Downriver

by Richard S. Wheeler

  “But she never comes out? All white women live inside the logs and never come out?”

  Gill, who was at the tiller, smiled. “Where’d you get that notion?”

  His attitude annoyed her. “I know about white women. They are weak creatures who have to stay in their lodges and are afraid of the sun. That is why they don’t come with their men.”

  “They’re busy cooking and caring for the little ones, I guess.”

  “No, they are weak. They faint away, make the little death, in the sunlight. So it is said among my people.”

  “Reckon we’ll see one soon, and outside, too.”

  “What is ‘outside?’”

  Gill looked startled. “Why, there’s the outdoors, like we’re in, and there’s indoors, like inside a lodge.”

  “But no white woman ever came to my land or visited my people. It is because they are frail and die.”

  Red Gill grinned. “Now, I reckon you have a case.”

  That day they sailed past several more cabins and on each occasion, Victoria studied the homestead, trying to see a white woman.

  “There ain’t any,” she said after passing a large log house on the left bank. She eyed him skeptically. “You don’t have one. Where’s yours?”

  “I don’t want one. I run away from a dozen, and I’ll keep right on running.”

  Skye had been listening idly to all this from his resting place near the bow. “Is this Missouri?” he asked Gill.

  “Left bank, I suppose,” Gill said. “Right bank’s Indian territory.”

  “Who says this thing?” Victoria asked.

  “Gover’mint drew a line; this here is civilization to the east, and that there’s unsettled country to the west. We’re fixing to pass Fort Leavenworth. That’s where the soldiers control the river, look for smuggling and all that.”

  “We’re stopping there?” Skye asked.

  “Don’t have to. Not going downriver. But they’ll be looking at us in their glass.”

  “Are there women there?” Victoria asked.

  “Yep. Mostly officers’ wives.”

  “Then we will stop. I want to see them.”

  Gill looked uneasy. “I reckon you’ll see white women aplenty down the river a piece. No need to stop at Leavenworth.”

  The way he said it alerted Victoria to his discomfort. “You do something the soldiers don’t like?”

  Gill clammed up and glared at her. They were sailing a vast expanse of river, wider than most lakes she had seen, with thick forests on either bank. Clouds had settled over the whole country, turning it all flat and gray. She didn’t like this moist Missouri land.

  “You need a woman,” she said to Gill.

  Gill grinned again.

  “I’ll get you a good woman. Maybe Lame Deer. She makes a good woman for you.”

  He stared at her. “She’s MacLees’s woman.”

  Victoria laughed triumphantly. “She was. But white men don’t keep their mountain wives. Gabe Bridger told me all about mountain wives and how they ain’t the same as real wives.”

  Gill eyed the shore uneasily.

  “Some do,” said Skye, from his forward perch.

  She turned to look at her man. He seemed earnest and yet she was worrying about this trip. Maybe Skye would abandon her and find a white woman, frail and sickly so he could take care of her. That dark possibility had bloomed in her mind and the closer they got to this place of many lodges, St. Louis, the more the fear gripped her.

  “Maybe you gonna take some damned weak woman with pale skin, and send me back,” she said, an edge in her voice.

  Skye didn’t reply. He beckoned to her, and she slipped forward, around the boom and the chattering sail, watching out for her head if the boom swung in a breeze, and stood before Skye.

  He still looked sick and most of the time he simply lay there, letting Gill operate the boat.

  “When we leave St. Louis,” he said quietly, “you’ll be with me.”

  She wasn’t so sure of it.

  There, in the prow of the boat, was a leather device that Gill had rigged up to hold flowers. He picked a fresh bouquet of them each day, and they brightened the whole boat with their various colors. Yesterday he had picked a number of tall stalks with pastel-colored blooms on them, flowers she had never seen before, and now the pink and blue and purple blossoms decorated the boat. Whenever Gill spotted a patch of color on shore he steered the sailboat to that place and anchored long enough to replenish his bouquet.

