Sign-Talker (3 page)

It was in their eyes that the power was centered. These were scout eyes, hungry eyes looking for the best way through. He felt that they were seeing right through his own eyes into his spirit, though theirs was not the arrogant staring-down look that he as a half-breed got from most young whitemen.

Both of them looked to be about his own age, around thirty, so neither of them could be Clark the Town Burner, his uncle’s old enemy. That was a relief.

“Gentlemen, this is George Drouillard, our hunter I spoke of,” Captain Bissell said.

One of the officers, the one with short-cropped, dark auburn hair and a small, delicately shaped mouth, said, “So you’re Drouillard? I wasn’t expec—” His was the hard, bugle-edged voice.

Captain Bissell should have warned them to expect an Indian, Drouillard thought. “I’m Captain Meriwether Lewis,” the man said. “Thank you for coming.” Drouillard felt a buzzing, humming sensation such as he had felt once just before lightning killed a horse nearby. This man contained some troubling sort of medicine power.

Then the other officer, who was slightly taller and wore his thick, long, copper-colored hair pulled back in a queue, came around the table and put forth a huge, long-fingered hand, hard and rough as tree bark. Drouillard took it and felt strength come through him. This man’s face was longer, more craggy, but his mouth was wider and less severe, and his eyes, deep blue, twinkled with unguarded kindness. “I’m William Clark,” he said in that rumbling, soft-edged voice. “Come sit, Mr. Drouillard. Would y’ take a coffee or a toddy?” Having smelled the coffee already, Drouillard chose toddy. Clark said over his shoulder, “York, would y’ kindly scorch our guest some whiskey.” The servant nodded, looked at Drouillard through yellow-tinged eyes and winked at him, then busied himself with mug, spoon, little cloth bags and a brown, corked jug, all at a little table by the back wall. “He’ll make you what’s a favorite of mine for raw days like this,” Clark said. Drouillard sat on the puncheon bench in front of the table with his long rifle across his thighs, seeing no place else to put it. The officers pretended to be settling themselves and moving paper on the desk, but he knew they were studying him with so much care that it made him edgy.

Captain Clark said, “I know the name Drouillard. There was an interpreter, a Captain Drouillard, around Detroit, I recollect.… Saved a scout, Kenton, from the stake? …”

“Pierre Drouillard, sir. My father.” He remembered the man Kenton from childhood, and the famous story of how his father had rescued him from burning.

“So! You’re his son! And does he live in these parts now?”

“No, sir. He passed over last spring. In Ontario. He never lived out here.” After having one son by a Shawnee woman, Pierre Drouillard had left to marry a respectable French Catholic
woman and father a large brood of white children. Drouillard saw no reason to tell these strangers any of that sorry story.

“My condolences. I didn’t know,” Clark said. If this captain knew of Pierre Drouillard, perhaps he was a son, or a younger brother, of the Town Burner Clark.

Then the other captain, Lewis, who was pensively rolling a writing quill between his fingers, said, “Captain Bissell says you’re from Lorimier’s post, at Cape Girardeau, and related to him.”

The question put Drouillard on his guard. Perhaps these officers were trying to scout out the presence of old enemies in this territory where their government’s mission had brought them.

The black man had brought a pewter mug and set it on the end of the table close to the hearth, and now he bent to lay the end of an iron poker in the bright center of the coals. He straightened up, palms on the small of his back, pursing and unpursing his lips, watching the fire.

“Monsieur Lorimier is my uncle.” Lorimier, like Drouillard
père
, had been one of their enemies, so he said nothing more about him.

Then Captain Clark said, “Cap’n Bissell tells us that you’re an interpreter yourself. What languages?”

Cap’n Bissell sure tells them a lot about me, Drouillard thought. He glanced at Bissell, who was reaming out his pipe bowl with his penknife. Drouillard had never thought of himself as an interpreter. He was a hunter, a scout, a trapper. True, he oftentimes helped travelers and soldiers and Indians understand each other, at Lorimier’s store, at the fort. He replied, “Speaking languages? Of the whites, English, French, Spanish.”

“And the Indian tongues. Which of those?”

