by Don Gillmor
Thompson had spent his life gathering: information, knowledge, miles, a family, and now each year brought fresh loss. He had lost four children, his money, and he was losing sight in his remaining eye. He might lose the use of his leg. On winter mornings, it felt as if it were a wooden crutch, inanimate, useful but limited, not really part of him. He had lost most of his friends, though perhaps friends was too grand a word for people you had spent a few months with more than two decades before.
He thought of Welland, drowned, a big man who thrashed in the Saskatchewan River like a harpooned whale must thrash. He was gone before they could reach him. He thought of MacKay often. They had travelled together through thousands of miles. He missed his cheer, his Orkney doubt, his companionship. He had married finally and settled at Fort Augustus, and then took a fever and slipped away, gone.
The sun was low in a morning sky smudged with winter clouds. People in dark clothes moved gingerly through the snow. Thompson was dressed in his best clothes, which were musty and mended and long out of fashion and could no longer mask his poverty. His appointment wasn’t until nine, but he had left at six to avoid lying to Charlotte, and he walked the streets of Montreal for three hours.
The sheer boredom of clerking is what had driven him toward exploration. He mulled this irony as he finally trudged to the Hudson’s Bay offices and was directed to the ill-lit office of a young man named Pritchett whose job it was to hire clerks. Companies needed an endless army of clerks. They got bored or left for more lucrative employment, or they drank or stole goods or met with misadventure. It was a full-time job replacing them.
“You are seventy years of age, sir?” Pritchett said, surveying Thompson’s face and worn clothes, assessing his lifespan, his intelligence, his desperation. “It’s not an age when most men seek employment.”
“Most men are dead at seventy,” Thompson said.
“Yes. Do you have any experience clerking, sir?”
“I worked as a clerk for the Hudson’s Bay Company. It was some time ago.”
“When, precisely.”
“Seventeen hundred eighty-four.”
“I see. Much has changed, sir.”
Yes, thought Thompson. The Hudson’s Bay Company has been roused from its torpor by competition from the North West Company. A world has been discovered and mapped. And I am one of those who discovered it. I am the one who mapped it. In any event, what could have changed? Was there a new method of counting? Were there new numbers, new pens, new black notebooks to keep records in? Pritchett’s office was filled with dark folders. His desk was dark oak and there was a faint smell of something like embalming fluid.
“I invented the North West,” Thompson said, surprising himself.
“Indeed.” Pritchett made a note in his black book. “I’m afraid, Mr. Thompson, that your services won’t be required by the Hudson’s Bay Company.”
Thompson left the man’s office. He wouldn’t tell Charlotte of this new humiliation, though perhaps the job itself would have been more humiliating. He had once shared everything with her, but as his life veered into decline, he doled out his failure in small doses. He was protecting her, he thought. Perhaps he was protecting himself. She was sixteen years younger, a fact that had never been more glaring. She had borne their poverty without complaint. She would love him regardless of their circumstances, regardless of his occupation, or his infirmities, which were worsening. But these failures were adding up, and would soon present a terrible sum. He didn’t want her to be faced with doubt. What was love? What could it be reduced to? Habit, certainly. The city was filled with marriages that were simply legal partnerships. Some of these men had had other wives in the country, and they had separated those two parts of themselves with some success. In the North West, there had been passion and lust, the warm scent of savagery. What man hasn’t smelled it somewhere and embraced it as kin? But they moved back to the city, back to perfumed corsets, separate bedrooms, and a polite touch.
The light never quite arrived. One of those days that is held in abatement, a lengthy prelude to something that doesn’t come. He recalled showing the constellations to Samuel when he was a boy, locating the pole star for him and showing him how to calculate their position. But the heavens were of no interest to Samuel; he saw only its emptiness, not its potential. There was no story up there for him. Surveying wasn’t romantic work, but it was honest and it was outside, though neither of these advantages appealed to his son. Standing in an autumn rain, wet and shaking with cold, his face pale, his eyes hard and resentful, Samuel had yelled, “This is your world, not mine.” The cry of most sons. Thompson supposed he was right. Samuel saw his father trudging other people’s land, marking off the parameters of their wealth, a servant.
Thompson wondered if his son was still alive. There was a period when Samuel appeared in fevered dreams, dead on the prairie, stretched under the western sun, birds tugging at the wounds on his thin body. Thompson would wake up and convince himself that Samuel was simply a young man looking for a place in the world, like thousands of other young men, like Thompson himself, and that one day he would walk through the door, returned from the Orient with pockets filled with diamonds.
He remembered John sitting in the canoe at the age of four, seated on the blankets, watching the wilderness quietly go by, looking for dragons, clutching his father’s leg instinctively. Save me from this savage world. But Thompson hadn’t managed to do that. What father had? He hadn’t saved John or Samuel or Tristan or Emma. Children go out into the world equipped with curiosity and naïveté and rage, and then seek a place where these things are welcome.
And now Henry was gone.
Henry was thirty-one, and the melancholy that Thompson had glimpsed in him when he was a child had fully flowered. It was a black mood that held no violence, unlike his brother.
