Wide World In Celebration and Sorrow

by Leon Rooke

  “Mr. Clark, alas, is also in the grave,” he said to my husband. My husband fidgeted. He regretted Mr. Clark’s demise, but had never forgiven him his decisions in the nasty Black Hawk affair.

  “What do you hear of Sacajawea?” he asked us.

  Ah, I thought: dear old Sacajawea. Even Whig bankers loved Sacajawea.

  “She is toothless now,” I said. “Though still the charmer. Her grandchildren are strung throughout the Dakotas and Wyoming. They are all great warriors.”

  He sniffed. “I smell roses,” he said.

  At that minute a rock crashed through the window; agitators were assembling on the lawn.

  The captain’s man again appears by my side. A monkey clambers about on his shoulder. The monkey regards me with merry, attentive eyes, looking over my attire to determine if I possess anything that can be put to its own use.

  “The captain regrets the food aboard-ship is all contaminated,” the man says. “It is all at rot.”

  “Your captain has never heard of salt?” I ask. “Of smoke?”

  “Unfortunately, the pineapple does not smoke. Regrettably, the orange does not salt.”

  He scratches the monkey’s belly. The monkey gyrates on his shoulder, then produces an orange.

  I snatch at this fruit and have my teeth sunk into it almost before it has left the monkey’s hand.

  “To your health, princess,” the man says. He spins on his heels, the monkey chatters, and both are gone.

  This man is not so bad after all.

  Juice drips from my mouth. I have not eaten in a month.

  Minutes later, the monkey returns. He hops about in noisy agitation at my feet, making horrendous noise. But he loses not a drop of what he has brought. A rum bottle bobs atop his head. He settles the rum glass in my hand, pours from the bottle, dances about once more, then rolls away like a wheel.

  I hear gee-gaws of muffled laughter from the wheelhouse, and smile my own appreciation into the dark.

  I mean not to dwell on my vicissitudes, being not the whiner type and finding such a parade of memories repellent to my nature, as earlier said. But there it is: history must be composed, if lessons are to be extracted and life ever improved and the winds again to sing.

  All history, I mean to say, is not written in blood. To cite an example, I will mention the Night of the Trees. Soon after our train had crossed the border into Canada, it braked to sudden, lurching stop, and steam and dust engulfed us all. Urgent whistles rent the air and the very earth shook. The next moment passengers of every description were surging forth, the cars all but instantly emptying. Up and down the track people by the hundreds poured into the darkness, as though possessed by some claim of enthusiasm or madness beyond our normal call. Before one could make account for this, large beds of fire baroomed into being, these flaming campfires or outposts of light spreading far almost as the eye could encompass; in the shadows of these great flames an incalculable array of bodies swarmed this way and that, each man, woman, or child among them, it seemed, hastening to his or her objective as by some predetermined course and cause. Their heads and shoulders, sometimes the whole of their bodies, were soon obscured by their loads: massive trees, shrub plants, and flowering bush of every variety. These bodies in phantomish assembly, silhouettes at flow in graceful symmetry beneath the blackened sky. Others roved about in mysterious dialogue with pick and shovel, while numerous wagons pulled by horses barely larger than dogs arranged themselves in strange procession over the barren, ghostly plain, each of these instruments of transport piled high with mounds of black earth. In this rich cargo blinked pinpricks of mirrors all at steady flash, mica chips, my husband observed, and over these wagon loads rode a latticework of cages big and small. An extraordinary convergence of wild, plumed birds were at flutter within these cages; birds swayed upon the creaking carts with their heads under wing, or held forth as statuesque sentinels transcribing shrieks and clucks and throaty, rapturous song into the dark, implausible night. Still other conveyances arrived, some as though dropped from the starry sky. In these prowled a montage of beasts large and small, many of a species heretofore unseen in the new world, you would think; these beasts arranged either in quiet curiosity as to what mercies it was that awaited them, or in wild roar of outrage at what travesty already had ensnared them. Men and women of oriental cast were everywhere to be seen, come from nowhere to sound out their strange tongue to one another while applying tong and hammer to some spot immediately beneath where they stood. Transforming that spot in the instant and moving on decisively and with fierce muttering of excitement to the next chosen place; and the whole of this teeming terrain lit, as I say, by moonlight and torch – this flood of souls released to some higher plain of endeavour.

