Snowbound and Eclipse

by Richard S. Wheeler

  I hated myself for it, but I knew what I would do, and I knew that I had to tell him then and there, walking across that lonely valley in wooded hills, in a land as dangerous as the one we traversed en route to the Pacific.

  “I’ll need you this trip and can’t let you visit your woman. When I get back to St. Louis, I’ll write the manumission papers. I’ll do them in triplicate and file one, give you one, and put the other in the hands of Pierre Chouteau for safekeeping. I’ll also publish it in the Gazette.”

  He stared at me, unbelieving.

  “York, I’m freeing you.”

  He seemed bewildered. “You mean I don’t have to work it off, the money?”

  “I’m freeing you. When we get back.”

  “You mean I don’t owe you nothing?”

  “You’ll regret it. You’ll wish you never asked.”

  He sat there shaking his head back and forth, slowly, side to side, his lips parted, his eyes on some distant horizon.

  I don’t know what was impelling me, but I wasn’t through. The farms were just ahead; I saw light spill from a cabin a mile away. I saw cattle in the field, with a belled cow announcing her presence.

  “When we get back to St. Louis, I’ll write your papers, and I’ll give you a wagon and a dray. You can go into business. It won’t be easy. You’ll be competing with plenty of others and they might charge less. Hay and feed and pasture and oats cost money. Wagons break down; you’ll need a wheelwright now and then. All of that costs money. You’ll have to find a place to live, and that costs money. It’s called ‘rent.’ You can own a house or rent one. You try to raise a family, and there’s food to pay for, clothing to buy, furniture, cribs, blankets, diapers, coats, and all of it you’ll pay for. I won’t be providing it. And if you can’t pay, someone will come and take it all away and leave you in the ditch looking for wild asparagus or maybe a mallard or catfish to live on or stuck in a shanty, chattering and cold when the snow flies.”

  I finally wound down as we penetrated the hamlet, and two curs set up a clamor.

  “Mastuh Clark,” he said. “You gone and make me a man.”

  “No, York,” I said, remembering those years with the corps, “you made yourself a man.”

  44. LEWIS

  On September 15 they put me off here at Fort Pickering along with Pernia and my trunks. It didn’t matter much. For days they had stood guard over me; Pernia and the Creoles took turns as warders. The air on the river had been so thick and moist that I could scarcely breathe; the sun so blinding I couldn’t bear to abandon the cabin. White haze obscured the distant shores, and I felt myself being carried to the sea in the prison of my body, detached from the world.

  Sweet oblivion. To be aware was to suffer. I numbed the pain as best I could, blotted out the horror with powders, and the ghastly ruin of my body with spirits. They didn’t stop me inside the cabin; they arrested my trajectory only at the gunnels of the bobbing flatboat, where one or another hung onto my shirt while I performed my ablutions. I lay drenched in my filthy cottons during the midday heat; lay chilled at night even though the air was sultry. My heart beat relentlessly, pumping life into the ruin of my flesh.

  When we anchored at night they fed me broth and hung up the mosquito curtains around me, but little good those pathetic veils did. My arms and neck and face soon swelled with welts from ferocious insects, and only the powders were sovereign against the ache. I do not remember much of that journey, and don’t want to.

  Boulieu must have thought that a desolate and fevered governor was more cargo than he bargained for, because he took the tiller and made for the army post located on Chickasaw Heights in the Territory of Tennessee, on the left bank of the river. It was one of several posts commanding the river and its traffic, strategically located below the mouth of the Ohio.

  Of all this I was only vaguely aware. We bumped against the levee under the mouths of iron cannon, and some hushed conversation ensued beyond my hearing. Then four privates in blue appeared with a litter, and they lifted me onto it, and several others began hoisting my trunks off the flatboat and into a mule cart. We ascended a steep grade, but for how long I don’t remember. I only know I was threatening to slide off the litter.

  So I was a prisoner of the army.

