Sign-Talker

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  The primary uneasiness Drouillard felt was that a few people here in the settlement at Massac knew he was getting all this money, and knew that he would be riding out alone with it. The witness to the signing of the note, Antoine Laselle, had a look about him that did not inspire trust. Lorimier knew him and never recommended him.

  Drouillard had enough faith in his own alertness and marksmanship that he knew he would not be easy to rob, not by one or two men. Three or four might be a danger, depending on the quality of their horses and their boldness.

  A good hunter knew how to be elusive prey. Drouillard looked at the winter morning sunlight slanting through a window and said, “Gentlemen, please excuse me. I should start right out if I hope to make Lorimier’s before night.”

  They stood up and shook his hand. He would have liked to visit his uncle, and these men would fully expect him to go there.

  And so he would start out on the trace to Cape Girardeau. But in the swamps he would cut northward to the old Kaskaskias Trace, and leave no trail.

  St. Louis

  March 10, 1804

  The two captains stood stiff and proud in their blue uniforms, swords hanging at their sides, and on their heads the enormous hats that looked like upside-down canoes. The captains were looking up at the top of the flagpole in front of the Government House, where the blue and white and red French flag was starting to come down. Other American officers and soldiers stood in ranks, and nearby there were French soldiers and Spanish soldiers, all in their finery. The plaza was crowded with the townspeople of St. Louis, many of them looking as if they were about to weep, and in groups around the edges of the crowd there were Indians, colorful in feathers, fringe, quillwork, and silver jewelry, seeming to know ceremony when they saw it, but surely having no notion that their country was being sold out from under their feet.

  The crowd’s murmur changed to a moan as the French flag was taken off and folded by French soldiers. Yesterday in another ceremony, they had cheered when the Spanish flag came down and theirs went up. They had requested that theirs stay up until today, when the American one would go up.

  Drouillard watched, and felt the emotions of the crowd change like the coming and going of breath. When the American flag went up with its familiar corner of stars, an officer gave commands and a squad of American soldiers fired their guns over the flagpole. Whoops and throaty cheers rose from Americans in the crowd, many of whom fired their own guns into the air from amidst the crowd, frightening women and babies. Some of the Indians were now talking fast among themselves and pointing up at the American flag, which was new to them and probably of a more intriguing design, in their eyes, than the French.

  The dressed-up American soldiers in the ceremony were not those of Captains Lewis and Clark. These were from Massac and Kaskaskia army posts. Some belonged to Major Stoddard, an older officer who had been sent out to be a sort of soldier-governor until an American government could be formed. The soldiers who would be going on the journey were still up in the shabby little post at Riviere à Dubois: training, bored, scouring the muddy countryside for bootleg whiskey, getting into fights, challenging their sergeants, getting punished, being deleted from the roster for insurrection then restored when they repented. To Drouillard they were like a corral of young stallions within faint scent of a forbidden rutting mare, and the mare was St. Louis with its saloons and saucy women.

  Drouillard had assembled about a dozen French-Canadian riverboatmen and voyageurs for the captains. These were cheerful, rowdy veterans of thousands of miles of riverways, many related to each other, almost like a tribe. They were oblivious to the notion of military discipline. They answered only to their patroon, Jean Baptiste Deschamps, who would in turn answer to the captains. Most of them at times had worked on crews under Deschamps, who happened to be related to Drouillard’s stepmother in Canada. The soldiers scorned the voyageurs as motley civilians, someone at last whom even they could look down their noses at, and so in one way the French-Canadians were already serving, even though they had yet to touch an oar. Undisciplined though they seemed, the voyageurs did not loom as troublesome as the soldiers. The expedition was to start its actual journey up the Missouri in a month or so, if Captain Lewis ever decided he had acquired enough supplies, and Drouillard often wondered whether it would get a hundred miles along before a general mutiny of its soldiery.

