Charbonneau (6 page)

Mrs. Welch introduced Clark to the other boys, who were duly impressed by the large, robust man in the resplendent dress uniform. He had a friendly face and a smile that said he liked to have fun too. Welch was polite but not deferential. The first package opened, the big one, held a birthday cake, and Clark produced ten candles from a coat pocket. The second he handed to Baptiste.

The boy didn’t know what it was. It was made of shiny tin and nickel and polished wood, half a foot long, shaped like a tiny box, with a lot of square holes on one side. Baptiste looked at it a long time, then up at Clark.

“Paump, my boy, it’s a mouth organ.” He took it and blew through the holes. It made a clash of unmusical tones. “Mrs. Welch, maybe you can operate this thing better than I,” and he handed it over. She toyed with it tentatively for a few minutes, then produced something that Baptiste could recognize as a not-quite-right melody.

Clark handed her a piece of paper with a name and address on it. “This gentleman will call before the end of the week,” he said, “to show Paump how it makes music. I have no skill at such things, though I like a good tune. If you want him to,” he nodded at Mrs. Welch, “I’m sure he would come by from time to time to give instructions.” Mrs. Welch was pleased. It had been her idea.

Clark stayed after the boys had eaten their cake and been sent to bed. “And how is Paump progressing?” he asked Welch.

“Baptiste applies himself, and he’s a quick learner,” answered Welch. The Reverend didn’t like to hear Clark using the boy’s heathen name. “He’s a bit of an unbroken colt, though. Could cause trouble later if he doesn’t learn discipline.”

“Spirit is troublesome in a boy, but helpful in a man,” Clark observed. He was fond of saying such things.

“I hope this machine,” meaning the mouth organ, “doesn’t encourage his waywardness.” Welch considered a moment and put it diplomatically. “I think Indian boys should be at what’s useful.”

“But he loves music so,” his wife put in boldly. Welch ignored her.

Clark didn’t want to be party to a domestic disagreement, so he stood to take his leave. It was not his custom to involve himself in matters of strong feeling—they made him feel unclean. “You’ll let me know, I’m sure, if Paump needs anything.”

Welch shook his hand. “Baptiste don’t need but what the other boys have,” he said. He thought better of it “But we’ll let ye know if he needs a doctor or some such.” Clark nodded gravely.

Baptiste’s aptitude for that mouth organ amazed them all. In a couple of months the boy was playing the hymn melodies that he heard every night; in a couple of months more he was adding simple harmony to them. Mrs. Welch, impressed, asked Welch for permission to give him some musical tutoring. “He can learn to play the music,” Welch said, “that praises the Lord.” So she taught him the names of the notes and what the black spots on the lines meant, and the rests, and the differences between the clefs, and other musical paraphernalia. Quickly he was playing with both hands—one note for each hand—on the little clavichord, and before he was eleven he could play the simple four-part harmony of the hymns. When he learned a hymn well, Mrs. Welch even let him play accompaniment for the nightly singing.

But Welch predicted that the thing would lead to trouble, and it did. Baptiste picked up by ear the French provincial songs that Mrs. Welch sang and danced with him. Then he added the music of the streets. When he went to market with Mrs. Welch—the large open-air carnival of cart peddlers that focused the city’s commerce—he heard all sorts of fascinating sounds. The Americans had their robust backwoods songs; the Negroes, who were French-speaking, had their exotic, rhythm-driven songs; the French-Canadian riverboatmen had their lusty, bawdy working songs. Baptiste would beg the peddlers to sing for him, holding back the marketing, and the peddlers were amused by the little Indian boy who could imitate their tunes on the mouth organ with scarcely a mistake. As they walked to and from the market Baptiste played the mouth organ all the way, sounding out the song he thought he remembered from the last time or the new one he had just heard. Mrs. Welch indulged him, but warned Baptiste not to try that music on the clavichord. Reverend Welch might not like it.

“Baptiste,” said Mrs. Welch, “go tell Reverend Welch that a letter has come.” Welch and the older boys were slaughtering, out behind the barn. Baptiste couldn’t resist playing a tune as he walked. It was a Spanish fandango, a lively thing, and it made him lilt as he moved. He deliberately didn’t quit playing until after he was within Welch’s hearing range.

