Then he remembered that the foot was no longer there. Awakening to that knowledge brought back an awful poignancy. As a young man he had keenly enjoyed dancing, and almost all of his genteel memories, the few he had, involved occasions when there had been dances. He thought now about the absence of the leg, and wondered what had been done with it. But he didn’t ask. He was sure that such a question would shock Lucy too much.
She, who had been watching him closely, leaned near, her chair creaking, and dabbed away tears that were coursing onto his temples. She realized that she had never before in her life seen a tear on his face.
A messenger came, bringing the compliments of Senator Breckenridge with a promise that he would come to visit in a few days. Lucy thanked him, and as it was too late for him to return home, went out to arrange bedding for him on the front porch.
“George,” she said on returning, “this place is so small. And so remote from everyplace. We shall have couriers and musicians camped all over the premises tonight There’s even a party of Indians hunkered off the porch, waiting to see you.”
“Are there now! What tribe, d’you know?”
“Several. I don’t know which.”
“Is Two Lives still here?”
“I didn’t see him.”
“In any case, say I should like to talk with them. Have them come up. And Dick Lovell, too.”
“Not tonight, no indeed. I forbid it. You have to sleep.”
“Aye, I reckon. But come morning, then. Say I would like to talk with them then. And the other musicians, too, them as stays the night.”
“Yes, my dear. I’ll tell them.”
There was silence for a moment and she stood looking down at him in the candlelight. He turned his head on the pillow, his eyes on her face. “‘My dear,’ is it? By heaven, Lucy, you’ve never called me that …” He settled back, and gazed at the ceiling. “Nor has anyone, I recollect, since Mother. Rest her soul. Well, it has a rare sound to my ears.” He blinked rapidly. He heard the chair creak as she sat down.
“Well, there is a reason. All you Clark boys, I’ll swear, you’re scarcely the kind to inspire endearments. A clan of blamed heroes, the lot of you. Two generals. Two captains. Two lieutenants.” She shook her head and smiled. “And only Jonathan and William ever had the good sense to settle down and marry. I’ll wager they hear sweet words now and then.”
“Aye,” he whispered. “But you know, Lucy, I’d have married, had things been a little different.”
“Mhm. Well, you should’ve. Ought to have this place full o’ your own youngsters.”
“Well, Lord knows you Clark girls made up for me in the breeding department. All four of you. As it should be. As fine-looking a covey of quails as ever I saw.”
He turned his head and saw her gazing at him with her head tilted and a wistful smile on her lined face. He was buoyed by this rare exchange of banter, and touched by the deep, familial affection it veiled. He reached for her hand and held it. “Y’know, Lucy, this country has done right well for itself, having the Clarks.”
She saw the wetness welling up in his eyes again, and bit the inside of her lip to keep from groaning with the richness of her emotions. It was a minute before she could speak.
“Well, listen now, George. You’ll be coming to Locust Grove to live with us, as soon as you can be moved …”
“Lucy, I cannot …”
“Hush now! You should have years ago, instead of coming to this God-forsaken place. That … that …” She glanced toward his truncated leg, despite herself. “… Y’d never ’a’ hurt yourself that way had you been with us. You must come, George. You’ll always have a carriage to take you in to Louisville. And people around who … who care for you …”
His hand squeezed feebly on hers. He was too weary to argue the point with her just now. He knew that she was right, that he would be even more helpless to sustain himself now than he had been. But it depressed him to realize it. His selection of this solitary place to live had been his last gesture of independence. In giving it up, he knew, he would become a mere ward in the fullest sense of the term. Locust Grove was a magnificent place, full of young nieces and nephews, a staff of thirty servants and workmen, a cheerful and busy place. William Croghan was an enterprising man. To visit there was always a pleasure. But to go there and move in as a dependent—why, it would be unthinkable.
While he lay thinking of these dreary matters, the musicians concluded their serenade, and soon they were moving about and talking low on the porch. The prevailing music outside now was that of crickets and frogs and a whippoorwill. Lucy was beginning to arch her back against weariness.
“Eh,” he said at last. “We will discuss it soon. Now, before you go to bed, Lucy, will you please do me the favor of bringing me a moderate portion of that Jamaica rum from the pantry?” She did not answer, and, looking to see her staring at him with an edge of reproach in her eyes, he added, wincing, “The pain it’s coming on fierce now, sister.”
“And you, who declined it when they were actually cutting.”
“True, Lucy. But there were people watching then. Be a kind lass, now. You might just fetch me the bottle, so I won’t have to trouble you for more in the night …”
Now there’s another thing to be considered, he thought when she was out of the room. Here I can have it whenever I please and no one’s to fret. But what fuss and cajolery there’ll be to have my daily bottle there in a house full of them who cares.
She did not bring in the bottle, but the glass she bore was, to his pleasant surprise, brimful. She put her arm under his head and raised him to help him sip it. For her sake, he drank it with a seemly delicacy instead of tossing it down. She lowered his head to the pillow and sat on the edge of the bed, looking at him with canny eyes, again with that thoughtful tilt to the head. Lying with hands folded on his chest and the warmth of the rum spreading through him, he studied her aspect, and finally said, “Now, then, sister. Out with it.”
