The Expeditions (15 page)

He started up Woodward Avenue toward Mrs. Barbeau’s boardinghouse and his airless room, then stopped. He backtracked to Jefferson Avenue. The minister passed Italianate mansions and sturdy brick cottages, an Episcopal church, the Michigan garden. A bored-looking constable at the garden gate nodded at Reverend Stone. Dusk was approaching, the sun a low shimmer, the June air dense as oil. He passed down an alleyway beneath rows of strung-up laundry, then emerged onto Franklin Street. Across the road was the teamsters’ saloon.

Inside, the barroom was smoky and hot, the tables surrounded by cardplayers. Leander Clarke was nowhere to be seen. Reverend Stone moved to the bar feeling mildly disappointed. He ordered a glass of cider and paid with a gold half-eagle, and as he awaited his change he noticed the man beside him scowling; then the man tapped his elbow.

“Lonnafellalevy, wouye?” The man’s Irish accent was so thick as to be unintelligible.

“Pardon?”

“A levy. Loan us a levy. For a whiskey.”

The man sat hunched over an empty tumbler, dull-eyed, his head shaved as though for a bleeding. Reverend Stone said, “I am sorry,” and took up his change.

“I sees that half-eagle. Ye’s got plenty. Be Christian, stannus a dram.”

Reverend Stone hesitated; then he nodded to the barman and laid two half-dimes on the bar. He moved near the door and scanned the handbills tacked to an announcement board: an animal trainer showing camels from Arabia and elephants from Siam at the Military Square. A sixty-dollar reward for runaway Negroes returned unmutilated to Mr. Edgar Wallace of 77 Jefferson Avenue. A recovered atheist named J. Dover describing his glorious return to Christianity in a lecture at the Young Men’s Society. Reverend Stone finished the cider and ordered a second glass.

He drank it with a bowl of gluey beef stew as he fingered the coins in his pocket: likely enough money for Charles Noble and a guide in the northern peninsula, perhaps even enough for a pair of sturdy boots. Guilt gathered inside Reverend Stone but he forced his thoughts elsewhere. He found himself wondering if it was possible to live without faith.

He had weighed the question at seminary as a study in abstraction, but now he considered it as a practical matter: no mornings spent at the meetinghouse, no nights consumed by sermons. No disappointment in others’ failings. No guilt. A looseness in the world’s workings, a lack of heft and texture, a feeling of uncontrol. A vision of life as an ornate, peculiar drama. As a young man Reverend Stone had considered himself a vital member of the universe, part of a supreme struggle; now the notion seemed as childish as a fantasy.

His faith had weakened, he knew, after Ellen’s death. The shame of this fact continuously troubled him. He was not bitter or angry—he understood that death was as natural and necessary as birth—yet when Ellen passed Reverend Stone had found himself wondering if he’d fallen prey to some crucial misunderstanding, some misapprehension of His nature. He had always viewed God as a loving force, merciful and gentle; yet perhaps he had not comprehended the fullest meaning of His love. Weeks passed into months, his prayers yielding little solace, his thoughts tumbling into an endless, empty well. It was as though he was too exhausted to meet faith’s challenge.

Now Reverend Stone drank another cider then stepped out onto Franklin Street, the night cool and moonlit, the sidewalk glimmering with broken glass. On a whim he started east, toward the river. Laundry fluttered like ghosts above the warped laneways. An infant’s wail rose from an open cellar door. As he passed a lamppost Reverend Stone sensed a presence; he glanced back to see the shaved-headed Irishman strolling beside a second man. Reverend Stone nodded to the pair then turned quickly away.

He turned down a familiar-seeming alleyway. He counted twenty paces then looked back: the men entered the alleyway, silhouetted by lamplight. Reverend Stone quickened his pace. Coins jangled in his trouser pocket. He began to run, hat clapped to his head, brogans slapping the waxy clay. He turned to see the two men sprinting, then with a lurch the minister stumbled to his knees and elbows. He scrambled to his feet as a cry caught in his throat. The city seemed suddenly deserted.

He veered westward and in the distance saw a streetlamp like a lighthouse beacon in the gloom. Franklin Street. He would burst among the revelers, breathless and pointing, and a crowd would shield him with fists readied. Reverend Stone gasped, his lungs feeling slashed by razors. A fat mustachioed man stepped from a carriage house holding an urn of night soil. The minister shouted, then pain jolted through him as his legs jerked sideways and he slammed to the ground, the smell of manure suddenly sharp. He rolled onto his side among a blur of shadows. He squirmed to his knees but a kick knocked him flat and robbed his breath. Reverend Stone looked up to see the mustachioed man step into the carriage house and shut the door.

