Thompson had heard of St. Louis, of course, and of the Mississippi River, but after traveling for so many days alone, avoiding the towns, sleeping in woods and ravines, he was ill prepared for the draw and sweep of it, the sharp delineation between east bank and west, the city rising from the bluff on the opposite shore, buildings like Sirens luring trail-weary Argonauts. The river, brown and wide and swirling. The city an impenetrable mass of brick and plank, foreboding and indecipherable to a man of Thompson’s experience and current disposition. As his ferry approached the landing, they passed steamboat after steamboat moored along an endless wharf. Although Sunday, an army of men were at work loading and unloading boats, a clatter of iron wheels and horse hooves, men shouting, cinder-belching steamboats fitted with hissing and grinding machinery, sounds mixing and merging and rising in a raucous din like the low rumble of a distant battle.
Once disembarked, he roamed the levee, uncertain of direction, stupefied by the confusion of activity, the bustle of people and animals. He required supplies. He did not desire unnecessary human contact, and he need not have worried. He observed little neighborly interaction from anyone. Men jostled him, seeming not to notice his presence on the street. No acknowledgements except from those who wanted something: shills loitering outside taverns bidding him enter; an aging whore with rouged cheeks and a slightly humped back who cupped a breast in her hand and asked if he might desire a place to rest his head for a spell; one old hag with a goiter the size of a melon bulging from her neck who pressed Thompson so insistently for a coin that he had actually to push her aside to pass.
He came upon a mercantile and ducked inside. A dim and cluttered place, several men sat smoking pipes around a cold potbellied stove in one corner. Dusty tins of hard biscuits sat mingled with sacks of dried cod. The silent and dour proprietor eyed him suspiciously as Thompson packed his rucksack with a small bag of cornmeal, a tin of coffee, a square of salt pork which he wrapped in butcher paper. His expression brightened when Thompson retrieved a silver coin from the money belt and placed it on the counter. “Wasn’t sure of your intentions at first,” the shopkeeper said. “You come in looking fagged out, a little busted.” He offered a few coppers in change.
“Looks don’t tell the whole of it, I expect,” Thompson answered. He returned the copper coins to his belt and walked back into the street.
Outside, Thompson left the wharf district and climbed into the city, walked through the heart of it, three- and four-story brick buildings throwing the street into early shadows, street after street, row after row of brick and stone, iron lattices over glass windows, gas lamplights along Main. A disorienting, unsettling maze; he did not comprehend the attraction of the place for so great a throng.
“COME SEE PHILADELPHIA,” HIS BROTHER, Jacob, had urged that last night at the Reverend’s table. He radiated enthusiasm when describing the crowds and the tall buildings. “Everything so convenient, one hardly has need of a mount.” The city, his brother lectured, is the future. All that is progressive and forward-looking comes from the city.
“Perhaps,” Thompson had countered. “But I can imagine no place better suited to my temperament than here.”
His brother and he had converged at their childhood home because their father, the Reverend Matthew Grey, was not well. Chopping wood, the blade deflected off an oak burl and nearly severed his foot. The wound now festered, filling the parlor where Thompson first greeted him with a faint, disagreeably sweet odor. The Reverend was unable to rise from the settee, compelling Thompson to stoop down to embrace him, awkward for both, and decidedly cooling the reunion. Reverend Grey had pointed dismissively at the foot wrapped in a thick bandage seeping a yellowish discharge. “Administer what ointments you think best, I told the physicians, and let God’s will be done.”
God’s will apparently was to take His time in determining His servant’s fate, and with his father teetering between recovery and decline, Thompson petitioned him for an advance share of his inheritance. A land opportunity, he explained. The Brawley holdings adjacent to his own, the promise it held, the asking price better than fair. During moments of laudanum-induced magnanimity the Reverend readily consented to the advance, only to rescind later, when the effect of the drug lessened and his parsimonious nature reestablished hold both on his senses and his purse strings. The Reverend grew indignant, railing at Thompson’s boldness during his time of peril. Thompson determined to stay on until he could resolve the matter. A few days stretched into a week, and beyond. Rachel would require help in the fields. Surely the neighbors would look in, lend a hand. It’s what neighbors did. They knew of his mission. But time passed without resolution. A day short of two weeks, without having secured title to his inheritance, resentful of his father and of his brother who had no intention for the estate other than to sell it once he assumed ownership, ashamed over his own dereliction of family and field, Thompson returned to Deep Woods, returned to Rachel and the boys. Rachel and the boys.…
“NEED DIRECTIONS?” THOMPSON STOOD IN the middle of the road, Saint Louis, mid-intersection, immobilized by memory. He turned to the voice and recognized two men who had been smoking in the mercantile.
