Downriver

by Richard S. Wheeler

  thirty–nine

  The closer they came to St. Louis, the lonelier Skye felt. That was odd, and he couldn’t fathom his own feelings. Here at last, in North America, he was seeing familiar things: brick buildings, handsome frame houses, neatly tended farms, bright gardens, cobbled streets, men and women in ordinary attire, and not the exotic buckskin garb of the mountains.

  People like himself, speaking the English tongue as he did, engaged in occupations he understood. A branch of England, really, even though this robust young nation had fought free of the mother one, and was absorbing thousands of immigrants from other parts of Europe.

  How could he possibly be lonely, just when he was coming into contact with people like himself, after so many years? Maybe it was the dog. He grieved for No Name. Maybe it was Victoria, who was acting strangely, perched in the rear of the little sailboat singing softly, dark dirges that sometimes attracted his concern. She had a stricken look upon her; a bleak, desolate gaze he could not fathom, and sometimes tears in her eyes.

  Maybe he was lonely because she had pulled into her own world.

  Red Gill had turned quiet too. The memory of his partner Shorty was haunting him. This time, instead of floating down the river with his partner and a fortune in furs, he was coming back to St. Louis without any returns for his effort, and the other half of the partnership had been committed to the riverbed, a long way away.

  For days, Skye and Gill had traded stories to while away the boring hours on the river. They had both turned brown and blistered under the relentless sunlight bouncing off the murky river, and pummeling them from above. There was no shade, save for the sail itself occasionally, on that majestic waterway that sluiced through the wooded green shores of Missouri.

  A place called Westport Landing, near Independence, had interested him because for all the years of the rendezvous, it had been the jumping off place of the packtrains heading west. It was more of a town than he had realized; handsome redbrick buildings around a square, the simple, plain American architecture yielding its own practical beauty.

  It was there that Victoria had finally seen white women going about their daily business, some with baskets in hand on the way to the butcher or baker; others strolling with their children, or hanging their wash on lines, an occupation that intrigued Victoria.

  At last, Victoria had come to understand that white women were neither fragile or weak or sickly; they didn’t come west with the trappers because this was a different culture, not a bit like hers, and women simply played a different part.

  Here, too, she saw her first black men and women, except for swart Jim Beckwourth, the mulatto mountain man who had lived with the Crows for years. But Beckwourth hadn’t been very black, and these in Missouri were as dark as ink. She studied them, exclaimed at them, and marveled that so handsome a people could be white men’s slaves.

  Skye himself bloomed and he was beginning at last to put his wounded body out of mind. He could breathe without feeling sharp pain. His shattered ribs and cartilage no longer grated at his side whenever he moved. He had not yet recovered the full use of his wounded arm, and sometimes it prickled clear down to his fingers, but each day he managed to increase the range of movement. Someday soon he could hold up a rifle again, and even aim it. He walked with a small limp when the torn muscles in his thigh balked at their task, but he worked at healing that, too, by walking round and round the boat, and as much as he could on land whenever they docked.

  But what worried him most was Victoria. The farther they plunged into settled America, the darker was her visage. And she had never stopped her private singing.

  Once he had observed her studying birds that swooped over the water, or patrolled the shores.

  “Magpie is not here,” she said.

  Gill had confirmed it. The western magpie did not exist in this central part of North America. That news had brought a sharp intake of breath from Victoria. Her spirit helper, the chosen guide she had met during a spirit-dreaming session as an Absaroka girl, was no longer present, no longer flying before her. Maybe that was why she was singing. She was alone, bereft, like a white man so far away he was beyond the visibility of God.

  They had no cash, but sometimes stopped at a riverfront town anyway, bartering a few items from their outfits for fresh vegetables, berries, or beef. Oddly, Victoria refused to leave the sailboat, desolately sitting there at the levee, or on a dock, when Skye and Gill tried to trade something for fresh food.

