Snowbound and Eclipse

by Richard S. Wheeler

  “I wish I could do it all over,” he said. “I wish I could start upriver with the Corps of Discovery again, and try it once more.”

  “What for?”

  “To avoid the mistakes I made,” he said.

  “Mistakes are what a discovery trip is all about,” I said. “I don’t know of any anyway. There was not a decision, an act, a choice, that you would want to change.”

  He looked at me so desolately that I felt chilled.

  Then he gazed out his window, and I sensed that old sadness was stealing through him again. I had seen it so often, but I had always seen his own vital force, his enthusiasm, his strong character triumph over the perfidy of his feelings. He could be melancholic for an hour or two, and then spring into action as if no gloom had ever filtered through his mind.

  “You know, Meriwether, nothing prevents you from going upriver again,” I said.

  “Bates does. I cannot leave here with Bates undermining everything I am and every step I take.”

  “No, not even Bates keeps you here,” I said. “If you need to walk that ground again, walk to the shining mountains, see the black herds of buffalo, then go walk it. Resign. I wish I could go with you.”

  He said nothing, but somehow I knew his mind was far upstream.

  32. LEWIS

  The intermittent fever afflicts more and more; I have had moments when I am delirious. Today, Monday, June 19, has been such a day. I saw Lisa and the last keelboat off on Saturday, but came only briefly to the levee because I am indisposed.

  I have debated for weeks about seeing Dr. Saugrain again. I have dosed myself with my mother’s simples rather than submit myself to another misdiagnosis. But now I’m at wit’s end and scarcely know how to treat the disease. He is, after all, one of the most eminent physicians in America, and I thought I might consult him about doses.

  I visited him at his chambers near me on Rue L’Eglise, and found him occupied with a Creole mother whose infant wailed pitiably through the varnished door. He bade me wait in his anteroom, and was in no hurry to see me. But at last he dismissed the woman and welcomed me coolly.

  “Your Excellency,” he said, without warmth.

  “I am here about doses,” I said abruptly.

  He nodded, his sharp eyes taking in my entire condition in a glance.

  “Sit yourself there,” he said, rummaging among his diagnostic tools.

  “I’m not here for an examination. I’m here because my extract of cinchona does not seem to be controlling the fevers.”

  He grunted and ignored me.

  “Open your mouth wide,” he said, and peered in, using a small mirror to see what was to be seen.

  “Quinine is not the only powder you are taking,” he said. “You are taking heavy doses of mercury.”

  “That’s because I need a purgative.”

  “Is it?”

  He peered at my eyes. “Enlarged pupils,” he said. “Which opiate is it that you employ?”

  “Dover’s powder.”

  “Ah.”

  He listened to my chest with his horn, and ran his practiced finger over the lumps in my face, examined my hands and feet, and looked at my nostrils.

  Then he straightened, his small body radiating his special dignity.

  “Your Excellency, it is time to face what must be faced,” he said.

  “It’s ague. Malarial fever.”

  “If it was ague, the quinine would be sovereign. Do you suffer chills so violent that no blanket warms you and you shake for hours under a heap of them, and then suffer high fever and profuse sweating?”

  I had no reply to that, and stared mutely.

  “Then perhaps your self-diagnosis lacks science,” he said archly.

  He turned his back to me, perhaps to free me from that piercing gaze that seemed to unearth everything within my heart. He stared out the window, and then began softly.

  “Lues venerea. Just as I have said, monsieur.”

  “No!”

  “How much mercury chloride do you take?”

  I started to reply, but he interrupted. “It is ten times too much. So much mercury in your brain; it ruins you even before the venereal does.”

  I started to protest, but stopped. He was all wrong.

  He spoke gently now. “I can perhaps help a little. In the third stage, Governor, mercury does little good. It helps momentarily, yes. It provides less and less relief, and then no help at all. You are there, at that lamentable point, most regrettably. The disease advances on its own schedule, shall we say. I recollect cautioning you to keep the doses small; that would have been better for the sake of your mind. Now I would prescribe no doses at all.”

