Anything to lay off that milk a minute. It was very odd. As a kid, Bill had eaten whatever was put in front of him. His dad used to challenge him to eat seven hot dogs or nine pieces of chicken, and he always did it, and never puked after. He’d eat his food and his dad’s, too. But then, his dad had sort of eaten vicariously through Bill, because of his severe ulcers.
“How’d he do it?” Henry asked.
“Shot himself. Once in the head, then the chest. When that didn’t work, he cut himself, sort of head to foot, with a straight razor.”
“I couldn’t cut myself,” Henry said. “I might be able to hang myself, though.”
“Henry, old boy, I hope you never have to work it out,” Bill said.
His son made him feel interesting. He was the kind of kid who wouldn’t want you to think you were boring, who wanted the people he met to feel good about themselves. Bill even felt guilty sometimes, having a son and liking it, too, like it was something he didn’t deserve.
Similarly, Jefferson and Lewis had almost been father and son, working alone together a lot in the president’s house. Lewis even delivered Tom’s first state-of-the-union address to Congress. Lewis always showed great presence of mind when in physical danger, people said. Others said less flattering things: that he was bowlegged, stiff, graceless, and awkward, that he reminded you of Napoleon. And Lewis did, in fact, sign “Citizen” in some of his letters, after the French custom of the time.
“There are always the murder theories, of course,” he said. “He was slightly mixed up with a traitor named Aaron Burr and his daughter Theodosia. Lewis even predicted his own death to her, in a letter.”
“But you don’t think it was murder,” Henry said, nodding. Henry worried about him, Bill knew, and seemed to know when he was down and wondering about the point to things. Much as he tried, Bill had difficulty reciprocating. It was just hard for him to picture what Henry—a modern boy—thought about during a given day. Public school had not changed, was still filled with threat, profanity, violence, obscenity and in-your-face sexuality. But in his own schooldays, it’d never occurred to him to borrow a gun from home. Now, if you had trouble at school you just killed everyone, staged your own massacre. Nobody understood it, but this harmless-looking thing, a public school, was actually driving some people insane. In the privacy of their minds, some kids were made nuts by it. And adults had little control over it, that shadow-world called adolescence.
Henry was an inch from triumph over the glass of milk. The color was leaving his face as he worked.
“We have a reliable account from people at the inn, what he said, what he did, the order of events,” Lewis said. “He said he wanted to rob his enemies of the pleasure.”
The blood gradually came back to Henry’s face, but it was clearly taking all of his will to beat this thing. He carried his plate and glass away, and pretty soon Lewis heard him above his head, in the bathroom. He strained to hear if Henry was getting rid of the food, their other fear, but couldn’t hear a thing in that old plaster-walled house, soundproof as a vault. You could commit murder in any room.
Bill stayed on the couch, thinking. It was supposed to be this big secret. When Tom asked for the money from Congress, he lied and said they wanted to explore the Mississippi. He didn’t want the Spanish or British to guess the truth, that he was about to grab up the whole thing, sea to shining sea.
It was a suicide mission. When Tom gave his instructions to Lewis, he didn’t say “when you elude the dangers and reach the Pacific.” Oh, no. He said “should you elude the dangers, & etc., etc.” He wasn’t sure they’d even come back.
He must have fallen asleep. Emily’s voice suddenly woke him. “Lewis, what is this?” she asked. His eyes popped open. On the floor was a sizable, long shipping box. “Please don’t tell me that’s what I think it is.”
“It’s not. I swear.”
“Because it looks to me like the UPS man just left a gun at my house.”
In fact, that was what it was, or at least a replica of one.
“You promised me, Bill. You said we would never ever keep a gun,” she said.
“It’s not. It’s just a replica of one that Lewis carried,” he said. “It won’t fire. You’d need powder and patches and ammo.”
“It doesn’t feel like any replica. It’s heavy, just like a fucking gun,” she said.
She went upstairs to take off her work clothes, and he sat up, a little dizzy from so much sleep. As he tore away the strapping tape, Henry and Emily appeared in the doorway, then moved into the room and sat on the sofa before him and the box. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s not addressed to Pandora.”
“I’d like to see it, please,” she said.
He ripped away plastic and Styrofoam, exposing a solid maple case, flipping the antiqued-brass latches and prying up the lid. It was astonishing, pretty, as it lay in its custom red-velvet rest, solid walnut stock, octagonal barrel, polished brass flintlock mechanism and ramrod, a bead of real gold as the front sight.
“Okay, so it’s a gun,” she said.
“It’s just for show,” he said, lifting it out, hefting it. “Here, Henry, you want to hold it?”
“Now, why would he need to hold it?” she asked, then looked at Henry. “Do you want to hold it?”
“Yeah, give it here,” Henry said, and knelt down to take it. “Wow, are they always this heavy?” He put it to his shoulder correctly and aimed, closing one eye, squeezing the trigger. As he did, Lewis got a sudden gut-wrenching shock to his nerves that it might somehow fire, and Emily saw his expression.
“Just a replica, huh? Give it back to your dad, Henry,” she said.
They sat over the gun for a moment. It was interesting how there seemed to be four people in the room now, like the gun was someone. And even after he’d wrestled the gun upstairs to his office and thrust it harmlessly away, into a closet, it still felt like somebody was there.
They weren’t talkative during dinner. When he did speak, Bill had the sense the gun was listening, and knew they were aware of it, feared it. Which was strange because, as a kid, Bill often handled guns and never feared them. It was people you had to watch out for, what they suddenly did to you or said to you when no one was looking.
Emily was trapped, he knew, between respecting his book research and looking out for Henry. Women could be their own worst enemies in this regard, taking any male endeavor more seriously than their own.
After dinner, Bill went to his office under the stairs as usual, to sit and ponder.
The thing was, Lewis was supposedly helping found a new order of man in the New World, and was an agent of the Enlightenment. He called the expedition Voyage of Discovery, and his party members the Corps of Volunteers for Northwestern Discovery. It was strictly scientific. On the other hand, the money came from the War Department. Which meant they’d use military hierarchy and army discipline, with flogging for most offenses, and shooting for desertion.
He invited Clark, his favorite ex-commander, who’d taken early retirement due to health problems. Clark was at home
