Across the Endless River Read Online Free Page A

and motioned to the bird, which continued to search for grubs and worms. “My spirit will be your spirit,” she told him in Mandan. “Always keep the bird with you and I will be with you.” He opened his hand and they both looked at the tiny figure, worked in obsidian, with the outline of wings etched into the stone and two dots of white shell for eyes. When they looked up the bird had flown away.
    Although he showed no fear and adopted the solemn countenance that his Mandan uncle, Limping Bear, counseled for what he called Pompy’s new path in life, a feeling of bottomless dread took hold of his belly when his parents set off up the river and left him behind. His young body vibrated with a resistance to everything that surrounded him, all of it strange and new.
    St. Louis was an awful place to stay. Captain Clark’s wooden house creaked and whistled at night. In the Mandan village, his parents’ lodge had been like every other, adorned with clothes, blankets, weapons, and utensils. Captain Clark’s house was bigger and fancier than all but a few of the other houses in town, filled with shiny wood furniture that was rubbed and polished daily so that it resembled brown glass. Everyone he met told him how lucky he was to be living there, but he didn’t feel lucky. He felt confused and alone. The people looked different to him, yet soon he discovered that he was the one who stood out. He was a mixed-blood. Clark’s housekeeper, Alberta, a short, fat old Negro woman who kept a kindly eye out for him, used to tell him periodically in those first months, “You look down the road before trouble finds you, honey, ’cause there’s people would love to see you run into some.” Young as he was, he understood: he had to keep his eyes and ears open and never forget he was different.
    Pompy became Baptiste, his Indian name used only by Clark as a term of endearment when the two of them were alone. Clark’s slave, York, took him to the dry goods store and watched while Mr. Kennerly fitted him out according to the captain’s instructions with corduroy pants, a flannel shirt, socks, shoes, a woolen coat, and a brimmed hat. The shoes, especially, troubled him. Baptiste had never had anything but moccasins on his feet, and now he did not like to wear these strange pieces of footgear with their rigid soles, stiff leather uppers, and a complication of holes and laces. When he complained, Captain Clark was understanding but firm. “Save your moccasins and deerskin shirt for the river, Pomp. If you are going to live with white people, that means dressing like them, right down to your toes.”
    So he dressed like them and talked like them. His French was much stronger than his English, but that soon changed. At first he stayed with the Clarks, but before long he moved into the home of a Baptist minister and schoolteacher who boarded Indian and mixedblood boys whose parents had gone up the river in the fur trade. The Reverend Welch was a stern disciplinarian, but he was a patient schoolmaster and Baptiste enjoyed his lessons. Baptiste’s sundry supplies for school were the first thing he owned aside from his clothes and the few objects in his medicine bundle, and he doted on them as if they were living creatures that could receive his affection.
    The small slate and sticks of chalk intrigued him. He had seen slate outcroppings along the river, but he had never imagined its use for this purpose. Sums tired him, though, and soon the association of arithmetic with his slate was inevitable; he used it only when obliged. But his sheets of paper and quill pens were another matter. From the outset, the deliberate precision required for writing captivated him. He loved the way the continuously changing pressure of his hand on the quill moved slender lines of ink across the page, magically blossoming into words and then sentences. Like languages, writing—“the art of