had possession of their lands. It made him very cross, their cool insolence. He saw red. He saw stars. For some reason, he recalled his empurpled rage in the schoolyard, at six, when a mentally-defective boy tore the picture he’d drawn for his mother’s birthday, when he’d tried to kill the boy with a rock.
In the river the day before, he saw, on a rock projecting out over the water, a painting of a strange figure, the Manitou, their Zeus, and Michimanitou, their Hera. The Nations were, in their polytheism, strangely touching and backward. But he had his own backwardness, his own clumsy wrongness. For instance, something about the crudeness of the men made him very dull and ugly inside, festering and impure. He was not happy among them, and sometimes felt a stinking misery. That was the sadness again. And yet he loved to see the little “kids” in the villages. If only they need not become adult men and women. And many would be dead when they came back, so where was the point in liking them? Yes, today he was in a bad patch.
By evening, he’d found his way back to camp, following smells of corn cooked in grease, and pan-bread, boiled salt pork, and Indian meal cakes which gusted down the channel into his nostrils, tender and red from hay fever.
At sunset, the clouds suddenly caught flame all along their bottoms, and burned like a wildfire turned upside down. O, what madness the sky could display! Its violence and lurid feeling never lasted, though. It was turning gilded and innocent again, the last ember going out. Each day, something in him flared up and wanted to cry out to those colours, as tho to a parent, “No, don’t leave! Don’t go! Don’t leave me here among these awful people! O, take me with you, for they want to undo me, and harm me to death, and ruin me!” Though what exactly was being done to him, and by whom, he could not name. A game of some sort was being played against him. In truth, he wasn’t deemed worthy to command this expedition, but only available for the trip.
As he stood ’neath those clouds, facing the prairie, he felt the pressure and presence in those meadows and woods and fields of the ones who were coming. Though not yet born in haylofts in Europe, though not yet landed, still puking over the gunwales in the middle of the Atlantic, he saw all around him their ghostly houses and livestock and fences, privies and gardens.
Some of the things he’d already seen were beyond the pale. Nobody would believe it if he reported ten thousand pelicans carpeting an island. No, he could only report the plainer facts, like Clark’s negro York nearly losing an eye from having sand thrown in it. Yes, how plain, how very straightforward human behavior was, after all, and never any surprises. But what about the snake who’d swum up under a deer hung over the river to drain of blood, the one who wouldn’t stop dancing on his tail in the water and leaping at the fresh meat? The one he’d had to kill.
What was the use in telling the truth, though, since none could hear it?
What about the swimming swans and their whiteness? What a joy they brought, a joy so boundless. Then they’d shot one, and the corpse looked just like a bride killed on her wedding day in her white wedding clothes.
What was more, on the way down the Ohio, he’d shot a woman in the head. No, he hadn’t actually aimed and pulled the trigger, but he’d let the airgun, primed and ready, out of his hands for a moment, and a green French engagé had touched her in the wrong place, and the ball felled an innocent woman who’d been out strolling along the shore. The scalp wound gushed blood in vivid helpless warm gouts and he tried not to touch it but her blood got on his shirt and soaked through to his skin, and was hot like pissing oneself and gave an unspeakable tender horror as it made the fabric heavy. But he had no other. So he wore her blood, hot at first, then warm and very wet. It was terribly intimate, like holding a dying lover and having her blood splash onto you from her consumptive lung, from her abruption in childbirth. And the smell, even now, made him lightheaded to recall, how raw, like beef.
Maybe he fell in love with her. She struggled up out of his arms babbling, then looked at him as if he’d been indecent. Maybe a desire was in her eyes to slap at or hit him, though she held her bloody scalp instead and got clear of him, muttering in French. He loved her. It sometimes happened to him like that, stunningly. She seemed suddenly beautiful. But her mouth twisted in insult: he was wrong, unnatural. And there was God again for you! God and His jokes! I will make you handsome, but also somehow offensive to women. He never had the remark ready on his tongue, to cloy and soothe and entice their interest. How he loved a moment of their company, while his own was treated as clumsy, stupid. How dare he show up at their side! His very presence made blood pour from their heads.
He needed to withdraw, with apologies, though he should have stayed, to care for her poor head, to help her through her delirium and drain the swelling from the infection, her head grown pregnant from his penetration. He should have found a way to make her love him, and etc. But no, he had the mission and must depart. He never saw her again.
5. “…reason to believe he hath deserted…”
A man is sun-struck; A catfish breathes out of water; The incident of the feathers; The passing of Great-Spirit-Is-Bad Creek; Reed returns with a curious object.
Within a few days, a man had fallen asleep on guard duty and needed disciplining. Pleading his innocence until sentencing, which was one hundred lashes, he confessed, and got fifty instead. A man was then sunstruck while poling and walked off the deck directly onto the water, and was hauled up, sputtering and raving. Lewis bent over him as he lay dripping on deck and blocked the sun from the private with his body. He peered closely at the wet red-and-white whiskers, the bloodshot whites of blue eyes, the green spider-veins in his cheeks, the pustules scattered over his skin in lines like volcanic eruptions.
“What year is it, Private?” he asked.
“Fi’ty-eight ought eight, sir?” the man said.
Lewis’s mouth fell stunned, open, at that answer. “Do you know where you are, sir?” he asked.
“I don’ know nothin’. Nothin’s familiar,” he said, gazing side to side, then looking Lewis in the eye. “But you I know, sir! I know you from that hell!”
“What hell would that be?” Lewis asked. The fellow shook his ragged red locks and blinked fiercely. Lewis went a few steps away and got the medical kit, taking out a tiny metal tin of niter and making the man swallow some. In a few moments, a door behind his eyes seemed to swing shut, and a plain light came back to them.
Which disappointed Lewis obscurely. In fact, he was suddenly quite low, and threw the niter back into the kit. He had loved that French girl with the wounded head, but would never ever see her again. She’d heal and marry and the brute could never properly love her—not the way he already did!
“Explain, please,” Clark said, “the business of the year. The fellow was not even close and yet wants to go back to his post.”
“He meant anno mundi. World year,” Lewis said. “He counts from the time of creation, reckoned as the year 4004 before Christ.”
“Peculiar,” Clark said.
Lewis shrugged, for the Indians believed that the world was all an illusion, a mere shadow cast by the real one, and that one must know how to dream with eyes wide open in order to enter into and live in it. There were other worlds, without a doubt, but his own experience of them was second-hand and anecdotal. Never had anyone managed to seize hold of the least thing while visiting in those nether realms and bring it back, not a unicorn hair, not an angel’s wing, not e’en a speck of fairy’s shite.
As for this world, his world, it was strange and often unhappy. For Clark already had his girl, his wife-to-be, and likelihood smiled on all these plans. Lewis awaited the woman who would pine and sulk, weep and yearn and die with his name on her lips, make a riot for worms, lie stiff and gaunt and mere bones still longing for his touch, become dust, feed a crop, and then be ruminated by livestock.
Past noon, dark clouds moved in and the wind rose and whipped the trees, and the sunlight was all sucked away with the air, as in a cataclysmic eclipse or some other doom. The sky got angry and purple and boiled, with a state approaching panic