Centennial

by James A. Michener

  “Why don’t we try it?”

  “Why not, indeed?” McKeag said, and he called out to his wife. When Clay Basket appeared he said, “This one wants to open a trading post for Indians down at Beaver Creek,” and she said, “This fort is no place to keep our daughter.” They called Lucinda and the five of them spent no more than fifteen minutes discussing the dangers involved, and all agreed that they would head south as soon as McKeag could turn his accounts over to another.

  They were three days out of Fort John when McKeag astounded the Zendts by announcing, “At the bank in St. Louis, I’ve got twenty-three thousand dollars, so we’ll have them send us up three wagonloads of stock.”

  “Where’d you get twenty-three thousand dollars?”

  “Saved it ... when Pasquinel was wastin’ his. When word gets out that we have trade goods, the Indians’ll come flockin’ in, and I can speak most of their languages.”

  “I can put in two thousand dollars,” Levi said. “Where’d you get two thousand dollars?”

  “Sold my horses ... in St. Joe.”

  In this manner a solid partnership was formed, the sea and such in McKeag’s life, and he would prove as faithful to the second as to the first. Of the relationship Elly wrote:

  August 25, Sunday ... On a day like this I often wonder if our misfortunes on this trip came to us because we traveled on the Sabbath. I think that perhaps the Fishers and the Fraziers were right and that we should have rested as God commands. And yet when I look at the three people who are traveling with us today I find that they are more Christian than those we were with before. But Mr. McKeag has no relationship with God, while Clay Basket and Lucinda do not even know the name, and since none of the three can read, they cannot know the Bible. Yet God seems to smile on them so that whatever they do prospers, while on Levi and me he has frowned ...

  As she was finishing these lines, Lucinda came to the half-wagon and asked, “Is it hard ... to learn writing?” and Elly told her, “No, but I think you must start young,” and Lucinda, who was the same age as Elly, asked, “Am I too old?” and Elly replied, “No. I’m sure you could learn;” and she promised to teach her.

  Summer was nearly over, and McKeag explained that since it was too late to get loaded wagons back from St. Louis this year, they would occupy the time building a really substantial home at Beaver Creek, on a rise he remembered where they would be safe from the Platte when it flooded. From then on they spent each evening planning how the house should be built and of what.

  Clay Basket had noticed that a significant change was taking place in Elly and suspected that she had not yet told Levi, and one night when the men were discussing where they might find a supply of straight logs, she took Elly aside and said, “We must insist on another room, because your child will need it as she grows up.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Indian women watch.”

  “I think it will be born in winter. Will that be difficult?”

  “If the house is warm ...” She paused, then added, “And McKeag builds warm ones.”

  “I haven’t told Levi yet ... the disappointments he’s had.”

  “A child is no disappointment. Maybe that’s what he needs most of all.”

  When Elly decided to tell her husband, she discovered that he had known almost from the first. “I kept watchin’ you,” he said, “and I noticed little things. But it came clear that day when you were swept away at the Big Blue.”

  “What could you have seen? You were looking ahead.”

  “No, at the last moment I turned. And saw you protectin’ your stomach as you fell. That’s why, when Purchas made for you that day ...” His voice trailed off. “I would have killed him.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked, as if disappointed that he had ferreted out her secret.

  “Because you’re growin’ so beautiful. Clay Basket didn’t find out because you’re fatter. She saw it in your face.” This was true. With her growing pregnancy Elly had attained a serenity she had not known before, and her thin face was becoming actually beautiful. She would never again be a scrawny, sixteen-year-old willow stem; she was now a mature woman of seventeen with a burgeoning loveliness, as if the prairie had called forth a miracle.

  “It wasn’t really the elephant that made me turn back,” Levi confessed. “It was wantin’ to protect you and the baby.”