  “It’s not the venereal,” I said.

  He simply ignored my protest. “How much of the powder?”

  “I don’t know. Whenever I need it.”

  “Two a day; three a day?”

  “One at night.”

  “And how many by day?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied.

  “Nothing is gained by not knowing. Something is gained by knowing every fact, every dose, every risk.”

  “Two, three.”

  “I advised, Your Excellency, that you not imbibe spirits, because they hasten the disease. I trust you have abstained?”

  “No, and don’t speak of it again!”

  He did not recoil from my biliousness, but let it pass.

  “A gill, two gills a day, perhaps?”

  “Wine and porter.”

  “A carafe or two?”

  “I have no idea.” I was utterly out of sorts and ready to throw on my stock and coat and escape. But in fact a great heaviness was stealing my resolve from me. I felt ashamed of my maltreatment of him.

  “Forgive me,” he said. I felt his hand on my shoulder. “I am merciless, but with a purpose.”

  I watched motes of dust play in the midday sun pouring through his window, and felt the ticking of the eternal clock.

  “May we proceed, Your Excellency?”

  I nodded.

  “You ask about doses. Ah … The dose I recommend, I plead with you, is nothing of mercury. Nothing of the Peruvian bark. Nothing of Dover’s powder or laudanum. Nothing of spirits or wine or ale. Sunlight, fresh air, putting aside that which worries you, vegetables …”

  I knew I would not heed his prescription, but said nothing.

  “You spoke to me once of your mother’s simples, the herbs she gathers. Try them without the mercury, Your Excellency, but let science be your guide. Experiment. Observe results. Discard the failures.”

  “You have no cure, then.”

  “The disease sometimes cures itself. Pray that it will.”

  “You have nothing to offer me.”

  He stared again out the window. “No. Some physicians are experimenting with toxic metals. Poisons. Small doses of arsenic. I see little in it. I do not recommend it. Mon Dieu! The risk! Medicine is in its infancy. Someday there will be cures. I am a rationalist.”

  I sensed the man’s helplessness.

  I have an incurable disease. All that remained for me in this savant’s lair was a schedule for my doom.

  “What will happen?” I asked curtly.

  “You might survive many years. Then again, you might not.”

  “Do better than that, Doctor.”

  He shrugged, that petite Gallic expression of submission I knew so well. “The disease attacks each mortal differently,” he said.

  “I am talking about me, not the human race.”

  He nodded. “When your mind is clouded, when your memory fades, when your judgment lapses, when your hand disobeys and your handwriting falters, when your phantasms and demons crowd your mind, you will know that paresis is upon you.” He anticipated me. “Paresis is the madness often resulting from the final stage of lues venerea.”

  “I’ll know? Some mad people don’t know it.”

  “The paretic usually knows.”

  “And others? Will they see it?” I as
ked, for that was the crux of the matter.

  He nodded.

  “It can’t be hidden?”

  “Not to the discerning eye.”

  “And it will be visible in my flesh?”

  He sighed. “It already is, Your Excellency.”

  “Will they be studying me, hunting for the lumps in my face, the oddity of my conduct?”

  He stared out the window. “It is a cruel disease and the world treats its victims with utmost cruelty. They condemn the victim. They even laugh at him, for his indiscretions are naked before the world. The moralists rant. The gossips buzz. The ladies flee. Daughters receive lectures from their mothers about the secret vices of men and how to spot them. It is the snake in the Garden of Eden, slithering through good society, reminding them all that it could strike them dead. It is a pity, this barbarous intolerance, monsieur. No one pities the victim. No one tenderly assists him.”

  “What is done with such people?”

  “They are hidden away by families. The uncle in the attic.”

  “The musty old bachelor.”

  He tried to reassure me. “Do not despair. You will have good times. Maybe years. Live well and slow the progress of the indisposition.”

