From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  And with a swift, clean motion he made a slit through the brown skin and along the bluish vein and pulled back on the skin from the other side of her forearm so that the slit vein stood open and the dark blood welled out and began dripping, then running steadily, into the pan under her elbow. York loosened the thong and knelt looking thoughtfully at the shiny blood spreading over the pan’s tin bottom. The girl had shut her eyes and her head lay back and she seemed to be getting smaller as the blood ran out, smaller and more frail. God let this do it, William thought. Suddenly this little creature had come to be of supreme importance, her survival a hinge on which everything else hung.

  If we hadn’t come along, William thought, her life would’ve been as inconsequential and anonymous as that of a doe in the thicket. But we need ’er.

  He bent over and put his ear to her chest, and listened to the tiny bumpings of her heart. A life’s so fragile, he thought. He breathed the musky smell of her body, the gamey smoke-and-sweat smell of the sleeping robe with a trace of the Indian baby’s urine in it. Bump-bump. Bump-bump. Bump-bump. When he raised his head off her bare breast, he saw Charbonneau looming in the entrance. The Frenchman’s eyes were flashing and he was breathing hard.

  Oh oh, William thought. He doesn’t like something, and I think I know what it is. “Ye want something?” he said, pulling the robe up to her shoulder. Charbonneau stood simmering for a moment, then said in a voice pinched by fury. “A word wees you, Capitaine.”

  “Stand out of my light, Charbonneau. I’ll see you when I’m through here.”

  He bound the little wound when the pan was full of blood, and had York carry the pan away. “Now,” he said, rising to stand under the low shelter, before the puffed-up Frenchman. “What is it?”

  Charbonneau was almost in a fighting crouch and his fingers were like claws. His lips were drawn thin across his yellow teeth, and William had a sudden premonition that he would whip out his skinning knife. William put his hand unobtrusively alongside his own sheath. “What, Charbonneau?” he demanded again.

  The Frenchman thumped himself on the chest. “Charbonneau have decide: he will take his woman and go back. Char—”

  “Stop right there!” snapped William. “So help me, I won’t hear it.”

  “Charbonneau will take his woman—”

  “Now hear this: Y’re contracted, remember?”

  “Charbonneau does not like thees arrangement.” The Frenchman’s eyelids were hardened.

  “What you like doesn’t weigh much with me right now. God damn it, I have to doctor your squaw; York has to coddle your baby. I’m damned if I’ll coddle you! If you weren’t stuffed as full of yourself as one o’ your own gut sausages, your family would fare just fine, and y’ might be happy enough with your arrangement. Now get out.”

  Charbonneau crouched lower. His face was twisted with hatred; he was on the edge of his soul. William saw his hand moving back toward the antler handle of his knife, and so, conspicuously, put his hand on his own, and Charbonneau saw it.

  “Try to cut me,” William said, “and I’ll have you fileted, even before York can get in here to mash your skull.”

  The Frenchman froze, considering this even in his passion. And suddenly he seemed to crumble inside. His hands came around in front of him, palms up; his scowling thick eyebrows rose and his eyes brimmed.

  “Please, mon capitaine! If you understood—”

  “Cap’n Clark, sir!” It was Ordway’s voice outside.

  “Aye, Sergeant?”

  “Need your judgment on a matter, Sir.”

  “I’m comin’. Now,” he said to Charbonneau. “I’d have you flogged for mutiny if you were a soldier. But if you’ll straighten y’rself up, and act a man, and pull your load like the rest of us, I’ll forget this tantrum. Is that a deal?”

  Charbonneau nodded, slump-shouldered.

  Later that day, William got Baptiste Le Page aside while the boats were being loaded for the next morning’s departure. “Do you know,” he asked, “what goes on inside Charbonneau’s head?”

  “Un peu.” Le Page shrugged. “Can anyone know?”

  “He’s sore as a boil. Any idea why? Trust me; this is in confidence. Only to keep the peace.”

  Le Page’s eyes grew furtive. He looked around, pursed his lips and popped them with his index finger. Then he sighed. “Great delicacy, mon capitaine. I say this only because you ask. You yourself are a matter.” He rolled his eyes. “Oh, great delicacy.”

