From Sea to Shining Sea (95 page)

William was saying now:

“… to keep it a secret from the British mostly, I daresay. The President and Lewis are of a mind on that. Neither of ’em trusts Britain as far as a one-arm man can fling an ox.”

“I don’t either,” George said. “And I’d wager this expedition o’ theirs is in the nature of a race, to dominate that western space before Britain gets a hold on it. Ever since Mackenzie went across Canada, I’ve had a spooky notion that th’ Northwest will be full o’ Scotch fur traders and Sir Merchants before we ever set foot in it.” He pointed his forefinger like a pistol toward William. “Y’ better go, and not go slow, that’s my thinking. We’ll never be peaceful with Britain till they’re back on their side o’ the sea.” He opened the letter again. “Now I would take issue with ’em about this, though: the size of the expedition. Back at the first, I told Tom that four or five gents, of the best caliber, traveling light, would best serve, as so small a number wouldn’t alarm the savages. Looks here as how he means to make it a lot bigger party. A ten-ton boat! Jove! Don’t they know what it takes to move a ten-ton boat up a fast river? Why, thirty or forty men just to take turns a-rowin’! Or else,” he growled, “one o’ General Clark’s Unpatented Nonexistent Upriver Mechanical Barge-Paddlin’ Engines. Mark my word, Billy, every day you’ll curse all that weight a thousand times. Here where he asks you to scout up some hardy young men, as he says, ‘accustomed to bearing bodily fatigue in a pretty considerable degree.’ I’ll say this for ’im, he does foresee the strain o’ such a load, but what I wonder is, does he know y’ll fair be a crew o’ galley slaves goin’ up that Missouri? Meseems your friend’s been in the White House so
long, he desires to take it all with ’im, desks, bureaus, draperies, casements, and all! Ten tons, three thousand miles? B’God, that’d give Hannibal a hernia!”

William rolled his head back and guffawed. He loved to hear George rumble on in such spirit as this. And he knew George was right about the burden. William himself had been to New Orleans and back twice by riverboat, and he well knew that upstream rowing is slave work. “Well,” he said, “I’d reckon it’s on account of all that science he wants done along the way. And too, from what I’ve heard by Missouri fur traders I met, the Sioux up the Missouri are mean as pirates. I guess it would take a considerable strong party to push on by such as them.”

Fanny’s face darkened for an instant with worry. She had been imagining this daydream of a venture as a peaceful trek through a gigantic landscape with nothing more dangerous than perhaps a few bears or oversized serpents. She liked it that there was no war in the land, and had not expected she would have to worry about her beloved brother fighting Indians again. Now George was saying:

“I’ll grant you that. But I’ll wish luck to anybody who has to do natural science and haul a ship up that bedamned Missouri at the same time. Ha! Well, maybe His Excellency the President figures you’ll want a ship to bring ’im back a live mammoth. I remember he doubts there’s maybe ancient beasties still roaming in those places. Like those.” He tilted his head toward a pile of giant fossil bones just off the porch, specimens he had been collecting in the Falls, and in salt licks of the region, at Jefferson’s request. “He expects ye to run onto a Megalonyx, no doubt, or a mammoth at the least. Y’ be wary of mammoths, now, hear? Ha, ha!”

“How can you laugh?” Fanny asked George. “What if there are such things, and your own brother meets them?”

“Well, if there are, I’d like to’ve been the first man to see one. Since I can’t, I’m glad it’ll be Billy.” He winked at William. “I don’t worry about Billy, but the Megalonyx better watch out. As for Lewis, well, all he’ll have to do is stand his ground, and a charging mammoth would just past right ’twixt his bow-legs. Ha, ha!” George was having a rare good time making light of the dangers, trying to mask his own deep-flowing anxieties. It was not huge beasts that concerned him, but the real dangers he knew attended long marches: Starvation. Cold. Injuries. Bad judgment. Exhaustion. Indians. Recklessness on the part of vainglorious leaders. Disease and demoralization among the men. William would have to follow Lewis. George trusted William’s
good sense, but Lewis’s wisdom was an unknown quantity. And so he said:

“This friend of yours. Ye trust him all the way?”

“With my life,” William said immediately, not pausing to ponder it. He drained his glass and reached down for the bottle, and dribbled the remainder into their glasses. George called:

“Cupid! Fetch us that bottle with the green wax on the cork!” The old slave, his poll frosted with white kinks, brought it at once. William took his hand and said. “My boy York asked me to tell you. ‘Hey, Cupid.”’ The old slave smiled and replied:

“Please to tell him the same, Mast’ Billy. Tell me, sir, you goin’ take that ol’ fat boy Yo’k?”

