Sacajawea (96 page)

Late each afternoon, Sacajawea escaped the giggling women by taking a bundle of wash and going to the long sandbar at the river. The bar curved in from midstream and formed a small cove under some cottonwood trees. Here she washed Pomp’s leggings or her tunic, then stretched her weary limbs in the cool air. Once she pulled on the old blue jacket Clark had given her, which she had hidden in the center of her wash bundle.

Thought after thought crowded her mind. She tried to relax and clear the thoughts. In the small leather pouch around her neck she kept the stone that was like a piece of blue sky. The stone reminded her of childhood and how far she had come since that time. She felt the smooth sides and put the coolness of the stone against her cheek. She tied the thin string around her neck, trying to see the chip of blue upon her breast in the graying light. She closed her eyes. She saw the stone bright in her mind. After a while, she replaced it in the pouch.

She took out the now-tarnished peace medal Sun Woman had given her for good fortune on the long journey to and from the ocean in the west. Someday, she thought, I will let my son wear this around his neck—when he is someone important among the white men. Next, she held the rusty red piece of glass with the white bird raised on one side. This, she thought, I’ll always keep to remind me that my name is Sacajawea, Bird Woman.

Inside the pouch were several blue jay feathers, a red feather, blue ribbon, and also a small bone comb and a pewter mirror. She combed her hair, thinking of the time Clark gave the comb and mirror to her. She imagined him saying, “We will meet again, Janey,” his freckled face smiling. She pulled the jacket around her bare shoulders and smelled the coat’s familiar odor, breathing deeply into the folds. This was her medicine. This was the thing that preserved her courage and reminded her of places beyond the river villages. It was more tangible than memories.

Like the young brave when he grows into manhood, she, too, needed a medicine. It was something to giveher strength to meet the hardships of life. The young brave found his medicine by praying alone long hours with arms extended toward the sun, not eating until in a dream his totem was revealed. She thought of the trip to the Stinking Waters as her medicine dream—for now it seemed only a dream.

She saw Charbonneau coming between the lodges alone. Why hadn’t he brought Corn Woman? She hastened her steps and was about to call out when she saw that his head was bent and his shoulders hunched in a look of complete dejection. He walked with a bent-kneed slouch, deliberate and swift, his lips pressed tightly together. His face was like oiled deerskin. His mustache, whose uneven curls hung down on either side of his mouth, increased his melancholy look. The cries of the locusts came in broken chirps.

“Where is she?”

Charbonneau folded his bent legs under him and sat beside the hard-packed trail. “She went to the Land of Shadows during the deep snow.” Even and patient and never stopping came the song of the locust. All else was silence. Behind the clear, close sounds were others, more distant, and still others, more faint.

Sacajawea sat, placed her clothing bundle between them.

“She had a coughing sickness, and bad smell. She’s white as bone and food come up from her belly. She’s light as feathers and not wake up again.
C’est vrai!”
He crossed himself. “The family say she is my fault. I think they lie. Listen, how can it be my doing when I am not here?” Even sitting down, with his legs under him, he managed a most creditable swagger as he brushed off his hands. He wiped them clean of the incident, even though it still lingered to trouble his mind.

Sacajawea stared at the dusty trail. Her memory of Corn Woman was as bleached as dry bone. She could not imagine what she had looked like. She thought the locust sound was like the blowing of wind, spreading everywhere across the prairie, always there ready to be heard by those who wished to listen. It was a help, a familiar thing. But she could not put it into words for the man who sat with his head in his hands.

“La malchance me poursuit!
I am cursed with badluck! They say I left her too long with no hope of me returning. Those dirty Mandans! They knew I would be back! They are the ones. They let her die, telling her all the time I was gone and would never return. ‘Do not think of the man who has fled with palefaces,’ they said. She sat, never speaking, only coughing. One time her family, they scolded her for not eating. But she only sat watching the river, and when they said the boats of palefaces never would glide there again, she screamed and cried on her pallet. Her family say I am an ungrateful heart. Dieu, que je suis fou vous le demander! I am ashamed of myself.”

“It is no fault of yours. They miss their daughter and look for someone to take the blame for their loss. You are faultless.”