  “How am I a matter?” William thought he knew.

  “Charbonneau. You know him. His pride is here.” Le Page stroked his groin. “Ees a hard time for heem now. He no can … Ahm, ees the custom he no can make the la la, la la weeth hees squaw while the enfant ats her mammel. So …”

  “But what—”

  “You, mon capitaine, have make him jalouse.”

  “I give him no cause.”

  “The squaw, M’sieu, not what you do. But the squaw: she see you highly; she see Charbonneau a fool. Oh, mais non, she not say thees to heem, but he, ah, feel it.”

  Aye, William thought, remembering how Charbonneau had looked when he found him auditing her heartbeat. Le Page added:

  “He see these merry mens laugh. Alors …” Le Page put his forefingers up beside his temples like horns and waggled them. “Een his brain.” Now Le Page grabbed his crotch, to show where Charbonneau’s brain was, and said, “Een his brain they laugh at heem.”

  “Now I see. It is, as ye say, delicate. Then listen, Baptiste: if ye can—I mean, delicately—assure him it’s all in his head.”

  “I do that, mon capitaine. Already I do.”

  “Thankee. It is all in his head, ye know.”

  Le Page tilted his head and closed his eyes, then turned with a half-skip and sauntered back toward the pirogue.

  I’m not sure even he believes me, William thought. Now I’ll be damned. If this isn’t a silly brew o’ things.

  He thought of the squaw-girl, of her little heart bumping against his ear, of her little brown breasts, of the musty, musky smells in the buffalo robe. Then he remembered other brown bosoms, other dense-smelling buffalo robes.

  Then he brought Judy Hancock’s peach-colored face up behind his eyelids, and followed Le Page down to the shore.

  * * *

  “RECKON I KNOW WHY THE CAP’NS PICKED THIS RIVER,” groaned Private Windsor, up to his knees in mud, the pirogue’s tow rope rubbing his shoulder raw. “’Cause the other’n looked too easy!”

  “I heard that, Windsor!” William’s voice came unexpectedly from the bluff just above. “And y’re absolutely right, lad. It seemed to us this little voyage’s been too much a lark, and time you boys earned y’r pay!”

  Windsor cringed, looked up into the smiling face above the willows, and replied:

  “Right y’ are, sir! And we’re much obliged, as we all been apinin’ for some exercise!”

  Laughter rippled along the line of gasping, straining, stumbling, fly-bitten laborers.

  “Sacré du diable,” muttered Charbonneau. “Laugh and laugh. Toujours le comédie.”

  LEWIS AND HIS SCOUTS HAD BEEN GONE FOR THREE DAYS now. For William and the rest of the following party, the haul up the river had become a hell of toil and pain. The current grew more and more swift and turbulent as they ascended the south fork. Poling, rowing, or sailing were useless now; the men could move the boats only with tow ropes, stumbling along the muddy, rocky banks, which squirmed with rattlesnakes, or, in those long reaches where there were no banks at all, by floundering in the frigid river, twisting their ankles on slippery round stones or gashing their feet on sharp-edged rocks. Every minute or so one man or another would fall and go under completely, then rise, spitting and gasping, to resume his place on the towline. Now and then the whole line of men on a tow rope would drag each other down, and the canoe they were pulling would lurch and ship water, get away, or grate against rock so violently that it would have to be hauled out and patched.

&nbs
p; Sacajawea was gravely ill. She had been declining steadily, and in her sleepless sufferings had made sleep impossible for William and for York and Charbonneau. She was listless and feverish, attacked by violent pains in her abdomen and groin, and was incoherent much of the time, lying in the shade under the awning of the pirogue, unable to tend to little Pompey. York was becoming almost sick with worry. “Get well, Janey,” he told her, stooping over her pathetic, wasting little figure one evening. “Now, I love this yea ’poose o’ yours, but I ain’ made to be ’is perm’nent mammy.” He was beginning to realize that such was a distinct possibility.

