Long Knife

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “Speak,” said George, clasping his hands behind his back and assuming a pose meant to express strained patience.

  “We are resigned that our situation is the fate of war,” the priest began his obviously rehearsed dissertation. “My friends here are reconciled to the loss of their property. But they pray that you might not part them from their families. They hope that the women and children might be allowed to keep some of their clothes, and perhaps enough tools and provisions by which they, ah, at your mercy, of course, might through industry support themselves wherever they are to be sent …” The priest’s voice ended in a hanging tone, as if he hoped some sort of answer might be forthcoming. But when George only continued to stare at him, Father Gibault proceeded, a bit more desperately now, “… They wish to assure you that their conduct has always been influenced by their commandant, Monsieur Rocheblave, whom they always felt themselves bound to obey. They, ahem, they say that they have never had opportunity to inform themselves of the nature of the American war, but … but as much as they dared to, some of them have expressed themselves to be in favor of the Americans …” Here the priest paused to observe George carefully again, no doubt aware that this might sound very patently like a ploy to save their skins. Still George answered nothing, and his face betrayed no sign either of gullibility or skepticism. The priest did note from the corner of his eye, however, that some of the American officers were elbowing each other’s bare ribs and smirking. He gulped, licked his mouth as if it were extremely dry, and then feebly finished his petition: “That is all they ask, Colonel. As for me, I … I ask only that some vestige of my church be permitted to remain. I mean, I …” His speech fell apart; he seemed to have run out of either hopes or words, and a painful silence filled the room.

  This was the point to which George had hoped to bring them. He came around to the front of the desk, stood straight before the dismal-looking Frenchmen, and placed his fists on his hips.

  “One moment, Father. D’you suppose you’re speaking to savages? You must, judging by the tenor of your conversation. Don’t insult me! Do you suppose Virginians mean to strip your women and children and take the bread out of their mouths? Do we look like the sort of people who would condescend to make war on the church?” He paused a moment; the suppliants stood with their mouths open, not yet comprehending the course of his words. “It wasn’t the prospect of plunder that brought us here, but only to prevent the effusion of the innocent blood of our own women and children by the Indians, through the instigation of your vile commandant and his British friends. As for your church, our only concern with it is to punish anyone who does it insult. All religions are tolerated in America.”

  He paused again to let the priest translate this, and to watch the stir being created among the listeners by their gradual comprehension of his message.

  “By thunder, people!” he went on now, loudly and rapidly, “we are not savages and plunderers. Listen, Father: it is so apparent to me that you’ve been influenced by lies and false information from your leaders, that I am willing to forget everything past. Now, as soon as I am able to turn the heads of certain nations of Indians hereabouts, I will be perfectly satisfied to conclude our business here and rejoin my main army on the Ohio …” His officers looked at each other and sucked on their tongues. The Frenchmen stood as if dumbstruck, absorbing all these unexpected words, and George continued:

  “I expect an end to this war before long, as the King of France has joined the American cause.” This information seemed to send still another wave of astonishment through them, and he waited until they had finished exclaiming among themselves about it. “Now,” he resumed, “I am going to release your militia officers; but Mr. Rocheblave—who is so vicious and intemperate—he is going to be sent away. Now all of you might as well return to your families and tell them that they can conduct themselves as usual, with all freedom and without any apprehension of danger. My guards will be withdrawn from your town, with the exception of the home of a Mister Cerré, whose name has been put under question by some of your people. I shall post a proclamation shortly, and ask only that your people comply with it. You’re free to ally yourselves with my purposes or stay neutral, and any who wish to remain belligerent will be given a chance to go and take up arms with the British, in which event we would rejoice in doing honorable battle with them. If you gentlemen understand me now, why, I am tired of talking and have nothing more I care to say.”

  The citizens simply stood there for a moment, staring at him or whispering to the priest, who appeared to be almost beside himself. “They … they beg your forgiveness that they seemed to take you for barbarians …” he stammered. “They only imagined that conquered property goes to the victors, and they want you to understand that they did not presume you’re barbarians, ah …”

  “No more on the subject. Now just go and relieve the anxiety of your people.”

  The priest stood swallowing, moist-eyed, his countenance glowing as if he had witnessed some sort of a miracle, and George fully expected him to drop straight-away to his knees. The citizens shuffled and hesitated, every sort of expression passing over their faces, and the American officers, moved by the transformation that had taken place in this room in the last few minutes, stood up straight and stared at their colonel, blinking with amazement.

  At length the priest stretched out his trembling hands and took George’s big, hard right hand, and clung warmly to it, saying, “Colonel Clark …” George himself, who had been engrossed mainly in making the most profound impression possible, now was growing relaxed and receptive, and felt suddenly almost overwhelmed by the love that was radiating out of this odd-looking priest like heat from an oven. It was a powerful and unexpected presence in the desperate war room, a remarkable spiritual power, and George began to suspect that this priest was not some mere cringing capon, but quite possibly the best man in the territory. Father Gibault finally seemed to have found his tongue again. “… Colonel, I can only say that I and whatever influence I have with my Lord are at your disposal.”

  He turned then and rushed the citizens out of the room. George’s officers stood around with nothing to say; George sat down behind the desk, drained but somehow calm, and feeling his old familiar confidence returning to him.