  Numerous islands provided safe campgrounds. Missouri was thinly settled, and often they traveled for miles without seeing any sign of habitation or human existence on those brooding wooded shores. Skye sensed that the vast rural areas, still devoid of homesteads, harbored twisted and vicious border men who would stop at nothing. He had seen a few in the mountain camps, and knew that the young republic seemed to breed malcontents and murderers along with the many yeomen who were building a nation.

  They were meeting river traffic now; fishing boats, scows, keelboats, and once a proud white steamer, the Antelope, along with innumerable rowboats, used by Missourians to cross the river. All these local people used the islands as havens, including runaway slaves.

  Still, he wasn’t at home in this place. The weather had turned sultry and his clothes stuck to him, glued on by the sweat of his body. The moist air suffocated him and left him yearning for the sweet, dry comfort of the mountains. It stormed frequently, and not even the hastily rigged shelter of a tarpaulin spared them a miserable drenching and sodden moccasins and boots. He had taken to rubbing grease into his Hawken to keep it from rusting, and polishing the steel of his knives each day to fend off corruption of the metal.

  He could not fathom why any sane mortal would abide in wet, dank, gloomy Missouri, as hellish a place as he had ever seen. He would have preferred the jungles of Burma to this sweaty, overcast, choking place.

  It amazed him that he was willfully traveling all this way just to seek a position. Why was he doing it? He no longer could answer that piercing question. For the sake of a trading position he had endured two thousand miles of travel, three nearly fatal wounds, seen the brutal murder of his beloved dog, watched Victoria slide into fear and isolation, and discovered insult and rivalry and contempt in unexpected places, among unexpected fellow travelers. He could not even explain to himself what the trading position meant to him, or why he was willing to come so far, at such cost, to apply for it. All the reasons fell away.

  But oddly, one remained. He wanted to see the United States and fathom its robust people. Was it truly the hope of the world? What a curious reason to travel so far, and yet that wish to see the new nation had grown stronger than any other. He would see the land of the Yankees, and meet the people, not the wild ones who came to the mountains but the ordinary yeomen and burghers and their wives and children. Then he would know. And then he could weigh the grave matter, which was oddly affecting him with such passion, of whether to become a citizen.

  They camped one night on a narrow island that showed signs of other visitation; ashes, chopped wood, garbage and bones. Red Gill wandered off, down the long strand, leaving Skye and Victoria alone. Skye was plenty worried about her. His Absaroka wife was shrinking into a shadow of herself in this dank place.

  He took her hand. “Let’s walk some,” he said.

  She pulled her hand away.

  “You’ve got something hanging around your neck,” he said.

  She eyed him sharply and tried to distance herself.

  “Let me see your arm.”

  She stopped struggling, and rolled up her sleeve. The last crust over a small sore clung to the flesh where she had been inoculated.

  “This looks just about healed,” he said. “Just like the doctor said. Mine’s healed up. You’ll be fine, and now you won’t ever die of that disease, which gladdens me right down to my bones.” He tugged at a sleeve, having trouble rolling it up his massive arm, but finally he was able to show her a small, white dimpled area that was
the sole remaining sign of the smallpox vaccination.

  He began to fathom her torment. She had been singing a death dirge all these days.

  “Victoria, Victoria …” he said, clasping her to him. She resisted at first, but then her arms clamped his body and she hugged desperately. He ran his hand over her jet hair, his gesture awkward, and she buried her face in his chest and sobbed.

  “Soon we’ll go back to our country. I don’t much care for this place.”

  She lifted her head. “No, you will stay here.”

  He lifted his top hat and settled it, perplexed at her mood, and aching to lift her out of it. “The land of the Absarokas is my land now,” he said. “Those mountains with the tops white with snow; the pine forests, the good horses and endless prairies …”

  She shook her head.

  “We’ll be heading up the river in a few days.”

  “I have seen the white women.”

  He could not make sense of that. “They’re not so different from women of the People,” he said.