“Ah, Shawanese, Delaware. Kaskaskias and Wea of the Miamis. Ahm, Potawatomi, a little. Kickapoo, o’ course; it’s almost just like Shawanese …”

Lewis waved a hand toward the northwest. “What ones up the Mississippi? Any up the Missouri?”

This was a different matter. Drouillard tilted his head, gazed toward the wall. “I’ve traded with Osage, with Kansa, Kiowa, Oto,
Missouria …” He paused, remembering peoples who had come to the confluence of rivers with furs and hides. “ … Ojibway, Menominee, Arikara … Dakota Sioux, but only a little …” He looked at Lewis, needing to explain something here. The black man stooped and picked up the iron poker, which now was glowing yellow and red at its tip, and thrust it into the pewter mug. The liquid hissed, sending up a cloud of steam smelling of spice, whiskey, and hot iron, which for a moment overrode all the other odors of the room. He set the mug on the bench beside Drouillard with another nod and wink, put the poker back on the hearth and returned to the back of the room. In the steam were familiar scents: nutmeg, cinnamon, clove, rare things that Lorimier sometimes got into his store by way of New Orleans.

“Cap’n, I don’t know many
speaking
words of those people. But with hand talk, I can talk with about any Indian I meet. That’s what I mean, sir. Don’t want to make too much of it.” He picked up the mug by its hot handle, inhaled the steam, blew over the top and sipped carefully at the rim. It was strong and sweet, more whiskey than anything else. The heat and fumes riled his tongue and seemed to billow through his head. Maybe he should have asked for mere coffee after all. This stuff could make one drunk even quicker than cold whiskey, and whenever he had gotten drunk, he had been sorry long afterward. “With respect, Cap’n, may I ask what you want of me? All I’ve ever done for your army here is bring it meat.”

“And translate, and courier work,” Captain Bissell reminded him.

Captain Lewis leaned forward with his hands folded on the table. “I don’t know yet what we want of you, or even if we want anything of you, or whether you’ll be interested in us. From what Cap’n Bissell said, you can be counted on. You might serve us well in various ways. Can you read and write?”

That was a matter of which Drouillard was ashamed. The Black Robes had taught him a little of it before he fled them. He had never used it, had turned his mind away from it, perhaps even had deliberately wiped it out with his other Black Robe memories in turning back to the ways of his mother’s people. He
shook his head. “No, hardly. I can sign my name so you can tell what it is, but no curlicues or feathers on it.”

“Hm. All right. Would you … would you soldier? Join the army? I’m allowed to pay my soldiers in a land bounty, as well as wages.”

That was easy to answer. Soldiers were like slaves. He had seen that at this fort. No freedom to do or say anything or go where they pleased. “No, sir. Don’t look to me for a soldier.”

“He’s an
Indian,”
Clark said to Lewis.

“War Department doesn’t need to know that,” Lewis replied over his shoulder. “He has a Christian name.”

“What I mean is,
he
knows he’s Indian.”

Drouillard glanced over at Captain Clark and almost allowed himself to smile. Here was a man who seemed to understand that an Indian might well not want to soldier. Not to presume too much from a single remark, but here was something that set the one captain apart from the other.

Now Captain Lewis went on. “Then I could hire you as a civilian in the public service. Twenty-five dollars a month.”

Twenty-five dollars a month!
Drouillard had never needed money, or thought much about it. But it so happened that he needed money now. Since his father’s death in Ontario, his stepmother Angelique had been left without means. She had been good to him, and his dear friend and oldest half sister Marie Louise kept up a correspondence. They were his family. He had been trying to earn enough to help them by hunting for the fort, and twenty-five dollars a month sounded like a fortune. With that kind of pay, he could provide enough to keep Angelique and her large brood comfortable. Suddenly he was very interested in what these officers were saying. But he was cautious. He said, “Hire me for what, Cap’n?”

“Do you know what we’re about, Mr. Drouillard?” Captain Clark asked.

Drouillard crushed a tiny fragment of ground clove between his front teeth and relished the flavor of it while thinking how to answer. “Like everyone, sir, I’ve heard rumors.”

“The rumors being …”

“That you mean to take that big boat up the Missouri, pass over mountains, and go down to the sea in the West, sir.”

Clark laughed, a big laugh. “Sure a lot more accurate than rumors usually are! In fact, yes, Mr. Drouillard, that’s largely just what we’re about. And you, what d’you think of us doing that? Think we can?”

