The town had passed into American hands five years earlier, being prior to then the property of Spain. Yet it retained less of a Spanish flavor than New Madrid, a thousand miles inland.
Viewed from the river it presented a most romantic sight, perched on its green-topped bluff. The main street contained several houses of brick. Here cotton, not tobacco, was the king of crops, and several new mansions—the Belle View, Linden and Airlie houses—attested to its rising value. The population stood at roughly one thousand, with at least as many slaves. Yet they showed none of the swinish customs exhibited by the habitants of the Ohio towns. Everywhere could be seen attempts to create beauty—in the gardens, the verandahs, and the window boxes. Here was the northmost reach where the orange tree will endure winter out-of-doors. Pawpaws (Asimina triloba) stood in every dooryard, hung with their ripening custard apples. Pretty green parakeets (Conuropsis carolinensis) flitted raucously among the azaleas.
Louis was afire with questions at all the strange, new, and wonderful sights—“Sammy, what is that building with a pointed cap?” “That is a church, Louis”—and it was plainer than ever that his previous state of idiocy had been enforced upon him rather than inborn.
“Wait till he claps an eye on New Orleans,” Bilbo said over a rum punch on the verandah of the Brown Pelican Tavern, where we watched the sun set across the river. “Now then,” he cleared his throat, “there is the matter of the keelboat.”
“No doubt you intend to abscond with it to New Orleans,” I remarked.
“Wrong, sir,” Bilbo retorted, “for what more important baggage does a gentleman carry to a part of the world where he is unknown but his reputation! How much do you want for the old tub?”
“Old tub! Why, its keel was laid not four months ago!”
“Perhaps. But think what you have caused it to endure. Birds have beshit its deck. It has plunged down the falls of Louisville. This scow is verily a veteran of the wars. I will give you fifty dollars for it.”
Uncle and I glanced at each other in amazement. We had not expected to get half as much for it here at Natchez.
While we hesitated, Bilbo flung his purse upon the table. It rang with gold coins. “Well? What do you say?”
Uncle and I continued to look on dumbly as he made little stacks of the coins.
“There are the supplies on board,” I reminded him, “much of which we shan’t be able to carry with us.”
“Don’t be a little greedy-guts now,” Bilbo wagged his long finger before my nose. “The bacon is wormy, the cheese rotten, and the meal aswarm with weevils.”
“Back in May, when first you accosted us, it suited you perfectly well—not to mention all the whiskey you guzzled, not to speak of my chocolate filberts.”
“Very well,” Bilbo gave in easily, as only a man with bright prospects will. “Seventy-five and not a penny more.”
“Thee hast a deal!” said Uncle and winked at me, for he had the impression that we drove an exceedingly hard bargain.
“Only one thing do I ask you gentlemen,” Bilbo looked at us both with a beseeching face.
“What is that?” Uncle asked suspiciously.
“When you return to the states, put out of your mind my former regrettable career upon the Ohio and speak of me as the white knight of medicine you know me as today—for there will be those at New York, and even Philadelphia, who remember the young Melancton Bilbo before a cruel fate drove him west.”
“From hereon I shall advertise you as like unto the Nazarene who healed the sick and made the lame leap for joy.”
A tear came to his eye.
“’Tis close to the truth,” he averred. “Aint’ it?”
And so the next morning, after a sound night’s sleep upon a good rope bed, we bid adieu again to Bilbo et famille at the landing below the Natchez bluffs.
“Be so kind as to put this on a ship for Philadelphia,” Uncle said as he nailed shut the lid of a wooden crate upon the foredeck.
“What’s in it?” Bilbo asked innocently.
“Specimens.”
“What sort o’specimens?”
“Rattlesnakes,” Uncle said, and Bilbo backed off. Actually, it contained Puya seed, plus many botanical oddments.
“If all goes well, we should be in New Orleans ourselves before too long,” I told Louis in a separate interview at the rail.
“You will visit us then?”
“Depend upon it.”
“O, my friend, I will miss you and Uncle William.”
“I will miss you too, Louis. You have a whole world to discover. Perhaps while we are gone you will think again about returning to the East.”