A boot stamped his wrist and the tendons wrinkled. Hot needles tingled beneath his skin. Hands gripped his lapels and the shaved-headed Irishman gasped in his face, his breath thick with spittle.

“Stannus a dram, ye stingy bastard!”

The minister flung both fists, felt the man’s nose yield sickeningly. The Irishman huffed. The second man hissed
Down! Down!
as he struck the minister in the kidneys. Pain corkscrewed up to Reverend Stone’s throat. My good Lord, he thought, preserve me. He looked up: the Irishman’s mouth was bearded with blood. He drew back quick as a rat and punched the minister’s face.

He closed his eyes and the night’s silence grew to a hiss. Boot heels scuffed his shoulder, levered open his ribs. He tucked his knees to his chest as a crushing weight settled over him. The breath slipped from his lungs. The minister’s ankle was speared and the bones shifted. Preserve me, please. Reverend Stone covered his face with his hands.

He seemed to drift away from his body: he felt the blows land but only vaguely, waves against a distant shore. Hands rooted in his pockets and he moved to stop them, felt his fingers bent away. A man’s face was close to his: peering at him, breathing, saying nothing. Someone patted him on the head.

And then it was quiet and he was alone, there in the muddy street, curled like a sleeping child.

Five

Morning light showed the commis’ house to be smoke-blackened and littered with hare droppings. Elisha woke late, the sun a yellow smear on the window. Gray ash crusted the backlog. Professor Tiffin lay against a mound of skins with his shirt untucked, reading an octavo volume with a tattered pasteboard cover:
Travels in the Interior of Africa,
by Mungo Park. He grunted to acknowledge the boy’s presence, then slipped the book into his trouser pocket. They stepped out into a stumpy clearing surrounded by red maple and arborvitae and hemlock, the ground spongy with moss, the river slow as sap. Elisha figured the time to be near nine o’clock.

By day, the fur post held an air of faded optimism: scabs of whitewash flecking the frame house, shattered windowpanes like gap teeth on the log cabins’ faces. A collapsed privy beside a heap of trash wood, near a garden patch gone to weeds. Around them the forest was strangely silent. To Elisha it seemed as though every living thing was asleep or had disappeared.

Mr. Brush was squatting at the riverbank beside the overturned canoe, arranging a pile of stores. Without looking up he said, “Your half-breed is vanished.”

“Vanished to where?” Tiffin said.

“Her fishing gear is gone. So is one of the oilcloths.” Brush hefted a keg of pork, gave the tin mugs a merry rattle. “She took some pork and rice. At least she left us the canoe!”

“She is off fishing for your lunch,” Professor Tiffin said curtly. His eyes were heavy-lidded, ringed with violet moons. “She took pork and rice for her own breakfast.”

“She has never gone fishing without notice.”

“Then bless her independent heart.” He pulled the Park volume from his pocket and slumped on a pine stump. “She will return by noon, I guarantee. We shall wait.”

Elisha fixed a breakfast of coffee and leftover corn mush, some mottled cheese found in the storeroom. Images from the previous night seized him: Susette squinting at
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
her calloused fingers underlining a word; his hands moving down the woman’s knobby spine, her dress wrinkling beneath his grip. He shaved specks of sugar into the coffee, his excitement tempered by guilty unease. And then the plates clattering in the dirt, her cheeks shining with tears. Her apology. And now Susette was nowhere to be found.

He longed to see the woman but was terrified by the prospect of what he would say to her. Did she love him or was she simply lonely? That previous night, when she had apologized, Elisha had heard her words but could not understand their meaning. It was as though she’d been speaking a foreign tongue.

He should be the one to apologize, of course; and yet
she
had led him into the darkness,
she
had tugged her skirts up over her waist. She had fallen as far and as fast as he. Elisha realized that Susette’s actions nohow lessened his own guilt; they simply joined both of them in sin. He stewed over the thought as his coffee grew cold.

The three of them waited through the morning, Professor Tiffin occupying himself with Mungo Park and Indian whiskey while Mr. Brush completed a series of timber density calculations. Elisha paced along the riverbank, unable to settle his thoughts. At last he took his fieldbook and a pocket compass and started inland. He followed the river past a caved-in beaver dam and a ford that smelled of deer, then down through a patch of orange touch-me-nots that burst like confetti as he brushed past. Swamp cabbage and turtleheads and golden cowslip lined the river’s margins, the wildflowers’ beauty offset by the swamp cabbage’s thick stench. Elisha checked his bearing with the compass, then headed westward into the forest.

Beneath the canopy it was quieter, the river’s mutter silenced, his footfalls hushed by a litter of spruce needles. Elisha felt for a moment the sort of melancholy that seemed to fascinate poets: a gorgeous aimlessness, a sense that nothing he might do would matter a cent. And with it a conviction of being alone in the universe. He supposed the feeling was the opposite of prayer.

