Make Me a City Page 2

  Mr. Kinzie had risen late. Eulalie watched him cross the room, a high, winding man with pointy whiskers and glittering eyes like boiled candy drops. His skin was the color of tobacco and he had long bent fingers, only the tips of which he used to pick things up. He paused to eye the contents of the cabinet, ran a finger over the surface of the copper kettle and then approached the dining table that fronted the window. She became aware of a mighty rich and, to her young senses, unpleasant smell. The house had plenty of odors, safe scents that drifted through from the bakehouse and the timber store at the back to mix with the cedar-scented soap her grandmother believed could be used to clean everything. Those familiar smells were now overwhelmed by the perfume worn by Mr. Kinzie, a kind of cologne that made Eulalie think of bitter oranges and the bite of salt and the flash of lightning in the sky. It made her eyes water.

  Mr. Kinzie sat down at the dining table and Susannah, Eulalie’s mother, put a plate of porridge in front of him, with maple sap to the side.

  The porridge was too cold. Where was the coffee? Where was the bread? Were there no ham fixings for a visitor? Not even no eggs? What kind of inn was this? And what is your name, maid, he wanted to know, and where is your husband?

  Susannah, who was heating up coffee from the grains, told him there would be no bread until they baked later in the day, that she had seen no sign hanging at the door to advertise an inn, and that it was no business of his to know where her husband might be. (Jean Jacques Pelletier had, in fact, traveled to Peoria with Susannah’s brother—also, confusingly, called Jean Jacques—where the two of them would, no doubt, be on a drunken spree.) She was no maid, she added, but the daughter of Mr. Pointe de Sable, by whom he had been made welcome.

  That brisk speech caused Mr. Kinzie to change his attitude. He now behaved with lick-spittle civility. He was charmed to make her acquaintance, he said, touching his hat and smoothing his mustache. And he asked her to forgive him for being in a pucker, but he never slept well in a strange bed—especially, he added, when he had to sleep alone. No, no, she should not suspicion him because of that remark, for it was made with an honest heart. He explained that he had lost his wife but recently in distressing circumstances, and it was “exceedingly irksome to discover the blessed realm of sleep.” It was a habit of his, apparently, to use highfalutin phrases in an attempt to impress.

  And it is to her credit that Susannah did not fall, hook, line and sinker, for such bunkum. She was right to be skeptical of his sentimental yarn about a deceased wife. History records the marital affairs of Mr. Kinzie with accuracy, and somewhat differently. At the time of this visit to Echicagou, he was thirty-seven years of age, and recently married for the second time. His first wife, Margaret, together with their three children, had deserted him. He had married his second wife over two years previous, on January 23, 1798. She was expecting their first child.

  Mr. Kinzie’s tongue continued to wag. He told Susannah tall tales about his adventures, described the glamorous life to be lived in far-off Quebec and Detroit, and even managed to make St. Joseph sound like a rip-snorting place. Why was a beautiful woman wasting her youth in this backwater? “Trust me. I’ve seen more of life than you. The world is bigger than you think. Even if you does choose to stay here,” he told her, “I can make life better for you, if you cop my meaning.”

  Eulalie did not know what he meant by that, but she did know what she thought of him. She stepped out of her corner, marched forward and stared direct at Mr. Kinzie. She pointed one finger at him and, for the first time in her four years on earth, there emerged from her mouth a word.

  “Snag!” yelled Eulalie. “Snag!”

  Mr. Kinzie jumped back in his chair, knocking his porridge plate off the table. It shattered on the floor.

  “Snag, snag, snag!” Eulalie shouted three more times, before stepping outside. She did not run (or so her mother claimed later), as most children would have done. She walked, tresses in place, smoothing her skirt, a proper little lady. Stopping at the open window to look back inside, she felt herself enveloped in a maternal embrace.

  Together, they watched Mr. Kinzie finish his coffee. That seemed to calm him down. He stuck his forefinger into the pot of maple sap and twirled it around, before licking off the juice. Doubtless, he found it awful sweet. But he did not notice how the sap had gotten trapped in his mustache. As it dried, the hairs began to curl up at the ends, stuck together, ridiculously erect. He pushed back his chair, stood up and released a long, loud fart.

