Sign-Talker

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “Bonjour,” Charbonneau said, in a voice that seemed too small and breathy for a man of his size. “Où sont les capitaines?”

  “Là-bas, dans le grand bateau. Capitaine Clark, seulement. Allons-y.” Drouillard led them down and went up the gangplank and hopped on the deck of the keelboat. When he turned, he saw that Charbonneau was still standing on the bank, looking down fearfully at the water between the boat and shore, then at the narrow plank. The devil! Drouillard thought. If he’s afraid of falling in the water, he’s hired on with the wrong army! He coaxed him up by offering a hand. The two girls followed without hesitation, even smiling and chattering to each other, apparently at the novelty of balancing on the narrow plank. Drouillard offered his hand to them, but they shook their heads, holding their blankets about them. He noticed that they were good wool British blankets, not old, apparently one of the benefits of being married to a trader. Captain Clark, having felt them boarding, came out of the after cabin, where he had been writing or working on maps. He was not wearing a hat, and the girls stood stock-still, struck with the glory of his red hair and high, white forehead. Below the brow his face was as brown as theirs. They began whispering to each other, and from the expression in their eyes, they found him beautiful. The captain was shaking hands with Charbonneau when York emerged from the cabin and loomed behind him, resplendent in his secondhand military coat. The girls gasped, stepped backward as if to flee, then huddled together, each with her hand over her mouth, staring aghast. York frowned, then, maybe afraid he would frighten them unduly, smiled. Charbonneau himself had recoiled at the sight of York but, whether he had ever seen Negroes or not, he must have known of them, and recovered his composure while his young wives were still speechless.

  Charbonneau announced that he had come to speak of the terms of his hire, to have the captains meet his Shoshone wives, who might go with him and serve as interpreters when they reached their homeland in the mountains, and a few other matters that had occurred to him after their first agreement. So the captain took them into the cabin, which was warmed by a little barrel-like iron stove exhausted to the outside by a tin chimney tube. The stove was a bad experiment, having cracked from overheating in last winter’s camp, but for the present it was the only way to warm the boat cabin while the captains wrote and drew. It stank and seeped smoke, but would keep the ink from freezing in their pens until quarters in the fort with their fireplaces could be finished.

  Charbonneau understood virtually no English, so Drouillard stayed to aid his conversation with the captain. Charbonneau wanted permission to bring both his young wives on the journey, saying one would be jealous if the other went. Captain Clark replied that he was reluctant to have even one woman along, and wanted one only as a Shoshone interpreter. Charbonneau therefore began haggling; he offered to provide his own tepee lodge to shelter his family, if that would make it easier, and gave a hint that one of his wives might be available for laundering and other services, which the captain gave him no opportunity to specify. As this went on, Drouillard was making his assessments of Charbonneau and the young women. The Frenchman, he decided, was just a man who obtained as much as he could in any transaction, as traders do, and perhaps had a swollen sense of self-importance, as might a man with more than one woman at his service. One of the girls had a placid, pretty, round face and a sly way of watching Captain Clark and York intently without seeming to stare; she cast her gaze coyly around the little enclosure, as she would be expected to in a place she had never been in before, but she was really seeing nothing but Clark and York, her gaze always coming back to them. This one had opened her blanket in the warm room, and her full, ripe figure indicated that she must be the pregnant one.

  The other was barely half the woman: slight, wiry, and small-bosomed, the veins and tendons in her forearms defined under the taut skin, likewise her long, muscular neck. Jaw muscles, chin, cheekbones, and brow ridge were in high relief, and her mouth was prominent: generous lips over strong, forward teeth. She was not pretty, but this angular head on its long neck had a certain elegant tension and poise. She looked like a creature of quick strength—belied by painfully bashful eyes that appeared as if they were afraid to look up at a face. And yet it was this one, rather than the roving-eyed one, whose spirit seemed to vibrate like a coiled snake.

