wife. Clark refused at first, then tried beating him, then finally hired him out for hard labor. Though Clark at last relented, with urging from Lewis, who couldn’t bear to see a loving husband denied the comforts of marriage.
The bus now hugged the river, which looked exactly the way the captains had seen it, except for billboards, bridges, city skyline, power plants, barges, levees, dredgers, and a little airport with planes leaping off the end of the runway and banking hard right, heading west. And the river had a deep V-shaped channel now, so it couldn’t spread and wander five miles wide and three feet deep anymore. “Lo,” he said to the class, “the major artery of a teeming nation.” But it wasn’t really true; rivers hardly mattered now. And the fabled Northwest Passage, found at last by Amundsen in 1904, was utterly impractical thanks to the Panama Canal.
Lewis knew it, too, and long before they’d reached the Pacific: there was no all-water route, no great river stretching shore to dazzled shore. He noted it matter-of-factly, just the same way he wrote, “Shields killed first buffalo,” on the 3rd of August, 1804.
“So what about Sacagawea?” Joaney asked. “What’s her deal?”
“Stolen from the Shoshoni by the Hidatsa in an attack in which her family was slaughtered. Or, taken from the Hidatsa by the Shoshoni, then later stolen back. And eventually purchased by a Touissant Char-bonneau, French guide and interpreter,” he said.
“I bet they raped the crap out of her,” Skyler said. “You know they did! Why else do you take somebody?”
“Then you had to cook and clean for the asshole who stole you and raped you,” Joaney said.
“Sounds like my mother’s life,” Skyler said.
Joaney shifted her big stomach using both hands, like it was a big rock she was stuck under.
“Hey, why’d the Indians have to go and dig up Sergeant Floyd?” Richard said.
“Oh. Well, this chief wanted to put his son’s body in with Floyd’s,” he said. “That way, he’d go to the white man’s Heaven.”
“I think that’s sad as shit,” T said. “But I know black people like that.”
“Sometimes, we identify with a thing in order to handle being swallowed up by it,” he said. For some reason, he glanced down between Joaney’s parted legs, at her Battery of Venus clearly outlined by her stretch pants.
Bill thought of the falling-out with the Sioux, who tried to exact a toll from the party before allowing it to proceed upriver. And how Lewis got so furious, and called the men to arms. Fortunately, a wise chief intervened. But Lewis never forgot or forgave it, calling them the “vilest miscreants of the savage race” and telling the whole country to treat the tribe as criminals and outlaws.
Joaney suddenly groaned and sat forward, a tiny muddy puddle now down between her shoes, silvery and reflective like sperm or a snail’s track. She grabbed his hand. Skyler looked over the seat at the floor, and nodded to T, who nudged Richard. Then they just stared at poor Jo, like some hapless family band, perplexed by this event, unsure whether to make a sacrifice, dance, or pray. Bill slipped away and spoke to the driver, then came back and took Joaney’s hand.
“Tell me some things,” she said.
“Like what?” he asked.
“I dunno, but goddammit, make it quick!”
He started talking, about how they found the backbone of a “fish” forty-five feet long, just lying out in the middle of a field. And how the tribes ran gangs of buffalo over cliffs, like Jesus stampeding the herd of swine into the sea. He told about Martha F., whom Clark named a river after, and whose true identity remained a mystery, a woman lost to time. And about the meat ration, which was barely adequate at nine pounds per man per day.
He told her Lewis’s favorite dish was dog, any style. He got her to half groan about George Shannon, who kept getting lost and running out ahead of the party. Sure that he’d been left behind, he raced out so far ahead that only a chase team of hunters on fast horses could catch him. Afraid of running out of things for her, he strayed into the taboo, such as Lewis’s talk of the “Battery of Venus,” whether the women displayed or concealed it. He talked desertion and mutiny, and about Newman, who was disbarred, and the deserter, Reed, who had to run the gauntlet four times while the men bashed him with their pencil-thick brass tamping rods. “What’d the Indians. Think of that?” she gasped.
“They thought it was barbaric,” he said. “But when Lewis told them the reason, they agreed that examples were necessary, even in the best families.”
Joaney nodded, breathing fast, staring ahead. She was into something hard and reliable now, and it had nothing to do with him.
“Did he help her?” she asked. “I mean, when she needed it the most?”
“He tried,” Bill said. “Lewis was mostly into bloodlettings and strong laxatives. He got her a drink made from crushed rattlesnake tail, and possibly that helped.”
She nodded, panting. Even in extremis, he found her very lovely and dear, her skinny arms and legs, her swollen breasts and big stomach that would deflate into a pucker, her knock-knees, her lithe wrists and ankles, her long neck and dark brow, and her aloneness, and her need, and then her aloneness again. The bus gusted up into the hospital drive and he got down to help the nurse with the wheelchair, and then got back on the bus though it tore him up to leave her there. What a mystery it all was. And what an awesome race of creatures, splendid creatures, women were.
At home, he told the story to Emily and Henry at dinner. Instead of calm family time, their dinners had turned anxious, with Henry constantly stirring through his food as if for a dead mouse. Emily didn’t have too much to say about it except that Joaney ought to have had someone with her, that he should’ve at least stayed a little while, and what was the matter with people anymore, anyway?
In his office later he couldn’t work, thinking about Joaney, and about Lewis’s command of herbal cures, how he would’ve known about purple cone flower, for instance, that it was good for madness and delivered real results in rabid dogs. Lewis hadn’t done much for Sergeant Floyd, who’d died with such grace that it sounded made up. He’d calmly announced that he was “going away,” as if on vacation, and asked Lewis to write a letter for him. How romantic. So where was the crying and the pleading? Where was death’s sting? And could Lewis’s account really be trusted? The main thing Tom asked for was a daily record of the trip, and yet Lewis wrote in fits and starts, leaving poor Clark to somehow fill the gaps. Of course, certain things could be checked out, like Sacagawea giving birth during a total eclipse of the moon. It was a difficult birth, but Indian women pregnant by white men suffered more in labor, as if they’d displeased the gods.
In bed that night, Bill tossed and turned, and Emily mashed a pillow down on her head. At that moment, for all he knew, Joaney was not only in pain but all alone as well. O, what a world it was, and what a life!
8. “…the residence of deavels…”
He poisons himself; Sgt. Floyd dies; Killing the first buffalo; A visit to a residence of tiny Christian devils; Geo. Shannon missing; York makes himself more terrible than they wish; A man confined for mutinous expression.
Reed lay without moving all the night long, for Lewis got up to check that he was breathing and not dead. For reasons he couldn’t
