Charbonneau (8 page)

The boy put it on. It felt heavy around his neck, but it was beautiful. He decided to wear it even in his sleep.

Baptiste spent the day playing with Toussaint and Lissette and talking in rusty Minataree with Otter Woman. (The new wife had not come downriver.) They confirmed Charbonneau’s story. Clark watched the boy quietly, and concluded that Paump had weathered his mother’s death well. He seemed very grown-up, very even-keeled for his age.

After dinner that evening, Clark called Baptiste into his office. Charbonneau was sitting—uncomfortably, for he wasn’t used to chairs—in the leather chair opposite the walnut desk.

“You must change your schooling,” Charbonneau told Paump. “Your mother wanted that for you to learn to read and write.
Bien
, though your father cannot, nor his father before him, and had no need. But you must not learn to be a heretic Protestant. Your mother said leave it to the General, I say
bien
. But she is gone. You must be learned by the priests of the Mother Church.”

Baptiste looked at Clark. “It is his right,” Clark said simply. “He is your father.”

“It is good. Charbonneau says it must be so,” his father exclaimed. That simply, all was changed.

Baptiste was surprised that he felt disappointed. He didn’t dislike the Reverend, though, and he liked Mrs. Welch.

“I will see that it’s arranged,” Clark said to the boy.

Baptiste stood up first.
“Bien,”
he said, shook hands, and went to find Isaiah.

He made a boast of it at Welch’s house. Charbonneau became the
deus ex machina
of Baptiste’s elevation to a new world, to French Catholic society, to the domain of Bernard and Pélagie, M. Lisa and M. Chouteau. Isaiah helped him move his belongings the next day. It pleased Baptiste just a little to see that the other boys were envious; he promised Yves that they would get together often. The Reverend spent the day in a mood. He said good-bye with a grave finality, as though the boy were about to cross the River Styx. Mrs. Welch hugged him and kissed him, and almost made him cry.

DECEMBER, 1815: “Who made you?” asked the priest.

“God made me,” intoned Baptiste and the rest of the boys, “to know Him”—here some started mumbling, hoping the priest would not notice—“and serve Him in this world”—now most of the class was mumbling—“so that I may be happy with Him in heaven,” Baptiste finished loudly and alone.

“Drop out, Baptiste, and let the others try it bit by bit.” He spoke in French—all the instruction was in French—and began to rehearse the others. “Who made you?”

“God made me,” they started in an unintelligible rumble, “to.…” It was a mixed class of boys. Besides the hajf-breed Baptiste, there was one Indian, Jacques, a German Catholic who spoke almost no French or English, several mulatto boys who spoke French with a funny accent, and the sons of some of the town’s first families—the Chouteaus, the Lacledes, the Prattes, the Lisas, the Bertholds, the Gratiots, a mélange of French, Spanish, and Swiss
cum
American frontier aristocracy.

The priest amused Baptiste. His name was Francis Neil, and he wore long black robes which he treated fastidiously with delicate hands. In spite of his Irish name, he identified more with his French mother than his Irish father, and his English was halting. He was a light young man, refined-looking, gentle, mild, and in Baptiste’s opinion a little intimidated by his playful charges. Being naive and sincere, he was an easy set-up for practical jokes. But Baptiste, the ringleader, felt sorry enough for him that the jokes were gentle.

Father Francis Neil rather thought he had missed his calling. He might have been a monk who spent his hours reading devotionals and singing a half-dozen masses daily within the quieting walls of a cloister. Or, since he loved music and thought music the noblest form of praise to God, he might have been organist and choirmaster at a great French cathedral, perhaps Notre-Dame de Paris herself. Instead, by an infelicitous stroke of fate, he had been born into a crude frontier town on a brawling young continent more concerned with the ways of mammon than the ways of devotion. And, in an additional maladroit gesture, the town had been removed from the sovereignty of two old European Catholic cultures to the sway of an upstart Protestant nation, and had recently been filling up with merchants and rivermen and tradesmen and woodsmen and farmers who—Father would have put it delicately—did not share his own predilections. He walked through the streets of St. Louis with a faint air of disconnection, his skirts slightly hiked from the dirt streets.