  That evening while Levi wandered over the prairie, collecting buffalo chips so that Elly would not have to work, she stayed in the wagon, writing to Laura Lou. This letter stands as an epistle of hope and prescience, epitomizing the contributions made by the brave women who crossed the plains in pioneer days:

  August 27, Tuesday ... To be pregnant takes away the sting of defeat, for just as we shall be starting a new community where the rivers meet, so Levi and I shall be starting a new family.. Also, the land we are traveling through is the kind that makes you proud, for it is beautiful in a manner that those of us who lived always in Lancaster could never have dreamed or appreciated. This afternoon we came over a hill and saw before us the two red buttes which have been our target since we left Fort John. They stood like signal towers, or the ramparts of a castle, and they created such a strong sense of home that all of us halted on the hill to appreciate the noble place to which God had brought us. I think Clay Basket had tears in her eyes, for this was where she had lived as a girl, and her father, who must have been a pretty important man, liked to pitch his tent between the two buttes, and as she looked at them she thought of her family, for she told me, “My mother was called Blue Leaf from the name of a very beautiful tree that grows in the mountains.” Mr. McKeag had often camped alone at the Buttes and told us of how, when the snows came, he might be alone underground for three or four months at a time. And Lucinda, who is trying to learn the alphabet, listened most carefully, for she had not heard these stories before. Levi and I spent only a little while looking at the buttes, because our attention was taken by the mountains to the west, and we both thought that if we were to live within the shadow of such majestic hills we would become like them. It was now growing dark, and the sun disappeared and over the prairie which we have come to love so well came a bluish haze and then a purple and finally the first dark shades of night itself and we were five travelers on the crest of a hill. I feel assured that any family which grows up in such novel surroundings will be strong and different and I thank God that I am pregnant so that I can watch the growing.

  Next morning Elly was up early to prepare breakfast, and as she moved briskly toward the small pile of buffalo chips that Levi had gathered for her, she did not heed the warning sound, and as she stopped to lift a large chip, a giant rattlesnake, bigger around than her arm, struck with terrifying speed and sank its fangs deep into her throat. Within three minutes she was dead.

  “It’s God’s mercy,” McKeag said as Levi Zendt came rushing up, too late for even one last kiss. “It’s God’s mercy,” the red-bearded Scotsman repeated, as he gripped Zendt by the shoulders. “I’ve seen ’em die slow, all swole up. Levi, it’s better this way.”

  The stocky Dutchman could not be consoled. He had grown to love Elly as few men love their wives, for she had been finer in every way than what he could have expected. Life with her had been a constant unfolding of promise that the better years lay ahead and to lose her at the moment when a new life was beginning was intolerable.

  All that morning he wandered about the buttes, coming back repeatedly to her limp body to touch it, to inspect the fatal dots on her neck, but in the afternoon McKeag said, “Levi, we got to bury her.” Zendt refused to listen, until the Scotsman said, “It ain’t decent.” Then they took their shovels and dug a narrow grave in the lee of the western butte, and there she lay—Elly Zahm, patient, understanding, loving, the mother of lost children. She had come voluntarily on this great adventure and had won the love of all she met, and now she rested within the shadow of the butte. With her Levi buried her paper, proving that she had been marrie
d.

  On their way to the river another ox died, and the next day the wagon itself collapsed, both wheels gone. Levi was too numb to do anything about it, but McKeag and Clay Basket lashed his gear onto the backs of the three surviving oxen and chopped the wagon up for wood.

  So Levi Zendt reached the west bank of Beaver Creek, where the trading post was to be, bereft of all he had started out with. His sorrow was so heavy that for a long time he could not talk. But as the months passed, he did find some comfort in the task of helping McKeag build two sturdy houses and then a stockade enclosing the whole, with a battlement at the northwest corner, where attacks would come if they came at all. By November the place was secure, and on a cold, windy day McKeag went to the Platte and chopped himself a set of stakes. Taking Levi and the women with him, he paced off plots, each a mile square, three of them on the western bank of the creek, two on the eastern, and he staked out the corners and told his group, “We’re layin’ claim to five sections. One for me, one for Levi, one for Clay Basket, one for Lucinda, and one for dead Elly, and we will defend them against trespass.”

