Later, when the children were out on the meadow playing shuttlecock with the new game set William had brought them, George and Fanny and William seated themselves on the porch in facing chairs. William quickly summarized all the news of friends and relatives back in Virginia, then took a long sip from his glass, sighed, set it on the floor between his feet, and drew a letter from his pocket. “D’you remember my particular friend Lewis?”
Fanny smiled. “The smart one, with the jug-handle ears.”
And George said, “The one so bowlegged his horse could walk out from under ’im and he’d not know it was gone till he fell on the ground.”
William threw back his head with a laugh and his merry eyes crinkled. “Well, as y’ know, two years he’s been President Jefferson’s secretary. He got those papers we sent for on your claims, George, and here they are, and we’ll work on ’em after bit. But also he’s writ me a letter that ought to interest you quite some, and I can’t wait any longer for you to hear ’bout it, so here.” He handed the letter to George and contemplated him as he read it, reaching over to hold Fanny’s hand.
George’s expression changed often as he held the rustling pages, changed from bright interest to deep thoughtfulness, with now and then a skeptically cocked eyebrow, a nod of approbation, or a shadow of sadness. He glanced up occasionally at William as he read. When he came to the end of it, he murmured, “So. The route to the Pacific.” Returning to the beginning then, he reread phrases, lingered over them.
“Well, for heaven’s sake, I’m perishing with curiosity,” Fanny exclaimed. “Read it out loud! Or let me.”
And so George began, his voice deep and deliberate, with the high, carefree shouts of the children in the background, and the tone of the letter was so confident, its scope so grand, that to Fanny it seemed that the words could have been George’s own, instead of Meriwether Lewis’s.
“‘My plan: It is to descend the Ohio in a keeled boat of about ten tons burthen … thence up the Mississippi to the mouth of the Missouri, and up that river as far as its navigation is practicable with a boat of this description, there to prepare canoes of bark or rawhides, and proceed to its source, and if practicable pass over to the waters of the Columbia or Oregon River and by descending it reach the Western Ocean.”’ George paused, his eyes unfocused. He was remembering the Missouri, the wide, muddy mouth of it, remembering his hand in the water, remembering all those thoughts he had had so often about the veinwork of these very rivers. Then his eyes returned to the words at the end of his finger, and, moving the finger again, he read on:
“‘I feel confident that my passage to the Western Ocean can be effected by the end of next summer or the beginning of autumn.… Very sanguine expectations are at this time formed by our government that the whole of that immense country watered by the Mississippi and its tributary streams, Missouri inclusive, will be the property of the United States in less than twelve months from this date.… You will readily conceive the importance of an early friendly and intimate acquaintance with the tribes that inhabit that country.”’ George tapped the page with his knuckle. “This is Tom Jefferson talking through your friend Lewis. His notions are stamped all over this. By heaven, this stirs me, Billy!”
“Read her about the scientifics,” William urged. “It’s the very things you advised Jefferson clear back when he first wrote you about such an explorin’ trip!”
George looked up from the paper at William. “Ye remember that, do ye! Remember that day he wrote me about it? Why, that’s twenty years if it’s a day!”
“Do I ever remember it! It’s been in the edge o’ my mind ever since! Read that part, George.” All three were squirming.
“All right, here. ‘Other objects of this mission are scientific, … ascertaining by celestial observation the geography of the country … learning the names of the nations who inhabit it, the extent and limits of their several possessions, their relation with other tribes and nations, their languages, traditions, their ordinary occupations in fishing, hunting, war, arts, implements … diseases prevalent among them and the remedies, the articles of commerce they may need, or furnish … the soil and face of the country, its growth and vegetable productions, its animals, the mineral productions of every description, and in short to collect the best possible information relative to whatever the country may afford as a tribute to general science.”’ George paused and blew out a breath, shaking his head, and Fanny interjected:
“Mercy, but that’s a tall order! All that, and canoes as well? Does he think he can do all that, that little man? How would he even—”
“Wait, sister,” said George, with a tilt of his head and a sly smile. “O’ course he can’t do any such a thing all by himself, and that’s why he’s writ the following words. Listen:
“Thus my friend you have a summary view of the plan, the means and the objects of this expedition. If therefore there is anything under those circumstances, in this enterprise, which would induce you to participate with me in its fatigues, its dangers and its honors, believe me there is no man on earth with whom I should feel equal pleasure in sharing them as with yourself. The President has authorized me to say that in the event of your accepting this proposition he will grant you a captain’s commission.’”
