came Lewis’s letter, which said, Hey, pal? How’s it going? Howzabout joining me on this crazy mission we’re unlikely to ever return from?
Clark’s affirmative reply went out in the next day’s mail.
Lewis had waited ’til the last minute to invite him, so either he was sure of Clark’s reply or he didn’t have anyone else to ask.
What was Lewis told to prepare for in the West? Woolly mammoths and giant sloths, cannibalism and polygamy, a light-skinned race of “Welsh Indians,” a mountain of pure salt and the ten Lost Tribes of Israel. They asked him to study suicide among the savages. For instance, did they ever do it from heartbreak in love? While he was at it, he was supposed to find an all-water route to the Pacific Ocean and, if it wasn’t too much trouble, the Northwest Passage.
Bill was in bed early, with Emily already there, but not asleep. They lay there—together but not touching, not talking but conscious. Then she gradually left him and he was awake in the house, and so was It. Meaning his oldest adversary, Depression. That siege engine of mental illness.
Creeping in through his teens, twenties, and thirties, now it was always over him. And sometimes the illness set down so hard, he thought seriously about doing it, that it might be best for everyone if he did, and saved them from a prolonged, drawn-out crash and burn. He and Emily were newly married the last time it hit hard, and had a tiny baby. Naturally, she’d wanted him to shake it off and pull through, but she’d also needed to look out for Henry. Bill lost his college-teaching job along the way, and now they got by on two secondary-ed salaries, hers from a special-ed position. They’d probably never ever retire.
And while Lewis the insomniac lay awake, maundering all of this, he knew that Lewis the explorer was lying in his grave in Tennessee and not worrying about a single thing. Not the least thing.
4. “…we fear something amiss…”
Shoving off from St. Charles, Missouri, May 1804; Observing the Manitou figure-painting on a rock; York nearly losing an eye by having sand thrown in it; Seeing the gilded clouds; A snake dances on its tail in the river; Recalling the woman shot the first day.
In fact, he never rested, and even now crawled on hands and knees through a tunnel of redbud branches. He looked around for the river, relying on it to guide him. The foliage was thick and lush, the height of summer. Squirrels dropped things or plummeted to earth themselves. A French engagé fired a gun at some game on shore.
Amid shouts and cheers, they’d shoved off. Now they made their wavering way, having left behind just everything, all of their loved ones. Somewhere, young women were tearful. He felt the hard fact of forty days’ provisions with no place to replenish anything but water, meat, and firewood for three years. An unlimited letter of credit meant very little now; there was nobody up here to honor it. No Indians either, the wise ones having cleared out, having vanished in a half instant into the shade of towering immense black or green trees.
They’d met one Daniel Boone, and dined on deer brisket and yams at his large rustic French-style house, and received a book from him on loan, which was his fireside reading while blazing the Kentucky trail: Gulliver’s Travels. Lewis was grateful to have it, but more so to be quickly on their way.
Because he was very, very late. Possibly too late to reach the Pacific in time to seize the continent from the British. A Canadian had etched his name on a rock above a bay on the Pacific, then somehow a decade had got by. Lewis was just thirty, but already ten years too late, it seemed. He was in a bad patch.
At the next rise, he stood a moment, thinking of Pierre Chouteau’s half- breed daughter a few stops back, a most decent-looking female. And he was already keeping a secret from the men: Captain Clark’s commission was not that of a captain at all, but of a lieutenant. Which gave him an awkward edge on his older friend, who’d been dying in domestic comfort when the fateful letter had arrived.
He felt observed. When commander, somebody was always watching, even watching you think. The president had tried very, very hard to turn up someone better. But nobody with the right qualifications, in botany, anthropology, astronomy, geology, zoology, and medical science, ever appeared.
The mission was almost certain to fail on account of weather, illness, starvation, and Indian attack. Also, he suffered desp’rate bouts of anger at God, for making him fatherless, and the eldest male child, and his family’s only hope. Sometimes he even hated Him, and resented being left down here in the dark in so many ways. Why couldn’t God just love him, as he seemed so freely to love and bless so many who didn’t deserve it? He even enjoyed defeating God, in little ways, like pressing down a trigger to end the life of some dumb, beautiful creature He had made. And then destroying and ripping it, with strong white teeth, God’s handiwork.
That morning, they’d met a tribe who gave them watermelons for roast meat and did not believe it when he said the U.S. had possession of their lands. It made him very cross, their cool insolence. He saw red. He saw stars. For some reason, he recalled his empurpled rage in the schoolyard, at six, when a mentally-defective boy tore the picture he’d drawn for his mother’s birthday, when he’d tried to kill the boy with a rock.
In the river the day before, he saw, on a rock projecting out over the water, a painting of a strange figure, the Manitou, their Zeus, and Michimanitou, their Hera. The Nations were, in their polytheism, strangely touching and backward. But he had his own backwardness, his own clumsy wrongness. For instance, something about the crudeness of the men made him very dull and ugly inside, festering and impure. He was not happy among them, and sometimes felt a stinking misery. That was the sadness again. And yet he loved to see the little “kids” in the villages. If only they need not become adult men and women. And many would be dead when they came back, so where was the point in liking them? Yes, today he was in a bad patch.
By evening, he’d found his way back to camp, following smells of corn cooked in grease, and pan-bread, boiled salt pork, and Indian meal cakes which gusted down the channel into his nostrils, tender and red from hay fever.
At sunset, the clouds suddenly caught flame all along their bottoms, and burned like a wildfire turned upside down. O, what madness the sky could display! Its violence and lurid feeling never lasted, though. It was turning gilded and innocent again, the last ember going out. Each day, something in him flared up and wanted to cry out to those colours, as tho to a parent, “No, don’t leave! Don’t go! Don’t leave me here among these awful people! O, take me with you, for they want to undo me, and harm me to death, and ruin me!” Though what exactly was being done to him, and by whom, he could not name. A game of some sort was being played against him. In truth, he wasn’t deemed worthy to command this expedition, but only available for the trip.
As he stood ’neath those clouds, facing the prairie, he felt the pressure and presence in those meadows and woods and fields of the ones who were coming. Though not yet born in haylofts in Europe, though not yet landed, still puking over the gunwales in the middle of the Atlantic, he saw all around him their ghostly houses and livestock and fences, privies and gardens.
Some of the things he’d already seen were beyond the pale. Nobody would believe it if he reported ten thousand pelicans carpeting an island. No, he could only report the plainer facts, like Clark’s negro York nearly losing an eye from having sand thrown in it. Yes, how plain, how very straightforward human behavior was, after all, and never any surprises. But what about the snake who’d swum up under a deer hung over the river to drain of blood, the one who wouldn’t stop dancing on his tail in the water and leaping at the fresh meat? The one he’d had to kill.
What was the use in telling the truth, though, since none
