does it not?”
Irving sat still and stared at the black, waxed floor planks as though he were wishing it to be true, as if wanting a new faith to go along with his return to the new continent. Clark felt embarrassed, like he had disappointed a younger version of himself. “This new age is confusing,” Clark said. “In a way, one misses the Spanish and the unquestionable right of conquest. Lewis would disagree, but where is he now? Do you see him here or there? When a man speaks too long and loudly for the Enlightenment, it seems the world must kill him.”
Clark was aware of saying things he never ever had, so this must be the last person who would come asking.
“But why?” Irving asked, as if waiting earnestly, erectly, to know.
“Very simply, this must not be the actual world, but something merely painted on its surface,” Clark said. “Otherwise, life would matter and we would take every measure to preserve it. Instead, we recklessly chance everything. And if not slaughtered that time, we do it again. The notion that life is precious is the greatest lie of our age. What matters are the passions, the thrilling lusts of rage, desire, and hatred. Nothing else is actually here.”
Irving was writing quickly, trying to get it, note for note. “Do you have it, then?” Clark asked. “Are we finished?”
“Yes, I believe so . . .”
2. “…cutting himself from head to foot…”
At long last, Lewis had come to the place, a hollow by the side of the road, an inn simple as that which snubbed Mary. O, here, finally, was the large house with milled boards! And a cabin of roughcut timber, a barn with a trotting-horse weather vane and honeysuckle on the post box. Also, an arbor, some limestone steps, and a dirt lane between house and privy.
The smokehouse door was propped with a stone, flies swirling ’round glazed hard rinds of hams. His gown was dry, despite attempts to drown in the river. Now only Pernier knew, and what he knew nobody else ever would, because of his marked silence. Pernier took the horses under a tree and waited there, staring at the ground, apparently having one of his philosophical discoveries. Pernier was wise, poor, and free. But if he ever left Lewis, he must simply take up with another great person.
The keeper’s wife greeted them, and liveried the horses. Then showed him the place. “Pernier and I like to sleep under the stars, except in bitter weather,” he said. “Yet your inn is fine as any like it in the world.”
No doubt, she brewed a weak coffee and larded rather than buttered the morning cake. But was honest, good, hard as bricks if tried, in all ways a credit to her kind. She offered her bed. “I have not gone near one in years,” he said, panting and holding his head. “A bed is the shape of a grave.”
He would rest on the hard floor in the buffalo robes, the ones that were his bed in Her wilderness.
Trees overarched that road thickly to the east, more sparsely to the west.
He sought a vantage point in order to look back. The clouds, spread across the horizon, were true anvils, purple-black and full of rain. They blocked the sun. The rays broke forth in ev’ry direction, illumining random pieces of ground. The picture shimmered, as if trying to collapse altogether. He’d come far, but could not see a road. A heaviness in his sight promised a sleep e’en the trumpets of Judgment wouldn’t break. There was no joy in anything, except the evening, the sweetest he’d known.
He sat bitterly shaking in the lengthening gloomy light. That lady brought her sewing out and sat in her rocker. Her nimble hands, separate from her intent, still form, tried to restore order to a chaotic void. It wasn’t the chair which rocked, but the world that moved while she stayed in place. She was the center. O, Copernicus, revise your formulae, for a new body stands still in the heavens!
He’d never felt content as just himself, and was not now. He’d started as an industrious eldest son, wonder boy, who ran the farm and its indentured blacks. Yet all along, he’d been indentured, too! For being great only meant labouring under a great yoke. But what was wrong with the world could not be righted from this side, the living side, of it.
Lewis guzzled his whiskey, mind tumbling and staggering while he drank and drank and stayed perfectly sober. The lady in the center. Her chickens scratching in the dirt, her horse kicking in the barn, as her sun plunged into her Pacific whose waters lapped along her vast, impious soul. But he’d seen what Columbus never did! Yet it would not help finish her sewing by dark.
Wishing to speak to her, his mind was a tangle. Pacing outside the cabin, he was trying to outrace fate, seeing the open door and blanching, stumbling away. He’d produced no true accounting. But how could he tell one story while holding back another? If only, when he’d come back to the world, the world had been there. But it was nowhere. This lady rocking, just miles from where she was born, was now the whole thing. Columbus, dying of the syph in the tropics, knew this at the end.
When Lewis was a boy, they’d said the world revolved at furious speed. So he tested this by leaping into the air—and coming down in the same place.
That lady’s eye was on him. She looked up to plot his trajectories toward and away from her. She knew distresses of the soul, how to recognize the signs in cows, pigs and men. He needed to speak to her with his knotted, poor tongue. His servant, Pernier, attended all from the shade of a flow’ring crab. And knew and knew, and said nothing.
Clark would catch him up, Lewis was sure. Clark would not let him perish alone here. He simply had to last a bit longer. Still, all was in readiness for his crossing over.
And they had toiled so furiously upstream, while this place, o’er-reached by trees, struck by hard lines of radiant light, blindly waited. Locust Hill, snowy mornings, his dogs, Mother’s face. That sad monster called boyhood. Lewis’s throat constricted, and swallowing became impossible. In the end, a body simply outlived its usefulness.
He was now in for the worst. The heart beat and beat and need run itself out.
O, to see his Janey again! For hers was a soul so grim, stoic, and resolute. We are sent to keep one other person alive. And not ’til the end do we know which one was ours, which was the one we were sent for. All of one’s good was displayed in a moment. But not ’til the end did one know which moment.
Wishing to speak to that lady, he saw she was just now occupied with the memory of a dead child, and turned away. By not marrying, he’d at least been spared that!
Night now came crashing and breaking in pieces, shards and motes of black.
Her cow’s lowing fell quiet. Her dog barked. That lady would wish him a good night, if only he could approach her. Pernier attended with dark and somber look. The lady knew! O, she knew his plight, even with her little ones tucked in bed, her chicken dinner simmering on the stove, bubbling tiny curls of bloody feathers. Her cribs were full to the very top, for winter.
“A pleasant evening—” he croaked, at the apogee of his orbit.
“Yes, Captain?” She brightened, for here was conversation.
O, dismal! O, painful! Reflections swarmed to goad him away from her, for she was comfort and aid. Any instant, he’d beat his head and cry out and be truly insane. He just managed to break off with a smile. With a slight bow, going his way politely while a din, a gnattering of demonic flies, resounded by his ears.
He began to circle and chant. Looking west, where ev’ry hope went to die.
The clouds with weak gold light along their bottoms were seeing the world’s end. The world: the thing for which he’d never stop fighting. But why was it all designed? God, please end the world, and let us all awaken in the next!
A cardinal said, again and again, Am I alone? Where are you?
But O, for an earth made the way they’d believed! With one long river top to bottom and shore to shore. Which prov’d the creation was not for Man, who was only cast-away in it.
No,