Snowbound and Eclipse

by Richard S. Wheeler

  “But put my trunks in there,” I added, pointing to my quarters.

  They unpacked the horse and carried my heavy luggage into the dark confines, while Mrs. Grinder finished her preparations.

  “Where’s my gunpowder, Pernia?” I asked.

  “In your canister, sir.”

  “I want to recharge my pistols. I’ve neglected it. This is not a safe place.”

  Pernia eyed me uneasily, and then took my horses off to water and rub them down, as he always did. I entered my new dominion, alone at last. I had not been alone for a month. My two trunks rested in a corner. A not very clean tick lay on the puncheon floor, and I supposed it would have its complement of bedbugs. But that would not matter. I had escaped at last.

  Twilight comes swiftly this time of year, and I knew I would not have to wait long for darkness to fall. I pulled off my shirt and put on my blue-striped nightshirt over my pantaloons. Mrs. Grinder invited me in and offered me some stew, but I refused. Her ragamuffins peered shyly at me, astonished at my odd attire.

  “Give it to the servants, madam,” I said.

  “But you should have some, Mr. Lewis.”

  I dissuaded her. I was not a bit hungry and my fevers were mounting again. “I would take a little whiskey if you have it, madam.”

  Wordlessly she lifted a jug and poured a gill or so into a cup for me. But once I had it in hand, I didn’t want it, and sipped but little.

  “Madam, have you any gunpowder?” I asked.

  “Gunpowder?”

  “Yes. I wish to clean the damp powder out of my pieces and recharge them.”

  “Oh, sir, Mr. Grinder might, but he’s not present now, and it might be a while.”

  I sighed. Would my intentions be defeated by that? I could not find my powder flask. Perhaps Pernia had it. Or perhaps it was in one of the trunks left at Fort Pickering. My two pieces were not loaded.

  “Hidden it, have you?”

  “Sir?” asked Mrs. Grinder.

  “I was talking to someone else, my servant, madam.”

  She looked about, saw no one, and stared at me.

  “You cannot know what it takes to do what I must do,” I said.

  “Are you indisposed, Mr. Lewis?” asked the poor woman.

  “Madam, it’s a very pleasant evening. I think I’ll just sit outside and have a pipe before I retire, if that is suitable.”

  “Oh, of course, sir, of course. I just thought maybe something is amiss. If you’re indisposed I have a few simples I might steep for you.”

  “No, madam, you look after your children, and trust the night.”

  She backed away, carrying her pot and ladle and a trencher intended for my use.

  I watched her retreat, confused, toward the barn with the stew, and settled down on a bench outside my cabin door. I pulled out my old briar pipe and tamped some sweet tobacco into it, enjoying the soft sweet quiet of the fading day, the thickening blue of a lifetime.

  48. LEWIS

  It came down to duty. I could preserve, for the republic, the Meriwether Lewis they knew and celebrated, or not. I knew what I must do, but didn’t know whether I could summon that mournful courage to do it. And so I argued with myself that soft Wednesday eve in the oak groves of Tennessee.

  I hated this!

  Oh, if only I might repeal three years; but how sad and feckless to think it. I paced and argued, but there was nothing to argue. The nation had built a shrine to me, and I had befouled it. Like the whited sepulcher, it contained corruption within.

  I could not go east; I could not ride into the City of Washington without betraying the trust invested in me. I could not sully the Corps of Discovery, my loyal and stouthearted men. I could not beslime my mentor and friend Tom Jefferson. I could not open the floodgates of gossip. I could not babble my case to Mr. Madison or Secretary Eustis, for they would be listening to gossip and not to me. I could not bear the thought of entering into the presence of my mother, with her searching gaze and saddened mien.

  I watched night settle and listened to the crickets. I heard the last of a day’s toil in the cabin next door, and then the soft darkness settled over the farmstead. It was a gentle night, this eleventh day of October, soft and melancholic, the tang of the good earth in the night breezes.

  There were black holes in a starlit sky, where occasional clouds obscured the universe. Even in that infinity, there was no place to go, no escape.

