Nor did Reed appear to recall finding it. And in a day or two, the private took up the old objects and implements of his former life as if by habit and was good and obedient as one might hope. Through a painful canal, he’d got new birth back into the tribe, and remember’d a purpose in the midst of his agonies there.
Days passed, and their visits to tribes along the way fell into a pattern of savage surprise at so many white faces and so much weaponry. One could scarce wish the situation reversed. Exchanging diplomatic half truths about aid on one side and obedience on the other, they kept on the move. He was never alone, but had the unlucky, rare gift for loneliness with a fellow human by his side. And wondered if God had a reason for making each mortal so singular and so painfully aware of the fact. And what’d become of his wounded French mistress? Where was she and did she touch her scar and think of him?
As he looked about, he seemed to see his life had already happened. He’d no great love like what lay before Clark, simple, easy for the taking. This job was prearranged before his birth, for the president was already his relative. He then stumbled on a grassy outcrop of what looked to be purest cobalt, weathered to a delicate creamy orange—and broke off a morsel. Having suddenly an awful hunger for that element, he thrust it into his mouth, while some distant part of him exclaimed, Poison! Poison! Spit it out! Like his mother shaking him the time he’d swallowed that one-cent piece.
His eyes and nose now burning, he stumbled toward the river, throat convulsed shut, tears scalding his face. With stung and puffy lips and swollen tongue, he could not even cry for help, and fell face first into the water and gurgled and sucked down mud and weeds. Somehow, Clark was now upon him and shaking him, asking not just what he’d ingested, but why. The grappling felt angry, and Lewis could not tell whether Clark was trying to push him deeper into the water or haul him up out of it. Clark spluttered and started into questions he could not finish. “Why did you—? What on earth were you—? What is the meaning—?” But the pure mineral had burned out his faculties and, as Clark dunked him, up seemed down, the sky was under him, the river above. What was more, he wished that it might never ever stop. Then abruptly he needed air and began to fight. He and Clark had each other by the neck and rose up each choking the other and the streaming drops appeared to fly sideways off their bodies. He let Clark go and was thrown or fell back into the water and there decided to rest. O, how lovely was a river! He would simply drift. Soon, though, his lungs missed the airy, chaotic world and he broke free again with the help of a multitude of male hands and voices. He waited to be pulled to pieces by those hands, but was lifted instead.
Later, it was night, and he lay alone in the grass. And then it was morning, and a mouse’s shadow jerked along the outside of the tent. He followed it as far as his eye could reach. God surely hated him because he was still alive, feeling bludgeoned, butchered, and skinned. Clark was talking to him. They’d been conversing and he’d dozed. “—as for what was in your mind, I cannot presume,” he said, and was waiting for Lewis’s answer.
“I wish to call it accident,” Lewis said.
“Lewis, you do not take careful care!” Clark snapped.
My, he sounded alarmed! But that was Clark, with a body full of reliable anger and outrage that broke out as easily as his sweat.
“Something’s amiss,” Lewis said, holding his head. “I want to eat a yard of earth. I could chew rocks or eat dung. Some element is lacking in me.”
“How are you now?” Clark asked. “And have you heard? Sergeant Floyd is dying.”
“Somehow, I knew that he was,” Lewis said. “I must see to him.” He tested a foot on the ground. He sat up, temples pounding.
“That seems hardly wise,” Clark said. “And useless, too, for he will not last the night.”
He was up already, and staggering off with Clark still talking, bursting out of the tent, finding a friendly tree to lean on while the rollicking earth settled. Going tree by tree, and not believing a thing was real ’til he’d touched it, he found the right tent and slipped in. Floyd, on his back, with that singular look of the dying, those thousand-mile eyes, greeted him and then said, “I am going away.”
“Are you, then? Are you sure that’s a sound idea?” he asked.
“Please write me a letter,” Floyd said, through wet mutton-chop whiskers. Lewis smiled, and nearly made a joke about letters of reference to Saint Peter. He felt they were brothers at this moment, sharing their nearness to death. For Lewis felt his own life would end any moment, though it was curious how it persisted and hung on. A little after he took the letter down, Floyd died.
At dawn was a solemn little ceremony, a yawning shallow trench, prayers, a lively pitching of fresh earth into a hole, onto Floyd. The men looked to Lewis to say something. Finally he knelt and put a hand on Floyd’s cold forehead and said, “Ah, Floyd, you whom we invited with us on our expedition. And now you go and leave us out of yours!”
That task done, Floyd entombed, enshrined in limestone, all desire abandoned him. He felt trumped by death. The men waited on him in dismay, with searching looks, until at last he gave an order to load boats.
Later on, they saw the first buffalo and Private Fields shot and killed it. Lewis walked out and stood by, his mouth yet aching from the mineral, burnt lips stinging, tongue still thick and hard to work. Was there any hope of getting to the Pacific without some slight desire to do so? Clark joined him, to toe the cooling animal.
“This before us is the first buffalo, Clark,” Lewis said, with difficulty. “The very first one.”
“And a very grand fellow indeed,” Clark said. “A tasty-looking morsel.”
“I am not making myself clear,” Lewis continued, and wiped his eyes, which cried tears, for some reason. “I must not be well. I simply wish to say that here at our feet lies the first buffalo. I cannot say more than that, though I apparently feel a great deal about it.”
But O, feeling! What a nuisance, bubbling up so suddenly and irresistibly. Why was it so excessive, so contradictory? He must be going out of his mind, or perhaps he already had, years ago.
Farther on, a group of Sioux came up on foot and bade them pay a visit to their town, using signs. Later, they escorted Lewis to a large hill that appeared man-made. He was told, through interpreters, that it was the home of little Christian devils, eighteen inches high, with freakish large heads, whose blowguns could kill at great distances.
He burst out laughing, certain the interpreters had got it wrong. The Indians, blankets on their shoulders, feathers tied in their hair, scowled, and their chief made a sign, a single finger drawn away sharply from the mouth, twisting and turning, for an untrustworthy person. Lewis choked back the untimely mirth, which only doubled its intensity, finally biting his tongue ’til he tasted blood. Then they soberly investigated the hill, but no little demons were about.
Nevertheless, the place had an airless, doomed, and motionless sense, and was gusted with dry, hot winds, the grasshoppers singing at a steep infernal pitch. Its chest-high grasses were full of currents and whisperings, making it palpably a region of spirits and bad medicine.
“Something awful occurred here once,” he said to Clark. “Certain places on earth have this about them, this dark sort of dread.”
He’d seen it all before, he was sure of it, as if he were repeating this same journey over and over, endlessly, like an inward-turning circle, as though his life had got loose from the mainstream and was caught in an eddy. They walked down from this “spirit mound.” There would be a road up to it one day, just