  Collins joked that evening, trying to ease the worried look on York’s face: “I don’t blame ye, boy. I can see why ye wouldn’t want t’ be th’ mammy of a child that Charbonneau was th’ daddy of!” York frowned at Collins for a moment and then laughed for the first time in two days.

  William had come to consider himself as good a stomach doctor as any layman could be. But the remedies that worked unfailingly on the men had no effect on her. Lord God, he thought suddenly this evening, what if this is no gut matter, but the female region?

  “York,” he said, “will you kindly take th’ papoose outside and sit with ’im, and all I want ye t’ do is make sure that hysterical husband o’ hers doesn’t walk in. I mean, make damn sure.”

  If that blamed jealous fool knew I was a-doin’ this, William thought, I’d have to fight ’im a duel sure. “Janey,” he said softly, peeling the robe down off her skinny, naked body, “I must look at your woman-part now. Do ye say yes?”

  She opened her legs listlessly, uncaring, thinking only how strange that he should ask. Neither Charbonneau nor any of the Indian men who had owned her before Charbonneau would have bothered to ask.

  William reached down into the dark place, hesitant, uncertain, self-conscious. How’m I going to know what I do find? he thought as his finger spread the labia and a strong, disagreeable odor came up. I don’t know anything about the womanly region.

  No, reckon not, he replied to himself. But I’ve dealt with enough infection lately t’ know corruption when I see it, no matter where I find it, he thought.

  She lay still and let him look and feel and probe. She knew that Chief Red Hair was the best of medicine men and that he was as gentle as one’s own mother. She believed that he could make her well if anyone could do it, and she had reached the place in her soul where all was equal, and if she could not be made well now, she would choose to die and go beyond this misery.

  For a moment as he looked into the glistening pinkness he thought this surely was the strangest moment in his eventful life. Here he was three thousand miles from civilization, down on his knees and elbows in a tepee on a riverbank, looking into the bottom end of a dying Indian girl, while his black man sat outside crooning lullabies to a papoose and stood sentinel against her husband. But there was no time to dwell on the absurdity of it. He palpated the inner labia and then slipped his forefinger up into the snug vagina, to find, he presumed, lesions or pus or some other clue to her disorder. He withdrew his finger and there was nothing. He inserted his finger again and touched gently around the mouth of the uterus, pressing harder then against the grisdy firmness of it and now watching her face for signs of pain. Suddenly she had a spasm and he saw the flash of white as she bared her teeth in a grimace.

  “Hurt?” he said.

  She groaned and nodded. He pressed again, at a different angle. “Hurt?” he said again. No. “Now? Hurt?” No. Then again, and she jerked.

  Well. It told him little; it told him only that likely there was something in her reproductive organs that hurt. And if the trouble was there, he did not have any idea what to prescribe or do about it, and he was sure that even if Meriwether Lewis were there, he would not know what to do about it either.

  We both know well enough how to stop and start the bowels and lance pustules and treat felons and set broken bones and cure clap and clean infections and sew up gashes and pull teeth and amputate frosted extremities, he thought, because our boys have had a steady round of those things.

  But none o’ them has anything like this, he thought. How can we be prepared for something like this?

  HE GAVE HER A DOSE OF LAUDANUM TO EASE THE PAIN SO that she could sleep. Possibly the cold she had has got her infected someplace down there in her menses, he thought. He remembered how his touch in her had made her wince.

  But it could be that the press of my finger just bothered some inflamed place in her intestines, he thought.

  He realized that he was having wishful thinking; that if it really was intestinal he might still be able to do something for it. So just in case, he gave her a dose of Jesuits’ bark, cinchona. She was almost too listless to drink, and just trustingly let him trickle the fluid into her mouth, and she swallowed it. He then soaked a wad of gauze in it and inserted it into her vagina, packing it in next to the uterus.

  I wish Lewis was here, William thought. He’s the doctor when it comes to real bad cases.

