to palaver. But within a very few minutes a horse had gone missing, and then sundry small articles as well. Lewis, standing under a huge, leafless tree, shielded his eyes to look up from the river at the chiefs on the ridge with the sun behind their feathery heads.
“I’ll have you know we are not afraid of Indians!” he shouted up to them, knowing that the words meant nothing, that his tone carried all his meaning. “When Indians steal from us, we kill them! Isn’t that so, Commander?”
“O, yes!” Clark said, standing in the sun, a hand on his sword, a second tiny figure they looked down at. “We have possession of your country! And we only deal fairly with those who are fair to us!”
The chiefs, blanketed, thin, squinting, and as wrinkled as raisins, expressed consternation and shock, anger, and outrage with a long retort, and so Lewis had his answer. He and Clark turned and walked down the hill, and with them flowed a body of two hundred warriors, and women and children, the entire village. He wondered, with a bitter curiosity, if it was almost over, if his slaughter would be next. Some young men got to the bateau and seized its line. Clark drew his sword. Lewis cried, “Men, take arms!” And then waited for the Almighty. But a doddering old chief limped into the shallows and took the rope from the young men, and indicated that taking him on board would avert a massacre. So they were allowed to escape, and put the old sinner ashore a few miles above.
That night had everyone in bad spirits. At the next village, they were skittish, and every sparrow’s fall was possibly a slaughter commencing. Those women, decorated with the scalps of defeated enemies, danced. Many had flint- and iron-pointed arrows run through their arms in grief for loved ones recently fallen in battle. So, apparently, did love hold sway with those people. But hatred did, too.
Lewis, reflecting on what had almost happened, had a bitter night. His sorrow acted like claws curved backward, and the more he struggled in its grasp and tried to escape, the deeper it dug and faster it held. His sentiments were crafted like a thousand tiny gold fishhooks into which he’d blundered, and now he attempt’d not to panic or resist. He got down and prayed with his head to the earth for it to be lifted, and was surprised there by Clark. “Are you ill, Lewis? What’s the matter?”
“Nothing at all. Merely resting.”
Clark stared and angled his head in that interrogative Irish way, and frowned as he did when a thing was irrational.
“Lewis, what was in your heart, making that call to arms?” he asked.
“Nothing. Curiosity to see how it would fall out,” he said, standing and feeling foolish about the dirt on his knees and his brow, making him appear like some sort of Catholic.
“But to fight rather than to bargain—?” Clark said.
“But Clark, I didn’t choose it!” Lewis protested. “I never choose a thing to do or say but what is thrust on me by my station, rank, training, situation, time of day, even the position of the sun. In effect, no choices appear to me at all but always the one course as though it were already writ somewhere. As though all this were occurring in God’s head, and He were setting it down, and rapidly, with no hesitation or crossing out.”
“Would you prefer some crossing out?” Clark asked with a worried smile, slapping dust out of his beaver hat.
“I do not prefer at all,” Lewis said. “I cannot resist a bit in these traces. They are snug and double.”
Clark plainly didn’t care for his answers and didn’t pursue them. The tribe later walked them out to see two large boulders with a third smaller, purported to be star-crossed lovers turned by the gods to stone, side by side for eternity. And their dog. “Romeo and Juliet,” Clark said.
“Though I can’t help but think of the Gorgon, Medusa,” Lewis said. “And of Lot’s wife, also.”
That evening, they confined a man (Newman) for mutinous expression, and sentenced him to seventy-five lashes. Lewis was curious to see an actual mutineer and visited him where he was shackled, finding a character with long blond hair and a rosy face, a regular cherub, but sunk into sullen study of his right shoe.
“What’s the game, Cap’n?” he asked.
“What? There’s no game, Private.”
“Sure, this here, the whole thing, is it. I’m just askin’, what’s the rules so we can all play and that’d make it fair.”
“I’m sorry you think so, for it will make the thrashing useless unless you see we are not about play and sport,” Lewis said, wincing at some shooting pains in his skull.
“Once more, sir. What game are ya playing on me? For I on’y said, to a few fellas, we should refuse to man-haul these boats above ten hour a day.”
“Aye, the men might listen to such a young, devilishly handsome fellow, and that is why, as of this moment, you are disbarred,” he said.
“Whuh! O, no, sir,” Newman said, casting forward onto his knees and trying to rise in the hobbles.
“O, yes. You are disbarred, Newman, and stripped of rank, and are now an ordinary teamster,” he said, rather relishing the blood rising in the fellow’s face, soaking his skin to the roots of his hair, the outrage, the sputtering shock at such a punishment.
“I’ll desert!” he said.
“Yes, do. And then I can hang you outright, you stupid upstart,” Lewis said.
Newman’s lip trembled and his color went as he saw it was no jest. “Wha’d I ever—why, Cap’n? I never done harm. I on’y made idle chat about the hauling!”
“I know what you are, man, better than you know yourself, and here is how to deal with you,” Lewis said, grinning. “I simply came to see if you are what I suspected, and you are.”
“I ain’t no harm, Cap’n. I on’y shot off my mouth to the others. They’re against me, is all, and have been all along! Don’tcha see?”
Lewis walked off, away from the bereft, hysteric voice, the pleas. Poor, handsome, craven creature. Though he’d enjoy the lashing of such a man.
Walking out, he noted that this nation’s houses were eight-sided, eight being the number of candles in a menorah and the days of Hanukkah. But he could espy no other Hebrew features that might identify one of the ten tribes. In an hour, just at sunset, the beating commenced and the stroke and Newman’s cry rang across the prairie. Suddenly, it stopped in the middle, the chief coming forth and staying the whip, crying out at such cruel treatment.
“Tell him we are making an example of this man for challenging my authority,” Lewis said to the interpreter. “Tell him that, if there are kindnesses at all between white people, it is lashing that makes them possible.”
The chief listened to the explanation and then, showing himself a sensible man, said examples were useful from time to time, and withdrew to let the beating resume. Newman at last fell on the ground, overcome by his wounds, and was beaten there to the count of twenty-five, then left.
9. “…they gave him four girls…”
A half-white boy survives a wildfire; Sacagawea and her husband join the party; A man stabs his wife three times; Sgt. Pryor’s shoulder replaced; York with frostbite on his p—; A visit from men dressed as women; S. gives birth.
The next day, they were under way early, the tribe anxious to consult a prophetic boulder about an impending war with their enemies. The men parted company with those tawny damsels, of marked esteem, and agreeable in nature. Lewis wondered briefly about a Miss G— H— and a Miss J— L— back at home, but could not believe in their existence. Surely those ladies had already lived, been loved, died, and were now remember’d on headstones under spreading shade trees. The clouds steamed like ships on a harbor, casting shadows on herds of buffalo streaming in rivulets o’er the plain.
Then several days and nights of