  But there was no consolation for Levi in the possession of land, and as the winter deepened he grew even more depressed. Clay Basket did what she could to comfort him, but when she heard him ask McKeag, “Where’s the Chalk Cliff you told me about,” she encouraged Levi to seek it out and stay alone for a while, hoping that solitude would enable him to master his grief.

  So he loaded a fair amount of gear on his back and walked for two days in a northwesterly direction till he came in sight of the cliffs at whose feet McKeag had once built his refuge. Some of the logs were still there, others could be cut, and he built himself a log-and-sod but on a spot that men had occupied for the past twelve thousand years.

  He became a typical hermit, talking to ducks that settled on the little stream and watching antelope as if they were people. He castigated himself for having brought Elly to this desolate land, for having turned back when the elephant threatened. He convinced himself that if they had pursued their course to Oregon she would now be alive and her son would shortly be born, and he became half mad, with the risk that when the snows covered him, he might cower beneath them and perish.

  The snows did come, much earlier than usual, and he spent most of December underground. February was a vicious month and he became a real animal, urinating in a corner of his but and allowing his excrement to accumulate there—never venturing out, never ceasing to blame himself for Elly’s death. If March were to bring blizzards, as it often did, he would soon be dead.

  Clay Basket meanwhile was watching the weather, calculating the depth of snow at Chalk Cliff. She could imagine what the imprisoned Dutchman was doing, and when a thaw came in late February she told Lucinda, “You must take two horses and go to Chalk Cliff.”

  “Why should she be the one to go?” McKeag asked.

  “He will be ready to come back,” Clay Basket said.

  “Then I’ll fetch him,” McKeag volunteered.

  “He doesn’t need you,” she said. “Only Lucinda can save him.” Her words had the force of accumulated wisdom, for although Indian tradition required that a maiden remain a virgin till the day she took a husband, Clay Basket realized that a human life had to be rescued, and she was willing to send her daughter to a man who had seen no one for many months. Indeed, she suspected that two lives might be involved, for at Fort John she had watched with dismay as Lucinda shifted her attention from one useless trapper to the next. It had then seemed only a matter of time before the child must go off with some old lecher like Sam Purchas, and this she could not permit.

  “Go to him,” she said, and Lucinda saddled up two pintos and rode westward.

  When she came to the cliff, it took her some time to find where Zendt was holed up. Finally she discovered the hut at the north end of the cliff, and she stood at the entrance, calling, “Zendt! Zendt!”

  It was some time before she got a response, then a bearded, bleary-eyed man appeared, blinking at the sun. “You are filthy,” she said, and although he tried weakly to stop her, she moved inside to witness the appalling conditions under which he lived.

  “Zendt! How could you live like this!” She started to make the place habitable, and as she worked she saw that he was far too weak either to help or to mount a horse for the return trip. So she made him a new bed of clean branches cut from the little willows that the beaver no longer usurped for themselves. She built a fire and made some hot food, which he ate ravenously. Then she unloaded the pintos, and with two buffalo robes, fashioned herself a bed at his feet. He was asleep before she lay down.

  In the morning he adjusted his weakened eyes and saw that she had stayed with him, and he asked in a faltering voice, “Why are you doing this?” and she replied, “My mother sent me. We love you, Zendt, and do not wish you to die.” And then the despair of recent months overwhelmed him and he hid his face and wept.

  She nursed him back to strength, and one day in mid-March, forced him to ride for a short distance, and it was obvious that he was nearly ready for the trip back to the stockade. It was a beautiful day, and they rode some distance into the plains, where she showed him the little stone beaver climbing the mountain. That night when he went to bed, she lay down with him and for a moment he was confused and the memory of Elly Zahm came between them, but he was then only twenty-four and soon the passion of her body overcame him, and for one week, as spring came closer, he experienced untrammeled joy and found new strength.