  Captain Clark had finally made it clear to Charbonneau that he could bring only one wife, and that if he chose to bring neither, he might as well stay at home with them both. Clark was, however, very interested in the notion of bringing the tepee lodge. “We won’t have the keelboat to live in,” he mused aloud, “and the tenting’s going a-frazzle on us. O’ course, we can’t tote poles for the thing, but any time we mightn’t find any suitable ones in the woods, why, we could rig a frame of oars and masts off the pirogues.… Tell him, George, we’ll consider buying his lodge cover, additional to his wage, and we want him to bring whichever wife he thinks the better interpreter. Between us, I hope it’s not the flirty, pregnant one. She’d be trouble amongst so many men.” Drouillard translated to Charbonneau, watching his face go through all the expressions of dismay, wistfulness, anger, and helpless resignation. Then he turned to the captain.

  “The little stringy one’s smarter and tougher, he says, and would be the better interpreter. I think he hates to say that, sir, because he seems to prefer the other one for, well, cuddling.”

  “Well, how much of that would there be anyway, with thirty men about and a babe on her breast? She’ll be better off staying home with the tribal women, and the skinny one going with us. Works out fine. Tell him it’s a deal: the lodge cover and this skinny girl. And him, o’ course. It’s her we want anyway, not him, but don’t tell him I said that.”

  He turned back to the Frenchman and announced the agreement. They went on for a while in French, and finally Charbonneau nodded and stuck out his hand to Clark. Drouillard smiled ruefully and said: “He corrects us on one misunderstanding, Cap’n. It’s our little skinny one who’s with child, not the one who looks like she is.”

  Clark looked at her and blinked. “Good God, where’s she hiding it? Well, tell him to take ’em home and work out their feelings there.” He picked up a pencil. “Find out her name.”

  Drouillard and Charbonneau talked while York and the moonfaced girl flirted with their eyes. Drouillard glanced at the thin girl and found her shy eyes on the captain. “As I make it out,” Drouillard said, “she is bird, maybe crow, woman; S’ Kaka Weah.” It sounded similar to the part of his own name that meant Feathers: S’gawateah.

  Clark moved his lips and wrote: Sah ca gah we ah or bird woman.

  “Makes sense,” he murmured. “Wasn’t that one Missouria fellow Ka Ga Paha, Crow’s Head? And Kakawissassa was Lightning Raven.”

  They watched the Frenchman totter fearfully down the gangplank, his wives covering their laughter with their palms. Captain Clark shook his head and said, “I don’t envy that man. Having to go home and tell one wife he’s going away with the other! In fact, I don’t envy any man having two wives. And Jessaume says he has others besides.”

  “I don’t know,” Drouillard remarked, fanning the air. “Man smells strong, eh, worse than beaver gland. They might all be glad to have him out of the house awhile.”

  Now York was laughing behind them. They turned to look at him. “That li’l gal goin’ with us, eh? Good, Mist’ Droor. Makes three of us color people, you, her, and me. ’Bout ten white to one color, now. Was twenty to one, just ’smornin’. And a year ago it was just me, one! Heh heh!”

  Captain Clark snorted. “Why’d I ever teach you ’rithmetic, you uppity black rascal? Go make us some coffee!”

  “Just don’t tell that bird woman you eat babies,” Drouillard said. “We’ll lose us an interpreter before we’ve got her!”

  Drouillard saw a Mandan boy walk across the snow and stop right in front of Captain Clark and give him something. Then Clark sent York into the fort. The slave returned with a small, round trade mirror, which Cl
ark put in the boy’s hand. The boy was saying something to Clark in his language. Clark made some sign. The boy made signs that said four and then bear. Clark glanced around, watching for some chiefs and elders who were coming up to the fort, and the boy ran off to where another boy was waiting for him, and showed him the mirror. They started down the bank.

  Just then Drouillard heard an eagle’s cry, very close, looked up, saw none, and then realized that the sound was coming from where Clark stood. The captain had a whistle in his mouth, made of the wing bone of an eagle. That was what the boy had given him. When the boy heard it, he turned, smiling, and Clark waved at him.

  “Fine whistle, eh, Drouillard!” the captain called to him. “I’ll keep this. I think that boy made it himself for me!”