  They deposited me in a whitewashed room walled with broad plank, barren and clean and so bright it hurt my eyes. A surgeon’s mate examined me, took the measure of my fever, washed me, and then vanished. I heard mumbling in the hall outside my room. I discovered faithful Pernia hovering there, eyeing me solemnly. The room tumbled and whirled, and Pernia loomed over me and vanished. I wanted my powders and knew I would have to discover where they had taken my trunks. I was burning up again.

  It didn’t matter.

  When I opened my eyes again I beheld a man of rank, his gold epaulets announcing his estate. I knew him somehow, and yet I didn’t.

  “Governor, I’m Captain Russell at your service,” he said. “Gilbert Russell, commanding Fort Pickering.”

  I nodded.

  “The river men have put you in our care,” he said. “We’ve a surgeon’s mate here, and he has examined you. Are you following me?”

  I nodded.

  “He’s going to apply cold compresses to reduce your fever, which is elevated.”

  I nodded.

  “Your manservant says you’re en route to New Orleans, and then to the Chesapeake. My advice, sir, is that you will need some little while to recover from this attack.”

  “Thirsty,” I said.

  Russell nodded. The surgeon’s mate brought a tin cup of cool water. I drank greedily.

  “I would like my chattel brought here,” I said.

  Russell paused for just a moment. “Most of it, Your Excellency, will be brought directly. My surgeon’s mate believes you are suffering from an excess of some things in your medical cabinet. We will ration those for your own sake. A glass of claret each day will suffice.”

  “But my pain—”

  “We’re up above the river, Governor, and it’s cooler here. Clean linens and cold compresses and fresh air will restore you directly.”

  “I want my powders, my snuff. I’m a physician; I dosed the entire Corps of Discovery.”

  Russell sighed. “And so you did, sir, and brought your corps back safely. I am filled with boundless admiration.”

  “Is this an infirmary?”

  “Actually, officer’s quarters.”

  “Am I free to go?”

  He hesitated again. “The boatmen and Mr. Pernia suggest, sir, that you were temporarily so fevered that you were acting against your own best interest. We have a watch stationed for your own safety. If there’s anything you need, why, I am your servant in all else.”

  Even as he addressed me, my mind was quieting and the coolness of the room was comforting my burning flesh. I lay in a clean squared log bunk between muslin sheets. A breeze billowed through the open windows now and then. His talking wearied me. I nodded.

  I remember little of the rest of the afternoon, except that the mate steadily applied cold compresses to my face and neck and chest, and so relentlessly that for the first time in a week I felt cool. I fashioned a vast longing for the powders, but knew I had no prospect of getting them, and lay cool and tense through this afternoon, while my faithful Pernia wandered in and out, studying me. I can imagine what he and the river men had told Captain Russell.

  My mind clarified wondrously at twilight, and I was able to look about and see something of the post through the open window. Far below, the vast river glimmered, en route to the Gulf of Mexico and my rendezvous with a coastal packet, which would carry the prisoner, Governor Lewis, across the breast of the gulf, around the dangling organ of Florida, to my destiny.

  I knew at once I wouldn’t go.

  Captain Russell visited me again that evening. It was very quiet. I heard nothing, not even crickets at their nightsongs. An assortment of enlisted men changed compresses every few minutes, cooling my body
and mind.

  “Would you like some claret, Governor?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  The surgeon’s mate handed me a filled glass; a weighed and measured portion of wine. I struggled up in bed, took it, and sipped.

  “Are you comfortable?” he asked.

  “I’m changing my plans, Captain. I’m going overland from here.”

  He hesitated. “You’re not fit, sir.”

  “I will be. I have my journals of the overland expedition with me. I fear that I might lose them if British men-o’-war stopped us. They’d love to get their hands on something like that. They are all ready for publication. All I need do is deliver them to my printer in Philadelphia. Years of work now ready to be set into type.”

  I wondered why I was telling him that. Had I lost all honor? But perhaps the end justified the means.