“Oh, something you said. Tell me, George, as a hero: How much of bravery is just a matter of knowing you’re watched?”
He slowly worked his lips into a wry smile. He was delighted and intrigued by her question. “Why, I would reckon, sister,” he said with deliberation, “at least a half.” He was quiet for a minute, then he went on: “Don’t ever tell another soul. But why I had the musicians out there was because if I’d had to holler, their damn screechin’ and bangin’ would ha’ drowned it out. Heh, heh!”
And when she had kissed his forehead, blown out the candle, and left his bedroom to go and rest on the cot by the fireplace in the cabin’s main room, General George Rogers Clark lay pondering that wily question of hers, smiling at it between the onslaughts of pain.
It was true. There were endeavors he could remember which had succeeded simply because, having once launched them so boldly, he could not afford to be seen failing at them.
For the essential business of leading, he thought, is that you have to keep your people believing it can be done, even if your own reason concludes it’s impossible. That’s how I played it, from the very beginning, from the day I first went back East to persuade Governor Henry to let me do it …
PART TWO
1777–1780
2
CAROLINE COUNTY, VIRGINIA
November 1777
THEIR HORSES SNORTED STEAM INTO THE COLD, DRIZZLY AIR; hooves squished in the sodden ground of the meadow; saddles creaked. The two horses seemed to hang close together as if for comfort in the dankness, and now and then George’s left foot in its stirrup was pressed against his father’s right. Both then would rein the horses a few feet apart and continue along the fencerow.
“This will be in corn,” said John Clark, with a sweep of his arm. “Over there I’ll graze army beef for General Washington. Dickie and Edmund had some of the hands out here cutting fence rails last month, as you see. We’ve not had the weather to erect ’em yet.” He fell silent and squinted ahead, absorbed in thoug
hts of next season.
George glanced at his father’s profile, the long straight nose, deep-set eyes, the skin all freckles and furrows, not wrinkled much yet; he was not yet fifty. His torso and thighs were solid and compact. He seemed quieter and more thoughtful than he had been before George’s westward sojourns beyond the Alleghenies. George had no doubt that worry over his sons’ fates was largely the cause of John Clark’s gravity. Jonathan, his eldest at twenty-seven, and a captain in the Continental Army, had been nearly killed by smallpox and other sickness while serving in the Southern theater; John, barely twenty and a lieutenant, had been captured by the British at Germantown a few weeks earlier and his fate was as yet a mystery.
They came to an angle in the fencerow and George glimpsed, through the trees, the clearing where he had grown his own first crop of tobacco at the age of fifteen. Ten years ago it was, but he could remember the weight of the sun on his back, the rank smell of the dark leaves. Ten years seemed as remote in the past as the forest gloom beyond the mountains now seemed remote in the distance. Another world. He had crossed a threshold of his life when, poring over crude maps during lulls in the defense of Kentucky last year, he had conceived the idea that the British could be invaded in their own western outposts. Since then he had been carrying that vision with him, and it had occurred in every detail in his imagination, its possibility coloring everything he saw, directing his every action. The other settlers in the Kentucky land, brave and hardy as they were, saw only as far as the end of the day and the edge of the clearing, as if their minds were stockaded; they saw the Indian raids only as something to be endured, rather than stopped or controlled at their source. In that sense, George thought as he glanced again at his father, this stable and patient John Clark is like them. He is cautious and looks forward only from one season to the next.
Suddenly John Clark turned to face his son, even as he was being observed so thoughtfully; there was an anxiety in his eyes. “Has Dickie spoken to you, about joining your expedition out there?”
“No,” replied George. “Nary a word.”
“He’s talked of little else since you came back from Kaintuck. He’s quite fired with your scheme.”
“He would be a good lad to have along.”
“I must ask you to discourage him, though.”
“He is eighteen now, is he not? If he doesn’t join me, I’m sure he will go to join Washington almost as soon.”
“I can’t spare him, George.”
“With all respect, Father, I doubt you’ll have a choice in the matter. I mean, he may go to the eastern war as Jonathan and Johnny have. Or he might join me and I can keep an eye on him, eh?”
“As you did on your cousin Joseph last Christmas?” The question came loaded with a sarcasm unusual in John Clark’s nature. George was stung by it; he spurred his horse a few yards ahead in anger, turning his back on his father. Then he reined in and waited for him, cooling his temper.
“I am sorry I said that, George.”
“I’m sorry, too.”
“But you must understand it’s a worry on your mother. Not knowing whether her own nephew is dead or a prisoner in some Shawnee town.”
“It couldn’t be helped, Father. You know I always take every precaution. But I’m sure you don’t know what an undertaking it was to transport five hundred pounds of gunpowder through those parts. It’s remarkable that we made it at all. I’m deeply sad about Joe. But such things happen. You must understand, Father, I’m commandant of the whole Kaintuck militia, and I’ve lost many a brave man. I’ve shewed you the Kaintuck, and you saw it’s land worth defending. Joe fought, and we mightn’t’ve got the powder there had ’e not.”