  I straightened. “I am a public man. What is your advice?” I asked directly.

  “When the time comes to withdraw from public life, you will know, Your Excellency. It will be plain. But even after you withdraw into private life, you will have good days, time to write and think and prepare your papers. The disease will not kill you soon. It often takes eight or ten years from infection, and you have been infected only four.”

  “You are treating John Shields. How is he doing?”

  The little Frenchman paused, trembled, and summoned his courage, plainly seeking words. “He is gravely ill, my captain. I do not expect him to last a month.”

  “Of lues venerea?”

  The doctor nodded.

  “The same as mine?”

  “From his liaison with the Shoshones, yes.”

  I had no time at all. I thanked the diminutive doctor, dressed, and headed into the bitter sunlight, a doomed man, bearing his badge of shame for all the world to see.

  33. LEWIS

  I don’t remember such a beautiful summer, the breeze so caressing and the mornings so aglow. The presence of death gilds the world. This July of eighteen and nine I have taken to walking the verdant bank of the majestic river, the mightiest artery of the republic, marveling that so much water from such distant country is rolling toward the sea. What small slice of it is from the headwaters of the Missouri? From the Jefferson River, where we left Louisiana to cross the continental divide?

  What stories that restless water could tell me; of painted Indians warring on its banks; of shamans praying to their spirits; of fat beaver patiently building their dams of aspen; of countless buffalo drinking from it or paddling across it; of cottonwoods toppling into it; of dust storms turning it to mud; and of the bones of the dead that it rolls and tumbles to some great continental grave in the delta beyond New Orleans.

  I walk through tender green timothy and bromegrass and orchard grasses and rustling leaves and thickets of brush and cattailed swamps, stirring up moths and butterflies, so that I might embrace a clean world and leave a befouled one behind me. I am finding sanctuary in nature.

  I have always walked. On the great trip I walked while the others rowed and poled. My legs still sing under me, enjoy the rhythmic steps, sweep me along and never tire. I have spotted species of sedges and swamp flowers and lilies that tax my memory and might be unknown to botany; but now I do not pluck them. I reverence them alive and let their discovery await other eyes and other times. I have a horror just now of plucking anything to its death. I want to leave each bloom unmolested, and to see alertness in the eye of each creature. Life itself is the greatest gift.

  Sometimes the past clasps me until I groan with memories. If I were to keep on walking I would arrive at the confluence of the Missouri, and if I never stopped, I might make the Mandan villages by fall and find a lodging with Big White; the captain and the chief united once again. I might taste succulent, tender buffalo hump again, and live in buckskin clothing that armors against the wind, and watch the savages howl and dance around their fires as sparks fly into the night. But the yearning passes, and I return to St. Louis after each hike, weary but uplifted by every natural thing I meet. For a little while, anyway, I will free myself from the webs of fate.

  This is the river of death. I see mutilated catfish, their bellies chalky white, drifting toward the bayous. I have watched dead crows and terns and sparrows drift by, feathery on the water, en route to the sea. In time, the waters that flow by me will rifle every vault, melt every bone, and empty all the death of a continent into the Gulf of Mexico. I have watched the water flow through the ribby ruins of a buffalo, and watched the waters sluice the naked skeletons of cottonwoods and willows to the sea. All manner of things pass St. Louis, but death most of all.

  I am reminded of these things but do not dwell upon them. For even as disease devours my flesh and eats my soul, I redouble my efforts to strengthen Louisiana. I have called a territorial council this summer. There are urgent matters to attend. The British furtively war upon us and mean to take us back into their empire. They have never believed their own defeat and will need another lesson.

  The embargo has stopped our shipments of furs to Europe, so St. Louis languishes in debt and despair. Its warehouses bulge with rank-smelling peltries and skittering bugs, and some prominent citizens cannot afford the meanest tax.