  Oryxes nursed, cutting her eyes to right and left.

  The night wore on. The mysterious work on the great plain beyond our windows continued without let up.

  Six white butterflies hovered at my window. They disappeared the instant my eyes claimed them. Scant seconds later they were at soft circling wing in the air above my child’s head. As one, they descended, settling on the baby’s brow. I sped them away with a wave of hands, but the second my hands stilled they again dropped as one upon the child’s brow.

  “She will live sixty years,” my husband said.

  Or die, I thought, in six days.

  One Foot grasped my wrists to hold them quiet.

  “Six days or sixty years,” he said. “Do not wage war against the stars.”

  I watched the butterflies traverse my newborn’s face.

  At this point in our journey we were days from even the smallest hamlet or outpost and indeed knew not where we were, or were bound; in the darkened coach, with all this before us, my husband’s spirit had revived; he sucked at my one breast as Oryxes suckled the other.

  “You will bring great scope to the assignment,” I told him. “You will bring honour to us, and to Yale, and to the Jefferson Chair. In the spring I will take Oryxes home and walk with her among our pyramids.”

  So much was the sense of goodness upon us that we swore anew our vows, pledging a strengthened loyalty to all in nature that was tranquil and harmonious.

  Through the night the army worked beyond our windows, and at daybreak when the great fires were nothing more than ashen piles a great virgin forest stood in seemingly endless stretch towards the horizon; the arid plain was no more. Birds were in bivouac in the trees, or in summit each to each, and beasts and fowl at roam among the foliage and dazzlement of blossoms.

  Something unyielding in the heart had finally yielded, I thought, and created this amazing oasis.

  In the distance one could hear mighty waterfalls, and witness their wet haze in the clouds.

  Morning, now.

  Those who had disembarked came on again as the sun rose. They wore their previous composure now, and showed no evidence of toil; they were eastern loudmouths in suit coats and boots, in quaint round-topped hats and string ties. They were demure ladies in unsoiled travellers’ dress, in high-top shoes that still carried shine; they were strutting schoolboys and young gentlemen in apprenticeship to a latitude of professions and trades. Boisterous soldiers, as drunk or obscene as they had been earlier, trooped in noisy combat or comradeship up and down the aisles, to fling themselves into whatever empty seat or lap their province of thought led them. Old men and women hobbled aboard, as bent by ache and disfigurement as when they had disembarked. Hardly the crew, you would think, to have wrought what they had wrought through this wondrous night.

  The fat impresario of the railroad swung elbows, fitting himself again beside me into his old seat. His bloated, immaculate hand thrust itself One Foot’s way.

  “Now,” he said. “You were saying. As a redman and savage, and one who has known the unblessed life, what might be your thoughts about that infernal Yale Chair? Every scalawag and dog to have his day? Is that your tune?”

  “Them coolies,” I heard one woman whisper to another, passin
g along the aisle. “I couldn’t make out the single word! Must we have ignorant foreigners in pigtails building our railroads?”

  Our boat chugs on through the night, aimless as a plank tossed into water. Our stomachs have soothed and we repose on the deck like bundles of hay dropped haphazardly over the rail. Wind rakes at old cuts in the flesh, and my bones acknowledge their age. The sky has blackened, we can see nothing. Our boat scrapes bottom, brushes invisible foliage, and one can feel the lean of a thousand trees; we lift uncertain hands to dislodge drooping vines. One hears an occasional splash in the water, nearby or in the distance, and the heart quivers: is it fish or one of our own, sliding away into the black mystery?

  The captain’s man again returns, on shoes as silent as the evening’s character.

  “A pillow, princess? The captain desires you should be comfortable.”

  Something else scrabbles across the deck, approaches me; already I have raised my knife. What does it want?

  “It is only the monkey,” the man tells me, “come with a blanket.”