“Not to France.”
“No, to New York or Philadelphia.”
“Would you like that, mon pois de senteur?” Louis asked his bride.
She nodded her head, honked avidly, threw her arms around my neck, and basted my face with viscous kisses. Louis looked on with pride and delight. Next, Neddy stepped forward.
“The best of luck to you on your venture inland,” he said in that mellifluous baritone he employed so rarely, and then only at times of great moment.
Finally, Uncle and I returned to the landing as Bilbo cast off the lines. It was but two hundred miles to New Orleans and they would arrive there in a matter of days. I was not altogether easy in my mind about leaving Louis in Bilbo’s care, but at least they would be in a city and not upon an island in the middle of no place. Who could say but that Louis might even gain some important lessons in human nature under the old rascal’s tutelage.
When Megatherium had vanished round the bend, we climbed the steep road back to the village with as much of our equipment as we could well carry—muskets, rifles, powder, blankets, et cetera—and bargained with a trader in livestock for the purchase of an ass to bear this cargo into the unknown, and of course to carry back out the pelt of a giant sloth, or so we hoped. Before noon, with our ass loaded (I named him Tom, after the architect of our mission), we walked past the old Spanish burying ground and the town cow pasture and once again entered into the wilderness, on an old footpath known as the Three-Chopped Way.
Like Zane’s Trace of Ohio and the Natchez Trace, which ran northward through daunting Tennessee, the Three-Chopped Way was an ancient game trail trodden by untold generations of deer and Indians. It made a line roughly east-west through what is today Mississippi and Alabama to Georgia. Since it transected the country of that most cruel and obstinate tribe, the Creeks, it was not a highway followed by many whites, and we were naturally apprehensive lest we fall into Indian hands. But in a week’s march we encountered but one solitary warrior—upon what errand we never did learn—and this under strange circumstances.
We met at either end of a beargrass meadow. He did not skulk away at the sight of us, nor nock an arrow—he carried no firearms—but rather watched us with deep curiosity, as bears and other wild things sometimes do when you cross their paths in the forest. Nor did we brandish any weapons at him. We only returned his gaze in the fierce sunshine that flooded the little meadow. He took some steps toward us, then we toward him. At length we stood eyes to eyes, he scrutinizing us as though he had never seen our like before. There was something childlike in his face, an innocent wonder you do not see in the eyes of adult whites in the humdrum of their daily pursuits, nor even in church on Sunday when brought into contemplation of God and His miracles. Finally, with a little grunt, he tore himself from our own curious gazes and continued on his way, as if he had fully satisfied himself we were men and not manticores. Uncle, who had known many savages in his day, thought the incident passing strange. Nor in that week’s march did we encounter any sign of megatherium, though the supply of game was profuse, a stupendous bounty of deer, turkey, snipe, and bear—so many walking hams, briskets, roasts, tenderloins, breasts, drumsticks, and chops as to make Kentucky compare like the pantry of some poor country parson. And here also was a botanical wonderland for Uncle: new species enough to exhaust the supply of nam
es of colleagues, relations, and friends to honor. Three varieties of Yucca, for example, he named after the children of his associate in natural philosophy and fellow Philadelphian, Mr. Peale (Yucca raphaelis, rembrandtis, titianis). I followed him with brush and paintbox at the ready, absorbing myself in the art of natural portraiture for the first time since we had set out on our mission—for the first time, really, since those leisurely days of the summer previous, when Columbia College had invited me to depart and I had rediscovered my love of painting.