Charbonneau stared at the woman who spoke with understanding. He marveled at her this moment. She had a man’s logic in that slim body that was like a child’s. She was soft and slight; to have such a hard stubbornness about her seemed out of place.

“Her memory cannot be taken from you. It lives forever within your heart.” She looked down at him.

She spoke like a grown woman, he thought. “A memory, she is cold like my Corn Woman. I want something warm and soft.
Pouf!
You are here. You are warm.
Ma pauvre
squaw!”

Sacajawea smelled the dampness among the tules at the edge of the river, and felt the unyielding roughness of a stone under her hands.

Charbonneau boldly pushed aside her clothing bundle, then pushed upward on her tunic. His hands were knotted, tanned by the weather. They ran down the sides of her body, feeling with a surprise and familiarity that it was firm and warm.

“Otter Woman lays soft and warm in her couch waiting for you,” Sacajawea whispered, repulsed by his boldness, sympathetically aroused by his grief.

“Mais non!
It is not Otter I feel my hands tingle for. It is for you I have the hotness in my belly. I want you here, in the twilight, struggling on Mother Earth beneath me.” His hands were shaking as he crossed himself.

He pushed her down before she could escape. Hisbreath was hot on her face; she let out a strangled groan. She felt the silent texture of the stone with her hands, and the powdery dust of the earth — like a thing heard, like the locusts.

“This is your duty to me,” grunted Charbonneau. His leather trousers lay around his ankles.

Clark was able to provide education for two, perhaps three, of Charbonneau’s half-breed children, and he also cared for René Jussome’s daughter. By eighteen-ten old Charbonneau, almost certainly accompanied by Sacajawea, had come to St. Louis, bought land, and tried to settle down.

Excerpt from p. 438 in
Lewis and Clark: Partners in Discovery
by John Bakeless. Copyright 1947 by John Bakeless. By permission of William Morrow and Company.

W
hen the air began to feel crisp, and the daddy longlegs were grouped in clusters outside the lodges, a sure sign of fall, Sacajawea found time to visit her dearly loved Grasshopper.

Rosebud stirred the fire outside the lodge door. Sweet Clover sat on a skin pallet in the autumn sun. She smiled vacuously. Grasshopper helped her eldest granddaughter, Chickadee, sew a leather pouch.

“You have come in time to see me huge as a mountain with this kicking papoose inside!” Rosebud shouted with glee. “I hope that this is a boy who smiles as much as your Pomp.”

Pomp had seated himself beside Chickadee, and he laughed as she awkwardly pushed the bone needle in and out of the leather.

Sacajawea could feel the welcome; it lay warm all around her.

After a meal of boiled squash, root of the yellow water lily, and white turtle meat, Grasshopper persuaded Pomp to stay with Chickadee, and Sweet Clover to wash out the gourd bowls so that Rosebud might rest with her sewing. Then she invited Sacajawea to go to the village of the Dead.

Not a word was spoken as they walked outside the village stockade and across the prairie, where the sunflower heads had lost their long gold petals and only the seeds were left. Goldenrod blossoms waved across the land like wands. The two women, one waddling at a slow pace, the other gliding along with the unhurried steps of youth, approached a ring of chalk white skulls. Then Grasshopper spoke.

“On a warm day after several of rain, I came here, some time ago, alone. The scaffold where the body of my man rested had broken and fallen to the ground. I used my scraping knife and dug a hole for everything left, except this skull. It was beautifully bleached and purified. See!”

Grasshopper led Sacajawea to a skull that sat upon a bunch of wild sage in a circle of other skulls, numbering about a hundred. The skulls were eight to teninches from each other, with the faces all looking to the center—where they were religiously protected and preserved in their precise position from year to year.