  Ah, Red Gill. She liked him. He was a strange and secretive man, but she adored his flowers. He called these hollyhocks, and said they were white men’s garden flowers, not wild ones. She didn’t know what wild flowers were. Garden flowers and wild flowers were as confusing as indoors and outdoors. She had asked him why he gathered the flowers and put them in his boats, and he had said he was an artist at heart, and he liked flowers, and they reminded him of women.

  “Them flowers are pretty. That’s reason enough.”

  “Are they just to look at? The People make medicines and spices and food from them, too.”

  “We have flowers for that,” Gill said. “Women have herb gardens. Women especially got a whole list of flowers that cure things. Like foxglove and skunk cabbage and red pepper and mandrake and goldenrod.”

  “Damn, white women, they good for something anyway,” she said, evilly.

  At midafternoon, they approached a settled area with white frame buildings that looked very strange to Victoria, all snugged on a bench just above the river, in front of wooded bluffs.

  “Leavenworth,” Gill said. “Just a little of it’s visible from the water. Most of it’s up, top of that bluff. Parade ground, officers quarters, barracks, all that. This here, the levee and the warehouses, that’s where they do business.”

  Skye lifted himself from the prow and examined the on coming post. “Inspections?” he asked.

  “From stern to stern, everything going upstream, from canoes to steamboats.”

  Something in Gill’s voice registered worry.

  “I want to stop,” she said.

  “Ain’t a good idea.”

  “Why, mate?” Skye asked.

  “You ain’t even a citizen, Mister Skye. They’ll be wondering how come you’re around here, coming out of Indian Territory, without being no citizen.”

  “Mister Gill, are you saying my presence here is illegal?”

  “I don’t rightly know. Everyone in Injun country’s supposed to be licensed. Me, I’m licensed for the river.”

  Skye glowered at the distant post, which slumbered in a pale sunlight. “All right, let’s get past it then,” he said.

  Victoria heard strength in his voice. Her man was beginning to come alive again. She had sung many songs over hirr and driven out many devils.

  She spotted men in blue coats standing along the levee and one was glassing them with a brass instrument. She had seen a few of these in the mountains and marveled that they could make everything come close.

  Then she spotted a white woman. She stared, uncertain for a moment, but yes, it was a woman, in brown skirts. Victoria could even make out the pale face, and the straw hat the woman wore, and the woman’s hair, which was the color of cornmeal. She had rarely seen hair like that. It seemed to glow yellow, even though the sun was obscured by light clouds.

  This woman was staring at the sailboat and talking with the three men in blue coats. At last she had seen a white woman. For years she had wondered why the trappers came to them without women. She itched to talk to this one. She had a list of questions to ask. What did they wear? What powers did they have? How did they raise their children? Did they care about their men? Were they proud of their men, the way the People were?

  She watched the blue-coat men move about on the levee, suddenly in a hurry. Two of them approached a small brass cannon and fiddled with it. Then a ring of white smoke erupted from it, followed by a sharp crack.

  Gill sighed. “Dammit all to hell. Th
ey want us to report,” he said, pulling on the tiller until the boat hove around and headed toward the right bank.

  “What for?” Skye asked.

  “Who the hell knows?”

  Skye pulled himself up, lifted his top hat and settled it over his unshorn locks, and waited for the little boat to dock under the mouths of cannon.

  thirty-eight

  A half a dozen blue-coats stood at the levee. To Victoria, they looked all alike in their uniforms and visored hats. But one wore a sword and had more marks of honor sewn to his clothes. A chief, she thought.

  Cussing softly, Red Gill steered the little sailboat toward the bank, while Skye dropped the sail. Gill tossed a line to one of the soldiers, who wrapped it around some pilings set in the muddy earth.

  “Mawning,” said the man who’d caught the line. “Going downriver are ye?”

  “St. Louis,” said Gill.

  The soldiers were eyeing the cargo, what little there wa of it.

  “No hides, I see. Is this all personal gear?” the man asked

  “Yessir, corporal,” Gill said.

  Victoria wondered what a corporal was. The man’s honor were sewn on his coat, but she didn’t know one from another

  “Any pox you know of upriver?”

