Sign-Talker (10 page)

Captain Clark nodded thoughtfully. “Remarkable gent. I was uneasy to meet ’im. Y’ already know why. But he didn’t mention it at all, the war, I mean. Just said he knew my brother by repute but never met him personal.”

Drouillard had a rush of appreciative feeling toward his uncle, and had an urge to tell Clark how Lorimier had been a better father to him than his own had been. But he kept it to himself, because he was still in a dark mood about the whipping he had seen, and for days he had been so heartily tired of being Lewis’s messenger boy that he was sorry he ever signed on. He was glad when Sergeant Ordway came and required the captain’s attention on some matter down by the keelboat. So once again Drouillard was left in the care of York, who now had to dispense his hospitality from a campfire under a canvas instead of his usual cabin kitchen. But apparently he and his master were used to camp life; he had an orderly little arrangement of iron forks, spits, kettle hooks, and utensils, as well as a hinged box stocked with toddy-making paraphernalia, and a coffeepot hanging over the fire by its bail, seething away. This was the military camp for York and the soldiers; the captain surely would be sleeping in town as guest of some citizen or other. St. Charles, the last real settlement west of the Mississippi, was renowned among rivermen for its hospitality. Many of its residents were the families of voyageurs; Cruzatte and the voyageurs’ patroon, Deschamps, lived here, and two others, Malboeuf and Hebert, had lived in the town at times in their wandering lives. So, as usual, only the soldiers had to camp out. Drouillard warned himself not to take a
toddy this time, but he was saddle-weary and peevish, and when York offered to fix him one, he shrugged and accepted, and sat on a crate to watch the servant prepare it. After two sips he found himself feeling mean again, wanting to say some of the things he had stopped himself from saying to York back at the winter bivouac.

“That captain ever whip you like that?” he asked. “The way they do that soldier Collins?”

York took a deep breath and sighed it out, looking off into the darkening sky. “Not ’xackly like ’at, no s’.”

“What, then? Bullwhip instead of switches?”

“Mast’ Billy don’ whip me.”

“I thought you just said he does.”

“A man on the place do. Not hisself.”

Whitemen always have people do everything for them, Drouillard thought. “You have a family?”

York nodded, momentary sadness in his eyes. “Wife.”

“Like to be with her?”

“Oh, I sure do!” That came out unguarded.

“Wouldn’t it be good if you could choose to stay with your wife, or go with the cap’n? You could choose, if he didn’t own you. D’ you know the whitemen tried to make Indians slaves when they first came? Didn’t work, though. They’d run off. So the whitemen cut off their feet so they couldn’t run away. So they’d just sit and make themselves die. That’s why the whitemen had to go get you folks. You couldn’t run home, across the ocean.”

York said, “You makin’ ’at up?”

“No. Indian people remember way back. Eh yeh! If anybody claimed to own me, or thought he could whip me, he’d never find me.”

York was sweating, brushing at mosquitoes unthinkingly. “Mist’ Droor, I been hopin’ you be on ’is jou’ney. Bu-But maybe you talk too much trouble.”

Drouillard drained the rest of the sweet stuff from the pewter cup and put it down. He wasn’t pleased with himself, tormenting
a poor slave just to work out his own irritation at the masters. But he did have one more thing to say: “Think about that ol’ Caesar.”

The soldiers and boatmen were lifting, toting, and sweating next day, reloading the vessels to improve their trim, when Louis Lorimier rode into the camp from upriver, flanked by two young riders carrying long guns. Drouillard recognized them as his uncle’s secretary and a surly Shawnee who sometimes rode as his bodyguard. Lorimier was grinning like a possum, his hat plume waving in the breeze. The horses were muddy to the chest, and walking tired, and Lorimier was flicking his mare on the withers with the end of his long braid.
“Bonjour, neveu!”
he shouted with a toss of his head.
“Bonjour, mon capitaine!”
He waded through a clutch of voyageurs who had run over to greet him.

Sitting to take a whiskey by Clark’s canvas shelter, Lorimier reported that he had had an agreeable conference with the Kickapoos up north, that they had promised not to attack the Osage this season. He had played on their jealousy of the Osage by telling them that an Osage chief was going to visit the Great White Father in the East, and that if the Kickapoos honored their promise to be peaceful, they too could have a chief honored by such a journey. Lorimier was pleased with himself. He would intercept Captain Lewis in St. Louis and give a full accounting to him.