“Oh, my dear Billy!” she cried, jumping up and clapping her hands to his cheeks. “You! Why, if you go with him, he could do all that so easily it would be a lark! Oh, I’m so proud of you, Billy! Oh, haven’t I always told you you’d get some chance to make yourself as grand a name as any!”
“Hey! Hey,” he laughed, grabbing her wrists and pulling her hands away from his ruddy cheeks. “Hey, I haven’t even said yet I’ll go! Ha, ha!”
George kept scanning the letter. Then he looked up and said, “So, then. At last Tom Jefferson’s going to do it: the route to the Pacific!” He paused. “Will you go?”
“I’m considering it right hard. Thought to get your opinions on it.”
“My opinion ye fairly know: do it. I wish I could. Too late for me now, though. You do it, I say. Such a chance, by God, by God!” He shook his head and his eyes were moist and full of westering. “That about the States owning that land inside a year. What d’you reckon they’re up to? Buyin’ it from Napoleon, or what?” Three years ago Spain had ceded her Louisiana Territory to France, and since then every thinking Westerner had been wondering and worrying what the ambitious Bonaparte might intend to do in the New World.
“Lord knows what they’re doing,” William said. “By the way, Fanny, Lewis warns me this whole plan o’ his is a secret o’ the most delicate kind, so we dasn’t speak on’t outside of ourselves.”
“Good for me!” she exclaimed. “I fancy knowing something no other woman anywhere knows. If other women thought as I do, there would ne’er be gossip.”
They laughed with her, then George said, “If we lived by the Shawnee code, there’d be precious little of it. Their punishment for gossip about people is death.”
“What a splendid idea!” Fanny exclaimed. “Tho’ I doubt it would silence some Louisville women I know.”
“Ha, ha! I’ll say this, though,” William ventured. “We’d have no government. Every man jack’d be on the gallows a week after he took office!”
They laughed so that Fanny’s boys stopped their game and looked curiously toward the porch. George gazed upon William and Fanny and for the moment was almost happy. This news of the western exploration had so affected him that he felt as young as they. And it strengthened his old faith in Tom Jefferson. Once, not long ago, in a letter to Jefferson, George had asked him to consider William for appointment to some kind of leadership in the West where his abilities might be used and some honors gained, and he had reminded the President that he had every right to expect such a favor. And now this. It was obvious that Tom Jefferson still held the Clark name in high esteem. That was very gratifying.
William was saying now:
“… to keep it a secret from the British mostly,
I daresay. The President and Lewis are of a mind on that. Neither of ’em trusts Britain as far as a one-arm man can fling an ox.”
“I don’t either,” George said. “And I’d wager this expedition o’ theirs is in the nature of a race, to dominate that western space before Britain gets a hold on it. Ever since Mackenzie went across Canada, I’ve had a spooky notion that th’ Northwest will be full o’ Scotch fur traders and Sir Merchants before we ever set foot in it.” He pointed his forefinger like a pistol toward William. “Y’ better go, and not go slow, that’s my thinking. We’ll never be peaceful with Britain till they’re back on their side o’ the sea.” He opened the letter again. “Now I would take issue with ’em about this, though: the size of the expedition. Back at the first, I told Tom that four or five gents, of the best caliber, traveling light, would best serve, as so small a number wouldn’t alarm the savages. Looks here as how he means to make it a lot bigger party. A ten-ton boat! Jove! Don’t they know what it takes to move a ten-ton boat up a fast river? Why, thirty or forty men just to take turns a-rowin’! Or else,” he growled, “one o’ General Clark’s Unpatented Nonexistent Upriver Mechanical Barge-Paddlin’ Engines. Mark my word, Billy, every day you’ll curse all that weight a thousand times. Here where he asks you to scout up some hardy young men, as he says, ‘accustomed to bearing bodily fatigue in a pretty considerable degree.’ I’ll say this for ’im, he does foresee the strain o’ such a load, but what I wonder is, does he know y’ll fair be a crew o’ galley slaves goin’ up that Missouri? Meseems your friend’s been in the White House so long, he desires to take it all with ’im, desks, bureaus, draperies, casements, and all! Ten tons, three thousand miles? B’God, that’d give Hannibal a hernia!”