  But if Levi Zendt was a lusty twenty-four, he was also a strictly reared Mennonite—that a pagan Indian girl should share his bed confounded his moral sense. One morning before dawn, as he lay beside her pondering this problem, he chanced to recall the sermon about Ruth which the minister at the church in St. Louis had delivered:

  And it shall be when he lieth down ... thou shalt go in and uncover his feet ...

  and he judged that if it was permissible for Naomi to commit her daughter-in-law, the great-grandmother of King David, to such a mission, it was permissible for Clay Basket to do the same, and the first half of his dilemma was resolved. Gently passing his arm under her sleeping head, he kissed her, thus acknowledging that she had been sent, perhaps by God Himself, to save him.

  The time had come when they must return, so they saddled the horses and loaded them with gear, and started the long journey home. Since there had been much snow this year, there was moisture in the ground, and from it sprang a million flowers, gold and blue and brown and red. The prairie was a carpet of buds, a more beautiful face of nature than Levi had ever seen before, more to be cherished than his groves of trees in Lancaster, for the trees endured whereas the flowers flourished for only a few days and would wither as soon as the hot sun struck them in June and July.

  Occasionally Levi placed Lucinda on one of the horses and led her along the pathless route; at other times they set both horses free to wander as they wished and in time the animals smelled the Platte and headed south for water, and then the little caravan followed the river until it reached the stockade.

  “You’re back,” McKeag said, proceeding immediately to show Zendt the improvements he had made during the winter.

  “You’re thin,” Clay Basket said, and no further comments were made, but Levi Zendt, still wrestling with the second half of his dilemma, asked the McKeag family to sit with him in the sun outside the palisade, and when they were gathered he said, “Alexander, I want to marry your daughter.”

  “High time,” McKeag said.

  “But I cannot do so unless she’s a Christian.”

  “All right, she’s a Christian.”

  “She must be confirmed ... and able to read the Bible.”

  “I can’t teach her. Neither can Clay Basket. Looks like it’s your job, Levi.”

  “I am not a teacher, Alexander.” This led them to an impasse, which Zendt broke with a remarkable proposal: “So I have been thinking that when you go to St. Louis to buy our goods, you ought
to take her along and put her in school.”

  As soon as this was said, everyone listening recognized its merit. Clay Basket wanted her daughter to learn to read. Lucinda had always wanted to see St. Louis. And Alexander McKeag knew that a life as valuable as his daughter’s ought not be wasted. It was he who proposed an improvement on the plan. “I have a room in St. Louis ... with Pasquinel’s St. Louis wife. Clay Basket will take the girl there, and they can live in my room until she learns to read the Bible.”

  Within two days they were packed and ready for the long trip to the Missouri. McKeag viewed the trip with pleasure, for he wanted to show his daughter the city that had played such a prominent part in Pasquinel’s life. “And while I’m there, we’ll file our claims to the land.”

  “Where?” Levi asked.

  “I don’t know where. But believe me, it’s important to have ’em on record ... with stamps and seals on ’em.”

  The idea appealed to Zendt, and he said, “Before you go I want to stake out a claim at Chalk Cliff.”

  “Why do you want that forsaken spot?”

  “It was important to me.” So he and Lucinda saddled the best pintos and galloped west to the cliff, where they cut saplings and staked out a square facing the cliff, and when they reviewed their land a great passion overcame them and they made love as they had never done before, wildly, like the primitives who had once inhabited this spot, and without knowing it, they became one with the buffalo bones that lay buried here, and the campfires of ancient people who tipped their spears with Clovis points, and the bones-made-stone of diplodocus, dead more than a hundred and forty million years, and they were part of the flowers that grew during one wet year and lay hidden during ten arid ones, part of the unfathomable mystery of this land and these mountains and this turbulent river. It was love in its perpetual significance, something quite different from what he had known with Elly, and he whispered, “Be sure to come back from St. Louis. I need you.”