Climb the Wind: A Journey Into Another Past Read online

  Lemuel paid the man, picked up his bags, and continued down Second Street toward Pennsylvania Avenue and the Baltimore and Ohio station. He had thought, vaguely, of going home, but Ely Parker had suggested that he go west and Lemuel had readily agreed. Commissioner Ely Samuel Parker, apart from the bond they had in common, had been his comrade, his sponsor, and his commanding officer. But Lemuel had grasped at the notion of going to St. Louis because he would have work there and he did not know where else to go. He could not go home; the home he remembered no longer existed. The Rowlands would be relieved to get his most recent letter telling them that he was not coming home after all.

  In front of the station, a few carriages waited. The trees that had been torn down from around the station during the war had still not been replaced. Lemuel made his way inside and threaded his way through the crowd to the doors on the other side of the station. Grigory Rubalev was supposed to meet him. Lemuel had seen him only once in Washington, but the Russian was an easy man to spot. He wondered again why Ely Parker had suggested that he travel with Rubalev, and what the commissioner wanted from him.

  “I might need you out West, Poyeshao,” Ely Parker had told him during their last meeting in the commissioner’s office. “Poyeshao”—only Ely Parker called Lemuel by that childhood name, although he had abandoned his own childhood name, Hasanoanda, long ago. Poyeshao and Hasanoanda—they had done well for two Seneca boys, better than many whites would have expected them to do. Parker’s example had inspired Lemuel, who had admired the older man enough to follow him into the ranks of the army and onto the staff of General Ulysses S. Grant.

  Now Grant was president, and Ely Parker had been appointed commissioner of Indian Affairs. The honor of that appointment had given him an office that oversaw some of the most corrupt men in Washington, as well as an opportunity to make more enemies among those who would resist Parker’s efforts to clean things up.

  “I may not care to stay in St. Louis for too long,” Lemuel said.

  “I’m not your commanding officer now,” Parker muttered. “If you don’t stay there, you’re free to go elsewhere. All I ask is that, if you see or hear anything that might be of interest to me, you pass it along.” Lemuel sensed what the commissioner had not said: Whatever happens, whatever you discover, I know that I can trust you.

  Lemuel nodded. “I’ll probably stay for a year, at least.” He doubted that he would learn much in St. Louis, certainly nothing about any unrest among the Indians of the northern Plains. Even after a few months in one Sioux camp, he had picked up nothing except some knowledge of the Lakota language and customs and the distinct impression that he was being told as little as possible. He had finally left, writing a report of his observations for Parker before traveling east to his home, not knowing then how unwelcome he would be there.

  “Grigory Rubalev is also traveling to St. Louis,” Parker continued. “I can arrange for you to travel together. It would ease the tedium of the trip.”

  Lemuel, feeling that he had no reason to object to this, had agreed. But what did the commissioner want? Why was he to travel with Grigory Rubalev? An adventurer, some called Rubalev, while others murmured that he must be a spy for the tsar, sent to Washington on some secret mission. Lemuel had found out that the Russian had been seen often in Washington during the war to preserve the Union, appearing and then dropping from sight for months at a time, and suspected that he was a profiteer. He had seen Rubalev leave Parker’s office one time, in the midst of a small group of men; the Russian had towered over all of them.

  He was to travel to Louisville in Kentucky, then go on to St. Louis from there. Rubalev was to meet someone in Louisville, where they would rest and recover from the first part of the journey. Lemuel thought of the hours and days ahead, sitting on a hard wooden seat as the train bumped and bounced him west. Maybe he should not have agreed so readily to travel with Rubalev.

  Passengers were already boarding the Baltimore and Ohio; perhaps the train would leave on time after all. He walked under the overhang, looking for Rubalev. The Russian, Parker had told him, would have Lemuel’s ticket as well as his own. Lemuel had objected at that point. He was not so poor that he could not purchase his own passage, and did not like the notion of accepting a stranger’s largesse.