William rolled his head back and guffawed. He loved to hear George rumble on in such spirit as this. And he knew George was right about the burden. William himself had been to New Orleans and back twice by riverboat, and he well knew that upstream rowing is slave work. “Well,” he said, “I’d reckon it’s on account of all that science he wants done along the way. And too, from what I’ve heard by Missouri fur traders I met, the Sioux up the Missouri are mean as pirates. I guess it would take a considerable strong party to push on by such as them.”
Fanny’s face darkened for an instant with worry. She had been imagining this daydream of a venture as a peaceful trek through a gigantic landscape with nothing more dangerous than perhaps a few bears or oversized serpents. She liked it that there was no war in the land, and had not expected she would have to worry about her beloved brother fighting Indians again. Now George was saying:
“I’ll grant you that. But I’ll wish luck to anybody who has to do natural science and haul a ship up that bedamned Missouri at the same time. Ha! Well, maybe His Excellency the President figures you’ll want a ship to bring ’im back a live mammoth. I remember he doubts there’s maybe ancient beasties still roaming in those places. Like those.” He tilted his head toward a pile of giant fossil bones just off the porch, specimens he had been collecting in the Falls, and in salt licks of the region, at Jefferson’s request. “He expects ye to run onto a Megalonyx, no doubt, or a mammoth at the least. Y’ be wary of mammoths, now, hear? Ha, ha!”
“How can you laugh?” Fanny asked George. “What if there are such things, and your own brother meets them?”
“Well, if there are, I’d like to’ve been the first man to see one. Since I can’t, I’m glad it’ll be Billy.” He winked at William. “I don’t worry about Billy, but the Megalonyx better watch out. As for Lewis, well, all he’ll have to do is stand his ground, and a charging mammoth would just past right ’twixt his bow-legs. Ha, ha!” George was having a rare good time making light of the dangers, trying to mask his own deep-flowing anxieties. It was not huge beasts that concerned him, but the real dangers he knew attended long marches: Starvation. Cold. Injuries. Bad judgment. Exhaustion. Indians. Recklessness on the part of vainglorious leaders. Disease and demoralization among the men. William would have to follow Lewis. George trusted William’s good sense, but Lewis’s wisdom was an unknown quantity. And so he said:
“This friend of yours. Ye trust him all the way?”
“With my life,” William said immediately, not pausing to ponder it. He drained his glass and reached down for the bottle, and dribbled the remainder into their glasses. George called:
“Cupid! Fetch us that bottle with the green wax on the cork!” The old slave, his poll frosted with white kinks, brought it at once. William took his hand and said. “My boy York asked me to tell you. ‘Hey, Cupid.”’ The old slave smiled and replied:
“Please to tell him the same, Mast’ Billy. Tell me, sir, you goin’ take that ol’ fat boy Yo’k?”
“Eh? Take ’im where?” William passed George a lighted pipe.
“To where you goin’, sir. To th’ ’Cific Oshum.”
George chuckled at William, then said, “Cupid, ye scoundrel, what’ve I said about eavesdropping?”
“I wasn’t, Gen’l Clark, sir. Clark men just got big voices. I can’t fetch you a jug with my fingers poke in my earho’s.”
William laughed, his ruddy cheeks furrowed with deep smile-lines. “Cupid, you’re bad as that York is. Yes, I’ll take ’im. What would ’e do with ’imself, without me to pester? Just sit an’ turn to lard, is all. Now scat. And not a word o’ this to a living soul, y’ hear?”