  Drouillard nodded. He thought it was a fine thing for a man to take such pleasure in a gift from an Indian boy.

  December 1804

  It was an amusing sight, but he felt too much sympathy to laugh:

  York stood in front of Captain Lewis in the half-finished officers’ quarters of Fort Mandan with his long shirt pulled up and his breeches down while the captain examined his penis.

  “I’m afraid so,” Lewis said. “Frostbit. Now, York, can you explain this? Frostbite in this weather I understand. Half our hunters have it in their feet and faces, and no wonder, cold as it is. But how did you happen to have this thing out long enough to get it frozen?”

  Sergeant Ordway, waiting nearby for a medical consultation of his own, chuckled and said, “He was prob’ly doin’ sign language to some squaw.”

  York clenched his jaw. Drouillard, who was here with a broken left hand, saw how much self-control the slave had to use when soldiers made fun of him. Drouillard’s hand had been crushed and lacerated badly more than two weeks ago when a log was dropped on it during construction of the fort’s storage room. It still ached intensely, especially in the cold, but he could move all his fingers now.

  “Was just pissin’, Cap’n.” York said. “Took too long.”

  “Why?”

  “Hard t’ start, Cap’n. Hurt an’ burns.”

  “You mean it hurt even before the frostbite?”

  “Yes, s’.”

  Captain Clark, writing by the fireplace, looked up at his slave with a frown. “Damn it, York. You come down all venereal rot, you won’t be worth much to me, now will you?”

  “Sorry, mast’.”

  Drouillard looked at the slave, thinking: Aye, York, take care of that thing, it’s his property. York was in great demand by tribal women, both Mandan and Hidatsa, who believed he must be a source of great spiritual power. Whiteness too was considered powerful medicine, and several of the soldiers, especially the blond and red-haired ones, had been welcomed most ardently by the village women. Lewis got some dry bark from the medicine chest and gave it to York. “For the frostbite, make a tea out of this bark, and when it’s lukewarm, soak that blacksnake in it. You have frozen toes too, don’t you? Soak them in it too, and keep massaging them lightly while they soak.”

  The sergeant laughed again. “He supposed to massage that other thing too? Guess he won’t mind that.…”

  “Sergeant, I presume you’re here on a venereal complaint too? How many others of you?” Lewis asked the figures hulking inside the door for sick call.

  Two hands went up, but a soldier named Weiser said, “Not me, Cap’n, sir. I just got me a hitch in m’ hobble, rheumatism I reckon.”

  Most of the boils and felons and skin problems that had plagued the soldiers all summer were gone now, succeeded by colds, pleurisy, rheumatism, cuts and sprains from construction accidents, the venereal complaints, and frostbite and snow-blindness. The captains had expected severe winter in this northern latitude, but nothing had prepared them for cold this deep. This was like another world. One night there had been a display of spirit lights high in the northern sky, looking like long fringes of starglow rippling against the black sky. The captains of course had had a name for it and had written a description of it, but Drouillard believed it was a message from North Grandfather Spirit, and he had smoked a prayer pipe to it outdoors under the frigid sky.

  The barrack rooms of the fort had just been roofed when winter struck, with sleet and then fine, stinging, windblown snow, and frost shimmering in the air at dawn, snow falling and drifting, and the river freezing so rapidly that the captains realized that the keelboat and pirogues were frozen fast in the river’s edge. They had been too busy getting the fort roofed over to stop and drag the vessels ashore, and now they were fast in ice, and the captains had to worry that their hulls might be damaged or even crushed. Cold was so keen and intense at night that the water-laden cottonwood trees split open with reports like rifle shots, and outdoor sentries had to be relieved after half an hour. The thermometers, by which these methodical men measured each day’s temperatures, morning after morning, made them exclaim with disbelief. Howling wind blew to drift the snow into smooth or rippled shapes like great waves. One morning Drouillard had heard Lewis exclaim that it was seventy-seven degrees below the freezing of water. The wind hissed so relentlessly through the fine cracks between logs and chinking that it was necessary at last to plaster the entire inside walls of the living quarters with clay. Once the clay had dried by the heat from the fireplaces, the rooms were so airtight and snug that Drouillard thought he would suffocate in his sleep.

