ever keep a gun,” she said.
“It’s not. It’s just a replica of one that Lewis carried,” he said. “It won’t fire. You’d need powder and patches and ammo.”
“It doesn’t feel like any replica. It’s heavy, just like a fucking gun,” she said.
She went upstairs to take off her work clothes, and he sat up, a little dizzy from so much sleep. As he tore away the strapping tape, Henry and Emily appeared in the doorway, then moved into the room and sat on the sofa before him and the box. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s not addressed to Pandora.”
“I’d like to see it, please,” she said.
He ripped away plastic and Styrofoam, exposing a solid maple case, flipping the antiqued-brass latches and prying up the lid. It was astonishing, pretty, as it lay in its custom red-velvet rest, solid walnut stock, octagonal barrel, polished brass flintlock mechanism and ramrod, a bead of real gold as the front sight.
“Okay, so it’s a gun,” she said.
“It’s just for show,” he said, lifting it out, hefting it. “Here, Henry, you want to hold it?”
“Now, why would he need to hold it?” she asked, then looked at Henry. “Do you want to hold it?”
“Yeah, give it here,” Henry said, and knelt down to take it. “Wow, are they always this heavy?” He put it to his shoulder correctly and aimed, closing one eye, squeezing the trigger. As he did, Lewis got a sudden gut-wrenching shock to his nerves that it might somehow fire, and Emily saw his expression.
“Just a replica, huh? Give it back to your dad, Henry,” she said.
They sat over the gun for a moment. It was interesting how there seemed to be four people in the room now, like the gun was someone. And even after he’d wrestled the gun upstairs to his office and thrust it harmlessly away, into a closet, it still felt like somebody was there.
They weren’t talkative during dinner. When he did speak, Bill had the sense the gun was listening, and knew they were aware of it, feared it. Which was strange because, as a kid, Bill often handled guns and never feared them. It was people you had to watch out for, what they suddenly did to you or said to you when no one was looking.
Emily was trapped, he knew, between respecting his book research and looking out for Henry. Women could be their own worst enemies in this regard, taking any male endeavor more seriously than their own.
After dinner, Bill went to his office under the stairs as usual, to sit and ponder.
The thing was, Lewis was supposedly helping found a new order of man in the New World, and was an agent of the Enlightenment. He called the expedition Voyage of Discovery, and his party members the Corps of Volunteers for Northwestern Discovery. It was strictly scientific. On the other hand, the money came from the War Department. Which meant they’d use military hierarchy and army discipline, with flogging for most offenses, and shooting for desertion.
He invited Clark, his favorite ex-commander, who’d taken early retirement due to health problems. Clark was at home doing not very much and probably wondering if he was finished, done for, washed up at thirty-four. Then came Lewis’s letter, which said, Hey, pal? How’s it going? Howzabout joining me on this crazy mission we’re unlikely to ever return from?
Clark’s affirmative reply went out in the next day’s mail.
Lewis had waited ’til the last minute to invite him, so either he was sure of Clark’s reply or he didn’t have anyone else to ask.
What was Lewis told to prepare for in the West? Woolly mammoths and giant sloths, cannibalism and polygamy, a light-skinned race of “Welsh Indians,” a mountain of pure salt and the ten Lost Tribes of Israel. They asked him to study suicide among the savages. For instance, did they ever do it from heartbreak in love? While he was at it, he was supposed to find an all-water route to the Pacific Ocean and, if it wasn’t too much trouble, the Northwest Passage.
Bill was in bed early, with Emily already there, but not asleep. They lay there—together but not touching, not talking but conscious. Then she gradually left him and he was awake in the house, and so was It. Meaning his oldest adversary, Depression. That siege engine of mental illness.
Creeping in through his teens, twenties, and thirties, now it was always over him. And sometimes the illness set down so hard, he thought seriously about doing it, that it might be best for everyone if he did, and saved them from a prolonged, drawn-out crash and burn. He and Emily were newly married the last time it hit hard, and had a tiny baby. Naturally, she’d wanted him to shake it off and pull through, but she’d also needed to look out for Henry. Bill lost his college-teaching job along the way, and now they got by on two secondary-ed salaries, hers from a special-ed position. They’d probably never ever retire.
And while Lewis the insomniac lay awake, maundering all of this, he knew that Lewis the explorer was lying in his grave in Tennessee and not worrying about a single thing. Not the least thing.
4. “…we fear something amiss…”
Shoving off from St. Charles, Missouri, May 1804; Observing the Manitou figure-painting on a rock; York nearly losing an eye by having sand thrown in it; Seeing the gilded clouds; A snake dances on its tail in the river; Recalling the woman shot the first day.
In fact, he never rested, and even now crawled on hands and knees through a tunnel of redbud branches. He looked around for the river, relying on it to guide him. The foliage was thick and lush, the height of summer. Squirrels dropped things or plummeted to earth themselves. A French engagé fired a gun at some game on shore.
Amid shouts and cheers, they’d shoved off. Now they made their wavering way, having left behind just everything, all of their loved ones. Somewhere, young women were tearful. He felt the hard fact of forty days’ provisions with no place to replenish anything but water, meat, and firewood for three years. An unlimited letter of credit meant very little now; there was nobody up here to honor it. No Indians either, the wise ones having cleared out, having vanished in a half instant into the shade of towering immense black or green trees.
They’d met one Daniel Boone, and dined on deer brisket and yams at his large rustic French-style house, and received a book from him on loan, which was his fireside reading while blazing the Kentucky trail: Gulliver’s Travels. Lewis was grateful to have it, but more so to be quickly on their way.
Because he was very, very late. Possibly too late to reach the Pacific in time to seize the continent from the British. A Canadian had etched his name on a rock above a bay on the Pacific, then somehow a decade had got by. Lewis was just thirty, but already ten years too late, it seemed. He was in a bad patch.
At the next rise, he stood a moment, thinking of Pierre Chouteau’s half- breed daughter a few stops back, a most decent-looking female. And he was already keeping a secret from the men: Captain Clark’s commission was not that of a captain at all, but of a lieutenant. Which gave him an awkward edge on his older friend, who’d been dying in domestic comfort when the fateful letter had arrived.
He felt observed. When commander, somebody was always watching, even watching you think. The president had tried very, very hard to turn up someone better. But nobody with the right qualifications, in botany, anthropology, astronomy, geology, zoology, and medical science, ever appeared.
The mission was almost certain to fail on account of weather, illness, starvation, and Indian attack. Also, he suffered desp’rate bouts of anger at God, for making him fatherless, and the eldest male child, and his family’s only hope. Sometimes he even hated Him, and resented being left down here in the dark in so many ways. Why couldn’t God just love him, as he seemed so freely to love and bless so many who didn’t deserve it? He even enjoyed defeating God, in little ways, like pressing down a trigger to end the life of some dumb, beautiful creature He had made. And then destroying and ripping it, with strong white teeth, God’s handiwork.
That