There were many of these circles made of bleached skulls on this part of the prairie, but Grasshopper knew precisely which one was her man’s. She had brought a half-filled bowl of turtle stew, which she placed beside the skull. She told Sacajawea she would return for the empty bowl in the morning. Scarcely a day had passed on which she had not done this since she had placed the skull in its circle of companions. The two women sat cross-legged beside the white skulls. Grasshopper began to talk to the skull in front of her in a pleasant and endearing way. She told how her child, Sacajawea, had come home and how beautiful she was. She told how winsome and bright her part-white grandson was. She kept up a conversation with the skull for quite a while; then she took out a pair of moccasins from a parfleche swung across her back and began beading them with quills. Now she told the skull of the expected grandchild and how pretty and strong all of Rosebud’s children were.
¹

Sacajawea sat quietly enjoying the sunshine, unable to recall anything like this ceremony among her own people. The Shoshonis left their dead on scaffolds or in trees and did not speak of them again—and probably never saw them again.

Grasshopper put her sewing away, brushing her skirt for the journey home.

A week later, Sucks His Thumb came to Charbonneau’s lodge with a message for Sacajawea. Rosebud had a new papoose, a girl named Sparrow. Sucks His Thumb sat near the cooking fire and ate what Sacajawea handed him on a bark plate, boiled corn. Otter Woman suggested that they start right away to make a cradleboard for the new papoose. She sent the children to the river to find good, pliable willow stems for weaving a head protector on the board.

Sucks His Thumb asked questions about the father of his two companions Tess and Pomp. “Why does he not pull out the many face hairs? What does he do with the beaver pelts he packs in such large bales? Are theremore white men where he came from? Why do more and more white men from the northeast come into the Five Villages?

“For beaver, of course,” answered Tess.

“Why, then, doesn’t your father go to the white village and trade his pelts there? Maybe the white men would give him wonderful things for those good pelts.”

“Wonderful, like a hole in the middle of the back,” answered Tess. “Little brother,” Tess said, strutting to and fro like his father, “the white men do not want our people in their villages, but they want to come to ours.”

“We welcome them,” said Sucks His Thumb.

“Ai,
we have manners,” said Pomp.

Charbonneau traded one of his compact bales of beaver pelts to a British free trapper from Lake of the Woods region for a new-fashioned, percussion system flintlock with a horn of fulminate powder and leather bag of lead balls. The trader said the gun and fulminate compound had recently come to the Hudson’s Bay in a shipment of regular flintlocks. Charbonneau was skeptical, but he thought the balance of the rifle suited his short-fingered hand exactly, so he was happy with the trade and did not question the origin of the gun too closely. He rubbed the stock with bear’s grease and held it up to admire the shine of the wood’s grain. Every day he took it out and aimed it at anything that moved—squirrels, ravens, gophers, a striped skunk, and once a skittish mule deer that hightailed it off before he could find it in the gun sight. Charbonneau blamed the fact that he could not hit anything on the faulty position of the sight. He picked up a piece of sandstone to rub, work over, and enlarge the
V
of the sight with several dozen well-placed strokes. When that did not work he blamed the novel percussion powder that the Britisher had bragged about to him.
²
“The slightest nudge makes this fulminating salt explode—bam! Be bloody cautious, my friend.”

This new powder was placed in a tube connected to the bore of the flintlock and then struck with the hammer, the flash being strong enough to ignite the charge. Charbonneau was told that he did not need priming powder, there was no pan for free sparks. However, henearly always put pinches of powder on the flint for good measure. He told himself that it was the same precaution the Indian took when he used fire sticks. They would put a little black powder down before rotating the hard stick in a block of softer material and the powder would make a big spark for certain ignition.
³

Charbonneau’s women expected him to bring home plenty of game after strutting around the lodge talking about his beautiful new thunder-maker. It seemed to be a prized possession. He kept it handy at all times, and at night it was under his couch for easy reach.

Blowing out the ends of his mustache one day, he said to the women, “My new gun, she is hoo-doo. You know what I mean. I hunt but bring home nothing. Little Bird, you are going to have to buy more meat from your adopted brother—what’s his name?”

“You mean Fast Arrow?” Sacajawea asked. “What do I trade? Maybe some dry tea or your smoking tobacco?”

Charbonneau pretended not to hear the question. He wondered why he did not take his family and leave this blamed village. He could find a place where he was not considered weak and ineffective, where the people would look up to him for his physical and mental abilities. He went to bed and lay on his side, where silently he watched Otter Woman scour out a kettle with sand and balsam twigs, rinse, then fill it full of water. As soon as the water steamed Sacajawea added dried squash and left it to boil.