  The erection of the palisade across the front of the fort was in process now, and it had become an ordeal. With the ground frozen hard as rock, ditching for the palisade poles required burning fires in the ditch to thaw the earth enough to dig out an inch or two at a time.

  In the hard freeze, the problem of securing food for the troops had become critical. Jessaume the interpreter had exaggerated the ability of his Mandans to provide meat. Though they had many horses and were good hunters, they were cautious about ranging far for the buffalo because of their fear of large Sioux and Arikara war parties. They brought some meat, but most of their food contribution was in corn, which they brought across the river to trade for manufactured goods. They wanted spear and arrow points and war axes that the corps blacksmiths, Shields and Willard, fashioned for them out of any metal scrap they could spare. The ringing of hammers on anvils went on every day. Visiting Mandans, fascinated with the bellows and the metalworking, were usually crowded about so tightly that the smiths could hardly work, and they had to watch for pilfering.

  Drouillard had been of no use as a hunter because of his broken hand. He had, in fact, missed opportunities to hunt buffalo on a grand scale, the way the Mandans did it: racing on horseback alongside great, fleeing herds, shooting point-blank at them with powerful short bows reinforced with sinew, bows so strong that an arrow might pass clear through a buffalo’s heart. Both captains had gone out on such hunts, with parties of soldiers and Indians. Their accounts of the skill and recklessness of the Mandan horsemen were thrilling, and Drouillard was impatient. He longed to go out and ride with these free, brave, cheerful people over these spacious slopes and plains in pursuit of the swift and mighty t’ tanka, as they called the buffalo—the kith tippe, in his Shawnee memory. Sometimes he stood in front of the fort and watched these people ride out, a people as yet uncorrupted by whitemen, a people still free on their own land, and his heart ached for his own people’s past.

  And yet, how free were they, really? They had their picketed, fortified town, and they were happy and secure within it. But their women prayed and wailed when the hunters went away, because the Sioux and the Arikaras were out there. The men were happy to go out when a dozen soldiers went out with them, soldiers with their long-shooting rifles. But their enemies were always in their minds, and it took all their courage to go on long hunts, out of sight of the towns. Their enemies were like an invisible prison wall.

  Sometimes Drouillard wondered: How free is anyone? Even soldiers sleep in a fort. Even the strong, far-ranging buffalo were ringed about with enemies they feared: the packs of wolves who stalked
their weak and young.

  These wolves of the plains were so numerous and aggressive around the hunting camps that the captains said they usually got more than half the meat of a hunt. When the herds were far from the fort and villages, the hunting parties sometimes had to build wooden pens to protect the meat from the wolves until it could be packed home on the hunters’ backs, on horseback, or on sleds. When the hunters came in from those distant hunts, they were usually frostbitten and fatigued almost to death from camping a few nights in the bitter cold.

  Every ordeal of that kind increased the captains’ admiration for the Mandans. He heard them tell in awe of Mandan hunters caught out in the plains with no way to make fire, surviving all night with no shelter but a buffalo skin despite cold so intense that ax heads were too brittle to use.

  “I’ll wager,” Captain Lewis said now as he prepared a mercury dose in a penis syringe for York’s venereal complaint, “I’ll just bet you that you’ll never find one of these Indians with a frosted cock!” He shook his head.

  York chuckled. “Well, Cap’n, I do try t’ keep it in warm places much as I can.”

  “Oh, don’t you, though!” Captain Clark exclaimed.

  The captains regretted the spread of the venereal complaints among the troops, but did not try to forbid or even discourage carnal relations with the village women. The officers had finally come to understand that this was a part of the diplomatic accord they wanted to achieve. It was helping to dissolve the line of suspicion between strangers and strangers. Some of the soldiers, originally after mere sexual relief, now had genuine sweethearts in Mandan families, and those families were pleased and honored, because they esteemed the Americans as brave, strong men with spiritual power.