “Canady told Papa my books are in. That’s the Byron Poems and the Ivanhoe.”
When they started back from the bookstore, it was in the half-light of an unseasonably warm day. They walked in a roundabout way to stay on paved streets. (The new paving made the old French residents curse because it broke their wooden cartwheels.) A thaw was on. There was no sense in getting muddy or getting splashed by passing wagons. There was also no reason to hurry.
Coco was leafing through the Byron. She stopped to read a short lyric aloud to Baptiste in her chirping English. He stood close so that he could see the page. When she looked up at him to say with her eyes how fine the last line was, he slipped an arm around her waist and kissed her tentatively. She pulled away and looked seriously at him. Then she kissed him back, and she meant it. He was kissing her more eagerly when she broke it off. She took his hand, touched his shoulder with her head for a moment, and they walked home. Baptiste was rampaging with elation and confusion and fear and eagerness. He was also embarrassed. His pants bulged like they were trying to hide a wagon tongue.
Duri
ng dinner and in the parlor afterwards they were most discreet, sitting well apart and permitting themselves no more than sly looks. Baptiste did lapse into long silences a couple of times, awkward, ungracious, uncharacteristic silences. He was looking at Coco and wondering whether she was a virgin. He was afraid that would be a barrier. By the time Mme. Berthold proclaimed herself tired, he had made up his mind that she was a virgin, and that it would be a barrier. Coco managed to squeeze his hand quickly in the hall as he left—there wasn’t time for more—and he didn’t care about barriers. He was in love.
JANUARY 31: Baptiste’s diary: “Am I the tinker’s lamebrained, hare-lipped son? Four straight evenings have I been late at the Bertholds dallying with Coco—dallying because I have scarce more than kissed her sweetly on the lips. Why do I tap timorously on the door when I ought, like the intruder at Macbeth’s gate, to cudgel it until it swings wide? I play the lackey in this affair, when I should be playing the knight gallant. If I try that, I may end up playing the knight errant. But I must, must, must try.”
FEBRUARY 2: “A day of mixed clouds, foreshadowing nothing—rien. A splendid evening: No especial progress with Coco, though I think she turned away my explorations less promptly than before. Still I am transported. With her and her alone do I feel and believe that I can be happy, for the present, with stolen kisses; such extraordinary kisses they are. And there is her strict background to consider. Altogether I am a happy man, supremely happy when I can touch her and hear her voice.”
FEBRUARY 4, 1822: Thinking it over, Mme Berthold reached a conclusion. Doubtless the flirtation was innocent, though looking at the Indian boy she sometimes wondered how innocent. She liked the boy, liked his adolescent graciousness and his obvious desire to please. But if the children intended to go beyond innocent play—Coco was no longer a child, really—she would have to put a stop to it. So when they went to Coco’s room on the transparent premise of finding a book, she delayed for a few minutes and walked in on them.