The sensation evaporated as he hiked deeper into the forest. Waxwings whirled overhead, a pair of yellow streaks dodging through the understory. The mating dance, nature’s fascinating shamelessness. Elisha wondered why it was that some species’ mating habits were complex and cloaked in mystery, while others needed no such artifice. The waxwings called, a pennywhistle chorus. He found himself humming, “
A la claire fontaine, M’en allant promener…
” Perhaps I am wrong, he thought—perhaps there is less to fear than I expect. He felt thrillingly alive, like a man who’d discovered a vanished country.

He sat against a hemlock and opened his fieldbook, but could not focus his mind to serious observation. Finally he wrote:

June 26, 1844

Along this pleasant amber-colored river are many ginger-orange touch-me-nots, with small triangular serrated leaves and flowers shaped like small trumpets. A beautiful flower, but strange: its seed husks burst quite explosively at the barest touch, scattering seedlings in every direction. In this manner it achieves reproduction.

This strategy is remarkable but certainly imperfect—for what if I had not chanced to pass along the riverbank this morning? Who, or what, would have scattered the seed? A sparrow or hare or deer, purely by providence—and so perhaps touch-me-nots tend to thrive at feeding locations of these animals (the nearby ford smelled strongly of deer musk). Regardless, it seems ill-advised to rely on another species for one’s own survival.

Particularly ill-advised to rely on humans, Elisha thought. Humans were skilled at cutting down, burning up, gouging out; not the opposite. Touch-me-nots would not fare well in Newell or Detroit.

Another highly curious plant present along this river is the swamp cabbage, whose foul smell is doubtless intended for some purpose, most likely to ward off insects that might feed on its fleshy purple leaves. In contrast, the cowslip’s cheerful yellow flowers perhaps serve as welcoming beacons to passing bees, who might feed on them to facilitate reproduction. In sum, nature seems inclined to bestow one of two gifts: the gift to attract, or that to repel.

With plants as with people, nature’s cruel chance—for surely there was no logic behind the choice of gift. Were there, the ugly and cruel would die off over time, and the beautiful and kind would remain. But that was not the case at all.

Increasingly I find myself here, among immense white pines or at the lake’s crystalline edge, in a state of pleasant yet profound confusion. Nature’s questions do not, at first glance, appear as questions at all: it is only upon reflection that her paradoxes appear. Then one wonders how anything at all—plant, animal, insect, bird—manages to thrive. And yet here this forest stands, in deep and solemn harmony, requiring nothing but sun and wind and rain for its own survival.

Better, Elisha thought, though still entirely lacking in precision. And nowhere describing anything new to the world—no new plant or animal or insect or bird. Or idea, for that matter. Elisha sketched a shriveled bracken frond, then with a sigh dragged the pen across the page. He closed the fieldbook.

He started eastward toward the river. Clouds had joined in a pasty white layer, so he hewed closely to the compass bearing until he reached the river, then turned northward past the deer ford and collapsed beaver dam. Elisha quickened his pace as he neared camp. He entered the clearing to find Mr. Brush squatting on a stump with his fieldbook open across his knees. A mineral specimen lay between the book’s pages.

“Out practicing your painterly technique, were you?”

Elisha was taken aback by the man’s stern tone; then Brush grinned and motioned the boy over. He said, “I was conducting a timber survey not two hundred yards due west. I recorded a bearing with my solar compass, however when I recorded the same bearing with a magnetic compass the two readings differed wildly—the magnetic compass’s needle skittered like a beetle. Now! Why do you suppose that might be?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think for a moment, my boy! Why?”

Elisha glanced past Mr. Brush: the frame house’s door was propped open, coughs of smoke trailing from the chimney. The party’s packs and kegs and instrument cases were laid out around the flagpole, as if in preparation for departure. Susette and Professor Tiffin were nowhere to be seen.

“Perhaps you erred in your measuring process,” he said. “Perhaps the magnetic compass was poorly leveled.”

“Iron, of course! The compass needle’s magnetism was distracted by ferrous ore deposits near to the ground!” He took up the mineral specimen. “I discovered an ore outcrop that had been exposed by a windfall pine. The ore was literally entangled in the tree’s roots.”

Elisha turned the specimen over in his hands: it was a shaly pewter-colored stone shot with thick maroon veins. He scratched at it with a thumbnail, then rubbed it across his shirt cuff. It left a reddish streak. He smiled weakly. “Susette,” he said. “Has she yet returned?”