  Indeed, it is the monkey. I can smell now the raw smell. I can hear the monkey scratching its fur.

  “Cover the princess,” the man says. The monkey chatters a polite reply. I see the waves of yet a blacker darkness, and cool air, and the blanket settling lightly over my legs. The hair on the monkey’s hands brushes my face.

  “No rum?” I ask.

  The rum glass finds my fingers. I hear the slosh of liquid in the glass. I drink.

  “Tell the monkey thank you,” I say to the captain’s man.

  “No need to,” he says. “You already have. You could talk that Egyptian tongue, he’d likely understand that too.”

  They start to go.

  “Should be quite the show,” the man says. “Quite the celebration. Whole country at fever pitch. You’re coming home, princess.”

  It seems to me I can feel some timid increase in the boat’s speed. Some added play in the waves. Some extra force in the breeze.

  It occurs to me that I must have the captain’s monkey. I must walk through the capitals of Europe, Asia, and the Far East. Through this continent and back again in the New World. I in my princess dress and the monkey at my side, our hands intertwined.

  Oryxes the First, I seem to recall, had monkeys and birds sealed with her in her golden tomb.

  The railhead at Winnipeg, where we took on the cattle and into whose terminus we had been rerouted, was not an improvement, although it was here a man named Riel, said to be a rabble-rouser and menace to the earth’s innertuning, furtively boarded and sat with us and recited his name. He spoke into his chest, although his eyes darted everywhere. He was an outlaw, on the run. Branded a traitor. His friends dead. So many of his people homeless, on their knees, or dead. Gutted end to end. The Great White Father was The Snake With One Belly and Two Heads. One head lived on the Potomac, the other up here. The snake’s belly was fat with the dead. It liked the lard. The two heads saw little of each other. They did not need to. Such brains as the snake possessed were located in the belly. Or was up its arsehole, forgive me, princess.

  Riel wore a bell on a rawhide cord looped around his neck. He drew back his coat to show us this. A handgun hung by the same cord. He had never fired this weapon, he said, without first ringing the bell. The ringing bell made him feel easier about the matter. It soothed his conscience and brought peace to the swans at swim in his head.

  “What was decided with the Chair?” he asked.

  Yes, he had been approached in the early days. The offer had chagrined him; he had believed himself unworthy. He was too angry. Although in those days he had trod about with six bells round his neck, and no handgun, or even a knife or stone in his pockets.

  “Try One Foot, I told them. He’s the bigger fool.”

  We shook with laughter at this.

  “What news of Sacajawea?” he asked. “She always excited my blood, though her own ever ran clear. She was ever trimming my nails, inserting sticks into my hair or slapping tree bark onto my face. Correcting my French. I see her now, walking Paris streets under a gay umbrella, white poodles dogging her heels. Quite the savage, eh? Sacajawea could read one page of Latin in Clark’s book, and thereafter speak the tongue with a sauciness and grandeur the match of Cicero.”

  Ah, we all thought. The old days.

  “Where do you go now?” we asked.

  He laughed, and waggled his head.

  The baby wriggled on my lap, wanting to join in.

  “A child shall lead them,” Riel said. “Onwards into light.” He tickled the infant’s chin. “Never fall asleep on a tree’s mossy side.”

  A man stalking the aisle paused at our chairs and leaned his face into Riel’s. Riel tinkled his bell. The man straightened and hastened on.

  “And what news,” he asked me, “of the empire? Of the darker continent? How fares the princess, her heels raw from the Dakotas’ lam. So far from home, and for so long?”

  “Upriver, slave ship oars thump out the iambic beat. More and more vessels thicken the water. High tide is ever higher.”

  He withdrew a white handkerchief, and with it daubed his sugar under my eyes.

  “Downriver, there’s talk of a canal.”

  “Ah,” he said. “The innocent life.”

  For a time within his environment our spirits lifted; we smoked and spat and dwelled on the eternities and toasted the baby.

  He slipped away, and our train rattled on, again in ungainly lurch towards the Dakotas.

  A night and a day passed. The vultures once more plied commerce with our route, gliding calmly by like gulls at a seaport.