It was as though some key had unlocked a door in my brain; that behind this door lay not only the patterned beauty of the world itself, but my capacity to see it and to understand my place in relation to it—to feel my heart palpitate at the sight of a wild rose, the scarlet spikes of Canna indica, the solemn grandeur of moss-hung oaks, the jewel-like appearance of a ruby-throated hummingbird (Archilochus colubris) as he hovers ’neath the pink and scarlet blossoms of the trumpet vine (Campsis radicans). My concentration focused as never before. I could squat for hours on end in the midday heat before a bough of drooping wisteria (W. frutescens), tracing the delicate lilac-hued clusters of blossom with eyes and pencil, then coloring these forms with paintbox and brush, and arise from this lengthy task not wearily but as though refreshed from a beautiful dream. Our botanical partnership thus became the why and wherefore of our days. Frankly, I was beginning to have my doubts that megatherium might be found anywhere in this part of the world at all. There were no bones, no scats, no evidence to suggest the existence of so monumental a creature, and, most significantly, no sightings—though we saw vast herds of other quadrupeds. Nor did we catch so much as a glimpse of the sloth’s putative companion, the mastodon, an animal not adept, one would think, at concealing its massive self. And so, one sultry evening, as Uncle and I supped happily on a fricassee of squirrel, I put the issue to him direct:
“Uncle, have you any doubts that the giant sloth lives in this part of the world?”
“O, I doubt it absolutely, nephew,” he replied candidly, and to my astonishment added, “I doubted it from the very start.”
“From the start…?” I echoed him. “Then why did you agree to come?”
“I wanted to botanize the deep interior of this fabulous continent, to discover, classify, and record the vegetable life of these unknown territories. ’Twas vanity, I suppose, and no small sin, for sooner or later another man of science would have achieved the same deed, but I wanted to be that man. Can thee forgive me, Sammy?”
“Yes,” I assured him, and honestly so, though my heart sank amongst the fricasseed squirrels in my belly.
“’Twas quite an adventure, does thee not agree, Sammy?”
“You wanted to have an adventure?”
“O, heavens, yes. One more before I become stardust again.”
I saw now, in his expression, how much of the marveling boy remained in the stout body of the sixty-two-year-old man.
“I wanted to have an adventure too,” I confessed.
“Thee has. And found thy vocation.”
“Do you think so, Uncle? Might I hope to become a painter?”
“Dost wish to fritter away thy years at commerce? Balancing accounts, uncrating teacups, pinching pennies?”
I thought of home, Father’s store. Dear, dogged, kind Papa.
“I could not bear the prospect,” I admitted.
“There ’tis.”
“But I tried to be a painter once and failed,” said I, recalling my miserable career as a miniaturist.
“Pish, twaddle, and bosh.”
“I was a complete fizzle, I assure you, sir.”
“’Twould make a capital epitaph ’pon some fellow’s headstone: ‘He Tried Once and Failed.’”
“I sat in a cold garret and starved.”
“’Twas Providence’s way of saving thee from a career as a painter of snuffboxes.”
“I had hoped to earn a living. And go on to larger subjects.”
“Thee shall. When we return to Philadelphia, I will commend thee to Dr. Peale. There is always work to be done around Peale’s museum—stuffing specimens, cataloguing. It shall be thy college, and there thee shall learn, from the master, the science of the painter’s art. Thy innate talents are already visible.”
“I think I should like that more than anything in the world, Uncle.”
“Thee can board at Owl’s Crossing and ride our old mare Jenny across the Schuylkill to the city.”
“I cannot conceive of a happier situation.”
“Then it shall be done,” he concluded.
With that, we unrolled our bearskins, bid each other pleasant dreams, and closed our eyes to the peenting darkness. Never did I enter the portals of slumber with sweeter expectations for my future.
But no sooner had my career been neatly mapped out than we became lost. The Three-Chopped Way—so-called because of the triple blaze cut into the trees as signposts along its route—was never a very good trail. Not much traveled, the footpath was overgrown from disuse. Its telltale blazes were cut at long and irregular intervals. Sometimes as it crossed swamps and daunting cypress sloughs we would lose track of it for a day or more. In fact, we had thought ourselves lost on several occasions, only to blunder back upon a tree with the familiar triple axe marks. But now we hadn’t seen such a signpost in three days. Our way through the woods became a baffling blind progress, a groping through the darkness of the unknown, and then misfortune deprived us of our uncomplaining donkey, Tom—as genial a creature as an old dog—who was attacked by a monstrous rattlesnake and killed. Several hours did he lie a’dying against our hopes, and we were helpless to meliorate his agony, though I lodged the contents of a pistol in his murderer’s head. When his breathing stopped we were not only lost but reduced to carrying our necessaries upon our own backs. Two more days we stumbled forward until we struck a good-sized river and upon its bank a scene that augured our arrival in a lost and forsaken country, for there, pinned through his skull by an Indian spear to the trunk of a wahoo tree (Ulmus alata), reposed the remains of our erstwhile savior the Woodsman.