  By the light of a stub candle, I stormed through my chattel and found the powder flask, which Pernia had artfully buried under my journals. I grasped the embossed canister and plucked it out of the trunk. In my other trunk I found my two brass-mounted Pennsylvania pistols, encased in a polished cherrywood box. I opened the box and beheld them in the drear rays of the candle. They were costly, reliable pieces, and had served me well during the expedition. They had put balls into grizzlies. They had comforted me in emergencies.

  I lifted one, and felt the smoothness of the walnut stock and the coldness of the ten-inch octagonal steel barrel. I lifted the other, two old friends whose loyalty I did not question. The locks and frizzens were fine, the flints fresh. The pistols had been cleaned and oiled, and were ready for whatever use my eye and finger might put them to.

  I charged each piece, pouring the full measure of good Missouri powder down the cold muzzle, patching a forty-four-caliber ball and driving it home, and then priming the pan. I hefted them. They felt fine, balanced, formed to my hand, and I pointed them here and there, at the candle, the floor, the wall, my trunks. Everywhere but at their target.

  “You are a coward after all,” said my censor.

  I responded by pointing the pistol in my right hand at my forehead.

  Could I not do what needed doing?

  I paced again, the pistols putting authority to my every gesture.

  “Mr. Eustis, if you will just let me explain. There was no way to execute Mr. Jefferson’s design to return the Mandan without some expense. The regular army declined, so we created our own. But it will pay off, sir. And the presents we distribute along the river will ensure the safety of our western flank in the event of another war. The British never stop stirring them up! You will see, sir, how well it was spent. And now I am ruined. It’s a burden hard to bear. Can you remedy this?”

  No response rose out of the night.

  “Who can say I lack courage?” I cried. “I faced savages with drawn bows intent on killing me. I braved roaring white rapids in a hollowed-out log of a canoe. I walked into savage villages even as I saw their warriors spread out and arm themselves and prepare to butcher me. I chose what rivers and paths to follow, often against the perceptions of the rest. I ate dog and horse and other meats that repel most men. I sat next to murderous men armed with long knives. I urged us forward when the faint of heart wanted only to flee. I faced angry bears and buffalo. I suffered a grave wound without complaint. Courage I have, for any good cause. And this is the best of causes.”

  All this I declaimed into the night, not caring who heard.

  But there was only the hum of crickets. A wisp of smoke from Mrs. Grinder’s fieldstone chimney eddied in.

  And still I loved life too much.

  “I am trapped! That is the sole reason!”

  Then I thought of the unspeakable disease, of the shame, and thinking of the shame heartened me, and I thought I could do this thing if I could summon one swift moment of inner steel. Ah, that was the secret. One swift moment.

  And still I could not.

  I stepped to the door. Moist air met me. I saw no stars. The skies had been blotted out. I slumped to the stoop and sat dully, my mind purged of every thought. I knew nothing, scarcely knew my name, and could not even think of simple things. Maria Wood, she did not wait for me.

  The calm eluded me. I had no more anodynes. I had snuff, and only a swallow of spirits. Violence was my only salvation.

  I stepped into the inky black of the cabin, lifted the pistol in my right hand to my temple, and pulled …<
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  49. CLARK

  I have tarried here at Locust Hill some days with the governor’s family, trying to make sense of it all. Mrs. Marks has welcomed me, along with Meriwether’s half brother John Marks. I will stay a while longer in Albemarle County, where the family and Thomas Jefferson are quietly putting Meriwether’s affairs in order. But soon I will go to the City of Washington for talks with Secretary Eustis and President Madison.

  The news reached me in Shelbyville, Kentucky, only three days after I had departed from my own family at Mulberry Hill, Indiana Territory, and started east to untangle the financial affairs afflicting the Clarks and the governor and the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company.

  The blurred story in the Argus of Western America, published in Frankfort, shattered my repose, and I read it over and over, trying to draw from it the information I wanted. But it was mute on all the essentials.