“Eh? Take ’im where?” William passed George a lighted pipe.

“To where you goin’, sir. To th’ ’Cific Oshum.”

George chuckled at William, then said, “Cupid, ye scoundrel, what’ve I said about eavesdropping?”

“I wasn’t, Gen’l Clark, sir. Clark men just got big voices. I can’t fetch you a jug with my fingers poke in my earho’s.”

William laughed, his ruddy cheeks furrowed with deep smile-lines. “Cupid, you’re bad as that York is. Yes, I’ll take ’im. What would ’e do with ’imself, without me to pester? Just sit an’ turn to lard, is all. Now scat. And not a word o’ this to a living soul, y’ hear?”

“By what I see,” George said through a stream of exhaled smoke, passing back the pipe, “you don’t need my opinion. Y’re decided on going.” Fanny looked at William, biting her lower lip.

“Pert near,” William admitted. He saw a momentary shadow go over George’s face, and understood what it was. So he said:

“Jonathan can take over your suits and all. He’ll prob’ly do a lot better by you than I’ve done. He’s got law in ’is bone marrow.”

“Aye. Well,” George said. “But he’s all wrapped in his own affairs. You’ve been the best helpmeet a man ever had. I’ll … I’ll miss ye, youngster.”

George sat for a while, moist-eyed, gazing westward. He drank half a glass down without saying anything, while Fanny nursed a glass of sherry and watched her sons swat their new shuttlecock to and fro down on the sunny meadow, Ben and Charles against Johnny. William, who was accustomed to his brother’s pensive spells, sat silent, gazing eastward, back toward Virginia, whence he had just come, and now the hazy blue distances dissolved and he was beside the bricked-in spring on the hillside where he had last dallied with his Judy Hancock. Another of her picnics.

Picnics were her favorite diversions, and that babbling spring among ferns and dogwood trees, with its little brick terrace and pewter dipper and stone bench, was her favorite place on the whole Hancock estate for picnics. She seemed to be aware that the place surrounded and enhanced her fair beauty as a filigreed frame does a portrait. And there Judy would take William for picnics and allow him to gaze upon her as if she were a picture in a gallery. They would nibble on dainty tidbits her father’s chef had prepared and packed in a basket, and she would talk to William of all manner of lovely and exquisite things out of her education: of fables, of music, of Grecian gods and goddesses, of Florentine art. And to William, Judy herself was a goddess-child, work of art, her voice music. It was hard for him to remember sometimes that she was only twelve; he would see her as the lady she was to become. Sometimes he thought he understood now how Bill Croghan had been, waiting for Lucy to come of age. William was surprised that he could spend so many hours in the company of a twelve-year-old and not be bored, but she seemed to know more soul-stirring things about the loftier realms of civilization than anyone. She could write poems that marched along in cadence and rhymed at the ends, poems full of words like Pride, and Charity, Prudence, Vanity, and Forbearance. She knew of an ancient Greek island where some lady poet had run a sort of outdoor girls’ school, and William would daydream of dozens of beautiful creatures, like Judy and her sisters, scantily clad in diaphanous shifts, romping through meadows, and every part of his soul and body would be stirred by those reveries. The other Hancock girls had simply faded from William’s ken, into courtships and marriages with elegant neighborhood swains, and so it was turning out true, what he had told his mother in her last hour: it
would
be Judy Hancock. Her father had agreed that when she became eighteen, if they both still so desired, he would sign his permission for a marriage license.
Six years to wait!
William had left Fincastle in a daze, wondering how he could endure such an eternity.

But then this letter from Meriwether Lewis had reached him, and now those six years did not seem so much at all. And what a lady Judy would have become by the time William returned from the Western Sea, crowned with an explorer’s laurels!

William blinked away these fancies, almost embarrassed, wondering:
What if George knew what’s in my mind! He’d think I’m naive. Probably say I’m thinking like a novel-reader.

And now he was looking at George, at the saddened eyes, the bitter downturn in the corner of his mouth, the little red capillaries
in his face, his hands gnarled and big-knuckled from arthritis and his joints stiff with rheumatism. George knew the sorry truth about laurels. William realized suddenly, with an up-rushing in his breast, that almost everything he knew, every manly trait and skill he possessed, George had taught him.
No greater a man has walked this land
, he thought.