Drouillard lifted the hot mug and took a sip to hide his smile. He thought about what name to use for God. Then he swallowed and said, “Cap’n, that’s a long, long way upstream. But if the Creator, and all the Indians out there, allow it, I would say the rest of it will depend on how hard you can push on.”

The two officers glanced at each other with raised eyebrows, and all was still in the room. The big black dog rose, stretched, and padded with scraping toenails to the side of Captain Lewis. He fondled its ears without looking down, and finally said, “Indeed an interesting opinion. And how do you think God and the Indians will favor us?” There was a little antagonism or mockery in his tone, but he seemed earnest for a real answer, so Drouillard gave it.

“What you tell the Indians, about why you’re in their country, they will have to judge whether to believe you. But the Creator will know.”

Captain Clark opened his mouth and pulled at his chin with one hand as if to make his face longer. Captain Lewis’s eyes sparked, his eyelids narrowed slightly, and he gave off a surge of intensity that Drouillard could feel. “Would you mean to imply that, well, that we would … mislead them?”

Drouillard thought that perhaps he should not have spoken that way to a white army officer who was thinking of hiring him. But if he was going to get involved with these people and go into other Indians’ land with them, they needed to talk straight with each other. “Cap’n, sir, I am what you call Shawanoe. My people lived by the Ohio and along the Miami. Now your people have our country. In losing it we learned that when some whitemen talk, what they say changes between their heart and their tongue.”

Captain Lewis clenched his thick jaw muscles. He glanced
down for an instant, then back up. “Interesting how you see that, Mr. Drouillard. I wonder how you know that? Captain Clark and I were at Greenville when the Indians willingly signed the treaty that turned those very lands over to the United States. We saw Little Turtle and Blue Jacket and the others sign it, and they signed it of their free will because they trusted what General Wayne told them. I don’t remember seeing you there, do I? Were you a witness to some deception that we missed?”

It was true that he had not been there, but Drouillard had heard that the chiefs were held hostage and bribed and made drunk until they signed, and that they were never told they would have to leave the lands. He had heard all that bitter, sad story from Shawnees who came to Lorimier’s. But to argue the point with these men who had been there was pointless.

Captain Lewis continued, “I assure you that what is in my heart is what will come from my tongue.” He paused, and added, “And God will know it’s true.”

“Then, sir, who am I to doubt it?”

After a long moment, in which Drouillard could feel Captain Lewis’s heat simmering down like a boiling pan lifted off the fire, the captain went on. “If you go with us as an interpreter, Mr. Drouillard, you should have a full understanding of our journey. You might not have heard the news yet, that the government of the United States has bought the country west of the Mississippi, up to the western mountains, from the government of France.”

Drouillard felt a chill run from his jaws over his shoulders and down. So that was the truth about that treaty!
Bought it!
An angry heat flushed his face. This was talk too big for the mouths of mere human beings, who were just one of the animal families. This rigid soldier, a mere Two-Legged in a blue coat, was speaking of a portion of Mother Earth far bigger than an eagle’s horizons, and he was saying it was
bought
, which was the word meaning traded for money, as when one goes to a store in St. Louis and counts out rag-money for a keg of gunpowder or a wool blanket, or perfume for a French tart.

Land belonged only to the Creator. His people did not believe that even a handful of it could be sold, though they had learned
that whitemen believed they could buy it from Indians and sell it to each other and make the Indians get off it. That was the reason why his mother’s Shawnee people had no homeland anymore and were scattered about in little square tracts where whitemen told them they could live. It was a reason why there was no war chief anymore who could decorate him with an eagle feather even if he earned one. It was a reason why his name was Without Eagle Feathers.

Drouillard picked up the toddy mug again and occupied himself with a long, careful sip until he felt calmed and balanced enough to think or speak. Then he mentioned something else that had sounded wrong since he first started hearing about it:

“From
France?
Sir, how does France sell a country ruled by Spain?”

Captain Clark, who was now half standing, half sitting against the edge of the table with his arms crossed on his chest, gave a booming laugh. “Napoleon,” he said, as if the name explained everything. There again was the name of that soldier-king in France who was always making war over there. Drouillard looked from one captain to the other.