  Russell nodded. “It’s a prudent idea, Governor. The British would love a prize like that. And they’d make good use of the journals, too. The maps, the botany, the observations. But in your condition …” He let the rest of the idea slide away. “You know, the chances of being stopped by a British warship are very slender. I don’t suppose they are more than one in a hundred.”

  “The British have intelligence, Captain. They would know of my journey.”

  “The sea is a restful way to travel,” he said. “You need do nothing but recover your health in your cabin, watch the dolphins, and think about the future.”

  “I am already better,” I said. “I’ll go overland.”

  “Not alone, sir, not alone. In your condition, I could not let you do that.”

  I saw at once that the webs of fate binding me wouldn’t be snipped so easily. I sipped the claret and smiled up at him.

  “Is there anything you need?” he asked.

  “I need to write a letter to Mr. Madison, telling him of my progress and my change of plans.”

  “I will supply the necessaries at once, Your Excellency. The post leaves early in the afternoon.”

  The captain visited with me a while more, and then suggested that I might wish to retire. It was yet light out, but sinking toward a Stygian night. He seemed formal, ginger in his dealing with me, conscious of rank. He bowed, saluted, and departed.

  I dozed. A little later, an aide appeared carrying a small, burnished field desk of cherrywood, several sheets of vellum, an ink pot, and a dozen quills.

  “The captain, sir, says you requested this,” the corporal said.

  I nodded. “Please light the tapers,” I said.

  The corporal nodded, vanished for a moment, and returned with a glowing punk. He lit one candle and then the other, and retreated.

  I struggled to sit up in bed, and finally managed to pull the field desk to me, but my mind refused to work. Words had fled me. Phrases meandered through my mind, and I feared I would not be able to write one word.

  For some infinity I tried to write Mr. Madison, the words forming aimlessly in my head and skittering away. It was necessary to send this letter; to let the world know I would head for Washington with intelligence of value for the president and his secretaries.

  But after half an hour, or so it seemed, I had not managed a word. I pulled the field desk off me, and blew out the tapers. Soon thereafter, in the close dark, I felt cold compresses on my forehead again. They might cool the fever of the body, but not the fever of the soul.

  45. LEWIS

  I awakened this morning feeling cooler. My fever had abated. I was not gladdened. A white blur of light probed through the window, but it did not hurt my eyes. I discovered Pernia sitting in a chair in a corner, as blurred a man as he always had been, for I knew him by his conduct, and not by his heart.

  “Your Excellency—”

  “Why are you here?” I asked.

  “Governor, we’re watching over you.”

  That seemed odd. “Was I that out of sorts?”

  His glance slid away. “You were indisposed, sir. You look better now.”

  I had been abed a long time. “What day is this?”

  “Friday, Governor.”

  “I mean the date.”

  “The twenty-second.”

  “And when did we arrive?”

  “The fifteenth.”

  I measured that, slowly grasping that I had been in this bed for a week or so. I remembered phantasms, the tossing images, watchful soldiers, and the captain, yes, Russell. Captain Russell of Fort Pickering. Not Captain Clark. I remembered talking to Russell about my trip down the river, and my need to see the president, and my fear of the British on the sea, and the valuable journals I bore with me.

  I looked about me, focusing eyes that refused to serve me. My trunks were collected in a corner, a black heap. A cherry field desk sat on a bedside table. Yes, I had scratched and blotted a letter to Mr. Madison. I remembered it clearly. It had required relentless effort, and neither my mind nor my hand was quite up to it. I had told the president that I would go to Washington overland; that sickness had delayed me. That I had important matters to bring to his attention. I wondered whether I might retrieve that labored epistle and do better.

  “Was the letter to Mr. Madison sent?”

  “Yes, Governor. I folded it, addressed it, and gave it to Captain Russell. He sent it in the next post.”

  I nodded. “Where are my medicines, John? I want to take some powders.”

  Pernia looked uneasy again. “The captain and the surgeon’s mate have them, sir. They took away most everything but the Peruvian bark, for fear you might make, ah, your own employment of them.”

  “It was ague, then.”

