about Sacagawea?” Joaney asked.
“Her name meant ‘bird-woman’ in Hidatsa, the tribe that stole her away from her family,” he said. “In Shoshoni, it meant ‘boat-launcher.’ Like Helen, she’d apparently launched a lot of boats.”
At eye level, when he turned, was suddenly a map of North America, and some wag had pasted a little arrow pointing to his town: you are here. Good to know. He was right where the Kanza or Kaw met the Missouri, smack in Osage territory.
So where were the native faces? He couldn’t find even one. And the fierce eyes looking back warned him to be careful of what he wanted to know, how badly he needed to find out.
“Why’d he do it?” Joaney asked.
Skyler had jewels sparkling in the side of her nose, and both earlobes, and an eyebrow. Under the clock was a very good copy of Clark’s map of the Missouri, its course and tributaries. Mozart suddenly started to play, but it was hollow, false and tinny. Richard dug hastily into his bag and brought up a little device. Lewis snatched it, and faces turned eagerly to see what sport he’d make of Richard. He shook the thing. He pressed its numbered face, making it squawk and object like a parrot. “Jesus, take it easy!” Richard said, grabbing it.
Joaney’s eyes, like the Mona Lisa’s, followed him everywhere, head turning on the long, elegant stalk of her neck. “The Bible, if one counts all the begats in Genesis, dates creation at 4004 b.c.,” he said. “That’s the kind of pre-Darwinian era Lewis lived in. The world was still young. Everything was fairly new, from the Republic on down. Even if you’d made bad mistakes, it wasn’t too late to fix them. The trouble was, somebody was going to rush past you and grab up everything good, if you didn’t hurry.”
“Just answer the question,” T, for Tremaine, demanded, his only black kid.
This must’ve been what Jefferson meant when he said, “History will not be kind to us.” T asked the question as a command, but now his lip slightly quivered, as if his whole being trembled before the answer.
“He was way in debt,” Richard said.
“He drank like a fish. He ate opium pills like they were TicTacs,” Skyler said.
Lewis was dizzy, and dropped suddenly into the chair he’d apparently placed there for the purpose. He might be sick. His color, he assumed, was not good. “What can I offer except facts?” he said. “Born the same year as the Boston Tea Party, at age five he lost his father, who caught pneumonia one night in the rain, dodging a British patrol. Not much education. Passenger pigeons are extinct now, but their migrations once blotted out the sun. The family motto was Omne solum forti patria est, which means ‘It is best to die for one’s country.’ Or it might mean ‘To a brave man, all earth is his country.’ On his mother’s side, the motto was Force and counsel, but they were Welsh. Jefferson called Lewis’s grandfather the most sensible man he ever knew. Lewis shot a bull at full charge at age nine. He was head of a household at thirteen, with two thousand acres and twenty-eight slaves. He learned herbal medicine from his mom.”
For some reason, Bill now got out his wallet, taking out the first item, a likeness of himself on a card with a bunch of numbers. “Everyone was related to everyone else. For example, Sergeant Floyd, the only one who died, was Clark’s cousin. Lewis was related to Jefferson. The Randolphs, Hearsts, and Lewises all intermixed bloodlines too often, and it was blamed for the many suicides in the family. Robert Penn Warren wrote a poem about Lilburne Lewis, who chopped up one of his slaves with an ax, then killed himself. Is this helping?” he asked. “Is this what you want to know?”
They nodded, waiting for more. Just in time, the bell rang. He didn’t think he could stand, so he simply sat smiling and nodding as they filed out. “Don’t forget the field trip!” he said.
Alone, with his picture in his hand, he knew he hadn’t really answered their questions, not the big ones anyway. He felt that familiar lightness in his throat, craving for the cigarette, which he hated and loved and wanted and needed. It kept something down that was trying to bubble up in him, riot in him. The cigarette held it at the bottom of his throat.
He felt as alive as ever in his life, sitting there, but must’ve gotten up too quickly, because he saw darkness, then met the floor with a painless crash, thinking, Oh, a header! A face plant, a canvas nap.
Bill was helped up the steps and in the front door with Emily’s arm around him, having left the ER after a CAT scan for his head, a butterfly bandage for his brow. Emily’d left her BD (behavior-disordered) and LD (learning-disabled) kids with another teacher for a while, to care for him.
He couldn’t do the wraparound staircase to get upstairs and gingerly explored his way to the couch, getting onto it like it might tip or go shooting away. She heated chicken soup, with its slight tang of tin can, and brought a bag of frozen peas and a throw. He ate, with her watching him in alarm. He balanced the peas on his head and looked out at her from underneath.
“Maybe I should cancel this float trip. It’s just two days away,” she said.
“No, no. I plan to be floating the river, one way or another,” he said. “Don’t spoil it.”
“What if it’s a brain tumor?” she asked.
“Don’t you need to get back to work?” he asked.
She used to be an actress, strictly amateur, and they’d met because he used to write little melodramas for the local playhouse. But they gave it up years ago, when she gave birth to Henry, and they decided to get married because they were “in love” as Emily always liked to say it, with both words in quotes. At some point, she’d stopped saying it.
“When Henry gets home, tell him there’s a sandwich in the fridge, and that he’s to eat all of it, and drink all the milk,” she said, going to the hall mirror and pulling on her hair, giving it a few warning tugs. And out the door she went, back to face the kid who was making her life a living hell that week, old what-was-his-name? Dennis, that was it. Recently, he’d dived down a laundry chute, trying to kill himself on the concrete floor below, but instead got stuck and ripped flesh off both arms.
As soon as he heard her pull away, he got up, balancing the peas on his head, got his cigarettes from the drawer, Camels, with the matchbook tucked in the cellophane wrapper, and went grimly out to the sunporch and closed the door, holding his frozen-pea hat with one hand, sitting in the porch swing. As he lit the first one, his hand shook because he needed it. Smoke blew back in his eyes and smarted and caused tears. He pulled at the smoke, drawing it, that suction of lip and tongue, how it caused the tip to come to life, burn, a supersonic stream of air passing backward through the dried, treated, shredded, compressed, rolled tobacco, its nicotine released as a vaporized cool blue jetstream. And nothing leftover but ash. He used a soda can for an ashtray since Emily refused to buy one. Drawing on the cigarette was like sucking at the straw of life, taking it in, tasting it, mulling it around, getting soothed by it, using it up, then blowing it out, that moment just a memory now.
It was about tobacco, this story he was trying to tell. The Virginians needed land for their cash crop, and lots of it, because tobacco sucked all the nutrients out of the soil and gave back nothing. You had to have all the land you could grab. And no matter how much you had, it probably wasn’t half enough to make it in tobacco. The expedition carried 130 rolls of pigtail tobacco as a trade item. When they got west of the Rockies, the tribes had never seen tobacco before, but turned on to it, gradually.
Didn’t seem that long ago. But when Jefferson offered a bounty to anyone willing to try for the Pacific, he offered it in pounds, one thousand British sterling pounds, not dollars.
Lewis and Clark weren’t even the first ones. In 1793, when Lewis was just nineteen, a guy—a British subject—made it all the way. And on a rock overlooking the Pacific, he wrote, “Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty-second of July, one thousand seven hundred and ninety three.” An English sea-captain saw the message and sailed all the way around the Cape of Good Hope up to Boston, his story finding its way back to Jefferson. Which’d scared Tom to death, that