  The gun smoke from the flag salute had drifted away over the crowd, and now officers were signing papers on a little table. Speeches then began, and went on and on, in English, French, and Spanish—all three languages that Drouillard could understand, and thus could not help hearing. Had he not already heard so much from the two captains, much of this grand language about dominions, emissaries, and sovereignty would have been incomprehensible to him.

  As they droned on and on, simpler and truer things flowed through Drouillard’s mind and heart: Menoukgawmeh. Springtime. He could feel it, and even in this stinking town he could smell it coming on the wind from the west, from that vast country to which he would be going. Leaf buds were swelling, plants were pushing up through the thawing earth, the sap was up in the sugar trees, and the great bent flights of They Who Talk While Flying were going northward.

  He thought a little about the money, the debt to Mr. Graeter, which he had promised to pay back about a month from now. He still had no certainty that he could do that. Graeter might just have to wait until he came back from the journey. The good thing was that Drouillard believed in his heart that he had helped his Canada family. He was still not very good at money-thinking. Money was not a real thing in the Creator’s world; even though he had signed his name and become involved with it, he had to force himself to ponder on it.

  Another thing that kept coming into his spirit was the feeling of going. Though the boats and goods and men were all still sitting on the bank of the Riviere à Dubois, the force of going into the western country on the whitemen’s purpose was already something he could feel. His tomorrows would be spent with theirs, going in a direction with them instead of living from season to season in the round world of horizons. He would be a part of the whiteman force that had kept coming westward for generations, leaving nothing as it had been before. He would be going, taking his horizons with him, and there were enough dangers ahead, the known ones and the unforeseeable ones, even the dreamed-of ones like flint cutting flesh, that he understood he might not come back. This was a whiteman thing—going in a direction and taking your life along with you—but he was becoming a part of it.

  Chapter 4

  St. Charles

  May 17, 1804

  The day had come that Drouillard had begun to doubt would ever come. The captains’ boats had actually left the camp at Riviere à Dubois, crossed the Mississippi, and started up the Missouri, after weeks of delay. Three days on the river had brought the expedition a mere twenty-five miles up the Missouri to St. Charles, and it looked to Drouillard as if the entire enterprise had collapsed right there, under the eyes of the bewildered French inhabitants of that little town.

  When he had ridden in to St. Charles carrying another of those endless messages from Captain Lewis, who was still in St. Louis, he found the boats moored at the riverside, with the enormous cargo out on the riverbank in a great heap, as it had been for so long at the Riviere à Dubois camp. Even more ominous, the soldiers were standing in a double line whipping one of their own with bundles of switches, while the townspeople moaned and wailed or just grimly watched. The soldier was John Collins, who had often been drunk and disobedient at the winter camp, as had many of the soldiers. But this was the first whipping. With each hissing slash, Collins made a teeth-clenched grimace and his eyes bulged, but he did not cry out.

  The soldiers with their switches were grim-faced and seemed to be hitting him as hard as they could. Whatever he had done must have been much more serious than his misbehaviors at camp. There, he had once brought in what he said was the haunch of a bear, but which proved to be the ham of a neig
hbor’s hog, and the captain had been required to compensate the farmer. Collins had never threatened the sergeant with a loaded gun, as Colter had one day, but Captain Clark had several times labeled him a blackguard. Collins was a slim, fine-featured, comic fellow, seemingly well-liked, and it was troubling to see how viciously his fellow men were laying it on.