  “Pox?”

  “Smallpox. There’s a fright about it.”

  “Nothing we heard of.”

  “Who are you gentlemen?”

  “Red Gill. I got papers, only they’re not with me.”

  “Gill, yes. And this man?”

  “Barnaby Skye, sir.”

  “Nationality?”

  “Formerly a subject of the crown—”

  Victoria heard a tightness in Skye’s voice, and knew he was tense.

  “Canadian, then.”

  “No, not Canadian.”

  “Your squaw?”

  “My wife.”

  Several soldiers chuckled.

  “What are you stopping us for?” Gill asked.

  “Pox. We’re vaccinating everyone up or down; there’s a scourge in St. Louis, and some of the tribes upstream have succumbed. It’s a vicious and highly contagious disease.”

  Victoria had heard of it, this dread sickness brought by white men to the Peoples, with deadly results. Fear clamped her

  “Kindly step out and we’ll innoculate you with Jenner’ vaccine.”

  “You mean scratch us, like I heard is done?”

  “That’s the idea,” the corporal said.

  Skye helped her step out. The sailboat bobbed lightly behind them. White men’s buildings and equipment crowded the space. She saw only the small brass cannon here, but above, away from the river and higher, she saw the mouths of several big cannon, and felt the power of this place.

  Whitewashed buildings with glass windows. She ached to see what lay within, and how all that wood had been so cunningly joined together. A livestock pen with a pile of hay. Wagons and carts, buggies and carriages, such as she had never before seen.

  But what riveted her was the woman. Were all white women so beautiful? This one was young, and frankly curious, eyeing Victoria with as much fascination as she was eyeing the woman.

  What Victoria had thought was milky hair proved to be the lightest yellow, silky and soft, drawn back into a bun under her straw hat. And her face; what a face, her flesh creamy and rosy, her soft eyes the color of the heavens, and her nose thin and white. She had lips that formed naturally into a smile; she was a happy woman, with her daughter clinging to her soft white hand.

  They both wore brown. The white woman was adorned in deep brown muslin trimmed with white. Her generous skirt was gathered tight at her slim waist. Something like a men’s jacket completed the ensemble. Her daughter, who might have been five or six, wore a miniature soldier’s costume, with brass buttons.

  Victoria stared enviously. No wonder white men hid their women from the world. They didn’t want anyone else to see them! This one didn’t look weak or sickly. Her eyes shown and her countenance was lively. A dread crept through Victoria. If white women were like this, she would lose Skye. So riveting was the sight of this woman that she scarcely paid attention to whatever business these soldiers were conducting.

  “Captain Rosecranz, army surgeon,” the corporal was saying.

  The older one had brown muttonchops and small spectacles perched on his bulbous nose, and his gaze darted from one man to the next, finally settling on Victoria.

  “This will only take a moment, gents,” the surgeon said, opening a black pigskin bag. “You won’t regret it.”

  “Have we any choice?” asked Skye.

  “No, sir. We’re vaccinating everyone going up and down the river. For their sake. My good man, until we learned to vaccinate, England alone lost forty-five thousand a year. And Boston was practically depopulated for years on end. It’s a vile disease, high fever, followed by lesions on the face and then all over the body, which suppurate and disfigure for life—”

  “Is there danger to my wife?”

  Rosecranz paused. “Some savage women are more vulnerable. But I assure you, most do just fine.”

  “How does it work?”

  “You’ll be infected with cowpox, a mild version of smallpox. Jenner discovered that people who had the cowpox didn’t get the smallpox. I have a phial of lymph from cowpox sores and we can perform this procedure easily enough.”

  Fear burrowed through Victoria. “Sonofabitch!” she snapped.

  The doctor stared at her, startled.

  “I ain’t going to do this!”

  “You have no choice.”

  “I’m going to my people.”

  Rosecranz addressed Skye. “Hold her. I’ll scratch her and it’ll be over.”

  “No, sir. If she’s going to take the pox vaccine, it will be her choice.”

