Snowbound and Eclipse

by Richard S. Wheeler

  “Julia, I hope you’ll continue our Sunday open houses.”

  She nodded.

  “Be my eyes and ears.”

  “General, I’ll leave the affairs of state to the men.”

  “You’ll hear more when I’m not around than when I am. Write me at Mulberry Hill.”

  “Will you have room in your bags for a few things?”

  “A few. I’m packing light.”

  She wallowed to her feet and pulled some muslin from a drawer. It was bold crewelwork, orange, sea green, azure, enough to cover the seat of a chair. “This is for Harriet,” she said. “Can you put it in oilcloth?”

  Harriet Kennedy is her cousin, and I have a soft place in me for her. I promised I would. “She’ll like it, and like word of you,” I said.

  “Will you get to Fincastle?”

  “I intend to.”

  “Then I’ll have a letter for the colonel. You’ll take it, won’t you?”

  “Julia, I wouldn’t miss a chance to see your family. I’ll tell Colonel Hancock and everyone there that you’re fine, our boy’s fine, and Louisiana’s fine.”

  “Are you going to Ivy?”

  “Yes. I want to see Meriwether. And his family, too, but I want to check on him.”

  “Because he’s indisposed?”

  I nodded. Actually, I feared he might not be coming back to St. Louis, though I had never voiced that idea, even to Julia.

  “What is the matter with him, Will?”

  “He has a fever. It comes and goes.”

  “I hear it’s affecting him. It’s something horrible, isn’t it? His mind’s going, isn’t it? Whatever could it be?”

  I didn’t illumine her. I was sure it was the venereal but I didn’t really want her to know the nature of his indisposition. There are things to keep from a delicate woman. It has been clear to me for some while, but something I keep to myself. His vials and powders tell me much. The bills from Doctor Saugrain we recorded among his debts tell me more. But most of all, the ruin of his face, his eyes, his shuffling gait, his bewilderment, tell me the whole of it.

  I marvel that I chose prudence all those days and nights with the Corps of Discovery. I cannot call it love or saving myself for Julia; I am an army man. I have ordinary virtues, and few enough of those. Just caution. Because of my caution, which stayed me for nearly three years, my life is full and blessed and complete.

  Because of a moment of incaution, Meriwether is probably lost to public life. I need to know, and in particular I need to know whether that miracle worker, Lucy Marks, has any remedies. I will stop in Ivy not only to see an old and beloved friend, but to discover a verdict.

  Julia caught me in my reverie.

  She lifted a soft hand and pressed her fingers to my cheek. “I’ll miss you, my general.”

  I am not a man who fancies up words to present to a lady, so I just smiled and winked. She hugged me, and I hugged her mightily.

  42. LEWIS

  We floated downstream in a searing sun, the distant shores lost in white haze, the September light so fierce that even the veteran river men squinted from bloodred eyes and wiped away tears.

  I huddled in the cabin of this one-way vessel. In New Orleans it would be broken up for scrap, its planks sold along with its cargo of buffalo hides. Its derangement and mine were foreordained.

  I too floated down the river of life, helpless in my makeshift body, a prisoner being taken where I would not go. Boulieu, whose flatboat this was, kept a sullen eye on me, his frown shouting invectives at me though he said not a word. The damp heat sucked life from my lungs. My man, Pernia, sat beside me in the choked gloom of the cabin, his furtive glances telling me that I was under guard.

  I sweat from every pore, soaking my pantaloons and cotton shirt. I drank, defying their forbidding stares, finding my only solace in the raw Missouri whiskey in my jug. I was fevered again, but what did it matter?

  Often the Creoles abandoned the tiller, and the flatboat careened ever southward, the torpid water slapping its planks; but other times when the channel veered into sullen swamps, or rounded a headland, they were all busy sounding and steering and studying the colors of the turgid water.