  “Rubalev asked to make the arrangements,” Parker had replied. “He wants it to be easier for you to talk, and he also prefers to travel in as much comfort as possible with you.”

  Comfort, on a train? The man had set himself a difficult task.

  “Mr. Rowland?”

  Lemuel looked up. Grigory Rubalev stood on a step leading into one car. A conductor was just below him. “Mr. Rowland?” Rubalev said again. The Russian wore no hat. His blond hair fell over his shoulders, and his eyes were as dark as Lemuel’s.

  “Yes, I’m Rowland.”

  “I thought that it was you. I saw you one time, from a distance.” Lemuel was surprised that the man remembered such a brief glimpse. “Please come inside.” The Russian’s English held only a trace of an accent.

  Lemuel followed Rubalev into the car. The seats were upholstered and larger than he had expected, the car decorated with red curtains, brass fittings, and wood inlay, and he saw only three other passengers, all men, all at the other end of the car. “It is one of the new cars,” Rubalev said. “There are not many of them.” He glanced at Lemuel.”This Pullman car, I mean. We will be able to sleep without having to sit up.” He sat down on one of the seats near the front of the car.

  Lemuel set down his bags and seated himself across from the other man. The Russian had two large leather valises stowed under his seat; a third, smaller leather bag sat next to him. “Perhaps you would like to go to the smoking car, have a drink,” Rubalev said.

  “I don’t drink.” Lemuel thought of the father he barely remembered, who had tried to follow the ways of the Iroquois prophet Handsome Lake by giving up whiskey, and who had failed. Drink had ruined too many of his people.

  “And I suppose that you do not play cards.”

  “No, I do not.”

  “It is nothing.” The Russian waved an arm. “It might have been more interesting if you played cards, but—” He shrugged.

  “I am grateful for the chance to travel in some comfort,” Lemuel said.

  “It was Donehogawa who made the request. He proposed that I travel with you. I was happy to oblige.”

  Lemuel looked away for a moment. Donehogawa, the Russian had called Ely Parker—Donehogawa, the Keeper of the Western Door. Almost no one called the commissioner by the Seneca chief’s name given to him in adulthood; Lemuel was one of the few who did. The commissioner did not like to remind the whites around him of his origins.

  “I tire of Washington,” Rubalev said. “I tire of the East. I have gone from New Archangel to San Francisco to the Plains and Missouri, and to Cincinnati and to Washington, and back and forth, and now—” He closed his eyes for a moment and rubbed his forehead. “Now it is time to go back again.”

  “To Alaska?” Lemuel asked.

  “Alaska is no longer a Russian colony, Mr. Rowland. It is an American colony now.” A distant look came into Rubalev’s dark eyes. “And you are going to St. Louis. Commissioner Parker says that you are to work there.”

  “That is my hope. I have a letter of introduction from General—from President Grant. There’s work for engineers on the Mississippi levees. Much of the damage the war inflicted there still hasn’t been repaired.”

  “I wish you well, then. If you seek something else, I am certain there will be other opportunities.”

  Not as many, Lemuel thought, as there might have been had he been a white man. Donehogawa had found work on the levees, before the War Between the States, but only because engineers had been so badly needed along the capricious, everchanging river.

  Rubalev’s eyes narrowed slightly. The Russian seemed to be studying him. What was Donehogawa’s interest in this man? Lemuel thought then of the times when he had seen
a distant look in Ely Parker’s eyes, a keen and observant look, the look of a hunter stalking his game. Rubalev had the same look.

  Other passengers passed them along the aisle, a gray-haired man in a black suit, a woman and child in matching pink ruffled dresses. “You have known Donehogawa for some time,” Rubalev murmured.

  “Since the war,” Lemuel said. “He was an example to me, to several of us—the Seneca boy who worked in an army stable, who learned how to read and write and speak English as well as any white man.” He spoke carefully and precisely, as he had trained himself to do. White men could afford to be informal or careless in their speech; he could not. “He wanted to be a lawyer once—did he ever tell you about that?”

  Rubalev shook his head.