Mr. Brush held the boy’s gaze for a long moment. “She has not,” he said, taking the mineral specimen from Elisha. “She has not and I expect she won’t ever return. Your friend Mr. Tiffin is inside the house, consoling himself with whiskey. A damned pathetic sight.”

Elisha hurried across the clearing feeling faintly nauseated. He stepped inside the house then stood motionless as his vision adjusted to the dimness. A voice called, “Young buckra Elisha! Welcome to the maison de merde, also known as the house of shit!”

Professor Tiffin lay sprawled on a throne of skins. He was barefoot and shirtless, a book stuffed into his trouser waistband, one arm cradling the whiskey jug. With a thumb and forefinger he rolled a rabbit pellet before his eyes. “Fascinating beast, the snowshoe hare. Are you aware that it changes color with the season—that it is snow-colored in winter, and shit-colored in summer? A capital example of nature’s capital genius!”

“Susette is gone?”

“Gone, gone, gone.” He flicked the pellet toward the fire, fluttered his fingers like a bird’s wings. “Vanished like a squalid caricature of a Native. Like a lying, shiftless, heathen red nigger.”

“Perhaps she’s fishing at the lake edge—have you taken the canoe upriver?”

“I have been upriver, downriver, cross-river.” Tiffin blinked furiously then looked away. “A half-breed Catholic bitch, who should not have been trusted in the first.”

“Mind your language, Professor Tiffin.”

“Brush was correct about the woman. I was wrong.”

Frustration welled inside the boy. “She’ll return—she
must
return. We’ll wait one more day. I’ll search the riverbanks and up along the lakeshore. Mr. Brush can scout the forest.”

Professor Tiffin exhaled in a moan; then his entire body sagged, his shoulders slumping and head falling forward. He looked like a child’s string puppet that had been cast aside. He laughed softly. “Who will guide us to the image stones? We are near to them, my boy. We are very, very near.”

Elisha felt an urge to shake the man. Of course this was a mistake—Susette was pacing among the nearby pines, confused, the clouds causing her to swap west for east. She would wander into camp at dusk, hungry and abashed, and the men would tease her while she devoured a bowl of stew. And then whiskey, Shakespeare.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Yet even as Elisha thought this he realized that Susette would not return. She was likely hiking eastward along the lakeshore, or paddling in a Chippewa canoe toward the Sault. At that moment she was imagining what she’d say to her husband: about her departure with the expedition, about her early return. The notion sickened Elisha.

“There is yet hope.” Tiffin drew the book from his waistband and struggled upright. “Our dear friend Mungo Park, in deepest, blackest Africa, several days’ journey from Pisania. Listen:

Whatever way I turned, nothing appeared but danger and difficulty. I saw myself in the midst of a vast wilderness, naked and alone, surrounded by savage animals, and men still more savage. At this moment, painful as my reflections were, the extraordinary beauty of a small moss in fructification irresistibly caught my eye.

“Surrounded by jackals and flesh-eating tigers—yet he is comforted by a scrap of moss.” Tiffin smiled sadly. “Quite beautiful.”

“Yes. It is beautiful.”

“There is more.

Can that Being, thought I, who in this obscure part of the world brought to perfection a thing which appears of so small importance, look with unconcern upon the sufferings of creatures formed after his own image? Surely not. I started up and traveled forward, disregarding both hunger and fatigue, assured that relief was at hand. And I was not disappointed.”

Neither of them spoke. The fire popped, embers jumping like lightning bugs then fading to nothing. Elisha said, “So. Let us pray we have as much good fortune as Park.”

“Mungo Park was drowned at Bussa,” Tiffin said. “So let us pray we have more.”

Professor Tiffin and Elisha set off the next morning in a chill dawn rain, the canoe riding high through a windy chop. As if in harmony with the foul weather the craft began to leak, a trickle at Elisha’s feet that grew to a steady seep. Tiffin pulled toward shore, cursing providence in general and Susette Morel in particular. Elisha paddled with his head down, shivering. He felt a grave, disorienting sensation of having failed, but not knowing how.

The boy kindled a driftwood fire then gummed the canoe’s seams. Lunch without Susette was a makeshift affair: water set on to boil, then lyed corn and peas and a strip of pork belly tossed into the cookpot. The resulting soup was ill cooked and flavorless. They ate without speaking, crouched beneath a fly tent. Susette Morel had vanished; Mr. Brush was back at the fur post completing a detailed mineral survey. Professor Tiffin had proposed to paddle ahead to a Chippewa camp and engage a new guide, then return to the fur post in three days’ time. Now Tiffin stood, his head brushing the low tent. He said, “I believe I have forgotten to bring powder and shot!” Elisha smiled, as if at a poor joke; then he realized the man was serious. It occurred to him that they were woefully ill equipped, even for this brief journey.