the next village, the chief had two little fingers off in grief for a dead son, and the old men were sitting and talking with a miraculous half-white boy, recently spared horrible death in a wildfire that burned straight over him. His mixed ancestry, particularly the lightness of his skin, was credited for his salvation (never mind his quick-thinking mother who threw a wet hide over him). So the president’s dream of one nation, united sea to sea, was being born, coming into real vitality all around them. Yet Lewis was in quite as gloomy a frame of mind as ever, and wondered whether humans were really better than the previous drowned race, of which Noah was the last. It hardly took a prophet to guess the shape of this landscape one or two hundred years hence. Unease found him every few instants and his heart was tight. The pleasant evening mysteriously excluded him; he could not experience its joys.
Later, a man came into camp, quite French, traveling with two wives, and petitioned to join the party as interpreter, a Snake-talker no less. He was the very thing they needed to get over the Rock Mountains, which grew in size with each passing day, throwing their long shadows on the surface of every eye. They talked with him, and he kept referring to their “mysterious journey” ahead. Clark spoke to him first on the matter, and Lewis stood glancing across the ravine toward the littler of the two women, one who plainly didn’t belong to her station in life, and was estranged, and showed no fear or hope. She awaited her fate at a distance of three dozen paces, which was just near enough. He couldn’t see her well, but well enough.
Suddenly taking Clark aside, Lewis said, “My impression is of a man but ill-suited for his occupation. Methinks the smaller wife is somehow key in his employment and is the real translator.”
Clark did not look at the fellow, nodding. Direct, easy, red-headed, and military, Clark was suspicious of words when acts were possible, and trusted Lewis as more intuitive than he.
Lewis walked up to the fellow, in his red Flemish cap, with a nose, prodigious organ, all pox’d and pimpl’d, that had apparently been made slapdash by a blind artisan who was missing several fingers. With short legs, a concave chest, long arms, simian hands, and crude, blocky feet, he hunched rather than stood. Rough strips of cloud above them had spread apart, showing the stars. Mr. Charbonneau, or “Mr. Charcoal,” as he was called, crooked forth a dirty little paw to shake. Here was one more foreigner who could not do it properly, and was not manly.
“As to terms,” Lewis said. Which instantly made hatred boil in the hollows of the piggy eyes. Lewis stated a handsome price, twice what that fellow was worth, and yet the rage only seemed to double. Such crude hands as those had surely poisoned out of revenge, had bludgeoned a sleeping enemy to death. He breathed a miasma of indigestion through broken teeth and, in utter and complete disgust, gave his hand anyway. Lewis dared to glance again. The neatness of her outfit. The eyes illumined from behind and blazing into the growing night.
“It is good to at last meet a Snake-talker,” Lewis said.
“Where is the fucking pig who says otherwise?” the fellow demanded, then laughed. In the lowest of rustic scenes, such creatures were made, Lewis knew, and for the rest of their lives sought relief for their crude condition, and ultimately found none.
But she! She was daughter to the God who incinerated Sodom. He looked to find her once more, and saw only where she had been. The fellow turned quickly to see where Lewis’s eyes had gone, but Lewis shut them and ducked away.
Later, he lay unable to sleep, eyes open, feeling immured in the cracks in time, watching floating columns of apparitions—Northern Lights—dancing on the tent. When he closed them, her face glinted in the dark, self-evident, essential, perfect. Then suddenly, the oxish stare of the husband intruded, divining all, observing his observing, and he was wide awake again.
. . .
In the morning, he witnessed a serious farewell between the old wife and the new, looking long and earnestly in each other’s faces, for this was maybe the last time they’d set eyes on each other, this side of death. Then the old wife was gone, and without so much as a backward glance at her husband.
Lewis felt it had happened before, yet everything had changed. Now he had someone, one whom he was able to watch without needing his eyes. He saw her with his mind’s seeing-organ, and noted so many things about her: her sportive willingness to journey, the wry silent witness she was to a large party of men. Also, formed last by God, her labours were now heavier after the departure of the old wife, even though her belly showed that she was far gone with child.
In the following days, he knew her proximity, direction, and activity every moment. If ever asked her whereabouts, he could answer without looking up—but never dar’d.
That night, near 10 P.M., the dark erupted into shouts of anger and a woman’s cries of pain. He and Clark forced a way through the mob and found a lady bleeding on the ground from three deep knife gouges, and her husband, smeared with the warm life of his beloved, with three privates sitting on him. It seemed she engaged in sport with the men, and the husband caught her, coming in late.
“You see, Clark?” Lewis asked. “This bedroom diplomacy does violence to souls unsuited to it.”
“’Tis puzzling,” Clark said, shaking his head. “To a savage, jealousy is generally thought impractical.”
“O, ’tis the least practical thing in the world,” Lewis said. “Please to tell the men to turn in.”
After Clark did, Lewis stayed a while and stood where he could not be seen and watched the bridegroom sitting half naked in the bloody snow, gasping and blowing and spitting red from having bitten his tongue in anguish. Behold, the angry forlorn cuckold. He seemed not to care whether he froze to death, lost in wonder. Why, little one? Why do you do this to me when you know I love you? Or words to that effect, while her blood dried on him. Ah, love. Lewis at last withdrew to his own bed, but lay too agitated to sleep, tossing and remembering his French mistress, being bathed in her gushing blood.
The next afternoon, Sergeant Pryor, a mere youth with twinkling blue eyes, curly locks, and smooth, high forehead, got his hand wrong in a rope, helping to raise a mast, and the violent wrench tore his shoulder from its socket, and he fell on the deck and writhed and kicked, and was sat upon by three of his fellows while a fourth tried to draw the arm out straight. The first try failing, Pryor all but bit his own tongue off and blood dribbled out of his mouth. “Goddamn you men! You butchers! You filthy, lazy, worthless wretches!” he cried. “You have been against me! I know you do not respect me! But I am . . . agh! . . . your sergeant, you stinking filth!”
On the second try, the joint ground in the socket, then jumped out again. Pryor kicked out and would have screamed could his jaws unclench, which they could not. With eyes squeezed, leaking tears, he espied Lewis, and blinked and made guttural growls and gnashed his teeth. “I see them! The lights about your head! Look above your head!” he said.
At the third try, Pryor seemed to go unconscious for a moment, and went limp as if dead, in a contorted, tortured pose. He slowly opened his eyes. “O, yellow pack of miscreants! You vile, disobedient demons! I at last see you! I see what ye really are!”
On the fourth attempt, at the pop of the shoulder going fully home, Pryor dropped dead away and was left where he was, the men walking off muttering about what a pip Sergeant Pryor could be at times, though not so bad, after all, as some officers.
Lewis waited nearby, curious, with never an inkling that the sergeant could be so wild and vindictive. Pryor opened his eyes and glanced about, seeming not to see him at first. He looked around expectantly, then his face dulled with disappointment. “Everything is . . . as before,” he said.
“And how should it be, Sergeant?” Lewis asked.
“A bright flame played about your head,” he said. “All this—” he gestured at the woods, “—was of the most variant hue and brilliance. Each blade of grass was a bit of fire.”
Lewis stared the sergeant in the face, for Floyd had actually emanated some sort of orange flare from the crown of his head, while the feathers came down the river. And then, very shortly after, expired from no