“I’ll find my way.”
“Look lost to me. Look lost to you, Neil?”
“Lost, and in a bad box,” replied the second man, who was easing off to Thompson’s left as he answered.
“Tell you what,” from the first man, “you go on and show us what you got in that belt and we’ll be off.”
Thompson had been cradling his rifle in the crook of his arm, and now gripped it by the barrel and the neck of the buttstock and brought it out in front of his chest in a defensive position. The rifle was unloaded and the barrel visibly plugged for travel, plainly no threat to fire. As he half turned to keep the second man in his line of sight, the first advanced on him and grabbed the rifle mid-barrel to keep Thompson from swinging it on them. The man brought up a knife in his other hand and slashed Thompson twice on the forearm. Thompson held tight to the rifle and kicked up at the man, once, again, the second time connecting foot to groin. The man sucked in his breath, loosed his grip on Thompson’s rifle, and doubled over. Thompson brought the butt down onto the man’s instep, a crunching sound, and then swung on the second man, who had hesitated entering the fray an instant too long. The barrel of his musket caught the man a glancing blow in the forehead at the scalp line, dazing him and sending a rush of blood down into his eyes. Backing furiously away, he swiped at his face and seeing the back of his hand dripping with his own blood, turned for the alley beside two buildings on the near side of the street. The first man limped after him and together they disappeared into the narrow passage. Thompson did not pursue. He stood looking about, sucking for breath. The streets were still filled with passers-by. Other than two boys who had paused in their game of dice to watch the confrontation, no one gave Thompson so much as a glance. The boys turned back to their game.
The altercation shook Thompson from his torpor, awakened him to his surroundings. He retraced his steps to the mercantile and used a copper to buy a needle and some thread. With some grumbling the shopkeeper gave him an old flour sack which Thompson used to bind his forearm. He returned to the streets, walking quickly, and finally commercial landscape gave way to residential, and then to poorer frame houses of the workers and servants. He followed the Kingshighway to the city’s western outskirts, where he took a room above a roadhouse. He carried a measure of whiskey in a tin cup and fresh water in a washbowl from the tavern to his room, drank half of the whiskey sitting on his bed, removed his tunic, and used the remainder of the whiskey and the water to clean the two gashes on his forearm. He took up the needle and thread and sutured the wounds as best he could, washed out the blood on his shirtsleeve, and sewed the ripped material with the same needle and thread. He judged the tunic more neatly stitched than the arm.
He washed himself, considered shaving, decided against it. He reclined on the stinking mattress and attempted
to rest the night away but full sleep never came. The tavern dinned, floorboards creaked throughout the ramshackle structure, fights erupted and concluded downstairs, and thin walls offered no privacy at all. In the room to his right, he could not but eavesdrop on the adventures of a whore and her client, the escalatory slap of flesh against flesh so lusty and proximate that they might as well have been sharing his mattress. On his left, a man deep within the folds of drunken oblivion snored and snorted so loudly that the whore two rooms removed interrupted her partner’s increasingly strident bed-rattling to pound on Thompson’s wall and curse in protest.
Thompson lay there, his arm now throbbing, and wondered at this strange and hideous place, the city, where people seemed at once invisible and so inconsequential that almost no interaction between one person and another transcended the bounds of decency. To rob, to whore, to ignore common civility on the street? He realized he could never be a part of this place. He’d fled his farm, but the city would provide no sanctuary. So, then, where?
He turned on his side and attempted to doze. His arm hot to the touch, he shivered with fever.