The Reverend glared at him. “There’s a letter for you,” Baptiste said, growing afraid. Welch didn’t answer. He ripped the instrument out of the boy’s hands and stuck it in a hip pocket. Then he marched off toward the house. Welch was not a man to beat boys; he thought that punishment should be mental and emotional because that counted for more. He took the mouth organ away for a month, and called off Baptiste’s keyboard lessons for a week. When he let the lessons start again, he told Baptiste bluntly that he was to play only hymns, and no music for dancing or the divil’s other fancies.

OCTOBER, 1815: One morning after Baptiste angered Welch—he was expecting a stern regimen of chores and an after-dinner lecture—Baptiste got pulled off duties to go see William Clark. Clark lived clear across town—from the outskirts on the southwest to the northeast corner near the river—but Baptiste was ten and could go alone. He took the mouth organ to play on the way; he wasn’t allowed out often, and could take the occasion to wander around without Welch’s knowing.

Baptiste liked to visit Clark. Welch’s house was a primitive affair, made of posts that supported cross-ties, filled in with a paste of mud and straw, and covered with whitewash. It was only one story, had a big fireplace, and uneven slat floors. There were four rooms plus the detached, lean-to kitchen—the parlor, the dining room (which served as schoolroom and study as well), and two bedrooms, one shared by Welch’s sons and the student-boarders. In the winter it was drafty, dark, cold, and damp. But Clark’s place was handsome and elegant. The main house was of stone. It had joined walnut planks for floors, waxed and polished, with an immense center fireplace of stone in the parlor. Clark also had a separate building for the kitchen, a stable and yard, a blacksmith shop, a gunsmith shop, and a dram shop. Baptiste loved to watch Clark’s blacksmith work with the bellows and the fire, sparks flying and hammer clanging and the metal white turning to red. He also loved the parlor where Clark had collected memorabilia of the Lewis and Clark expedition—stretched hides, horns of elk and buffalo and bighorn sheep, Indian pipes, and the canoe that carried Baptiste, his mother and father, and Clark floating down the Yellowstone, When his mother and father came to St. Louis, Baptiste spent hours in that room, listening to stories of old times and the things he had done as a child.

It was a clear October morning, cool, with a hint of autumn in the air. He could smell leaves burning somewhere, for the maples had turned to red and begun to shed. As Baptiste walked he played “All the Way to Shawnee Town Long Time Ago,” a tune he had picked up from a boatman. When he grew up, he thought he might be a boatman himself. He had seen them bring the keelboats up to the levee. The boatmen had long poles that they socketed under their shoulders and drove into the river bottom. Then they walked backwards, downriver, along a cleated running-board, pushing the boat up against the current. It was hard work they did, and they sang all the while.

A tall, solemn black man opened the door for Baptiste. “Brigadier-General Clark, please,” Baptiste said politely.

“Governor Clark,” the black man answered without expression. Baptiste knew that, but he’d forgotten. “Governor Clark,” he said meekly. The black man led the way toward Clark’s office. Baptiste thought he looked strong just to be answering doors for someone. He knew that Clark owned the man, and wondered what it felt like to be owned. He couldn’t see anything in it.

Clark stood up behind his big walnut desk and walked slowly toward Baptiste. He said nothing, and his face looked strangely solemn. Baptiste stuck out his hand. Clark ignored it, stepped close, and without bending over put his hands under the boy’s shoulders, lifted him, and hugged him. Pressed against Clark’s cheek, Baptiste could not see his face. He was puzzled, and a little frightened. Clark drew back a little, and Baptiste could see tears in his eyes.

“Paump, my boy,” he said, “your mother is dead.” Baptiste looked straight into his eyes for a long time, but Clark said nothing more, and there was nothing more to see. Clark set him down. Baptiste slipped out of his encircling arm and sat down in front of the desk. Clark sat behind it.

The boy would not look at Clark. The big man fingered a piece of paper for a while, waiting for the boy. “This letter,” he finally said, “came down from Fort Atkinson. It says that Charbonneau has sent word from west of the Arikara villages that your mother is dead. It says nothing else, nothing about how or why.”

He pushed the letter across the desk to Baptiste. The boy didn’t pick it up, didn’t look at it, just kept staring at his knees.

“She was a fine woman,” Clark said. “Christ, she was.” He grimaced.

Baptiste kept looking down. At last he stood up, walked around the desk, and offered Clark his hand. Clark shook it. Baptiste turned and marched out of the office, through the parlor where the black man was polishing something, and out the front door. Then he slowed down and wandered along the street.