Henry was a mapmaker. He had followed his father into a dying art. Ungifted, melancholy, and without work. When Thompson went to his rooms after hearing that he was missing, he was confronted by Henry’s wife, Barbara, who was pregnant with their first child. She stood weeping, and she had a look that was both grateful and accusatory, suggesting that Thompson’s blood was weak, and that she feared the same fate for their unborn child.
Thompson began looking for him in St. Charles, stopping in at shops and alehouses, asking after him. He walked for six hours in a meticulous grid, his leg stiffening. The winter light was fading, the deepening of afternoon. He had walked and paddled more than fifty thousand miles in the wilderness, and now he was once again an explorer. He turned down an alley streaked with urine. Three men squatted against the brick, sharing a cloudy bottle.
“Do you know Henry Thompson?” he asked them.
The men stared up at him, their eyes rheumy and empty. The question hung there and Thompson moved along the alley. A woman was splayed against the brick, her pale, bruised legs exposed. She gave Thompson an awful smile. There was a wooden door near the end of the alley, held on with rope hinges. Thompson opened it and went inside. A dozen men sat drinking out of pewter cups in the dim light. He asked them if they had seen his son. One of the men looked up.
“Henry Thompson?” he asked. “I know a Henry. Young man.”
“He’s lost.”
“Lost,” the man echoed dully.
“I intend to find him.”
The man shrugged. Thompson continued looking until after nine, then walked home.
For four days, he walked the streets of Montreal, searched makeshift taverns that were hidden away, blighted spaces. In a few of them, Henry was known, but no one had seen him.
On the fourth day, Thompson found Henry in a dismal room in Lachine, sitting on the floor, his head resting at an angle against the stained wallpaper. His eyes were hollow and dark and filled with such despair that Thompson pulled his son’s head to his chest and sat down and cradled him for an hour. He held him as he had held him through his sickness at the age of two, when the fever wouldn’t break and Thompson had
held him because he thought it was the last of him.
2
NEW YORK, 1850
New York was the colour of an old blanket. Thompson walked streets that were crowded with children selling chestnuts, heavy old women hawking stained material, and men selling roasted meat, tin plates, knives, hats, and hairless dogs. He couldn’t fault this ragged army. He was there to sell as well, to find a buyer for his maps. He had written to Sir Robert Peel, the British prime minister, beseeching him to take the maps; they would be invaluable when negotiating a border with the Americans. Proof of what was there. How could you divide it up if you didn’t know what it was?
London had refused him, perhaps America would embrace him. It embraced everyone, whether they wanted embracing or not. They had just embraced Texas, despite Mexico’s protest. The new president, James Polk, favoured westward expansion. He coveted the Oregon Territory, and Thompson had drawn the most detailed map of the area. Perhaps Polk himself would buy the map, he thought, to see where he was expanding. On the northern border there was negotiation; on the southern, blood.
He remembered the dinner seven years ago with George Simpson, governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, a Highlander who had closed dozens of unprofitable trading posts and fired half the employees. A man of appetites and efficiency who abandoned his country wives and children when he moved to Montreal. Thompson wanted to sell him his maps of the Oregon Territory, and Simpson said he was interested and invited him to dinner. Simpson’s house in Lachine was dark and opulent, and Thompson walked to it through ten miles of rain, clutching his rolled maps that were covered in oiled canvas. The dinner had been sumptuous and Simpson told him stories of his travels, throwing his head back to laugh at every absurdity. A Highlander in all things, he saw no point in paying Thompson for his maps. Those rivers and lakes and boundaries would surface elsewhere. Every occupied territory eventually yielded maps; pirated and inaccurate and marred by self-interest, perhaps, but delivered without charge. A miserable walk back to Montreal.
Thompson passed a dense huddle of buildings on Tenth Street and found Coleman in a shop that was five steps down from the sidewalk. He was bent over a desk, a thin, fluttery man who looked up and saw Thompson with his maps under his arm. Neither was buoyed by the other’s appearance. Thompson introduced himself and tapped the large canvas roll.
“The maps I wrote of,” he said.
“Yes, yes.” It was clear Coleman didn’t recall.
“The North West, the Oregon Territory.”
“You’re a mapmaker then.”
“Yes.”
“Do you map cities?”
“No.”
“Cities are what people want now. New York grows so fast. Four hundred thousand people, half of them criminals.”
“Your president, as you know, is keen on westward expansion …”
Coleman looked at him with a blank face. “There are several books on the North West. Have you read …”
Coleman went to the back of the shop and his hands circled the air in front of a shelf until he pulled a book out.
“Here it is. The man was captured by savages. Lived like one for years then escaped. Died in Philadelphia. The sort of thing you might like. The price is reasonable.”
“My maps.”
Coleman smiled slightly, a dark, unfortunate smile. “There isn’t much call for maps at present. It’s all adventure, it seems.”
Coleman’s face had a finality to it. Thompson had come to New York for nothing. Coleman gave him the name of another publisher, Wainscott and Son, who published maps. Thompson walked the fifteen blocks to Wainscott, who wasn’t interested either.
“If you want to leave them, I’ll take a look. I can’t promise anything.”