COMING ONTO HIS FARM IN Deep Woods, he noticed immediately. The un-tethered horse grazing on dandelions along the irrigation ditch, the empty hog trough. A chimney free of smoke. Thompson jumped from the cart without reining the mule and threw open the door, calling. Dim indoor light, shadows only. A stench. Rancid meat from a cold pot hanging over dead coals. More, more than that.
“Rachel?”
Looking up from her bed, eyes shining, focused but unseeing. Face a mask of red sores, skin split and oozing. She did not answer, but turned back to Matthew, whimpering at her breast. Her finger weakly tickling his cheek, enticing cracked lips to suckle.
Thompson sat at the edge of the bed and put his hand to her forehead and could not believe the heat. At his touch her chin rose to him and her eyes grew wild. “Gabriel?” she asked, and then, inexplicitly, a line from a song, “Oh, my darling Nellie Gray, they have taken you away.” Then she returned to Matthew, “Take,” she said, offering her breast.
“Daniel?” Gently, the question. No reply, she coaxing the baby with incoherent muttering. Thompson looked about. The sleeping mat. He rose and approached. A stiff, bloated thing, the stench. An overstuffed sausage. He dropped to his knees, retched into the hearth, a great heaving expulsion. He could not bear to look at what days before had been his son. Could not bear to touch it. No choice. He dragged the mat on which his son lay from the house to a patch of ground beneath a persimmon tree and there he dug his son’s pit, the mat his winding sheet. He packed tight the crumbled earth. Later, stones to shield him from beasts. He went back into the house with a bucket of water and sat with Rachel and Matthew, a cool cloth to one forehead and then the other, squeezing a drop or two onto tongues swollen and coated white with mucus. He sat with them into the night. Toward sunrise, Matthew’s breathing grew shallow. Thinner, the breathing, and then nothing at all. The baby paled. Thompson had no prayer to offer up. Rachel woke just as he finished changing Matthew into his white baptismal gown. She sat straight up in bed and the look in her eyes told Thompson that this, she understood. That, for an instant, the veil of fever lifted. She opened her mouth but remained mute, as if there were no sounds for her grief.
Another grave dug, another son lowered into the ground. He kept his eyes shut as he scooped the dirt back into the hole. He returned to Rachel and sat at her side, holding her hand. She could not talk, a gurgling sound only, rapid breaths, and then she opened her eyes and stared at Thompson, stared through him. Eyes glazed. Unseeing in this world. He wondered if she saw into the next. He held a cup to her lips. “Try.” He hummed a lullaby, or some tune that reminded him of something like a lullaby. He smoothed her damp and matted hair. Her beautiful hair.
He sat through the day. Light moved across the room. Against his will, he dozed. At some point during the afternoon he thought he heard voices outside, a horse sniggering. And then silence and then night came on again. He nodded in and out. He dreamed the precise words to console Rachel, the correct prayers to summon his boys from the grave. But when he awoke he could not remember them. Rachel’s hand, cold, her stiff fingers intertwined with his.
THOMPSON AWOKE IN THE DARK of early morning, sweating, chest heaving. The memories would not leave him, would not permit rest. Awake and moving, he sometimes could distract himself, temporarily inhabit the present. But in sleep, the past returned, images crept back, burned anew, engraved themselves more deeply into memory, grew more vivid rather than faded with time. He sat up and swung his legs to the floor. The fever had broken. He tested his arm and found it stiff and tender. He tossed stale water from the basin out the window onto the street below and refilled it from the pitcher on the nightstand and changed his bandage. Before full light, he was up and on the road.
Thompson traveled for a week, following the course of the Missouri from its junction with the Mississippi, west by northwest across the state. In places the river bottom stretched for miles from either bank, fertile and, in places, cultivated. Sometimes the yellow bluffs came up close to the banks and from them he sat looking out over the expanse of river country, the hardwoods, the land’s gentle rising and rolling, the pale green of crops ripening in distant fields, and felt an unspecified yearning for something lost. From the stillness of the heights, he could look down on the world below and follow the progress of paddle steamers churning upriver, and flatboats gliding down with their loads of firewood or buffalo hides. Men going about their business. Sometimes the bottomland became so swampy with back eddies and side channels that he was forced to leave it altogether for a stretch of miles. But always the river revealed itself in the cut of the land, in contours carved from flowing water, coursing for millennia after millennia, for years uncountable in human reckoning.