And now he thought of one more thing he could do for George.

A big thing.

At that moment, like a statue coming to life, George inhaled, sighed, sipped from his glass and spoke:

“I’m glad it’s a Clark going. I’m glad it’s you. I pushed the frontier to the Mississippi ere I reached the end o’ my chain. Now you go the rest of the way. Y’ know what I wish?”

“What?”

“That Ma was still here, so we could walk in and tell ’er.”

“Aye, Brother,” William said. “Wouldn’t ye love to see her face!”

“Ha, ha! She’d probably have some proverb on the proper way to greet a Megalonyx!”

Fanny smiled and put her hand over her mouth, but her eyes were suddenly abrim with tears at the thought of her mother.

“Here’s to Ma,” said George, hoisting his glass, “who gave us the red in our hair and the flint in our soul.”

The brothers clicked their glasses and drank, then William hoisted his again. Fanny’s children, wearied by their play, were coming up the meadow toward the porch, likely thinking of supper. A smell of roast meat was wafting from the kitchen house.

“And here’s to Pa, who gave us kind hearts and steel in our sinew,” said William.

“Aye. To Pa.”

“To them both. May they rest in peace together.”

Fanny rose from her chair, her lip between her teeth, touched each brother on the shoulder, and then moved across the porch to meet her sons and steer them into the house. In this family, it seemed to her, no matter what might have befallen any old dream, there was always a new dream.

George and William sat in the light of the descending sun, drinking, mellow, looking westward, making hmmms in their throats, thinking of rivers. “Tell me,” George asked eventually, “just how drunk might ye be willin’ to get?”

“Hard to say, Brother, hard to say. But before we find out, let’s us go eat, and tell those boys o’ Fanny’s some tall tales.”
Once again, subtly, William was steering George from the bottle.

“By damn, that’s a good idea,” said George. “They could stand to hear about how I first met Logan the Mingo, couldn’t they?”

“And I’ll do y’ one better,” William replied. “I’ll tell ’em how I met Indians I’ve not even met yet!”

“Capital!” George gripped his chair arms to hoist his stiff frame. He grunted. He swayed a little, then limped toward the door. “I think you should tell ’em about the giant Sioux chief who rides to church on a wild mammoth.”

William rubbed his eyes and followed George in, chuckling. “To
church
? A Sioux?”

“Well, then, make him a Delaware. It doesn’t matter, as long as it’s the truth. Hey, I’m going to miss you, Billy. I wish I could be along.”

“Hey, George. One thing’s sure: with me, you’re always along.”

E
VERYONE STOOD STILL AND WATCHED AS
G
ENERAL
G
EORGE
Rogers Clark clumped stiffly back and forth with his cane and old army boots across the deck and in and out of the cabin of the keelboat that Captain Lewis had had built at Pittsburgh. George would tap the new, fragrant, yellow-gray oaken deck planks and gunwales with his hickory walking-stick and listen to the
clack, clack
with a tilted ear as if he were a musician tuning a fine instrument. The men on deck watched him and said nothing; the only other sounds were the burble of the sparkling Ohio around the hull, the steady rush of the Falls a few hundred yards upstream, the rustle of golden autumn foliage in a cool breeze, and the murmuring voices of the crowd of soldiers and townspeople on the wharf and the shore. Meriwether Lewis, dressed for this occasion in his full army uniform of the new style with
parallel rows of buttonhole braid, a cocked bicorn hat on his head, stood with his thick bowlegs wide apart and his hands clasped behind his back, waiting patiently and glancing from one to another of the Clark brothers as the old warrior, in his obsolete, swallow-tailed, buff-and-blue Revolutionary War uniform, appraised the vessel. General Clark’s coat was creased and linty and smelled of camphor from its long hibernation in a chest, but he looked grand and grave and dignified. He reminded Lewis of Washington.

William Clark, in a new captain’s uniform, hat in hand, strolled alongside his brother, pink-cheeked with pride, merry eyes glinting like new blue buttons through his red lashes, his copper-red forelock now and then stirred by the breeze, and he turned once or twice to wink at young Lewis. Two other Clark brothers stood on the deck, likewise tall and solid. There was Edmund, with his thick red hair, fortyish, a little jowly now; and Jonathan, prosperous-looking, with graying sidewhiskers. Jonathan was thinking that poor Captain Lewis had inherited his father’s looks instead of his mother’s.