He spent the afternoon on the bluff above the river, at the far end from the levee. He could see the keelboat and the workers far down, loading and unloading, out of hearing range. He looked at the water for a long time, thinking of nothing, just watching the brown water move slowly down the river and sometimes curl into a long eddy and straighten out again and flow down. The river was quiet except for the faintest lapping sound on the sand. A hawk came over his head, soaring high. Baptiste wondered whether it was looking down for something. It seemed just to hover there, high above the earth, unconcerned. It flapped its wings once, abruptly and briefly, and floated on toward the Illinois side.

Most of the time he just sat and looked. He did not think of his mother. After a long time he slipped his mouth organ out of his pocket and began to play softly. It didn’t matter what he played. He sounded out every tune he knew. Sometimes memories of his mother rose in his mind as he played, not thoughts, just sense memories—the warmth of her hand on his back, the smooth feel of her cheek, and the vibration in her throat when she held him there and talked to him. He would have played one of the songs she sang to him, but he could not remember the sounds clearly, and the ones he remembered didn’t fit the mouth organ. He played hymns, soft and plaintive, and liked them:

Nearer, my God, to Thee,

Nearer to Thee.

E’en though a cross it be

That raiseth me,

Still all my song shall be,

Nearer, my God, to Thee,

Nearer, my God, to Thee,

Nearer to Thee!

Though like a wanderer,

The sun gone down.

Darkness be over me,

My rest a stone;

Yet in my dreams I’d be

Nearer, my God, to Thee,

Nearer, my God, to Thee.

Nearer to Thee!

Late in the afternoon thin clouds covered the sky, the river turned gray, and a slight, chill wind freshened. He got up—his legs were stiff—and started walking home.

He went straight to bed, without seeing Welch. In the middle of the night he woke up, touched his cheeks, and realized he had been crying.

Mrs. Welch had nothing to say about Sacajawea’s death—just a hand on the cheek and “I’m sorry”—but she started using Baptiste every day to go to the market with her and tote things back. The market was a building and the plaza in front of it, on the south end of the levee. Carts rumbling and peddlers crying and chickens squawking turned it into bedlam every day. Baptiste got to know some of the peddlers: There was a German Baptiste liked to tease who sold milk. When Mrs. Welch would ask how much, he would answer, “It ish a bit” or “It ish a picayune.” Missouri, and the Louisiana Territory generally, had almost no U.S. coins or currency, so everyone used the old Spanish coins. A picayune was a half
real
, worth about six and a half cents; a bit was a section of a coin that had been primitively quartered, and it was worth twelve and a half cents. Baptiste discovered that the poor German, a worn, suspicious, middle-aged man, knew no other English. So if he asked the fellow, “Are your children yours?” or “Is your wife a witch?” and pointed to the milk, the German would answer uncertainly, “It ish a bit.”

An Irishman was sometimes there selling butter. Baptiste loved his blarney, and wouldn’t let Mrs. Welch pay until they had heard it. “I’d like to see anny butther in the whole market like that, I would, faith. Tis illegant i’ ’tis. That butter ull be making ye rise in the mornin’ now, it will.”

An Illinoisan came to peddle chickens. He was a tall, strong-looking, slouchy fellow with an air of obstreperous independence, sullenly proud to be an American and a free man. His hair signaled his independence by waving through the ripped crown of his straw hat. He stood with his hands in his pockets and looked about dourly, as though ashamed to be a mere chicken-peddler. Mrs. Welch asked, pointing at the sign on the homemade, two-story, cart-mounted chicken coop, “Is that the lowest you’ll take?”

“Well, yes, ma’am, it’s thar at that price.” He shrugged. “I couldn’t take a mite less—the old ’oman says they’re futh it, and she knows, she does.” He always took less of course, looking mightily offended as he took the change.

Sometimes Baptiste would stay with the Irish butterman while Mrs. Welch shopped and haggled. Baptiste would play his repertory of songs on the mouth organ—avoiding the hymns, which once made the Irishman curse at him—and if the fellow had been supping the profits from the butter, he would join in. Then he’d switch to old Irish songs in a vigorous, scraggly, wretched tenor, and Baptiste would follow along, learning whatever was new. Hearing Baptiste fumble, the Irishman would curse. “Mither of God, don’t ye know anythin’?” He’d look fiercely at the boy. “Heathen, a damnable heathen.”