  Yesterday at such a time I slipped to the larboard to relieve myself, and again I careened off the gunnel, the gloomy water inviting my company, but Boulieu spoiled the moment. I saw my face in the dark and mysterious waters. The ripples severed my image and mended it again, and I perceived myself as a boneless specter wobbling on the waters. Then I felt his harsh hand clasp my shirt and pull me back. He pushed me into the bilge and wagged a massive finger.

  “Governor, I tie you up, oui?”

  “Sunstroke,” I said.

  He grunted.

  That was all he said, but he entered the cabin, found my jug, and pitched it into the river. I watched it bob, roll, and sink. I have more in my trunks, a flask of good absinthe. He did not know of my powders. He did not know anything about me except that I am the governor of Upper Louisiana and a noted man he was transporting to New Orleans, not perdition. He did not know that his plank boat and my body were one and the same prison.

  Pernia helped me back into the shade, his mottled face fierce with shame. “You lie down; the fever don’t go away if you’re out in the sun.”

  I suffered Pernia’s rebuke.

  We came this afternoon of September 11 upon a curious loop of the river, and for a while bore north and west, the shoulders of the stream carrying me, for the briefest time, toward the Rocky Mountains somewhere beyond a hundred horizons. I thought of heaven. By late afternoon the heat had eviscerated me, the odd fetid smell of the river had nauseated me, and my imprisonment at the hands of Creole warders had driven me to distraction.

  But then Boulieu himself was steering the stained and sordid scow out of the channel toward a settlement, odd little houses, innocent of whitewash or paint, with verandas on three sides to ward off the sun, mud lanes with silver puddles, rank green shrubbery choking the yards, and a stench of sewage redolent in the sultry air.

  “New Madrid,” Boulieu said, in answer to my unasked question.

  New Madrid. We had come a long way.

  My head was clear. There was something I needed to do, and swiftly.

  The boatmen poled the flatboat into a grassy bank, tied it to some acacias, and stepped ashore while solemn boys in ragged pants watched suspiciously. One held a writhing garter snake.

  “We stay here tonight,” Boulieu announced to Pernia and me.

  I stood dizzily. I hadn’t shaven, wasn’t clean, wore sweatdrenched and river-scummed clothes, and my innards felt as foul as my attire. But the heat was subsiding and my mind was as clear as the sky.

  “Is there a merchant here?” I asked a boy, once I stepped out of the prison ship and onto a humped ridge of grass along the lapping waters. New Madrid was oddly bucolic and forbidding, a sleepy hamlet with chickens roosting on the main street, but as sullen as a thundercloud.

  He must have regarded me as the equivalent of a pirate, but he pointed at a tired, whitewashed affair a block inland. I walked. Pernia followed silently, his disapproval manifest in his conduct.

  The hand-printed sign announced a market whose proprietor was one F. S. Trinchard. I reeled in, unsteady on my feet and no less fevered.

  A sallow young man rose from a stool behind the counter.

  “Writing paper?” I asked.

  He surveyed me, probably wondering if I were literate, and opened a glass case behind him. From within he extracted a sheet.

  “Pen and ink bottle?” I asked.

  He shuffled around, and placed the items before me, along with a blotter. “Half a bit,” he said.

  I was too weary to protest the inflated price, so I dug into my small coin purse and extracted a one-bit piece. I uncorked the black bottle, dipped the split quill into the bottle, shook it gently, and began my inscription:

  Will

  I bequeath all my estate, real and personal, to my Mother, Lucy
Marks, after my private debts are paid, of which a statement will be found in a small minute book deposited with Pernia, my servant.

  Then I signed it, blotted it, and handed it to the young man. “Please witness this,” I said. He read it swiftly and signed his name.

  “Thank you, Mr. Trinchard. I am fevered,” I said. “It’s a precaution.”

  “Glad to be of service, my good sir. Help availeth.”

  I patrolled his emporium looking for certain comforts of the flesh, found nothing helpful except some cinchona extract, and headed outside.

  “Keep this safe,” I said to Pernia. “It favors my mother. If anything happens, get this to her at all cost. Do not fail me in this.”

  Pernia took it. He could read a little, which was good. I watched him struggle through the text.