  Nobody could find an explanation for why Eulalie had broken into speech for the first time. Pointe de Sable, though, guessed where the word must have come from. My Euladie (as he fondly called Eulalie) would have heard it used when she accompanied him on a recent river journey. In those days, “snag” was often shouted by the lookout on a boat to alert the pilot to the menace of driftwood hidden in the channels and shallows ahead. With hindsight, we can appreciate that this little girl had foreseen the threat represented by this unwelcome guest, this dangerous piece of human driftwood, if you will. Twelve years on, that diminutive word would be used again by sixteen-year-old Eulalie as another warning of danger. But on that occasion, as we shall hear in due course, the circumstances would be infinitely more terrifying than those that prevailed at breakfast on the first morning of Mr. Kinzie’s visit.

  * * *

  That same afternoon, Eulalie was in the kitchen standing on a stool, helping her mother mix flour for griddlecakes, when Mr. Kinzie returned to the house. She heard a curious thump on the porch followed by a rooting of hogs. His nailed boots mounted the steps. He was in good spirits, whistling a tune that was popular at the time: “Hail Columbia, happy land! Hail ye heroes, heav’n borne band…” Eulalie slid off her stool and took up a position by the door to the keeping room. Gray Curls and Lalime—or Uncle Jean, as she knew him—were seated in the easy chairs surrounding the fireplace.

  Unknown to Eulalie, Gray Curls and Uncle Jean were engaged in a heated conversation because Mr. Lalime had finally revealed the true purpose behind their visit. He had brought Mr. Kinzie to Echicagou, he said, at the request of a powerful trader in St. Joseph called Mr. Burnet. Mr. Burnet had instructed Mr. Kinzie to purchase Pointe de Sable’s estate, to include his mansion and its contents, his land, his outbuildings, his livestock and his trading store. Pointe de Sable, taken aback by the news, had given an immediate, unambiguous response. He would sell nothing to nobody. It had long been his desire, as his friend Lalime knew very well, that everything he owned should one day be inherited by his grandson Wabaunsee.

  Lalime told Pointe de Sable he might have no choice. “If you refuse,” he said, “they’ll use the law.”

  “And what be those laws in particular you talkin’? That a man don’t have the right to live on the land he cleared?”

  “Not when an American wants that land. When an American uses the law against someone like you”—Lalime shrugged—“the law goes down on its knee and curtseys. That’s the fact, no matter the way it’s done. You’ll suddenly find the law says it’s not allowed for gens de couleurs libres to own property in Echicagou, even though it did not say that yesterday. Or they’ll prove it was never your land in the first place.”

  Lalime reminded Pointe de Sable of the infamous agreement reached at Greenville in 1795 when the Potawatomies were hoodwinked into ceding six square miles of land at the Echicagou Portage to the United States.

  “But Greenville don’t mean nothin’ to the Potawat’mies,” exclaimed Pointe de Sable. “They never gone done buyin’ or sellin’ land ’cause they believe all the land everywhere, it belong to the Great Spirit.”

  Lalime agreed, but said it made no difference. Powerful people in St. Joseph wanted his land and buildings, and they would stop at nothing to get them. “I think you should accept what is inevitable,” said Lalime, “and negotiate the best price you can. I know these people. If you don’t agree, they’ll use force.”

  Despite this warning, Pointe de Sable refu
sed to have any dealings with them. Instead, he made a plan. As he puts it in his journal: “I tell Lalime I shall rip misself to St Josefs on Ladie Strafford for to find an attrney while he be keepin Kinzie man busie, so he dont suspectin nuthin. Let him start makin an account of everthing, noting it all down, from evry plate in the kitchn to the last bushel of grain in the storehouse.”

  Mr. Kinzie made his entrance just as this conversation came to a close. He sailed past them to retrieve the rocker off the porch, returned with it, sat down in front of the fireplace, and, as though he were quite alone in the privacy of his own chamber, he removed his boots and socks, and began to wiggle his toes.