“Aye. And so now you propose an adventure a hundred times as foolhardy.”
“No, sir. Only a hundred times as important. And with a hundred times as many men, I expect. Believe me, sir, I know exactly what I shall do every step of the way.”
“So you’re a prophet now as well, eh?” Again that sarcasm, but followed by a sigh.
“If to believe one can control events is to be prophetic, maybe so.”
John Clark reined in his horse and sat looking directly at his son, obviously no longer thinking just of the next growing season. His cloak flapped against his leg in a gust of raw wind. For this inspection tour of the four-hundred-acre Clark estate, George was wearing his customary buckskins and fringed leggings and a fur hat, and to his father he looked more like a thinly clad savage than a son of the Virginia gentry. The shape of his long, muscular limbs and powerful chest were evident in the light garb. His pigtail of copper-red hair and the ringed tail of his hat hung together down his back.
“Aren’t you cold, George?”
“No.” The youth laughed. “You sound like Mother.”
“Well, I don’t know why you’re not. I’m frozen clear to my fundament.” He grinned, his lips bluish, his big horsy teeth yellow. “What d’you say we go back to a fire and a toddy, son?”
“Good enough. Listen,” he said, as they turned the horses homeward. “Here’s a story you’ll like: A white man shivers in coat and boots on a day like this, but his guide, a Delaware, is naked but comfortable. The white man inquires, ‘How can you bear it?’ The Delaware asks him, ‘Is your face cold?’ ’Yes, but I don’t mind that,’ says the white. ’So,’ the savage tells him, ’me all face.’
“Well, Father, I suppose I’ve come to be like that: all face. I don’t mind it.”
Laughing, they urged the horses into a canter down across the meadow and into a leafless copse, splashed through a shallow brook, jumped a stone fence, and galloped up the slope of a small knoll where dry yellow grass waved. The sky was the color of gunmetal and the drizzle was changing to a spitting snow as the wind rose. Topping the knoll, they saw the house nestled among its outbuildings, its chimney smoke whipping away like spindrift. Cupid, a tall, skinny buck slave loosely draped in one of John Clark’s castoff blue coats, met them at the porch and took the horses to the stable.
Inside the door George and his father were jumped by seven-year-old William, whom they snatched up from the floor in their powerful arms and tossed back and forth between them until he was helpless with laughter, then handed over, reeling, to Lucy, a lithe ten-year-old with the long Clark nose in the middle of a delicate face. The two children went off to the kitchen, clowning self-consciously for their big brother, who, for all his affection and familiarity, seemed an awesome wild stranger from a wild land each time he returned from the west.
Richard and Edmund were sitting before the fireplace in their stocking feet, drying their boots. Their faces were flushed from exposure and smudged with ash and soot. They had been in a field at the corner of the farm all day burning stumps and brush from recent clearing. Edmund, only fifteen, appraised George with a rather timid smile: Richard, eighteen, almost six feet tall and currently trying to break the family of calling him “Dickie,” greeted him with a look of manly complicity. George went to them and backed up to the fire. “Hallo, boys! I’ve seen men come in from Indian skirmishes looking smarter than the two of you.”
“It’s dirty work, that’s what,” said Richard.
“It is indeed. Now if you wish to see some really dirty work, you should come out and see folks try to clear a field of those big Kaintuck trees. Big around as a house.”
“I do intend to, George. Say, now …” He rose and stood close beside George, dropping his voice. “I’d appreciate it if you’d put in a word with Pa to that effect. I fear he’s going to be ag’in it …”
George put an arm over Richard’s shoulder and grinned, gazing across the room to the sideboard where their father was decanting amber whiskey into two glasses. “Oh, ’a word to that effect,’ is it? A petition to King John of the Clark kingdom? You feel I have some influence in his court, eh?” He turned and squatted on the hearth and laved his hands in the heat of the fire. Hearing his father’s footsteps approaching behind him, he continued, “That you should settle with Fa
ther. All I’ll say is that any Clark would be a welcome addition to any party of mine.”
“So he’s broached it t’ you, I see,” grumbled John Clark, seating himself on a wooden chair beside the hearth and giving George a glass. They touched the rims of their glasses. “To Virginia,” said Mr. Clark, glancing shrewdly aside at Richard. “Why anyone should want to leave her is beyond my ken.”
“To Virginia,” agreed George. “Including her new county of Kentucky, where I predict all good Clarks will go.”
“What! Not to heaven?”
“Aye. Just the place I’m speaking of,” said George.
“Mm-hm. Well, if it’s such a heaven, pray tell me why you must go there with an army.”
“Ha, ha! Well said! But I’ll wager you’ll come there one day, all of you, once Henry Hamilton and his bloody scalp-takers have been smoked out.” He sipped the whiskey and winked aside to Richard.
“It’s a wild scheme, that’s all it is,” said John Clark. “You can’t go out there a thousand miles and capture forts from the British and the savages. By heaven, give any red-haired stripling from Virginia a gun and a survey chain, and he imagines he’s George Washington all over again.”
“Washington defended a border of near four hundred miles with seven hundred men in the French and Indian campaigns,” George said.
Long Knife Page 4