While Clark wrote a letter to Lewis, Drouillard and his uncle strolled into the town for a quick round of visits and libations with Lorimier’s many friends there. Afterward there was enough afternoon left for the twenty-mile ride overland to St. Louis on refreshed horses. The trace led southeastward up over the forested bluff and then emerged onto an intensely green vista of rolling prairie broken with copses of woods. Drouillard, carrying Clark’s letter about the cargo shift and the whipping, rode close alongside his uncle, knowing this could be his last sight of him for a long time.

“So,
neveu
, the
américain
fleet at last moves. And you have not changed your mind?”

“Sometimes I am ready to ask for my promise back. But I go along. They might not get much farther. The soldiers are wild, and they might desert or mutiny. They already hate that heavy boat. Their sergeant told me each man pulls about a ton. And they have perhaps a hundred times as far to go as they have come.”

Lorimier nodded. “The town people did not like the whipping of the soldier. Did you see it done?”

“I did. I expect to see more. In the camp the soldiers were always in trouble, and they find this much harder than camp.”

Lorimier was keenly interested in whether this voyage would succeed or fail. He said, “Do they talk of quitting?”

Drouillard shrugged. “They fall quiet when I come near. They think of me as the captains’ man, since I’m their courier. Even the boatmen are wary of me. I don’t like that.”

Lorimier put his head back and laughed. “You like to be alone, you, the hunter! This will help you be alone! Ha ha! But I tell you, I think they will get over the trouble and succeed. You must understand the power an officer has. It is all written, in army books. When an officer may whip, or cast out, or shoot a soldier.”

“Such things as your sons go to learn in the army school, eh?” Drouillard pictured the likable but spoiled boys, Guillaume and Louis, stiff-necked in blue soldier coats, with the authority to whip or shoot soldiers. He thought of soldiers now as he thought of York the slave, all probably wanting to run away, but afraid of the invisible whips, guns, and chains.

Lorimier rode along, chuckling, occasionally flicking a fly with the end of his braid. “C
’est ça, alors
. Not all bad for us. As I have said, it is good to be early in a promising place. Good also to have relations and prestige. You know that your father was a better trader and interpreter because he married your mother. And look at me. I am a shining portrait of
le pratique!”

Drouillard thought of Manuel Lisa, saying these same things about early advantages. Lisa had seen him as being of value because of the knowledge he would gain. If his uncle foresaw that, he had not said so. To Lorimier, it seemed, he had failed for
good when he ran away from school and became a hunting Indian, and apparently could never be as promising as the two soft and dissipated sons who would become officers. They had gone east earlier this month, along with some Osage headmen who needed to be overawed by the great cities and the Great White Father Jefferson.

“Eh bien,”
Drouillard said. “Who knows what will come of all this? Sometimes it does not look so good to me.” He was thinking not just of the difficulties he had seen, but those of his dreams.

“You are that dubious,” Lorimier said with a slanting smile and a shake of the head, “yet you seem to be going.”

“I gave my word. And, speaking of that: I gave my word too to Mr. Graeter about my debt to him. It is a month past due. But the captains keep me so busy running between them, I haven’t been able to go to Massac and pay any back, or renew the note. The captains gave me no advance to pay him off with. Now we’re going up the river and I have no chance to keep my word with him.”

Lorimier chuckled.
“Neveu
, there are two kinds of promises. The kind you must keep as promptly as you can, and the kind you make to moneylenders.” Drouillard looked at him in surprise. A promise was a promise, and he had never suspected that his uncle made distinctions. Lorimier shrugged. “I will tell M’sieu Graeter your excuse, and that he must wait. He will still be here when you return. And if he isn’t, even better!”

“Uncle, you are certainly free with the honor of my name.” He was not comfortable with leaving the debt untended, and knew it would linger in a part of his mind. But Lorimier knew of money things, and he knew Graeter.

Over the next rise their view deepened below and to the east. Across the Mississippi the last of the evening sun gilded the lush green woods on the slopes and top of the ancient mound-hill, and it stood forth glowing above the bottomland, which was now in shadow. The great, dusky lowland with the broad river curving through it and the sacred hill glowing in its ancient silence swelled his heart. This place among the joining rivers was
the land most familiar to his feet and to his eagle’s eyes. The thought of leaving it gave him an ache.

