Nick Gevers - Other Earths

“Then go to the locker. Open it and find his music, and bring it to me. But if you don’t find anything …I should rather you didn’t come back. I wouldn’t like to see your face come through that door and then be disappointed. If there’s something in there I must have, correspondence or suchlike, then you can have it sent to my bedside by one of the orderlies.”

My hand closed on the key. “I hope I’m not wrong about this, sir.”

“Me too,” George said softly. “Me too.”

“I won’t be long.”

I opened the curtain. The key was hard against my palm, digging into the flesh. Mr. Chamberlain was still going on, but no one seemed to be listening now. They had heard it all before.

Sailing to Egypt in the spring of 1798, General Bonaparte and his army passed within two miles of the English fleet, northeast of Malta in the middle of the night. What would have happened if Horatio Nelson had set a different course and had captured his enemy at sea?

Of course everything would have changed, instantly and for the better. Its revolution unchecked, France would have become a paradise on Earth, where free men and women raised their eyes from the dirt and stood up straight as if for the first time. Pigs would have learned to speak, donkeys to fly.

Colors would have been brighter, smells sweeter. The weather would improve. God would smile on France and all the French dominions. In June of 1815, gentle breezes would caress the empty fields of Waterloo. A system of high pressure would extend to the New World, and a midsummer hurricane would not rip apart the small, vulnerable French towns of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana.

It would not destroy the farmhouse of Fran¸ois and Marie Louise de Fontenelle in Pointe à la Hache, a sliver of land between the swamp and the Mississippi River. It would not orphan their children, Amelie and Lucien, and force them to abandon the only home they knew and ride north along the makeshift levees from which, years before, they had hailed the flotilla of barges carrying General Bonaparte to New Orleans, when he took up his duties there as governor.

Disconsolate, the two orphans would not have found refuge with an aunt and uncle on the Rue des Dryades in the capital of New France. They would not grow up sullen and resentful in the grand house of their relatives, treated like servants’ children. At age sixteen, Lucien would not steal his aunt’s jewels and run away. He would not join the crew of a flatboat heading north, past the indigo and sugar plantations, and then the cotton after that, and then the wilderness. Still shy of his seventeenth birthday, he would not come to rest in the territory of the Omahas, at Fort St. Jean on the west bank of the Missouri River, penniless, his money spent.

Two years later, he would not send the following letter:

“Ma Chere Soeur, my heart bleeds when I think of you still in the clutches of that madwoman and her nine-times-cuckolded husband. If there is anything that mars my current exultation it is that. But let me tell you what has happened here in this great country that is as fresh as if God made it yesterday—no, as if this is still the first morning of creation.

“I think of it that way even as I lie here on my deathbed, too weak almost to raise my pen.”

(In New Orleans, Amelie de Fontenelle would not wonder at the crude, small, unfamiliar printing on the envelope, the cherished hand inside. “Ah, is it true?” she would be spared from thinking.)

“My sister, it is true. I have received a sword’s thrust, but the wound has festered. Yet even so I would change nothing of that glorious afternoon when Colonel Bernadotte broke Jackson’s lines, unless it were to spare you unhappiness or to see my son Logan weaned from his mother’s breast, take his first steps. But like one of Captain Ney’s horse-soldiers at the top of the bluff, or like a Pawnee warrior with his coup stick in his hand, my thoughts have ridden far ahead of my story. “My dear, I beg you to forget your pride and not turn your heart away from my infant son. I assure you, his blood is better than our blood. His grandfather is Big Elk, great chief of the Omahas, and his mother is Bright Sun—Me-um-ban-ne—oh, I would like you to meet her so that you might cherish her as a sister for my sake. Let me explain to you the method of my courtship, for even after everything I can’t believe my luck or regret anything that has occurred. You must imagine me friendless and unhappy, hunting deer along the juncture where the Elkhorn meets the Platte. This was when the corn was small, and I came in through the fields of maize and beans. I left my horse and continued, finding the place deserted, or so I thought, because the tribe was hunting in the Sand Hills. I counted three-score lodges, which were mounds of raised earth, thatched with bluestem grass. I wandered among them. All their doors faced east, and all were blocked with an arrangement of dried sticks, so that the men could see if anyone had entered in their absence—all but one, thank God, and it the largest. I entered a low corridor in the earth and soon found myself in a dark space formed by a circle of wooden posts joined overhead by wooden rafters and a cage of willow wands. Light came from an opening in the grass roof, and I could see her sleeping on a raised platform like the princess in the story. Oh, she is so fair! It was in the afternoon, and the air was hot. I learned later she had hurt her foot, which was why she was sleeping in the middle of the day. She was not with the others in the fields, the old women and young children who kept the village while the tribe was hunting buffalo in the west. In this and everything I see the hand of Providence, for she was scarcely awake before we were man and wife, according to the simple ceremonies of her people. We scarcely had a word in common, but even so she begged me to stay, or else she begged me to leave before her mother returned—I would have pursued either course! But I was anxious to find the black-robe at the mission on Council Bluff and to prepare everything our sainted mother might have asked. And though my wife clung to me, and though she wept, I asked her to be patient, as I would come back the next morning with the priest.

“I wish I had never left her. But even in this tragedy I see Fortune’s hand. I would not have been able to prevent, by my presence, what occurred. That night the village was attacked by the vengeful and blood-thirsty Sioux, led by their chief and an American named Benjamin Burgess, also called ‘the lion of Missouri. ’ ‘The devil’ would have been a better name—Captain Ney had already told me about him, when I saw him at the fort. Burgess was a spy in Jackson’s pay. Always he was searching for a means to bring the tribes to warfare on both sides of the river, an excuse for the Americans to intercede. Life and property meant nothing to him. If he could steal away the favorite daughter of Big Elk while the camp was undefended …

“Once more I have charged ahead. That afternoon, when the shadows were longest, I reached the mission at Council Bluffs. I was looking for the black-robe, Father de Smet, whom I knew. But he had gone to baptize children in the Ponca villages along the valley of the Wolf River. Instead I found another, a Jesuit named Mylecraine.

“He has given me kindness, and with my wife he is tending to me now, and so I will describe him, a small man, even smaller than Governor Bonaparte when I saw him at the fort with Captain Ney. During the time I have known him, I have never seen him shave his beard, and yet his face is soft, his hands childlike and delicate. I say this to emphasize by contrast the courage he has shown. He is from Brittany, and he studied music before turning to God. Even now he takes his wooden flute and flageolets among the tribes, and I have seen the battle-scarred warriors of the Omaha sit round him in a circle, their faces soft with wonder and delight.