  The whole business had wearied me, so that my sole desire was to return to the plank bunk and collapse there upon the splinters.

  “You help me to the scow, and then you are free to go for the evening, John,” I said.

  “No, Governor, I’m right here looking after you.”

  He annoyed me. “I am quite safe.”

  He grunted something unpleasant that I took for rebuke.

  The boys had vanished, but a pair of dowdy women in bonnets surveyed the flatboat. Then they, too, hastened away, leaving only a bullfrog for company.

  Pernia opened the leather trunk that contained my journals, folded the will, and placed it within the leaf of the top journal, readily available. I watched.

  “All right. Go have a mug of stout,” I said. “Here’s a bit.”

  “Master, this is a strange place and we don’t know who’ll steal. I’m staying here to keep an eye on things.”

  That was my Pernia, a man so loyal he shamed me. But he was also dissembling. He was really there to keep an eye on me, not my chattel. The Creole crew had vanished into a public house off a way that spilled light into the mucky street, leaving only Pernia to see to it that I … did not disturb the peace.

  “Are you hungry? Thirsty, Governor?” he asked.

  I wasn’t hungry. “You could find some fresh water.”

  “There’s a spring running from a pipe,” he said.

  He eyed me, left the flatboat, which was bumping softly against the bank, and in short order returned with a pot of fresh water. It felt cool down my parched throat. I sipped the chill water again, feeling fever slide out of me and my ruined body improve.

  “Pernia, go buy me a quart,” I said. “There’s a public house over there.” I pressed six bits into his hand, watching his face writhe in protest. But he did what he was paid to do, trudged through a somnolent twilight in an unpeopled village, and then he disappeared within. I tried hard to remember the name of this place, but it eluded me.

  He returned wordlessly with a brown ceramic vessel in hand.

  “They were fixing to throw me out,” he said. “But I tell them it’s for the master. He says it’s a dollar a quart, so I says to him, fill it six bits’ worth, and he does.”

  “You are a true and faithful man, Pernia.”

  I reached for the bottle. He seemed reluctant to surrender it.

  “Maybe you should go to sleep, Governor.”

  “This will help me. I need it for pain.”

  He handed my bottle to me and shook his head. “I’ll be here, outside, so if you’re looking I’m right here.”

  That was both a jailor’s warning and a servant’s promise of service. He was too faithful, and I would need to devise some other path to gain my ends.

  I uncorked the brown bottle, mixed the spirits with the cool spring water, and sipped regularly into the hazy night, slapping at mosquitoes when they whined close to my face. Sometime or other, the Creoles returned and settled on the deck outside the cabin, where my whiskey breath and the close air wouldn’t afflict them. I wished I could remember the name of this place, but it did no good to think about it. The only reality was the fever which consumed me.

  43. CLARK

  River men carried us across the river to Cahokia on September 18, and York and I proceeded eastward through the Indiana Territory at once on two saddlers and with two packhorses. I gave York a rifle and powder flask, and we set off through forested wilderness that invited ambush from renegade Shawnee.

  Up in Vincennes, Governor William Henry Harrison was negotiating a treaty with the tribes, but there were dissidents itching to fight the incursions of white men to the death, like the prophet Tecumseh. So we progressed cautiously, our gazes examining every sign of nature, from the sudden flight of birds to unnatural silences.

  Both York and I were garbed in buckskins, which turned wind and weather well, and lasted better than fabrics. The trace was well traveled and there were shelters along the way, but there were also long stretches of thick hardwood forest that hid the sun and plunged us into gloomy cautiousness. The whir of an arrow would tell us we were too late and too few.

  In spite of the danger, I knew York was enjoying himself. All this reminded him of the Corps of Discovery and his carefree days on the long trail. And of the years when the distinction between his estate and ours blurred in his mind, until he was simply part of the company.

  I was thinking about it, too, and though neither of us spoke, we were well aware of the other’s thoughts. I enjoyed the road, the acrid smell of a horse, the feel of a good mount under me, and the occasional moments when we dismounted, stretched our legs, checked the packs, watered and grazed the horses, or surveyed the ever-changing skies.

