Across the Endless River Read Online Free PDF Page B

when he was eight years old, his father appeared at Reverend Welch’s house. There were shouts followed by whispers, then his father took him for a walk along the river. Reeking of whiskey, Charbonneau told him that his mother had died, breaking down several times and swearing in his sentimental way that he would have a Mass said for her every month.
    â€œShe caught the belly fever,” his father told him in a choked voice. “She took sick, and within ten days the fever burned her up until she was gone.”
    It was important for Baptiste not to cry in front of his father; he felt that if he could keep the tears back, he could keep the ground beneath his feet from spinning and hurtling him down.
    When his father went back north two days later, he cried many times, always alone. Captain Clark was away in Washington when the news came, and he didn’t return for several months. Soon after Clark came back, Baptiste saw a light in his office late one evening; he knocked and let himself in. He found the captain, red-eyed and distracted, at his enormous desk in the big cluttered room. They looked at one another and both of them began to cry, and neither cared to hide it. Clark hugged him and tried to dry his tears, but Clark’s own sobs would not stop. They gave in to their sadness then and wept together.
    When Baptiste thought of his mother, he thought of his spirit bird. The summer before she died she took him aside, down to the stream where they gathered willow branches in the Mandan villages. She had him show her the small black bird she had given him. He knew that it wasn’t a Mandan or Hidatsa piece; it was one of the small fetish objects—all of them birds—that she kept in a medicine bundle that was always with her, whether among the Mandan, along the river, or visiting him in St. Louis. She sat him in front of her and declared in a kind of solemn song, “I am the Bird Woman, and the spirit bird will always protect you, no matter what path I have taken.”
    Now she was gone someplace he could not follow. Everyone claimed to be his father: Charbonneau, Clark, Chouteau, Limping Bear, President Jefferson, Jesus himself. But he missed his mother. When he attended Mass with the Chouteaus, the priest often reminded him that the Virgin Mary was everyone’s mother, but Sacagawea was his mother, and the sound of her voice, her smell, her touch came to him in dreams. When he woke he was pained by the endless distance that lay between them, and he gripped the bird as if it were life itself, his fingers bloodless and trembling. Opening his palm, he saw the stone’s faint imprint on his skin, slowly fading in the pale light of morning.

T HREE
    1813–1815
    F or the next two years Baptiste remained in St. Louis. The United States was at war with England, and the Missouri and Mississippi river basins were disputed territory in their conflict, with many Indian tribes siding with the British. Word drifted down the river that Charbonneau was missing after a battle on the upper Missouri—perhaps killed, perhaps captured—and more than ever Baptiste felt cut off from his life among the Mandan.
    He thought often of his mother, the Bird Woman. Not every bird he saw made him think of her. The great flocks of blackbirds over the prairie, the eagles and vultures soaring above rocky outcroppings, the owls and nighthawks that flitted along the roads in the dusk: none of these brought Sacagawea to mind. But when he sat along the riverbank, immobile and watchful, and a single bird landed nearby to search the ground for food, his thoughts were full of her. As when she prepared to leave him that first time, the bird would hop about, then stand unmoving with its head tipped to one side, waiting for something unseen. At these moments he felt her presence, and he sensed that she still watched him.
    It was during this time that he discovered the miracle of letters. He saw Captain Clark write down his