“By what I see,” George said through a stream of exhaled smoke, passing back the pipe, “you don’t need my opinion. Y’re decided on going.” Fanny looked at William, biting her lower lip.
“Pert near,” William admitted. He saw a momentary shadow go over George’s face, and understood what it was. So he said:
“Jonathan can take over your suits and all. He’ll prob’ly do a lot better by you than I’ve done. He’s got law in ’is bone marrow.”
“Aye. Well,” George said. “But he’s all wrapped in his own affairs. You’ve been the best helpmeet a man ever had. I’ll … I’ll miss ye, youngster.”
George sat for a while, moist-eyed, gazing westward. He drank half a glass down without saying anything, while Fanny nursed a glass of sherry and watched her sons swat their new shuttlecock to and fro down on the sunny meadow, Ben and Charles against Johnny. William, who was accustomed to his brother’s pensive spells, sat silent, gazing eastward, back toward Virginia, whence he had just come, and now the hazy blue distances dissolved and he was beside the bricked-in spring on the hillside where he had last dallied with his Judy Hancock. Another of her picnics.
Picnics were her favorite diversions, and that babbling spring among ferns and dogwood trees, with its little brick terrace and pewter dipper and stone bench, was her favorite place on the whole Hancock estate for picnics. She seemed to be aware that the place surrounded and enhanced her fair beauty as a filigreed frame does a portrait. And there Judy would take William for picnics and allow him to gaze upon her as if she were a picture in a gallery. They would nibble on dainty tidbits her father’s chef had prepared and packed in a basket, and she would talk to William of all manner of lovely and exquisite things out of her education: of fables, of music, of Grecian gods and goddesses, of Florentine art. And to William, Judy herself was a goddess-child, work of art, her voice music. It was hard for him to remember sometimes that she was only twelve; he would see her as the lady she was to become. Sometimes he thought he understood now how Bill Croghan had been, waiting for Lucy to come of age. William was surprised that he could spend so many hours in the company of a twelve-year-old and not be bored, but she seemed to know more soul-stirring things about the loftier realms of civilization than anyone. She could write poems that marched along in cadence and rhymed at the ends, poems full of words like Pride, and Charity, Prudence, Vanity, and Forbearance. She knew of an ancient Greek island where some lady poet had run a sort of outdoor girls’ school, and William would daydream of dozens of beautiful creatures, like Judy and her sisters, scantily clad in diaphanous shifts, romping through meadows,
and every part of his soul and body would be stirred by those reveries. The other Hancock girls had simply faded from William’s ken, into courtships and marriages with elegant neighborhood swains, and so it was turning out true, what he had told his mother in her last hour: it would be Judy Hancock. Her father had agreed that when she became eighteen, if they both still so desired, he would sign his permission for a marriage license. Six years to wait! William had left Fincastle in a daze, wondering how he could endure such an eternity.
But then this letter from Meriwether Lewis had reached him, and now those six years did not seem so much at all. And what a lady Judy would have become by the time William returned from the Western Sea, crowned with an explorer’s laurels!
William blinked away these fancies, almost embarrassed, wondering: What if George knew what’s in my mind! He’d think I’m naive. Probably say I’m thinking like a novel-reader.
And now he was looking at George, at the saddened eyes, the bitter downturn in the corner of his mouth, the little red capillaries in his face, his hands gnarled and big-knuckled from arthritis and his joints stiff with rheumatism. George knew the sorry truth about laurels. William realized suddenly, with an up-rushing in his breast, that almost everything he knew, every manly trait and skill he possessed, George had taught him. No greater a man has walked this land, he thought.
And now he thought of one more thing he could do for George.
A big thing.
At that moment, like a statue coming to life, George inhaled, sighed, sipped from his glass and spoke:
“I’m glad it’s a Clark going. I’m glad it’s you. I pushed the frontier to the Mississippi ere I reached the end o’ my chain. Now you go the rest of the way. Y’ know what I wish?”
From Sea to Shining Sea Page 73