The Expeditions by Karl Iagnemma Read Free Book Online Page B

my decision, you are not obliged to join me on the expedition!”
    “I am the sole recipient of all appropriations. Without my presence you will not be paid.” Mr. Brush smiled impassively. “If you had arranged your affairs more carefully, we would be negotiating with this woman’s husband. We would not be involved in this gander pull.”
    The men stared at each other with expressions of polite distaste. Susette Morel strained toward the pair, fists clenched in her lap.
    “I am prepared to leave in two days’ time. Myself, this fine woman as our guide, and young Elisha Stone as an assistant.” Tiffin turned to the boy. “Yes?”
    Heat surged to Elisha’s face. He nodded once.
    Mr. Brush shook his head as the smile faded from his lips. For a moment he looked old and tired, his eyelids heavy and slack. To Tiffin he said, “You would have been better served staying in Detroit, waiting for your imaginary guide to appear. You seem ill-suited for practical work.”
    Outside a musket cracked and echoed, followed by a distant cheer. Supper at the fort. Susette Morel looked from Mr. Brush to Professor Tiffin to Elisha. She seemed as though she might curse the men or burst into tears.
    She said, “Merci beaucoup, thank you very much,” then rushed from the parlor.
             
    He spent the next morning pacing along the straits west of town, then walked a roundabout path back to his hotel room and stripped off his clothes and lay on the bed, his thoughts adrift among images of Susette Morel. Her hair was liquid black, her cheekbones smooth planes. Her skin was suntanned but freckled, a mixture of Native and French, but when she spoke she was neither Native nor French, nor American.
    Elisha could not decide if she was beautiful. It was her foreignness that confused him, her accent and strange clothes. As though the idea of beauty was being described to him anew. The boy trailed a hand down his chest, tried to will himself toward sleep. After a while he rose and scrubbed his face with cold water, then dressed and took up his hat.
    He stepped into the mercantile and Hudson’s Bay Company post and Indian curiosity shop, scanning the few female faces, then hiked eastward toward the fort. The picket gate was open and a group of soldiers were tossing quoits beside the blockhouse. Inside, Native men sat in a ring outside the Indian Agency, conversing in low tones. Elisha walked a circuit of the grounds, stepped inside the sutler’s and hospital. Susette Morel was nowhere to be seen.
    On a whim he peered into the Catholic church. A service was in progress. A handsome priest with a shock of black hair stood before an assembly of white women and soldiers and a single, somber Chippewa. “‘I am the living bread which came down from heaven,’” the priest said, “‘and if any man eat this bread he shall live forever.’” His English was marked by a German accent. “‘Except ye eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.’” The priest repeated the scripture in halting Chippewa and the Native nodded silently. Elisha wondered what the man might make of such a lesson.
    He spied the woman at the edge of the Native encampment. She was sitting outside a small log shanty, mending a fishing seine that was draped around her like lace skirts. The shanty’s window was hung with oiled parchment, its door propped open to reveal a table and pair of chairs, a stained pallet on the floor. A gray chemise hung like a ghost on the wall. Beside it was a carved wooden crucifix.
    The sight startled Elisha. The cabin was no better than a Native lodge, with its bark walls and dirt floor and smoke hole hacked in the roof. The Chippewa blood dominating the white, he figured. He ventured a few paces forward then took out his notebook and pencil. He sketched the woman’s face in profile, her forehead and taut lips and long, Roman nose. She was beautiful—of course she was beautiful. A beautiful woman living