of others, and guidance and temperance, he would perish, one felt fairly sure. He blundered blindly toward great things, and believed you’d help him, and e’en depended on ’t. He saw our potential, but fought back despair brought on by keen, sensitive perception of the problem and its scope.”
Irving wrote that. They both listened to the clock. “Are you familiar with Gulliver’s Travels?” Irving asked.
“Yes,” Clark said, looking up. “I seem to recall . . . early in our journey . . .”
“Those people believed that Gulliver’s watch was his god because he was constantly checking its face, as if for reassurance,” Irving said.
Clark waited for a point, then understood that was it.
“What about the all-water route?” Irving asked.
“For all we know, it is still out there, waiting for discovery. And the Northwest Passage, too,” Clark said.
“Do you truly think that?” Irving asked, pen paused.
“I am not certain that I ever did think it, or that it mattered to me,” he said, looking upward for the answer. “My friend asked me to join him, in triumph or in ruin.”
He was at last pleased by something he had said in the interview, and resolved to end it.
“Or both,” Irving said.
“Or both,” Clark concurred.
“Do you know,” Irving said, “that an angel of the Lord has recently appeared to a man in upper-state New York on four separate occasions? And that he has found, buried in the woods, some heretofore unknown books of the Holy Scriptures?”
“In New York?” Clark said. “Well, that sounds unlikely, does it not?”
Irving sat still and stared at the black, waxed floor planks as though he were wishing it to be true, as if wanting a new faith to go along with his return to the new continent. Clark felt embarrassed, like he had disappointed a younger version of himself. “This new age is confusing,” Clark said. “In a way, one misses the Spanish and the unquestionable right of conquest. Lewis would disagree, but where is he now? Do you see him here or there? When a man speaks too long and loudly for the Enlightenment, it seems the world must kill him.”
Clark was aware of saying things he never ever had, so this must be the last person who would come asking.
“But why?” Irving asked, as if waiting earnestly, erectly, to know.
“Very simply, this must not be the actual world, but something merely painted on its surface,” Clark said. “Otherwise, life would matter and we would take every measure to preserve it. Instead, we recklessly chance everything. And if not slaughtered that time, we do it again. The notion that life is precious is the greatest lie of our age. What matters are the passions, the thrilling lusts of rage, desire, and hatred. Nothing else is actually here.”
Irving was writing quickly, trying to get it, note for note. “Do you have it, then?” Clark asked. “Are we finished?”
“Yes, I believe so . . .”
2. “…cutting himself from head to foot…”
At long last, Lewis had come to the place, a hollow by the side of the road, an inn simple as that which snubbed Mary. O, here, finally, was the large house with milled boards! And a cabin of roughcut timber, a barn with a trotting-horse weather vane and honeysuckle on the post box. Also, an arbor, some limestone steps, and a dirt lane between house and privy.
The smokehouse door was propped with a stone, flies swirling ’round glazed hard rinds of hams. His gown was dry, despite attempts to drown in the river. Now only Pernier knew, and what he knew nobody else ever would, because of his marked silence. Pernier took the horses under a tree and waited there, staring at the ground, apparently having one of his philosophical discoveries. Pernier was wise, poor, and free. But if he ever left Lewis, he must simply take up with another great person.
The keeper’s wife greeted them, and liveried the horses. Then showed him the place. “Pernier and I like to sleep under the stars, except in bitter weather,” he said. “Yet your inn is fine as any like it in the world.”
No doubt, she brewed a weak coffee and larded rather than buttered the morning cake. But was honest, good, hard as bricks if tried, in all ways a credit to her kind. She offered her bed. “I have not gone near one in years,” he said, panting and holding his head. “A bed is the shape of a grave.”
He would rest on the hard floor in the buffalo robes, the ones that were his bed in Her wilderness.
Trees overarched that road thickly to the east, more sparsely to the west.
He sought a vantage point in order to look back. The clouds, spread across the horizon, were true anvils, purple-black and full of rain. They blocked the sun. The rays broke forth in ev’ry direction, illumining random pieces of ground. The picture shimmered, as if trying to collapse altogether. He’d come far, but could not see a road. A heaviness in his sight promised a sleep e’en the trumpets of Judgment wouldn’t break. There was no joy in anything, except the evening, the sweetest he’d known.
He sat bitterly shaking in the lengthening gloomy light. That lady brought her sewing out and sat in her rocker. Her nimble hands, separate from her intent, still form, tried to restore order to a chaotic void. It wasn’t the chair which rocked, but the world that moved while she stayed in place. She was the center. O, Copernicus, revise your formulae, for a new body stands still in the heavens!
He’d never felt content as just himself, and was not now. He’d started as an industrious eldest son, wonder boy, who ran the farm and its indentured blacks. Yet all along, he’d been indentured, too! For being great only meant labouring under a great yoke. But what was wrong with the world could not be righted from this side, the living side, of it.
Lewis guzzled his whiskey, mind tumbling and staggering while he drank and drank and stayed perfectly sober. The lady in the center. Her chickens scratching in the dirt, her horse kicking in the barn, as her sun plunged into her Pacific whose waters lapped along her vast, impious soul. But he’d seen what Columbus never did! Yet it would not help finish her sewing by dark.
Wishing to speak to her, his mind was a tangle. Pacing outside the cabin, he was trying to outrace fate, seeing the open door and blanching, stumbling away. He’d produced no true accounting. But how could he tell one story while holding back another? If only, when he’d come back to the world, the world had been there. But it was nowhere. This lady rocking, just miles from where she was born, was now the whole thing. Columbus, dying of the syph in the tropics, knew this at the end.
When Lewis was a boy, they’d said the world revolved at furious speed. So he tested this by leaping into the air—and coming down in the same place.
That lady’s eye was on him. She looked up to plot his trajectories toward and away from her. She knew distresses of the soul, how to recognize the signs in cows, pigs and men. He needed to speak to her with his knotted, poor tongue. His servant, Pernier, attended all from the shade of a flow’ring crab. And knew and knew, and said nothing.
Clark would catch him up, Lewis was sure. Clark would not let him perish alone here. He simply had to last a bit longer. Still, all was in readiness for his