“Oh infamy!” I cried at the awful sight.
We wouldn’t have known it was he but for the skunkskin cap and white buckskins, for his flesh had been consumed by ravening worms and all that was left inside his emblematic raiment were the glistening bones.
“Poor noble nimrod,” Uncle said.
“What do you suppose happened to him?”
“Why, obviously he hath been murdered by savages.”
“Yes, but how?”
“Art blind, nephew? His brain is pierced straight through.”
“But the Indians quailed before him. He was invincible.”
“His powers must have deserted him,” Uncle concluded sadly.
“Look how he appears to point with his arm,” I remarked. Indeed, the Woodsman’s limb did seem to gesticulate toward the river. “Damn me, a boat!”
There on the clay bank, baking in the harsh afternoon sun, lay a sturdy dugout of the Indian kind. We rushed to it. Inside were two stout paddles. Uncle and I glanced at each other over it.
“He has saved us again,” I declared. “Even in death.”
Uncle had no stomach to dispute this, for we had yet to bury the poor knight of the wilderness, and without shovels it was an awful labor. At last we heaped a cairn of stones upon his grave, and Uncle spoke a eulogy recalling his heroic deeds in life. Then we sadly filled the boat with our shooting irons and belongings and put out into the unknown river for we knew not where.
We soon determined that the river, despite its twists and turns, flowed generally southward and that we should follow it, hoping that it emptied into the Gulf of Mexico, where we might meet a friendly ship bound for New Orleans or some other civilized port. For we had further determined that it was time to begin the long journey home.
For more than a week we rode the slow current south. The terrain changed from mixed forest to a country of expansive savannahs promi
scuously dotted with palmetto (Sabal p.). Where tributaries or freshets watered this plain sprouted stands of pine woods, occasionally supplanted by groves of oak (the sand jack [Quercus incana] or the stately diamond-leaf variety [Q. lauifolia]). Now and then we spied upon the shore what looked like abandoned cultivated fields, often containing earthen mounds and tumuli of the ancient Indian kind, though we saw no wild people or any signs of their present habitations.
The weather remained very sultry, though it was now September. Late each afternoon thunderclouds gathered and burst, as though the sky were indignant with the heat. You could set your watch by these cloudbursts. The country teemed with birdlife, and very large birds too, making our northern forests indeed compare as “a land of stunted feelings,” for here on the sand bars flocked cranes and herons by the thousands, whilst fat brown pelicans expertly skimmed the river’s surface with bills like dipper nets. The curious water turkeys (Anhinga anhinga) would swim with their whole body submerged and only the long neck protruding above the surface, like a sea serpent’s. Here we encountered for the first time the strange roseate spoonbills (Ajaia ajaja), an huge clown of a bird with bright pink wings and rump and a swan’s neck surmounted by a silly green head like a Persian lime, made sillier by a mottled bill the shape and color of a buffalo-horn spoon. Here the carrion crows (Coragyps atratus) wheeled in impressive squadrons, for wherever life teems, so too lurks its shadow, death, and by cleaning up the refuse, these ugly, black, bald-head rats of the sky performed as invaluable a service as a crew of pretty maids in a busy mansion. And amidst this abounding life, this embarrassment of riches, slouched that fearsome true dragon of the New World, the alligator, his beady yellow eyes and steaming snout protruding above the waterline. It was the first I had ever seen of these monsters and they commanded my immediate respect.
Often we encountered them sunning on a mudbank, a dozen or more of prodigious size—up to twenty feet long—their plated bodies swaying under powerful, stumpy legs as they evacuated their plots of repose at our approach, and with surprising swiftness.
An Embarrassment of Riches Page 29