  Many of the men this evening were in pain with swellings, swellings in their joints, swellings in their groins, painful hot swellings in their armpits, all of which seemed to be aggravated by the constant cold water and the bruisings they were taking in the river. Many had horrendous boils and carbuncles in those places where their flesh sweated in elkhide and rubbed constantly with their movements: in their crotches, under their arms, inside their knees. William himself had a swelling on his ankle that had started, if he remembered correctly, when a prickly pear spine had broken off in the tendon and had been rubbed constantly by the edge of his moccasin. It was hard like a grape under the skin and he could feel that it was achingly distended with pus, but he could not take time to sit down with poultices and draw it to a head; he was too busy with running the contingent and doctoring the others. In exhaustion this evening, he had to do a job he particularly hated: a tooth extraction, on Bratton.

  The soldier sat on a log before him, his left cheek big as an apple.

  “Well, now, Bratton,” William joked. “I don’t know how I’m s’posed to work in your mouth if y’ don’t spit out that quid first.” Bratton, one of the few men of the whole Corps not addicted to tobacco, grinned lopsidedly and drooled. With his hands clenched between his thighs to control his fright, and that distorted grimace on his face, the big Virginia Irishman looked like a perfect imbecile, and some of the soldiers in the sick line were merrily telling him so.

  “Y’ don’t drink, either, do ye, Bratton?” William noted. Bratton shook his head. “That’s a pity,” William said. “You know there’s a dram o’ whiskey for a tooth-pull. T’ ease the hurt. Want yours? No? All righty, then. Open up here.”

  “I’ll drink his whiskey for ’im, suh,” said Collins.

  William stood with his pliers ready, and said, “Y’ know, I once had you wrong, Collins; I thought ye were a shirker. But now y’ just volunteer for things so eager-like!”

  The men laughed.

  “Sense o’ duty, suh,” Collins said, bowing like a courtier. “I’ll drink his whiskey gladly.”

  “But Collins, you don’t have a toothache.”

  “I can git one, suh.”

  And while everyone was laughing at that, William reached in with the pliers and yanked out Bratton’s decayed yellow molar. Bratton sat there stunned with surprise and pain, drooling blood, eyes bulging and pouring tears. “Now, Bratton, here’s your dram. Y’ can do what ye like with it, even give it to Collins there.”

  Bratton held the glass, looked for a moment at the angelically smiling Collins—and then tossed it down his own throat.

  “Horrors,” groaned Collins. “Another saintly soul lost t’ th’ Corn Devil!”

  * * *

  “THIS IS A TRULY SORRY STATE,” ORDWAY WAS LAMENTING to William the next afternoon. “Not countin’ the pint or so Cap’n Lewis is carryin’, we’re down to one gallon of ardent spirits.”

  William tried to make light of this depressing report. “Well, w
e knew it couldn’t last forever, didn’t we? Not with a crew like this ‘n.”

  “Hi! Hi! Cap’n! I see Joe Fields a-comin!” cried a voice over the roaring water.

  William clapped Ordway on the shoulder. “Don’t they say good news always follers bad?”

  They could see him now, high on the distant bluff, half-loping and half-limping, rifle in one hand, the other hand waving in great sweeps as he came toward them. Now they could faintly hear his voice. “What’s ’e sayin’, Cap’n, can y’ make it out?”

  A smile was spreading over William’s face. “Unless it’s just wishful hearin’, Sarge, I think he says they found th’ Great Falls.”

  The men had heard this now, and they knew at once it meant that their captains had been right all along and every one of them had been wrong, but they all stopped where they stood now, in the cold, rushing water, on the banks, all turned to grin at William now, and as if on a signal, they all began to cheer him. He gave them a big wave, then jumped off the riverbank and waded to the white pirogue, clambered dripping over the side and knelt by Sacajawea. She had raised her head slightly at the sounds of shouting and she looked at him, her face gray and slick with sweat, eyes sunken, hair hanging in damp strings.

  “Janey,” he exclaimed, grasping her hand. “Janey, listen! They found the falling water! Soon now, very soon, Janey, we’ll be in the land of your people! D’ ye hear me, child? Your people.” A trace of a smile began to show on her wasted visage. “Aye, Janey,” he said, “we’re a-goin’ to need ye then, so you start gettin’ well right now, y’ hear?”

  She nodded, a weak, weak motion, then her head fell back.

  His smile wavered.

  He knew it might be weeks yet before they could find her nomadic tribe.