But now, below, on this side of the river, were the roofs and chimneys of the whitemen’s town of St. Louis. As this valley was the place to which the river waters all flowed, this town would be the place to which all wealth flowed, if the plans of the whitemen came out as they hoped.

And he of the many languages was to help them make it so. He still wondered sometimes why the Master of Life had put him in the path of the Captains Lewis and Clark. But if the teachings of his mother were true, that was what had been done.

Drouillard had killed two bears on the prairie the day before, and he was making jerky of the leftover meat by drying thin strips on a rack above a bed of coals when a shout came from the river.

Two boats were coming down, carrying several whitemen and a boy, all dressed in skins. They came ashore.

They had been trading far up the Missouri with the Yankton band of Sioux, and had hides and furs in their vessels, en route to St. Louis. A very rugged and weathered old man was in charge of them. He introduced himself as Pierre Dorion, a patroon of the trader Loisel. He had traded twenty-five years among the Sioux. Within minutes the old man was cackling with the happy realization that Captain Clark was a brother of the great soldier George Rogers Clark, whom Dorion had aided during his Revolutionary War campaign on the Mississippi. Drouillard shook his head in disbelief. One couldn’t get away from that man’s reputation, even two hundred miles up the Missouri.

The captains bought three hundred pounds of buffalo grease and tallow from the traders. Then they set about persuading the old man to join them and go back up as far as the Sioux towns, where he might be very valuable as an interpreter and might use his influence to convince some Sioux chiefs to go east and meet
the President. They told Dorion about the purchase of the territory, amazing news to him, and about the President’s plan to shape all the Indian nations into a trade network. Dorion wasted no time deciding. He transferred himself, baggage, and his dim-witted camp boy to the red pirogue of the voyageurs, and sent the rest of his party on down the Missouri to market their yield.

Already, poor Collins was about to get whipped again. A hundred lashes this time. Just when the slashes on his back were fully healed from the punishment at St. Charles. He stood shirtless in the hot afternoon sun while the troops lined up with their fists full of whips. And Private Hugh Hall was stripped for whipping too. Fifty lashes he was to get.

Drouillard knelt a few yards away, rolling up wet deerskins to tie in bundles with wood ash, which would loosen the hair for easy removal. He wouldn’t watch this whipping business. Some of the voyageurs were helping him with the skins, others were loading the keelboat and pirogues with big bundles of cooked and dried venison they had been preparing during the two-day encampment, here where the Kanzas flowed into a sharp bend of the Missouri. Drouillard had shot dozens of deer in the weeks coming upriver, and some bears. He cut the meat in thin strips and dried it in the sun on such days as this, when there was no rain.

He felt like a free man again, ranging through this vast new country, back in his natural role as a hunter and scout. Now that the two captains were together, he didn’t have to carry letters and pouches back and forth between them as he had for so many weeks, and for the greater part of every day he felt as if he were roaming alone through a hunter’s paradise. Being the main hunter, he was excused from guard duty at night and from the
labors of rowing, poling, and pulling the boats up the swift river. But he made up for it with all this butchering and work on the hides.

Over by the gauntlet line Captain Lewis was making some angry pronouncement. The soldiers were warming up their whipping arms, switches swishing and hissing in the air, but Drouillard could hear hardly any of it over the drone and whine of the flies that blackened and dotted everything, especially his butchering places. His eyes and mouth would fill with flies if he opened them wide.

He had never hunted so hard or trimmed so much meat in his whole life as a hunter, even when feeding the troops back at Fort Massac. It was because he had never hunted for anyone who was working as hard as these soldiers. He guessed every man was eating maybe ten pounds of fresh meat every day, yet they grew leaner and leaner from their exertions. They were always drenched, with river water and rain sometimes, but usually with their own sweat. They were wretched with blisters, scald foot, and boils from the constant rubbing of sodden clothes, wet shoes, sweat-slick oars and push-poles and tow ropes, all aggravated by the bites of deer flies and black flies in the daytime and the clouds of mosquitoes at night. Many had other skin problems, rashes and tumors, which the captains blamed on drinking the scummy, muddy water of the Missouri. The men used bear grease faster than he and Colter could bring it in, to soothe their irritations and discourage biting insects. They all greased up liberally but sweated it off almost as fast.