  In fact that afternoon we scarcely said a word; nothing passed between us but my directions to him, which he acknowledged with a brief nod of his head, his dark face granitic and wary.

  I have been irritated with him for months, in fact years, but now, as he rode beside me, my anger washed away in the soft September breezes. It was a fine time of year to travel, and the forests veiled the sun and kept us cool though the midday heat was oppressive.

  The companion of my childhood and youth had experienced things unknown to most slaves, and had shown himself to be a worthy and hardworking member of our band of explorers.

  Yet he spoke not a word.

  Late that day I ventured to converse with him. “It is much like our trip west,” I said.

  He caught me in his gaze, his yellow eyes awaiting my direction.

  “That was a good trip, and you were a part of it,” I said lamely, not wanting to compliment him or inflate him. Why was I having such trouble talking to a slave?

  He nodded as if it was all of no account, but I knew he was listening.

  We paused a moment, when some mallards burst from a slough, and then proceeded silently until we had passed the place. He had lowered his longrifle, checked the priming, and was just as ready to defend us as any private in the army.

  “We’ll quit at the settlements,” I said. About nine miles ahead were some farms clustered together for protection. They had been hacked out of forest land, but in between the stumps grew a rich harvest of wheat and corn, melons and squash. We would eat well this night.

  He nodded.

  I wanted to talk to the man but every time I tried, I stumbled into silence. He pretended not to notice my agitation, but I knew exactly what was going through his mind.

  An hour later I fell into a familiar mode of dealing with him: “When we get there, you take care of the horses, rub ’em down and check the frogs and look for heat in the pasterns. I want a bait of oats if they have it, and plenty of good timothy. If any horse of mine lames up, you’ll be sorry. Get our truck under roof, and find yourself a place to bunk.”

  His response was a sigh and a whispered “Yassuh.” He kept his nag one step behind mine, which irritated me. I had to turn my head back to address him.

  “You’ll be wanting to see your wife in Louisville, but there won’t be time. I need you. So put it out of your head,” I said with a curt edge to my voice.

  He didn’t respond, but I could feel the hope leak out of hi
m even as he slumped in his battered saddle. He had been counting on it; a swift trip to the tobacco fields south of Louisville while I visited my brother and family at Mulberry Hill.

  We traversed another three miles in total silence.

  “Now, damn it, you know nothing about freedom,” I said abruptly. We were crossing a broad meadow, the browning grasses waving gently in the low sun, the liberty of the place exhilarating after the imprisonment of the dark oaks and walnuts and hickory trees lining the trace like a prison wall.

  “You know what it means? You’d have to take care of yourself. I make sure you’re fed every day. I keep you in clothing. I put a roof over your head. I do that whether you’re busy or idle or sick. Whether you’re accomplishing my ends, or fallow. I do that in the winter and summer. I do that on days when I have no need for you.”

  His response was to tap the flanks of his nag with his heels and pull up beside me so he could hear all this better.

  “If you were freed, what would you do?” I asked.

  He said nothing, afraid to talk about such a dangerous subject.

  “Go ahead, say what you are thinking,” I said.

  “Mastuh, I’d get me a horse and wagon and be taking goods from one place to another for hire.”

  “How would you do that? You can’t read. You can’t sign a contract. You can’t do numbers. You’d be cheated. They’d say they’d pay you ten dollars and give you three and you couldn’t do anything about it. They’d claim you spilled something, and try to take your horse and wagon from you.”

  He nodded. “Maybe I just do it for black peoples, not white peoples.”

  “You’d starve.”

  “Might be worth the starvin’,” he mused.

  “You’d be worse off than with me.”

  He didn’t answer that, and suddenly I laughed. He carefully refrained from laughing, too, but I saw the corners of his mouth rise a little, and I reached across and clapped his shoulder.

  What I saw then shocked me: there was more pain in his eyes than I had ever seen in him. Pain fit only for the dying.