He was at home in the cathedral, though. He liked its dark recesses, the soft light from its windows, its awesome height, its burnished pews, its peace. He reveled in its ceremonies. Though he knew that some people dreaded the confessional, he took to its intimacy, its humility. He found in the Holy Eucharist a moment of quiet epiphany. He felt uplifted every morning when he intoned the first chanting sounds of the mass. And he loved the hours he spent alone, every afternoon, practicing on the great organ.

For Francis Neil, in the thin and therefore overburdened hierarchy of the diocese, was the cathedral organist and the inculcator of the faith and of learning in the boys of the parish; in addition, he carried out his priestly duties of taking confessions, performing baptisms, administering other sacraments, and frequently singing mass. He knew that he would never rise higher in the hierarchy of the church, and at thirty-four he was resigned to that. He knew that the Bishop had many duties that were more practical and worldly than he would take to.

Baptiste’s lessons had changed tenor now—not only reading and writing in French and some English, but the catechism, Church history, stories of the saints, Latin for the boys over twelve, and lots of singing. Baptiste liked these lessons better: The catechism was easy, and he learned it as a game. He adored the stories of the saints. Father Neil’s favorite seemed to be St. Francis of Assisi, but he struck Baptiste as a little soppy, mooning over flowers and birds. Baptiste liked St. Maria Goretti, who chose at thirteen to be killed rather than to be touched in sexual intercourse; Baptiste liked to tell that story because the privileged white boys didn’t know just what sexual intercourse was, and he did. He also liked St. Januarius, who, on his saint’s day every year for hundreds of years, had wrought himself up and bled from the head and hands and feet where Christ had bled. Baptiste loved fantasy, and he would repeat this story to Father Neil so luridly that the good father wondered if the boy was too much affected. Baptiste took no interest in his namesake, who struck him as a madman, and a boring one.

During the Christmas season, Baptiste’s first weeks with Father Neil, the students were absorbed in singing. Father Neil taught them “Silent Night, Holy Night” in French,
“Adeste Fidelis”
in Latin,
“Panis Angelicus,”
“Good King Wenceslaus,” and dozens of other Christmas carols and songs. Some of them seemed a little too mournful or soupy to Baptiste, and he sang them in nasty little parodies. But he tried them on his mouth organ when he was well away from Father Neil, and they sounded nice. The harmony was simple enough for him to figure out, and soon he had the melodies pat.

One afternoon at the cathedral he slipped the mouth organ out of his pocket and played softly along with “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen,” one of his favorites. Father stopped conducting and stared. “Baptiste,” he asked, “what?…Play this song for me.” Baptiste did, this time loud, fast, and jauntily. Father Neil came and knelt down by the boy. “Why didn’t you tell me?” His puzzlement turned to beaming. From then on the class had its own accompanist Neil spent half an hour three days a week teaching Baptiste new music—all sacred music, of course. He promised Baptiste more lessons on the clavichord after he had learned his catechism and been confirmed. Father Neil was pleased. Here, for once, was an Indian boy with possibilities. For the Father believed that music revealed the soul.

After Baptiste’s eleventh birthday the work on the catechism got serious. He had been baptized as a matter of course when he came to the school. (The sprinkling made him smile when he thought how Welch would have hated it.) But now he was to be confirmed within a year and he had a lot to learn. He was quick, but Father Neil wondered whether he was too quick, wondered just what God meant to a boy born heathen, and sometimes suspected that Baptiste treated the catechism as a joke. Neil made him stop showing the heathen emblem he wore around his neck, though Father knew the boy kept it on under his shirt, and instructed Baptiste to keep a diary recording his spiritual progress. Nevertheless Baptiste and the other boys his age drilled and drilled. Soon the big occasion would come: the first confession, the first communion, and confirmation. Father Neil intended to make himself proud of them.

Baptiste was boarded with an elderly Frenchman, M. Honoré. He was told that M. Honoré was kindhearted to take him in, but Baptiste thought the old man just wanted the boarding money for wine. In the first three months he hardly ever spoke to the boy, and seemed never to get out of his ancient, battered robe and slippers, appearing always slightly drunk, Baptiste wondered what strange world he lived in as he lay on his sofa doing nothing all day. But he didn’t care, really, because Honoré left him alone. For the first time, Baptiste could wander around the city unrestricted.