  Drouillard hung back until the punishment of Collins was completed, thinking dark thoughts about it. He waited for Captain Clark to treat Collins’s back with an ointment and gauze, then took him the messages from Captain Lewis. It was dusk, and mosquitoes made humming, swirling clouds. Clark and Drouillard sat in the smoke of a cookfire to discourage the pests, and the captain read his mail by the firelight. His face was full of his feelings. He sighed, blew through his lips like a winded horse, and said, “Three more days? Damn, I wish he’d get up here. I’d like his judgment on a few things. Well, you need to know what this is all about. Wretched start on our voyage! We ran onto eight or ten drift logs already. Cruzatte says it’s because too much load was astern.” He waved his hand at the pile of cargo. “So we’re reloading ’er different, to keep the bow down. I wish he’d given that advice before we started up.” He pointed at the town. “Those good folk held a ball for us last night, dancing and all. That Cruzarte is lively on a fiddle, and I never saw such a little town with so many fiddlers! It was a fine time. But then that damn blackguard Collins got a bit too lusty as the wine flowed and made an ass of ’imself with some of the better ladies. When I dressed him down back in camp, he got mutinous with his mouth. Damned blackguard is what he is! So we had a court-martial for him this morning. For Warner and Hall too, for going absent from camp. Didn’t whip those two, but they’re confined till we move on.”

  Drouillard restrained himself from commenting that he had expected this kind of thing when the troops got near women and entertainment, after all those months.

  Clark went on, “I’m tempted to discharge that damn Collins before we get too far up. But Cap’n Lewis recruited him and thinks he has qualities we need. We’ll see, ’d reckon. Maybe he’ll think things over, rowin’ with his back all scabbed. Well, though,” he said, brightening and flexing his shoulders, “we’re on our way at last. Say, that Cruzatte you brought us is worth his pay! Even if he didn’t play the fiddle so agreeable. He kept us off many more a snag than we got on. Did he tell you he joined the army? Labiche too. You look surprised, eh?”

  “Yes, sir.” Drouillard shook his head. He would never have expected voyageurs to give up so much of their cherished freedom, or the army of the anglais-américain whitemen to accept half-breeds—although, he remembered now, they had offered to recruit him as a soldier, back in the beginning; he had rejected that notion so long ago that he had forgotten. So he said only, “I will have to remember that my old friends’ given names are no longer Pierre and François, but Private and Private.”

  Clark laughed. “You could be Private too. It’s not too late.”

  “Thank you, sir, but no.” He thought for a moment whether to make a critical observation, and decided to make it. “My people, you know, have that custom too, the gauntlet. But we run only our enemies through it. Not our own people.”

  Captain Clark leaned back and cocked an eye at him, an eye so dark blue in the evening light that it looked purple. “An interesting point. I’ll answer it this way. When I can’t count on one of my soldiers, he’s not one of my people, he’s my enemy, and the men’s too. They understand that, and that’s why they whip ’im with such relish.”

  “Hm. I see.” And he did. It was the first time an army thing had made Indian sense to him.

  Captain Clark waved mosquitoes away from his face, then stood up and walked around the fire to stand downwind in the smoke. Drouillard followed him around. The smoke stung his eyes but kept mosquitoes away. “I expect Mr. Lorimier back down from the Kickapoo town,” Clark said. “Thought I’d see him come down today. Let’s wait till midday tomorrow. If he shows up by then, you two can ride together down to St. Louis with the mail.”

  “Thankee, Cap’n. I do hope to see him before we go on up.” Drouillard knew that his uncle had gone to a Kickapoo camp above the Missouri as an emissary for the captains, to explain Jefferson’s intentions to them. The Kickapoos had been planning to make war on the Osages, the captains had been trying discourage them from it, and Lorimier was the right man for the diplomacy because he knew Missouri Indian trade, and also because Kickapoo was so like Shawnee that he could talk plain with them.

  Captain Clark nodded thoughtfully. “Remarkable gent. I was uneasy to meet ’im. Y’ already know why. But he didn’t mention it at all, the war, I mean. Just said he knew my brother by repute but never met him personal.”