  Pointe de Sable made a point of treating his guest with civility. He brought Mr. Kinzie a glass of whiskey and asked about his walk around the estate. The inquiry elicited no more than a nod of the head. Rocking back and forth, Mr. Kinzie took out his tobacco pouch, dipped a wad in his cheek and chewed, seemingly lost in his own world. From time to time he smiled, as if at some private joke.

  For a few moments more, not a word was spoken. The windows were open. There was a warm, treacly scent to the air, tinged by the aroma of baking bread. From the kitchen came the sound of more dough being beaten. The only strangeness was the snuffling of the hogs who, unknown to Pointe de Sable, Lalime or little Eulalie, were fighting over the remains of the dead “cyotie cat” Mr. Kinzie had deposited on the steps outside.

  At last, their visitor broke his silence. Gesturing toward the copper necklace Pointe de Sable was in the habit of wearing, he turned to Mr. Lalime. “What does it mean, Jean,” he said, “that your friend wears Indjun jewelry?”

  Lalime looked embarrassed. Pointe de Sable, though, maintained his equanimity and even managed a smile. “The same like it always means,” he said. “I been wearin’ this necklace since I first come to Echicagou, Mr. Kinzie.” He explained that it was a gift he had been given by a Potawatomie chief when he arrived to establish a homestead. He said no more than that, doubtless because he knew Mr. Kinzie would have mocked him were he to claim the necklace had special powers that derived from a Potawatomie legend about a monster called Nambi-Za, who ruled the nether regions of Lake Michigan.

  “That one’s wearin’ jewelry as well,” observed Mr. Kinzie, pointing toward the painting of Lady Strafford’s Vision that hung above the French cabinet.

  Pointe de Sable agreed that indeed she was. Perhaps in an attempt to allay any suspicions on the part of Mr. Kinzie regarding his newly hatched plan to seek urgent legal advice in St. Joseph, he went on to speak about the picture’s meaning and provenance. Truly, this was one of the most exquisite paintings it had ever been his privilege to behold. As Mr. Kinzie would observe, both Lady Strafford and her horse were depicted with such skill, they might almost be alive. Note the horse’s posture, and the beads of sweat on its flank. See how strands of hair escaped from Lady Strafford’s earlock curl, how the flush on her cheeks changed with the light. And if Mr. Kinzie would care to take a walk around the room, he would find her eyes seemed to follow him everywhere, never once averting their gaze.

  “What a hussy!” growled Kinzie, not shifting from the rocker.

  Pointe de Sable was not put off his stride. As always when talking about Lady Strafford’s Vision, he got carried away. “Look closely, Mr. Kinzie,” he continued. “Is not everything authentic? Do you not feel the delicate mist in the air? Does it not seem possible to stroke with your own hands the velvet of Lady Strafford’s crimson gown and the flimsy white lace at the cuffs?”

  “I’d settle for stroking what lies underneath,” said Mr. Kinzie, spitting on the puncheon floor. “You too, eh Jean?”

  Mr. Lalime pretended to be examining his hands.

  Pointe de Sable described the other features of the painting that delighted him, the mansion in the background with its Corinthian colonnades: the sweeping lawns and flower beds in bloom, the ornamental lake, and the small oval building in the foreground. Pointe de Sable believed this to be an oracle.

  “And what does she ask the oracle?” Kinzie inquired.

  Pointe de Sable told Mr. Kinzie he did not know.

  His journal, though, explains otherwise. There, we learn that he considered it no accident that Lady Strafford had posed for the painting in the midst of her estate, surrounded by her possessions. She was a worried lady. These were troubled times, and she wanted to find out from the oracle what would happen to her property, to her family and to herself.

  “This the first picture I purchas’d,” said Pointe de Sable, “from Governor Sinclair at Michilmackinac. That gentlem’n brung it cross the seas from England. The painter that gone done it, he wern’t no greenhorn.”

  Had Mr. Kinzie taken note of the signature at the bottom of that canvas, and mentioned it to the more refined folk in St. Joseph, he might have figured the painting was worth a great deal more than a few shiners. But he did not, so he remained ignorant of the fact that Lady Strafford’s Vision was executed by George Stubbs, one of the eighteenth century’s most celebrated English painters.