Thompson left with his maps, still unwrapped, and began to walk along Eighth Street, past a boy who was begging. “Have you something, sir?” he pleaded, his hand, streaked with soot, thrust upward. Thompson had nothing for himself even, and kept walking. The boy yelled a string of curses after him.
He heard several languages around him, a coarse, rich cacophony, and observed faces, dark-eyed people who moved as if they were late for an appointment. The streets were filled with commerce, moving goods, selling them. Groups of young men lingered at corners, waiting for the cover of night. Laundry waved from staircases and railings, white underclothes and dark coats and dresses, giving the buildings an unfinished look. There was a row of buildings burned to the ground, charred timbers lying like giant sticks and a group of children played among them. Thompson had never seen such a concentration of people in such a small area. They competed for the same resources: work, food, money, water. It was a city filled with dire opportunity. The natural laws were stretched thinly and tribes huddled each night, bound by blood or religion or language or nation, waiting for morning. Lines were redrawn as the city slept.
How would he map this city? It was a grid, each block containing a separate constellation. He walked to Mrs. Ogilvie’s boarding house, past her disapproving stare, through the smells of cooked cabbage and boiled meat to his small room. He spread his map of the Oregon Territory across the bed and ran his finger along the borders he had drawn. The Americans invaded as he was creating the map, and now he was trying to sell them maps of the country they weren’t able to take. If they had taken the country, he thought, his maps might be worth a great deal.
The soft October evening light left long shadows, and the maples were the colour of fire. Thompson sat on the wooden chair and observed Montreal through the window of their rooms. Coleman was an ass. Arrowsmith were crooks. Mackenzie over-rewarded, the Americans untrustworthy, the British blockheads. The Peigans had guns, the Irish were dying.
“What?” Charlotte was nudging him gently. He hadn’t realized he was talking out loud. The light was almost gone. They couldn’t afford to light the lamp at night and the room became slowly black.
In the morning he went over the list of all he had sold: his surveyor’s chains (twenty-six pounds), his theodolite, his good coat (five pounds, ten pence), a bed, the leggings of a Mandan dress, his navigator’s instruments, books. Only his maps, it seemed, wouldn’t sell. By October there was no money nor the promise of any. He and Charlotte moved in with his daughter Elizabeth and her husband, William Scott, an engineer, an efficient man who bore the presence of his in-laws with an air of pragmatism. Thompson had come to a decision. He would write his own book, not an entertainment, as Irving had intended, but an adventure nevertheless. He had hundreds of pages of journals. People read adventure, as Coleman had said.
The writing went slowly and his hand shook by late morning and by November the room was often too cold to work. His son-in-law rationed the lamp oil and he couldn’t write at night. At any rate, he was too exhausted and his eye wasn’t strong enough to work by lamplight.
On February 14, Thompson woke in the chill of their room, the residue of a dream—Saukamappee standing on Tenth Street in New York, eating roasted chestnuts and laughing—still in his head. He stared into blackness. There were a few seconds of suspended disbelief, followed by a flash of betrayal—Don’t abandon your God especially when it seems He has abandoned you—then the simple fact of that darkness. Thompson was blind.
“Charlotte.”
“Hmm.”
“I’m blind. I can’t see.”
She sat up and looked at her husband, who was staring blankly at the far wall. She looked into his eye, looked at that solemn face, with its child’s trust and fear. The blackness wasn’t absolute. There were shades, blue-black, grey-black, a few pricks of light that appeared like stars and were quickly extinguished.
At nine that morning Charlotte led Thompson to Dr. Howard’s office on Queen Street. In the small waiting room there was a child with a shirt wrapped around his head as a bandage. After an hour, Thompson and Charlotte went into Howard’s office. He was a small, thin man with a large moustache. He sat in front of Thompson and lit a candle and passed it across his line of sight, mo
ving closer and then withdrawing.
“What do you see, Mr. Thompson?”
“A glow, faint.”
“Can you see shapes?”
“No.”
“When did you lose your sight?”
“I lost the sight in my right eye when I was eighteen. Sixty years ago. The other eye, I awoke blind this morning.”
Howard drew closer and stared into his eyes. Thompson could feel his presence, the human warmth, the proximate breath.
“Did you ever see a doctor regarding your right eye?”
“No. The sight was lost from working by candlelight and staring at the stars.”
“You don’t lose your eyesight from staring at the heavens, Mr. Thompson. You have cataracts. There is a chance your sight can be returned.”
Howard rustled around the brown bottles that were against one wall.
“I’m going to fumigate your eyes with hydrocyanic acid,” he said. He brushed Thompson’s eyelids with veratria, and applied the acid. Then he set up a small machine that generated arcs of spidery light and moved it around the orbit of Thompson’s eye. Thompson could see distant lightning. Charlotte watched this necromancy in silent horror.
“For the next two weeks, Mr. Thompson, every morning upon waking I would like you to drink a wine glass filled with a mixture of gentian, a small quantity of sulphate of magnesia, and sulphuric acid.”
The mixture was predictably awful, a witch’s brew that burned and sent bile upward. Thompson was glad he couldn’t see it.