  Drouillard had a rush of appreciative feeling toward his uncle, and had an urge to tell Clark how Lorimier had been a better father to him than his own had been. But he kept it to himself, because he was still in a dark mood about the whipping he had seen, and for days he had been so heartily tired of being Lewis’s messenger boy that he was sorry he ever signed on. He was glad when Sergeant Ordway came and required the captain’s attention on some matter down by the keelboat. So once again Drouillard was left in the care of York, who now had to dispense his hospitality from a campfire under a canvas instead of his usual cabin kitchen. But apparently he and his master were used to camp life; he had an orderly little arrangement of iron forks, spits, kettle hooks, and utensils, as well as a hinged box stocked with toddy-making paraphernalia, and a coffeepot hanging over the fire by its bail, seething away. This was the military camp for York and the soldiers; the captain surely would be sleeping in town as guest of some citizen or other. St. Charles, the last real settlement west of the Mississippi, was renowned among rivermen for its hospitality. Many of its residents were the families of voyageurs; Cruzatte and the voyageurs’ patroon, Deschamps, lived here, and two others, Malboeuf and Hebert, had lived in the town at times in their wandering lives. So, as usual, only the soldiers had to camp out. Drouillard warned himself not to take a toddy this time, but he was saddle-weary and peevish, and when York offered to fix him one, he shrugged and accepted, and sat on a crate to watch the servant prepare it. After two sips he found himself feeling mean again, wanting to say some of the things he had stopped himself from saying to York back at the winter bivouac.

  “That captain ever whip you like that?” he asked. “The way they do that soldier Collins?”

  York took a deep breath and sighed it out, looking off into the darkening sky. “Not ’xackly like ’at, no s’.”

  “What, then? Bullwhip instead of switches?”

  “Mast’ Billy don’ whip me.”

  “I thought you just said he does.”

  “A man on the place do. Not hisself.”

  Whitemen always have people do everything for them, Drouillard thought. “You have a family?”

  York nodded, momentary sadness in his eyes. “Wife.”

  “Like to be with her?”

  “Oh, I sure do!” That came out unguarded.

  “Wouldn’t it be good if you could choose to stay with your wife, or go with the cap’n? You could choose, if he didn’t own you. D’ you know the whitemen tried to make Indians slaves when they first came? Didn’t work, though. They’d run off. So the whitemen cut off their feet so they couldn’t run away. So they’d just sit and make themselves die. That’s why the whitemen had to go get you folks. You couldn’t run home, across the ocean.”

  York said, “You makin’ ’at up?”

  “No. Indian people remember way back. Eh yeh! If anybody claimed to own me, or thought he could whip me, he’d never find me.”

  York was sweating, brushing at mosquitoes unthinkingly. “Mist’ Droor, I been hopin’ you be on ’is jou’ney. Bu-But maybe you talk too much trouble.”

  Drouillard drained the rest of the sweet stuff from the pewter cup and put it down. He wasn’t pleased with himself, tormenting a poor slave just to work out his own irritation at the mas
ters. But he did have one more thing to say: “Think about that ol’ Caesar.”

  The soldiers and boatmen were lifting, toting, and sweating next day, reloading the vessels to improve their trim, when Louis Lorimier rode into the camp from upriver, flanked by two young riders carrying long guns. Drouillard recognized them as his uncle’s secretary and a surly Shawnee who sometimes rode as his bodyguard. Lorimier was grinning like a possum, his hat plume waving in the breeze. The horses were muddy to the chest, and walking tired, and Lorimier was flicking his mare on the withers with the end of his long braid. “Bonjour, neveu!” he shouted with a toss of his head. “Bonjour, mon capitaine!” He waded through a clutch of voyageurs who had run over to greet him.

  Sitting to take a whiskey by Clark’s canvas shelter, Lorimier reported that he had had an agreeable conference with the Kickapoos up north, that they had promised not to attack the Osage this season. He had played on their jealousy of the Osage by telling them that an Osage chief was going to visit the Great White Father in the East, and that if the Kickapoos honored their promise to be peaceful, they too could have a chief honored by such a journey. Lorimier was pleased with himself. He would intercept Captain Lewis in St. Louis and give a full accounting to him.