“It’s your constant reminder,” he said, “that you serve me.” He was good to her so long as she was good to him. So long as she did what he said. Traveling all this distance, seeking out Lewis, risking her life and his—that was doing what he said—and so long as she was successful, he would reward her. She was in it for the reward, for what he promised her.
That is why she tries to keep quiet, keep her distance, keep from growing too familiar with anyone. Farmers don’t coddle or even name the cattle they plan to slaughter; they treat them as they do the corn in the fields, as the product of a job. These people—that’s how she likes to think of them, not as York or Clark or Reed or the doctor, but as people, a generalized mass—these people mean nothing to her. They could drown in a river or puke up a bad mushroom or fall on a knife and she wouldn’t care. She wouldn’t. She won’t. You get close to someone, if they get hurt, you get hurt. They are expendable. Every one of them but Lewis. That is what Burr told her and that is what she keeps telling herself.
But she can feel doubt tugging at her. She can feel anxiety tunneling through her like little worms. There was a time when she thought by Burr’s side was the only place she could feel some sense of belonging—until now. It’s the boy’s fault. The boy, York, desires her. Ever since he caught her beneath the gallows, ever since she took his hand and raced across the stadium with the vultures crisscrossing the sky above them, he has been following her.
She knows this and secretly revels in it. The other day, when they sat around the fire, he seasoned a trout fillet with some dill she harvested. He ate it and spoke to her with his mouth open, talking nonsense, telling jokes, wondering what life awaited him in Oregon. He had always dreamed of opening a theater— What did she think of that? Did she think that was a good idea? And hey, what was up with the mark on her shoulder? The one she was rubbing now. The one she was always rubbing.
“It’s nothing,” she said and dropped her hand.
“It’s a tattoo, right? You’ve seen mine? The jester’s mask on my back? What does yours mean?”
Rather than answer, she leaned in and stole a fillet from his plate and took a bite of it. “I’m hungry,” she said around a mouthful.
He smiled and watched her eat.
She doesn’t want to feel this way, her mind fizzy with attraction.
She tries to remind herself to feel jealous. In some fashion betrayed. That’s how she felt traveling all this way to retrieve the man who would share Burr’s attention. She has tried not to get close. She has tried. She kept her mouth shut as long as she could, kept her distance even when riding alongside someone. But her loneliness—an emptiness that aches like a pulled tooth—is a lifelong disability. And when the bat nearly took York, she felt like it was taking him from her.
They hoist their saddlebags. They sling rifles over their shoulders. Pans clank from their packs and ammunition chimes in their pockets. Gawea eyes up the campsite one last time, a place that felt briefly like home to all of them, before hiking away, following the river, feeling a barb of guilt as she once more leads them closer and closer to a destination they may regret. Lewis, she knows, will be protected by Burr. But what will become of the others?
*
Many things have changed since Lewis brought Clark back from the brink. Including the connection between the two of them. Their eyes often meet, and when they do, he feels a rippling in the air between them, like some electrical charge. When she departs the camp to hunt, he worries for her in a way he never did before, his chest constricting. It is almost as if, with so much of him inside her, she has become an extension of him, a third arm, a second head, her heart beating in time with his, so that they seem allied on a cellular level. “What’s happening to you?” she asks him one night, and he says, “I’m trying to understand the same.”
By the end of each day Lewis’s body feels languid but buzzy. He thinks often of his tin, aches for it, but no longer needs a dose of powder to quicken a connection, speed his tongue and hand. His mind, once walled in, is now free to chase paths never considered.
He packed the journal—mottled calfskin cover, yellowed onionskin pages—to document. He has spent so much of his life clapped away in the museum, reading other people’s words, studying and pinning and labeling the world as if it were a still life. By agreeing to leave, he agreed to activity. He left behind stillness for movement, engagement. If this is a new world, then who better to serve as its chronicler than he, the custodian of the old?
In the beginning, every entry seemed some variation of this: Woke before dawn, rode hard through the day, made it to X location, small argument broke out over lost provisions, no water, everything dead. At first he felt a failure and the world a failure too, everything a skeleton of what once was.
Then things changed. Now that there is water, now that he has risen from near death, now that he has sweated and shivered off his need for the tin, his mind hastens, faster and faster every day, a progression, like an avalanche of sand. He feels he is expanding, along with the world, both of them surprisingly, gloriously alive. Their purpose in exploring the country grows more and more wrapped up in his self-discovery, as if he were America, the next America, their geographies twinned. He scribbles down thoughts like these, along with a short record of their days and entries about whatever plants, animals, and insects he can observe.
“What are you writing?” York says.
“Nothing.”
He leans closer. “The corpse of discovery? What’s that?”
“The corps of discovery, you idiot. That’s us.” Lewis hunches protectively over the book until York shrugs and leaves him.