  “You oughtta be selling more of this firewater,” said Kinzie. He leaned forward, clearing his throat with a mix of a hem and a cough, and spat out a wad of masticated tobacco (which “gone done slidin like a brown slug cross the polshed timbrs”). “That’s your problem. You don’t understan’ the mind of the Indjun. You ain’t serious about bringing them grog.”

  Pointe de Sable was about to speak out, about to tell Mr. Kinzie he did not run a low-down drinking den. He was about to speechify along the lines that if you make the Potawatomies drunken on whiskey today, how they gonna pick up a hoe tomorrow? And if they don’t pick up them hoes, how they gonna pay for the whiskey? He was about to punch Mr. Kinzie with those points. But he never got to do it because there was a sudden rumpus, a high-pitched whooping, a burst of color, a flash of steel, a degree of youthful rowdiness the Pointe de Sable homestead had likely never seen before. All eyes turned to the open doorway. There stood six-year-old Wabaunsee, ululating, his eyes in a trance, painted for war like a Potawatomie brave. His slight back was arched as he thrust forward first one stamping foot, and then the other. From the corner of the room, Eulalie had a clear view of her cousin. Lines of red paint crossed his cheeks and chest. He had tied his hair into a scalp lock and planted it with feathers. In his hands he was clutching what looked like a real tomahawk. She had no idea where that had come from, but she did not trust him with it. Her cousin could be plenty wild and dangerous, even without a weapon.

  Mr. Kinzie leaped out of his chair, coughing out the tobacco in his cheek. Uncle Jean began to sweat profusely. Only Gray Curls stayed calm. He stood up and raised a hand. Wabaunsee was advancing, waving his tomahawk this way and that. “I’ll hang your scalp,” he screamed at Mr. Kinzie, “from my belt.”

  Eulalie was scared. She feared he might do it, and though not certain it would be wrong, given the identity of Wabaunsee’s proposed victim, she thought it likely would be. Her cousin had never attacked her with a blade, but she had often been on the receiving end of his temper and she knew what that felt like. So it did not seem inconceivable to her four-year-old self that he might take on a bad grown-up and win.

  At this point, though, Gray Curls intervened. He seized hold of the tomahawk in Wabaunsee’s hand and told him to wait outside.

  “That savagerous little animal,” hissed Mr. Kinzie. “I will make him pay.”

  “You have children?” asked Gray Curls. His voice sounded deep and soft as the big feather bed in his room, where Eulalie would go to hide beneath the covers when she wanted to be alone. “Because if you do, you know how deep they feelin’ sometimes, even they not able to put the feelins into words.”

  Eulalie could feel her grandfather’s eyes on her.

  “And what kinda man is it, Mr. Kinzie,” continued Gray Curls, “that gits hisself huffed over a tabby cat?”

  Mr. Kinzie swapped a new wad of tobacco from one cheek to the other. He talked about a man in St. Joseph, ab
out buying land and buying buildings, about Gray Curls being allowed as a “favor that ain’t deserved” to take his paintings with him when he left Echicagou, like the one of “that hussy” on the wall.

  “And you and your friends,” asked Gray Curls, “where you expectin’ us to go?”

  Mr. Kinzie twitched his shoulders. “It’s a big country, ain’t it?”

  Eulalie did not know what all the talk meant, but it frightened her. She did not want to go anywhere. She certainly did not want to leave her home. And whereas before she merely disliked her cousin, now she hated him. Because it was obvious to her that none of this would be happening if it wasn’t for Wabaunsee and his “cyotie cat.”

  In view of what will happen in the future, perhaps the fractious relationship between Eulalie and Wabaunsee as children should be placed in a broader context. Wabaunsee was a bully, though perhaps no more so than any other boy of that age. He would play tricks on Eulalie, pull her hair, trip her up and encourage his “cyotie cat” to hiss at her. No wonder, then, that she kept her distance from him. But perhaps, too, she resented what she had doubtless already intuited, though she was too young to understand why: Wabaunsee was her grandfather’s favorite.