  “They are like you, and you will go to them sooner or later. I know this. I have looked at them. They are beautiful, not like some old savage. They dress in skirts, many fine stitches, that no damn savage ever sewed. They got all these things, manners, you got and I don’t. You and me, what do I really know about you? You are stranger to me. But they know you, all your thoughts, because they were born like you.”

  She buried her face in his chest, and then whispered more.

  “We get to St. Louis, and they’ll all come to you and entice you and show you their white skin, and this old savage woman, she gets put aside. Even black women are better than savages.”

  At last he had some inkling of what was desolating her. It hurt him that she didn’t believe in his love and esteem for her anymore.

  “Have you seen me flirting with the white women?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “You think that because MacLees abandoned his red woman, and Bonfils probably will, that I’ll do the same?”

  “The white men all go back to their kind,” she said, her voice smothered in his shirt.

  “Have I told you that I love you, Victoria?”

  “Sonofabitch,” she replied. “In a few suns, you won’t say it no more.”

  forty

  Red Gill steered the little craft toward St. Louis in almost steady rain, a relentless drizzle that chafed at Skye, soaked his clothes, bred mold on his leathers, rusted every steel surface on his Hawken even when it was sheathed, and made the air hard to breathe. Victoria had taken to bailing out the sailboat with a tin cup, while saying nothing at all.

  The windless wet air made the sail useless. It flapped and dripped rain, and rarely collected a breeze. Skye finally lowered it, and they depended on the steady river current to take them to the great city. Victoria’s nose began running, and Skye pitied her. In all the time they had shared together in the dry West, he had never seen her nose run, and had rarely seen her sniffle. But now something in the very air was disagreeable to her, and making her sick. She said not a word, but he knew she was increasingly ill and maybe fevered. It worried him.

  The closer they came to St. Louis, the more animated Gill became, and he often jabbered about one landmark or another. The Missouri ran slate gray, its water murky and barely potable, the gloomy banks crowded with osage, locust, sycamore, shagbark hickory, oaks and elms, all of them cheerfully identified by the boatman. He, at least, was glad to return to his home. Skye wondered what sort of home Red Gill had. A room, probably, or maybe no quarters at all. The frontier was filled with vagrants.

  “This here’s the grand prairie back of St. Louis,” he said, waving a hand toward the right bank. “Mostly wooded, but plenty of parks too. Farm land now. There’s a limestone bluff near the river, and below that’s a bench where the city sits, most of it. The city’s bursting up the cliff now, and spreading out.”

  They drifted past two large islands and then into a vast and confusing confluence with the Mississippi, so enormous that Skye was glad he wasn’t navigating because he couldn’t tell one shore from another, and often there seemed to be no shore at all.

  “The Father of Waters,” Gill said, with a grand sweep of his rainsoaked arm. All Skye saw was gray mist stretching into obscurity. But Gill seemed to know where he was going, and hewed closely to the right bank, where a swift current propelled the little boat southward.

  At last Victoria stopped her bailing long enough to stare at this strange place where the Big River joined the Father River. She wiped rain away from her face, trying to fathom landmarks in this gray and featureless seascape. Her rain-drenched chambray blouse was plastered to her small body, and once Skye caught Gill staring at her with half-masked hunger.

  “We’re pretty near there,” Gill said. “If the fog lifted, you could see it now; biggest city in the West; biggest north of New Orleans, and still pretty much French, but that’s changing. Yanks like me setting it right.”

  The fog at the confluence gave way to a low gray cloud cover and lighter rain, and in time the ghostly city did emerge from the dark mist, a gloomy prospect of warehouses and other buildings crowded along the levee. But what astonished Skye was the number of steamboats, one after another, as far as he could see, tethered to pilings along the levee.

  “Pretty busy place, eh?” Gill said, some pride welling up in him. “Those there boats, they’re from the Alleghenies, come down the Ohio to here; or up from New Orleans, or down from the north, Illinois and Iowa and up there, or like us, down from the west. This is where it all comes; the goods, the commerce, the people. A New Englander can ship a cargo down the coast, around Florida, to New Orleans, and up here.”