It was a good city for an eleven-year-old boy to explore. The river, except during the spring rise, left a dirty, sandy beach where the keelboats put in and unloaded. Behind the beach, limestone bluffs rose from twenty to forty feet—good places to scramble and climb. The levee stretched from the bluffs to the tall, narrow, elegant houses that lined Main Street. At the north end of the levee squatted Battle Row, a long block of buildings first built as stores but then allowed to decline into boarding houses, taverns, and gambling places for the boatmen and their rough women. At the south end stood the Market House, where farmers and gradesmen plied their wares. On the levee the storage sheds of the fur trade were erected.

On any given day the levee was likely to be the center of the action. A keelboat would be unloading its sugar, tobacco, coffee, molasses, cloth and other staples from up the Ohio or from New Orleans, French-Canadian boatmen doing the heavy work and singing their rowing songs. Merchants would be weaving in and out of the sacks and barrels, making sure of their shipments, paying the keelboat captain, the clerks counting and checking; one farmer might be hawking apples cradled in his arms, another just gawking; French-speaking Creoles might be lounging or mixing in, making fun of the high-born French dandy who ignored them; rough fur trappers, scarcely used to such civilization, would be toting their skins to the warehouse, or heading from there to a tavern with their deerskin notes, the most reliable form of currency. Altogether a place to strike a boy’s fancy.

The town itself was going through severe growing pains. It had been a remote outpost of the French and Spanish, maintained for nothing but its prime location for trading in furs. It was becoming the principal city of the entire Western area of the United States, the hub of commerce and transportation. Within a little more than fifteen years from the time of its purchase, American storekeepers, farmers, tradesmen, merchants, fur traders, lawyers, and preachers flooded westward to St. Louis and made it the business capital of a new state of the Union. Even then it was a mélange of aristocratic and wealthy French, ambitious and rambunctious Americans, Creoles, mulattoes, French-Canadians, freed blacks—a pastiche of people, languages, customs, attitudes, prejudices, hopes.

Baptiste was just starting up Market Street from the levee one afternoon when a rock skittered past his leg. Baptiste wheeled: Two boys, one tall and gawky, the other short and stocky, both older than he, were leaning against a wall. The tall boy was casually tossing another rock up and catching it.

“What in hell you think you’re doing?” Baptiste challenged them.

“Chunkin’ rocks at a redskin,” the tall boy said. The stocky one snickered. He was fingering rocks in the street to find another one.

Baptiste was uncertain. “You think that’s fun, huh?”

“He’s a chickenshit redskin, too,” the tall one said sideways.

Baptiste doubled his fist and took a few hesitant steps forward. He was just about to yell back at them when the tall one bolted toward him at full speed.

Baptiste turned and ran like hell. He stumbled once and almost fell, and was mad at his legs before he got to the corner. Just as he turned onto Main Street, he saw a black boy standing there.

“They ain’t comin’,” he said simply, “they laughin’.” Baptiste stopped and looked back. “They laughin’ they fool heads off ’cause they skeered a breed and made him run.”

Baptiste glared at him. “Don’ put it on me,” the boy said, “I ain’t chunkin’ at ya’. ’Sides, I ain’t so white myself.”

“Yeah,” Baptiste said, and grinned. “I guess I let them scare me.” He looked around the corner. The boys were gone.

“They hate you ass ’cause you ain’t nice and white like them.”

Baptiste eyed the boy. He seemed angry and amused at once by the episode.

“My name’s Jean,” he said, giving it its French inflection. He had used that first name before.

“John,” the boy stuck out his hand. “I’m Jim.”

Baptiste shook it. He thought a moment and sized up Jim. “You want to get them?”

“Why not?” Jim grinned.

They circled the block the other way, picking up rocks as they went. “I live just off the Row,” Jim volunteered. “My ma takes in washin’, and she’s real perlite to the white folks she works for. Real perlite. She was so perlite to my daddy that me and my sister come along. He’s white—owns a tobacco plantation in Virginia.”

“He owns a plantation?”

“Yeah, he’s done rich. He freed us. Then he sent us all the way to St. Louy. To get us outa’ sight, my ma says.” He laughed.

They were just coming back to Market Street. Baptiste stuck his head around the corner and saw the two boys walking away.