  I handed the shocking paper to George Shannon, who was with me, and we stared at each other, scarce believing that our captain had left us, and by his own hand. My mind crawled with doubts, but at the same time I was not surprised.

  I was so grieved and disquieted by the news that I didn’t know what to do. There was in me a red-haired Clark itch to head south to the Natchez Trace and question all those at hand, rattle their teeth, bang heads together, and get to the bottom of it. Maybe they could tell me what had excited the governor’s passion and caused this last desperate escape. But on reflection, I abandoned that course. The governor would have been in the company of his faithful manservant Pernia and others, and I would soon enough get the whole and true story.

  I did alter my plans in one respect: I had planned to head directly to the City of Washington for talks with Secretary Eustis, with only the briefest pause in Albemarle County en route. Now I decided to sojourn with the governor’s family and help any way I might. Meriwether had given me power of attorney to settle his debts and perhaps I might be of use even now.

  In Shelbyville I wrote my brother Jonathan of the horrifying news, and said I thought the report was true. “I fear, Oh I fear the weight of his mind has overcome him, what will be the Consequence?” I concluded. Those last letters from Meriwether, posted en route, asking me to look after his affairs, persuaded me of the truth of it. I will destroy them.

  Shannon and I started east again, sharing in all tenderness and simplicity our memories of the great captain who walked the banks of the Missouri while we poled and rowed our vessels into the unknown. There was Meriwether striding before us, pausing at a plant he had never seen, stopping to unlimber his instruments and give us our latitude and longitude, sending Drouillard out to make meat, all of his hunters and fishers somehow feeding us off the land every day. There was Meriwether, bravely treating with glowering savages with arrows nocked in their bows, handing out gills of whiskey along with rebukes and encouragement, for he was always the taskmaster, exhorting us to do better even while commending our successes and rewarding the men any way he could.

  I was grateful to have one of the Corps of Discovery with me that long, sad journey east. We comforted each other as we proceeded on, Shannon always on horse, which he managed well even lacking part of a limb. We were remembering a man of unquestioned genius and honor, a man of such rare ability that he took us to the western sea and back without disaster, and left behind him a record of it all.

  That brought to mind my deepest concern: what of the journals? Were they safe? Had he finished the editing? The matter had become so tender with him that I ceased inquiring, and I was utterly in the dark about them. Were they too lost?

  There were moments when Shannon and I doubted everything we had read: maybe Meriwether had been murdered in a most vicious manner.

  “The Burr devils got him, plain got him,” he repeated, over and over.

  Meriwether did not lack conniving enemies in St. Louis, the Burr conspirators as well as disappointed seekers of privileges and offices. Shannon in particular seethed with the idea that a foul deed had felled the governor. Suicide was improbable. Neither he nor I had ever seen the governor in any great state of melancholia; his nature was to fight on, through the worst of events, until he could see daylight again.

  At times Shannon and I speculated: was the governor simply murdered by the bandits infesting the Natchez Trace? Was this Neelly the instrument of an avenging cabal? Was this the work of the Burr conspirators, whose faltering scheme to detach Louisiana from the republic the governor had stoutly defused? Was the crafty General Wilkinson at the core of it? Might the governor’s trusted manservant Pernia be a part of it? My mind seethed with possibilities, and yet, in the end, I believed the newspaper accounts were largely true. The governor took his own life.

  I knew things about him I felt I could not share with my doughty friend: Meriwether had been overwhelmed by sickness, and he had all too generously dosed himself with anodynes, powders, snuff, draughts of spirits, whatever he felt might release him from the suffering of his mortal flesh. I had seen his accounts: of medicines he had purchased a plenitude. Of visits to the doctor, Antoine Saugrain in particular, he had accumulated an alarming number, and it was plain to me that something was radically amiss.

  I thought of the unspoken thing, the lues venerea, which had afflicted him first on the Columbia and later at Fort Clatsop, and which he and I concealed from the corps and from the journal. I supposed he had the drips, but I was wrong. Had that vile affliction been his nemesis?