  The magnitude of the city stunned him. It seemed almost a London, and this seemed more than a Thames.

  “There now, you can see the new cathedral of St. Louis, that spire yonder where the Frenchies worship. That’s on the south edge. We won’t go that far. I’m going to head for LaClede’s Landing, the old dock where it all started, because near there’s where I’ve got my room. That street the church is on, that’s called Church Street, La Rue de l’Eglise, and this street on the riverfront, along the levee, it’s Main, La Rue Principal.”

  “The streets have two names?”

  “Yep, you can’t expect Yanks to twist their tongues like that speaking French. Next in is Barn Street, La Rue des Granges, and that cross street, heading up the slope, that’s Tower, La Rue de la Tour. See, it ain’t so hard.”

  Skye wiped rain off his face, and glanced at Victoria, who was staring in rapt bewilderment at something unfathomed in her mind, and beyond imagination.

  The slap of water on the hull reminded Skye that Gill was steering the craft across the current now, toward a small, stinking dock area where keelboats and flatboats crowded so tightly that they were tied to one another instead of to land. Gloomy warehouses and mercantile buildings lined the levee like black teeth, disgorging and swallowing the contents of the riverboats. And amid them, he saw grog shops, low, sullen buildings with rough characters lounging around their doors. Not a woman was in sight.

  “Rough quarter,” he said.

  “Roughest in the world,” Gill said, heading for a small opening between two flatboats. “They’d as soon slit your throat as let you pass. Unescorted woman has about as much chance as a shoat on a butcher block.”

  He eased the boat into an awkward corner, where projecting boulders threatened to hammer the hull, and the boat jammed suddenly against the levee. Victoria grabbed a line and jumped out. There was nothing to tie to, so she tugged the prow up a muddy incline.

  “Goddam,” she said, squinting at a scene so alien to her that she might as well be on another planet.

  The whole area stank of sewage, dead fish, effluent, rotting food, and decay. Skye stepped onto the black mud of the levee and stretched. For this had he come two thousand miles. This was the United States. He had never been in the United States before, at least its
settled region. And even this was barely settled, though French and Spanish had been on this river for nearly a century.

  The rain mercifully ceased. A breeze immediately rose, the air chilling him as it cooled his soaked shirt and buckskins.

  St. Louis! From here had come his succor for many years, and here would his future be decided.

  Everywhere, drays, freight wagons, buggies, carriages, carts, and even a few elegant victorias and landaus crowded the waterfront, with the cacophony of neighing, whinnying horses adding to the din. Black stevedores hefted enormous bales of cotton, or massive crates, or heavy casks, in and out of shadowy interiors. Great noxious puddles silvered the cobbled street. Rain had blackened the backs of horses, and still dripped noisily from eaves.

  Victoria gaped at the hubbub, the wagons, the Negro men, the white men in handsome suits, the roustabouts in duck cloth britches and loose blouses, and blue uniformed officers on the river packets. Skye thought she looked frightened but determined; a native woman trying to absorb the fantastic and show no shameful fear.

  He stepped toward her and slipped an arm about her waist, his hand clasping her and sending assurances toward her. She turned away from him, not toward him, and he sensed she did not want him to see her face, or the fear and awe and fascination in it; things a Crow woman would marvel at for the rest of her life; things too fantastic to repeat to her sisters around the lodgefires of her people; things that would make the Absarokas call her a liar if she tried to describe them.

  She said nothing, but found his rough hand and squeezed it.

  Behind them, Gill was shuffling goods forward in the sailboat and raising the dripping sail just enough to let it dry. It would rot if he wrapped and tied it wet.

  Skye watched, absorbed, and stayed on guard, knowing waterfronts well. He eyed his outfit lying in the prow, wondering how to store it and where. He was penniless.

  “Red, are we saying good-bye?” he asked.