Ten days west of Saint Louis, the salt pork ran out. Thompson had gone three days living on weak coffee and a thin mush of cornmeal mixed with water and a pinch of sugar. But he refused to pass through Jefferson City for supplies. His forearm yet throbbed, the wounds outlined in red and draining, a bothersome reminder of city hospitality. West of the town, a day’s journey, he located a promising oxbow on the river, spongy banks carpeted in new grass gently sloping into scrub flats cut with game trails. He camped off to the edge of the opening and slept the night without a fire. He primed and loaded his rifle and put it at half cock and slept sitting upright against a cottonwood. First light, a rustling, and three does and two small spike bucks came out of the brush to drink at the river. Thompson shot one of the bucks cleanly through the lungs. It lurched with the shot and kicked for the river but dropped before reaching it.
He dragged the buck by the forelegs up the riverbank and positioned it on its back, head uphill so it could bleed out when he cut. He dressed out the carcass and skinned it sufficiently to access the backstrap on each side of the spine. He removed the meat and cut it into thin strips on a flat stone he’d pulled from the river. After washing the blood from his hands and arms, he built a fire and roasted the liver and the heart on skewers. While the fire was burning down, he built a drying rack by suspending willow switches over Y-shaped branches staked on either side of the fire pit. He banked the coals and put on some green wood to raise the smoke and draped the meat strips over the rack. While the meat dried, he ate a chunk of the liver and dozed and then turned the strips, ate part of the heart and slept again. Road-weary and sated for the first time in days, he slept without dreaming and woke midafternoon, grateful and rested. He sacked the jerky, and left the river bottom for firmer ground.
3
Gradually, the land stretched out, the woods thinning and the hills flattening into broad reaches of rolling meadowland. Heat built through the day, little rain fell, and locusts flew up from the road at his passing and buzzed into tall grass. Thompson noticed the change, his mind recording countryside not so much his own any longer. It made it easier somehow to forget, to associate his memories with another
land, another time. For a day, sometimes, he could walk without falling into the trance of despair. For a night, sometimes, sleep came without visitation from the army of bones beating their muffled drums.
Although settlement thinned, traffic on the road increased. Thompson encountered growing numbers of emigrants striking for the western territories, small groups driving wagons drawn by oxen and mules. The traces, trails, and highways of the east converged at the bank of the Missouri on the border of Kansas Territory. He went by ferry into Westport the evening of July 2nd, passing through the city only because there existed no convenient detour. He did not stop, did not tarry, but hurried though a town that seemed constructed solely for commerce. Near the landing a tangle of ramshackle plank dwellings provided housing, he imagined, for the dockworkers, a cock-fighting pit and several taverns their entertainment. Above the landing, on either side of Westport Road, mercantile shops offered a dizzying array of goods to outfit the emigrants. Through glass display windows Thompson inventoried bolts of calico and flannel; kits of mackerel and dried codfish; coffee beans in hundredweight sacks; camp kettles of Russian iron; kegs of brandy; hardware, tools, rope and tackle. The household goods reminded him of his own home left behind, his family, his Rachel and Matthew and Daniel, and a wave of grief like a sudden nausea washed over him. He slumped against a hitching post until it passed, and then pushed on.
At town center, he stopped to fill his water skin at the community well. The water—clean-tasting, cool, and free of tang—refreshed him. He watched a merchant bargain with two aboriginals over a stack of pelts. The Indians were unlike any Thompson had encountered in the East. Taller, with long-muscled lines and skin more darkened by the sun. The strange ritual of trade, hands gesturing in pantomime, facial contortions, a few guttural syllables, were unintelligible to him, but obviously conveyed meaning for the participants. He left them haggling and on his way out of town passed a group of four Mexicans wearing wide cloth hats and colorful sashes. They played cards, laughing and talking in a melodic tongue, full of rolling consonants and soft vowels. Their skin was dark as some of the Reverend’s field hands, and it occurred to Thompson that he was about to enter a territory populated by natives so attuned to their surroundings that they took on its shading.
Crossing Purgatory Page 2