  “He worked in a law office for three years. Then he was told that no Indian could be admitted to the bar. So he became an engineer instead. I followed that path because Donehogawa showed that it was possible. He knew General Grant in Illinois, before the war. When he came back to New York, to Tonawanda, he was looking for Iroquois who would fight for the Union, and I volunteered.”

  “I understand that the Union forces were not overly eager to enlist you. The commissioner did tell me that.”

  Lemuel kept his face still. “The New York Volunteers had no place for us. General Grant had to go to some trouble to get us ordered to his staff. We joined him just before Vicksburg.”

  “Fools.” The Russian shook his head. “Fools and idiots!” The vehemence with which he expressed his sympathy surprised Lemuel. Would a profiteer and a spy have such feelings? His suspicions that Rubalev might be just another of the corrupt vultures circling Ely Parker, hoping for some way to take advantage of the Indian Affairs commissioner, faded.

  The train began to move. It creaked and shook as Lemuel rested against the back of his seat.

  Soon after the conductor came through to check their tickets, a porter arrived to make up their beds. Their seats were transformed into berths to hold mattresses. Rubalev took the upper berth, groaning a bit as he settled his tall form onto the shorter bed. By the time Lemuel had stretched out on the lower berth, the Russian’s breathing was deep and even.

  The porter had closed off their compartment from the aisle with a curtain. Lemuel lay in the stuffy, hot darkness, unable to sleep, then got up to make his way along the aisle to the washroom at the other end of the car. After relieving himself in the facility jutting from one wall, he washed his hands in the tin basin and went back to his compartment. Rubalev started from his sleep as Lemuel opened the curtain, stared at him for a moment, then stretched out again.

  The man, he saw, could fall asleep quickly and yet be awake in an instant. Lemuel had been able to do that during the war, but had lost the skill during his civilian life. He lay down again, shifting himself on the hard bed. He had slept on rocky ground and in wet mud during the war; this bed signified ease and comfort in comparison.

  “‘If you decide to come back East,” Ely Parker had told him in his office, “then let me know what you’ve heard and seen. Information is always useful.”

  “You sound as though you want a spy,” Lemuel had replied. “But we’re no longer at war.” Ely Parker had smiled at that. “I’ll write to you as soon as I get to St. Louis.”

  “There’s something else.” The commissioner frowned. “When you write to me, do it in our old cipher, and send the letters to this address.” Parker pushed a piece of paper with an unfamiliar name and a New York address across his desk. Lemuel managed to conceal his surprise at the request. They had used the cipher, based on their own Seneca tongue and in a script Parker had devised, to pass messages to each other during the war, knowing that any Confederate who might intercept them would not be able to read them. Perhaps Parker, surrounded by people who resented his efforts to put an end to the corruption in his office, was simply being cautious, but Lemuel had wondered. This seemed an excess of caution, the request of a man suspicious of everyone, or fearful of what others might uncover.

  And Donehogawa had wanted him to travel with this Russian who was sleeping so soundly above him now. Did the commissioner want him to report on Rubalev, to spy on him?

  The bed shuddered and bounced under him as the train moved along the tracks. This bed would not make for an easy rest, but it was better than trying to sleep upright. For a while after the war, he had feared sleep, but the dreams of war, the wails of the besieged in Vicksburg, the flames raging through Richmond, the screams of men torn apart by cannon, had not come to him in some time. Dreams were sent to men and women to guide them, so his people had always believed. Now he would welcome a dreamless sleep in which the spirits remained silent.

  He and Donehogawa had served together on the staff of General Grant. Despite the need for engineers, Grant had fought hard to get them both orders to join him. But they had proven themselves, with Donehogawa becoming Colonel Ely S. Parker and Lemuel breveted to the rank of major. Lemuel had believed that the tolerance shown toward them by the whites among whom they served would last only as long as the war did, and he had not stayed in their society afterward in order to test his suspicions.