  “They don’t know, sir, but they kept up the quinine you’d been taking. They thought you were dosing yourself rather to excess, and it was afflicting your mood.”

  “I’ll want my powders now.” It was a command.

  Pernia reluctantly shook his head, fearful to be resisting my direction.

  I struggled to sit up, and found myself too dizzy and weak and bewildered to do so. I had been here a week and scarcely knew the passage of time. And yet I did remember most of it after a fashion, the darkness and light in succession, the parade of soldiers sitting there, one after another, never leaving me alone, the wild thirsts, the cold wet compresses, one after another, the nausea, the quaking of my limbs.

  I lay in a dry cotton nightshirt. My freshly washed clothing hung from a peg in the whitewashed wall. I struggled to get up and dress.

  “No, Governor. My instructions are to keep you in bed,” my manservant said, reversing our customary relationship. “I think the captain would like to know you’re … better.”

  “Back in my head, you mean. Yes, tell him,” I said.

  Pernia left the room, and I was alone at last. I found a thundermug and relieved myself. I was heading for my trunks when Captain Russell came in, followed by Pernia.

  “Governor, I’m glad you’re up,” he said. “You asked to see me?”

  I sank back onto the bed. “I have to go to Washington,” I said. “I need to see the president.”

  Russell frowned. “You need to recover first. Then I’ll help you.”

  “It was ague.”

  “Your Excellency, my surgeon’s mate tells me it was many things, including the wrong medicines, and they had, frankly, affected your mind. Mr. Pernia’s conveyed your request for your powders, and I’m going to say no for the time being. My surgeon’s allowing you a glass of wine at evening mess.”

  The craving for some Dover’s powder made me tense, but I could see I had no choice. I nodded.

  “When are you going to let me go?”

  “When you’re back in health, and even then I intend to have someone accompany you. You’re not up to traveling without assistance. I thought to join you, because I’ve some protested warrants too, like you, and we could make our cases together. But I can’t get permission. They won’t relieve me. So I’ll need to find someone else.”

  “I can go alone; I’ll have my man with me.”


  “Mr. Pernia is an admirable and loyal man, Governor, and he’s looked after you for days, going without sleep to see to your safety. But you’ll be traveling with someone who can keep an eye on you, when I can arrange it.”

  I sighed and sank back into my pillow. I was going to be taken where I would not go, watched night and day, treated as a prisoner of disease.

  “Have you someone in mind?” I asked.

  “Major James Neelly, sir, agent to the Chickasaws. He stopped here on the eighteenth and I’ve apprised him of your condition and the need for a traveling companion. He’s willing to wait a few days until you are able to travel. I think you’ll find yourself in good company. He’s responsible, eager to serve the governor of Louisiana in any capacity, and beyond all that, an amiable friend who admires you boundlessly for your conquest of the continent.”

  I had never heard of him.

  “I’ll wish to talk to him in due course, Captain. But I wish it could be you accompanying me. I prefer regular army.”

  Major was an honorary title given to Indian agents. The man would no doubt be a civilian. Probably one of the innumerable parasites who sucked a living out of the government and the tribes they served. Maybe a rascal. No doubt avaricious, and probably a conniver. Maybe there would be some opportunity in all that.

  “At any rate, Governor, I’m pleased to see your progress. My God, how greatly you worried us!”

  “I hoped not to worry you at all,” I said dryly, knowing he would not fathom my meaning.

  I settled back into my bed and he left.

  “You can leave now,” I told Pernia.

  “No, sir, the captain wants a man at your service, and I do a turn; another man will take the night turn.”

  So I would still be a prisoner. I settled into the pillow, wondering whether anything had changed, whether my life had somehow improved, whether I might better gather my strength and proceed to Washington, dissembling about my purposes, and retreat to Ivy and obscurity.

  Nothing had changed. I hated my own dissembling. I had spent a lifetime, a happier time, holding my honor above all else. And here I was, concealing the dark design of my heart, even from my supine position in bed misleading those who were responsibly and affectionately looking after my body and soul.