  I have seen Antoine Saugrain frequently, and he has gently and tenderly taught me the signs of my own decay: memory loss, lapses of judgment, difficulty with speech, an uneven hand that shows up in blots and tiny or oversized letters or crossed-out words, fits of unseemly passion, ranting, puzzlement, and above all, incoherence. I face those things. I, Meriwether Lewis, face incoherence, when I will blubber out words that do not connect and defy logic. I face the end of my very self, and that thought is more than I can endure.

  He teaches me to understand my decline, for it is the only thing he has still to give me: the stigmata of my doom on my hands and feet, the cruel ciphers of the devil getting his usury for one voluptuous moment. That is the medicine the doctor portions out for me; that and a profound and sad affection he has formed for me, and a willingness to share in my desolation. The little doctor has become the physician of my soul. He charges but little now, but always manages to comfort me.

  I do not always heed his counsel, and he has stopped chiding me. I take my powders when I need them because I am desperate for them, and I drink spirits at the balls and parties I attend to conceal my affliction and drug away the pain and fever when they pounce. The world sees nothing of any of this, for I still cut a fine figure, but no one, especially the women, has ever looked deeply into the eyes of their governor and seen the hell within.

  Mr. Bates braced me again the other day. He has a catalogue of injuries which he writes down in the ledgers of his soul, and now that list is heavier than he can carry. He imagines himself a good official watching zealously over the public purse. I see him as an obstructionist, stopping my projects, quibbling about authority, finding fault with my every act, and spreading his toxins through St. Louis. He would have me leave for Washington so he might govern in my absence. I have no plans to go, but he has found the perfect way to force me: I will have to go east to answer his complaints.

  “Do you think I don’t know about your powders? I have friends all over St. Louis!” he snapped. “You have no secrets from me, sir. Not all your high connections can save you!”

  “My ague?” I asked.

  “Ha!” he snapped.

  “Mr. Bates, do you want my office? Is that what this is about?”

  “Never, sir. I am no usurper. I would be your loyal second, if you were but to consult me, but you never do.”

  “What can I do to reconcile us?”

>   “Nothing. It is a breach that cannot be bridged. You have earned my enmity, sir, and your very presence offends me.”

  I kept trying. “I assure you, sir, I am willing to listen and consider, and if I am misguided, I am willing to undo my arrangements.”

  He paused, nonplussed for once.

  “Give me specifics, Mr. Bates. Would you care to discuss my diplomacy with the Upper Missouri tribes? Are you content with the agents? Do I coddle the hostile tribes too much?”

  “I have no desire to press my views upon you; it would only stay your course.”

  I proceeded doggedly. “My appointments to office. You object to most of them. Pray tell me, what is wrong with, say, Boone?”

  Bates drew himself up. “We have talked too much. I will not give you one bone to chew on. Go counsel with the high and mighty.”

  I saw how it would go. “Set your own course, then,” I said sharply.

  That is the polite expression of a complete rupture. Except for our official duties, we need have no other congress. He stalked out of my office, as if even that final caution was an insult to his prickly person instead of a way of accommodating each other while harnessed to the same wagon.

  I stood at my desk, processing this latest bloodletting, and slowly took heart.

  I plan to endure. I will heal myself and proceed. I have let nothing slide and prosecute all manner of agendas to make this western border safe and secure and profitable, and a gem in the diadem of the republic.

  I sometimes think the madness is upon me. I often walk to a place three miles up the river where there is a certain stony bluff that affords a view of the great blue Mississippi and the distant shores of the Illinois country rolling away. And there, I gaze upon life and death and think that the world is indescribably beautiful, that all of creation sings to me, every bumblebee and tern and eagle and field mouse and daisy. I go quite mad with joy, feeling the blood pulse in my veins and the moist earth-scented wind inflate my lungs, and the voice of the wilderness clawing my bosom.

  And there I know I am a man, and will fight a man’s fight, and will depart from a better world than the one into which I was born because I have set my gifts upon its altar. No matter that disease robs me of all but youth; my name will be remembered.