  Now, as commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Donehogawa was in a position to help other Indians; or so he still hoped. He had brought Lemuel to Washington, telling him of his plan to form a board to keep watch over the bureau, but his efforts to put Lemuel and other Indians on that board had failed. Lemuel had expected such a result, while still hoping that he might be wrong. He had not come to Washington with any faith that his old comrade could change things. He had come there knowing that he had made a mistake by going home earlier and thinking that he could pick up the threads of his old life.

  His chest contracted as he remembered how the hills around Tonawanda had looked in autumn, the deep green of the pines amid the changing leaves of red, yellow, and orange. Sometimes the surface of a lake near those lands would grow so still that he could see the hills mirrored clearly in the water. He would imagine then that below the water, there was an upside-down land, where everything mirrored this world yet did not happen in quite the same way.

  In the upside-down land that he envisioned, men would hunt by calling out to the deer instead of silently tracking them. There, the Three Sisters of corn, squash, and beans began as fully grown plants before shrinking into the ground. People grew younger as they aged, and died as babies in the arms of their mothers. When the people of the False Face Society donned their masks, instead of going to those who were ailing, they went instead to the houses of the hale and healthy to burn coals and to chant. The white people lived in longhouses, and followed his peoples’ ways.

  Lemuel had not thought of his imagined upside-down land in years. He had been a boy when he first imagined the land under the lake. Not long after that, his mother had died and he had soon lost his father to drink. The Rowlands had taken him in and sent him to school with their youngest son. By then, he had learned of Donehogawa, the man the whites called Ely Parker, the Iroquois who could read and write in English and knew law and engineering, and he had decided that he wanted to be like him.

  The Rowlands named him Lemuel, and he had tried to live in their world, but there were others who often reminded him that he was not really one of them. Even in the eyes of his foster family, he sometimes glimpsed doubts. In a bout of homesickness, torn by the realization that he would always be an outsider in their world, he ran away from the Rowland farm and made his way back to the lake he remembered, longing for his old home, but the longhouses were poorer and shabbier than he saw them in memory, food was hard to come by, and his people were still struggling to keep their land from being taken by the whites.

  “There is no place for you here,” one of his cousins had told him, and Lemuel had returned to the Rowlands and their farm. Gideon Rowland had pleaded with his father to take Lemuel back.

  Once, while he and Gideon were sitting by a pond, Lemuel had conjured up the upside-down land in words. The other boy had not l
aughed at him, and after that they had whiled away many pleasant hours in telling stories about the people who lived there. Gideon was his friend, and the Rowlands had finally come to care for him in their quiet way. They had done what they could for him even when others made their lives harder because of him. He could imagine himself, at times, to be their true son.

  Gideon had left their home first, during the frenzy of volunteering at the war’s beginning. The two of them had been full of fighting words then, talking of courage and the Union and a quick end to the war. By the time Lemuel had won a place for himself in the Union forces, with the help of Ely Parker, richer men were paying for poorer men to take their places in the ranks. He did not have the money to pay for another to do his fighting, but would have enlisted even if he had. As a man who had fought to preserve the Union, he might finally win acceptance among the whites.

  After the war, when he had feared sleep and the dreams it would bring, sleep would come upon him even against his will. Now he often could not sleep, however much he longed for rest. The elusive, dimly seen dreams that had vanished when he woke, trembling and damp with sweat and hearing still the cries of dying men, had been replaced with memories from which there was no escape.

  Mary Rowland had stood in the doorway of her house, staring past him with her gray eyes, refusing to speak, to cry, to make any sign of welcome. Inside, Ezekiel Rowland sat with a younger man and woman Lemuel did not know.

  “My brother Benjamin,” Ezekiel said. Lemuel had never heard Mr. Rowland speak of a brother. “And his wife, Polly.” The brother had thin red veins in his nose; his wife had reddish hair done up in sausage-like curls and a pregnant woman’s bulging belly. “Come back to help us on the farm.” The couple had been given the room he and Gideon once shared.

  Lemuel had not stayed there long. He had seen the sharp look in Benjamin’s eyes that said, This farm will be mine some day, not yours.