  “We can’t let you pass if she doesn’t. She could carry the plague—”

  “It is her body and her decision, doctor. If she declines, I’ll head upriver with her.”

  Skye seemed formidable, except that he was surrounded by soldiers and helpless.

  “Well, let’s get on with it,” Rosecranz said. He turned to Gill. “You ready? Best to remove your shirt.”

  While Gill tugged his shirt off, Rosecranz opened a velvet-lined black box with shining medical tools in it. One was a needle on a little stick.

  He unstoppered a phial that contained a thick liquid, and then took hold of Gill’s arm.

  “I don’t like this,” Gill said. The fearless boatman suddenly looked liverish and upset.

  But the doctor had the arm firmly in hand, and squeezed one drop of the terrible liquid onto Gill’s arm midway above the elbow and shoulder. Then, with the needle at a low slant, he mauled the flesh, abrading it but not piercing it, drawing no blood.

  “Hey, are you sure …”

  “You’ll thank me,” the surgeon said, releasing the arm. “All done.”

  “All done? That’s it? Am I gonna die or get sick now?”

  “Some feel sick a few days. A mild fever. Most don’t. A sore will develop at the site of the inoculation, but it’ll go away.”

  Gill exhaled, as if to release a mountain of tension, and rolled down his sleeve.

  The physician turned to Skye. “Next?”

  Victoria saw the trapped look in Skye’s face.

  “Don’t do it!” she hissed.

  But Skye was unbuttoning his chambray shirt. He pulled it off, and stood hairy and bare-chested. The white woman stared, and then turned away.

  The doctor spotted the barely healed wound in his shoulder, and then the deep flame-colored furrow across his ribs. “Those are recent,” he said.

  The soldiers gazed intently.

  “Few weeks,” Skye said.

  “Where did you say you came from?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “How did you suffer these?”

  Skye shrugged.

  The corporal bristled. “You would be well advised, sir, to answer the doc
tor. Unless you wish to be detained.”

  “Shot from the cannon of the Otter.”

  “From Marsh’s cannon! And how did that happen?”

  Red Gill boiled. “Because some reckless fool named Bonfils thought we were being raided by some Sans Arcs one foggy morning and didn’t look at who he was shooting at, that’s why, dammit all to hell, and killed my partner and a little Injun boy too, along with some Sioux.”

  “And what were you doing with the Otter?”

  “Helping them get off a sandbar.”

  “In that little boat?”

  Skye and Gill explained, as best they could, that they were on a flatboat at the time, but the army contingent looked skeptical.

  “We’ll report this to Gin’ral Clark,” said the corporal, since there wasn’t much anyone could do about it. “I’d like to hold you, but there ain’t grounds. But believe me, don’t think this is settled.”

  “I don’t suppose it is,” Skye said, mildly, settling his top hat. “It would be kind of you to care about the injured more than caring about your report. You must have all the details from Captain Marsh, isn’t that correct?”

  The corporal bristled, itching for a fight, and Victoria thought they would all end up captives.

  But the surgeon clamped Skye’s uninjured arm to him, released a drop of that evil fluid, and again pressed the needle into the fluid and flesh ten or twelve times. Skye watched, grimaced, and then dressed methodically.

  The surgeon turned to her.

  Victoria knew she would perish. She had not seen her spirit helper the magpie for many suns. She fought back terror and tears.

  Skye gazed kindly, but left everything to her. She knew he would go upriver with her at once if she refused. But she hated the very thought of it, sacrificing himself for her, even as she dreaded sacrificing herself for him. But then she found her resolve.

  She pulled up the buckskin sleeve as high as she could, baring her thin brown arm. The white doctor held her brown arm, released a single drop of the fluid, and pressed the needle hard a dozen times, never breaking the flesh. She winced and studied the place where Death had entered her.

  It was done. The evil liquid had been pressured into her.

  The doctor was putting away his instruments.

  She felt a great despair as she rolled down her sleeve. She had to say good-bye to her man. In the boat she would sing her death song.