  Three days, four days, five.

  Then there was this same Luther underfoot again and the train at crash against a boulder set up across the rails. By Plum River this was, and it engorged, and somehow in the stew of this my newborn’s throat being had at, plus Luther’s gang at pile between my legs.

  You can see here my sketchiness, for I have little stomach for the chronicle. A body tires, it wants relief, and the mind, too, desires the pruning.

  Then this mucous scampering away into grass.

  But One Foot was wounded and his head a hollow bell and his eyes sightless in the aftermath.

  “More rum, princess?”

  “I thank you, yes.”

  “More?”

  “Yes.”

  “To the top?”

  “Yes.”

  We survived in these conditions and made on again, on foot now and following a path of stars, accompanied by the maddened cadenza of wolves at rove on the plain. Some two hundred of Luther’s sordid fireboilers drove in hot pursuit, as we nightly reconnoitred the matter from our moonward levels. This, thanks to a scurrilous document nailed to tree stump and post by our enemies, affirming that the Chair brigade had under face of darkness routed that institution called Yale, murdering every woman and child while they slept and leaving in their wake naught but the stench of rotting flesh in which maggots of a special Egyptian-Injun variety were at swim, with the whole of civilization now at peril. And these blackguards now loose in unprejudiced liberty through the continent, with more of their infamy to follow. And all this at the will of a moneyed claimant to the French throne, in conspiracy with the English Influence along the Potomac – and many a decent kettle-tender, pig-swiller, blackie or redman the dupes of these knaves who dared make use of the Jeffersonian name. These despoilers of his hand-writ Constitution and defilers of the of, by, and for, who would usurp our land’s very foundations.

  “More rum, princess?”

  “Dispatch the monkey for another keg.”

  “He’s asleep, princess. Between yer legs.”

  We reside now in the wheelhouse, our features at dance under the globe of yellow lanterns. I sit on the captain’s stuffed horsehair sofa, cold inside my bones, mindlessly rubbing the monkey’s scalp. The monkey groans in his sleep; he has the sound of one grown weary and old from the drone of my voice.

  Th
e captain is steadily attentive to the wheel and only intermittently shows notice of me. He cares for his boat and would have nothing harm her on this journey. “Yer has the mission, yer takes it,” he has told me. “Yer hopes to effect no damage to yer vessel what brings yer to or from it.”

  “Yer does?”

  “Yer. Yer does.”

  I have been here the past hour, the pair of us saluting ourselves with each drink we pour down our gullets.

  “Skaal!”

  “Skaal!”

  “Prosit!”

  “Prosit!”

  “To yer nanny!”

  “To yer nanny!”

  “Pura quanzu!”

  “Pura quanzu!”

  “A votre sante!”

  “A votre sante!”

  “Down the hatch!”

  “Down the ruddy hatch!”

  The captain is a piece of cloth new to my experience. I cannot make him out.

  “I told yer,” he says. “Yer takes on a mission, yer…”

  Another lantern illuminates the boat’s bow and some few feet of grey water. It illuminates the captain’s weathered confederates. Ropes are entwined about their torsos as they dig in their heels, as they sway and pull. We are in shallow water; this tub is scraping bottom.

  “We’ll get yer through,” the captain says. “No problem.”

  The monkey yawns, stretching his limbs. The right foot jiggles as he sleeps.

  “I meant to ask,” says the captain. “How’s that Sacajawea? There were a woman could come at yer like oyster on the half-shell.”

  “You knew Sacajawea?”

  “Why, my Lord yes. Like this us were.”

  He snaps his fingers behind his back, his torso at lean through a window. “Onward, boys,” he shouts. “Another league onwards!”

  It sounds silly. I help the monkey scratch at fleas, thinking that this monkey and I are walking down a Paris Street. We are creating the sensation, and why should we not? I shall not let the low-life deter me.

  Go away, I will say. You with your small minds. Who else will flap warm blankets over me when I am cold? I will sit on a bench and debate with the monkey Jeffersonian ideals and the Napoleonic Code.