  I perused more newspapers along the way. The fragmented and incoherent story had created a sensation everywhere. I learned that two balls had penetrated the governor, and that murder was a distinct possibility. All this aggrieved and disturbed me to the bone. I hoped the answers would come clear in Virginia, at least if Meriwether’s manservant, or this man unknown to me, Major Neelly, had carried his possessions and information to the governor’s family and to Monticello as I knew the governor intended. I could only hope, and hasten east as fast as Shannon and I could manage in nippy and often wet weather.

  When we arrived at Locust Hill, on Ivy Creek, on December 3, Mrs. Marks and John greeted us tenderly, and swiftly brought from the servants’ quarters the man I most wanted to see: John Pernia.

  “Mr. Pernia’s helping us with the estate. He’s visited Mr. Jefferson and delivered the journals there,” John Marks explained. “He’s eager to talk to you, and has tarried here for your coming, just so he could deliver himself of an account of the governor’s last hours.”

  That, indeed, was good news. While the servants hurried some hot viands to us, Shannon and I settled ourselves in the cream-enameled parlor, along with our hosts. In a moment, Pernia appeared.

  “Oh, General, General,” he said, clasping my hand. “What a painful matter this is! I have stayed here just so that you may learn of everything.”

  The mottled face of this Creole black man crumpled with feeling. Mrs. Marks and her son settled themselves on settees, all of us in that sun-drenched parlor, our sole focus the witness to Meriwether’s death.

  There unrolled, tentatively then more confidently, the account of the governor’s horrendous last days, madness and delusion plaguing him, fever and sickness felling him, spirits and opium pills and snuff addling him. I listened to the story, believing it all. I already knew most of it.

  “He says over and over to the major, to me, you are coming along right behind, and you are going to fix everything,” he said.

  “Was he … mad?”

  Pernia sighed. “Ah, my general … Sometimes he was raging at the secretary of war for protesting his drafts. He says to Captain Russell that the journals were all written up and ready to publish. General, he never did write a word.”

  “Tell me about Major Neelly, Mr. Pernia.”

  “The major, he was no friend of the governor, and had certain failings, sir, but he saw his duty, and he respected the flag. He took care of everything afterward, doing it right and proper. Because of him, the journals are safe.”

  “Why wasn�
�t he present at Grinder’s Stand?”

  “Now that be a strange thing, General. Two horses get loose of their hobbles the night previous; we hobbled them up for certain. The major did it himself, he being something of a horse fancier, and next morning two horses had strayed, one of the major’s and one of the governor’s. That’s when the governor is pretty cheerful; he said he would go on ahead and stop for the night at the first stand he came to.”

  “Someone let the horses loose?”

  “Someone did, sir. It was no mishap.”

  “Who, Mr. Pernia?”

  The man looked reluctant to talk, glancing fearfully at Meriwether’s mother. “The governor, pauvre homme, he had tried to throw away his life several times, and he be carefully watched for his own sake. I kept the vigil, the major watched, back at Fort Pickering there was a regular vigil, and that day, when the governor went ahead and the major stayed back to find the missing horses, that was the first time the governor wasn’t watched. He got free.”

  “But you were with him, watching.”

  He looked discomfited. “I couldn’t. The woman, Mrs. Grinder, she put us in the barn, sir, the people of color.”

  I nodded. “Was the governor murdered?”

  Slowly Pernia shook his head. “All this that happened, it was the most plain thing, after his trying so much, so many times.”

  “Why didn’t you come to him when you heard shots?”

  “The barn was très distant, General. We didn’t hear. I think the governor’s powder was damp.”

  “Why didn’t Mrs. Grinder go to him when he cried out?”

  “General, she thinks him a lunatic, him arguing with himself and shouting half the night. She thinks only of protecting her children. Her man was away. She didn’t unbar that door until the morning.”

  “How could a man shoot himself twice?”

  “The first ball, it creased his temple and tore out bone and exposed the brain, not taking effect, and after a while he found the other pistol and put that ball into his chest. And still he lingered.”