  And then in the buzzing midday silence a clamor of joyous voices began building up throughout the town; the bells of the church began to peal and people could be heard running through the streets, cheering and sobbing. George slumped behind the desk for a few minutes, swallowing hard, until he heard a commotion of women’s and children’s voices in the foyer; four or five young ladies and girls came sweeping into the room carrying vases of flowers, which they placed all over his desk, then curtsied and fled from the room like blowing petals. He got up and mounted the steps to the upstairs window again, and gazed out to see most of the populace thronging around the church, while others moved about in the streets decorating the fences with ribbons and flowers and putting up colorful pavilions. It was a spontaneous and extravagant scene, which strangely and unexpectedly wrenched his heart. Dear Heaven, he thought, I must find the leisure to write and describe this spectacle to my family and to George Mason. Why, these people are like children!

  When he went downstairs again, Leonard Helm followed him to the desk, wreathed in smiles, drew up a chair and sat facing him, shaking his head. Finally he said, “George, it’s the damnedest thing I ever seen. How in tarnation did y’ever dream up a vict’ry t’ turn out this way?”

  George leaned back in the chair and, with a great sigh, rubbed his palm across his clammy forehead.

  “I didn’t have much choice, did I? I told you, there’s ten times as many people in this valley as we have, and God knows how many Indians attached to ’em. The only way to control ’em is to make ’em our bounden friends.” He drew his hand down over his jaw now and sat forward, toying at the petals of a huge purple iris with his forefinger. “But we’re a long way from finished. We’ll lose our whole adva
ntage if we don’t do everything right for a long time to come. Now, listen …”

  EARLY IN THE AFTERNOON, AS THE FESTIVITIES WENT ON, GEORGE ordered the people of Kaskaskia to provide some three dozen horses, with which Captain Bowman would take an expedition to the villages of Prairie du Rocher and Cahokia farther up the Mississippi. Some of the happy gentlemen, in bringing their horses, expressed their opinion that little more would be needed to win those villages than to have some of Kaskaskia’s citizens go along with Bowman and convey the news of what had happened here. “There are many among us,” said one of the released French militia officers, “who have been in sympathy with your rebellion, Monsieur. We do not care for Governor Hamilton nor for Monsieur Rocheblave, and you may be assured that you would be welcomed joyfully if only the truth about your cause and your benevolence could be explained.” George pondered this, and wanted very much to believe it. But the attack on Kaskaskia and its attendant shock had been so dramatically effective in winning over the Kaskaskians that he felt a reenactment of it in those places would be more compelling.

  “Mon colonel,” insisted the Frenchman, “your men are supremely fatigued. Surely they could use some help. Let some of my militiamen ride to the villages with your captain, at least. Then, when he has secured them, we can bring our influence to bear in convincing them.”

  The man seemed sincere, glowing with enthusiasm for the idea, and George thought it would be a good diplomatic gesture to demonstrate his faith in his newly won allies. But all this was happening so swiftly that he was not yet convinced that the Frenchmen could be trusted to take up arms and ride amid his troops. If they had been fickle enough to turn on their former leader this readily, he thought, can I place such confidence in them?

  But there was not time to weigh the matter long; the villages were strung along the Mississippi for some sixty miles, and every passing hour increased the chances that warnings would reach them before Bowman could get there. Despite the attention George had given to security, it seemed probable that someone might have slipped away to carry a warning to those towns.

  After considering the dilemma for no more than five minutes, George made his decision, and he made it on the basis of the only evidence he had at hand: the faces and demeanor of the French would-be volunteers. He looked at their eyes and listened to their cheerful tones of voice and decided that there was no treachery there. “Go with them, then,” he said at last, and the French officer astonished him by grabbing his shoulders and kissing him exuberantly on one cheek and then the other, to the extreme amusement of the Virginians nearby.

  “Do your best, then,” George said, trying by stern aspect to cover his embarrassment. “Keep in mind this is the first time you’ve ever borne arms as free men, and thus a chance to do y’rselves proud.” The Frenchman’s eyes flashed at the thought.

  Thus the little force, nearly half made up of French militiamen dressed up as if for parade, all mounted on some of the finest horseflesh George had ever seen, thundered out of the fort and up the river late in the afternoon, colored richly by a descending sun, cheered on by a good part of the Kaskaskia population, foremost among them the young ladies of the village. That feminine urging, George thought as the expedition was hidden in its own dust, should do as much as anything could to make them behave honorably on our behalf. Much of the reward on their return, he mused, will be the company of these cheerful young women. As he watched the colorfully dressed, animated ladies turn from the road and fall into little groups, laughing, chatting in their musical tongue, some of them casting coy sidelong glances at him, their shapely arms and calves bare and sun-kissed, he was washed over suddenly by a powerful wave of longing, of desire, of loneliness. A succession of faces, hands, arms, flickered through his memory: young women who had leaned in his arms in reels so long ago in Virginia, sunburned girls in homespun who had shared his few idle moments during the defense of the Kentucky settlements, the naked Mingo girls bathing in the shallows of clear creeks during his long-ago visits with Chief Logan’s people before Dunmore’s War, the adoring face of that chambermaid Nell in Williamsburg. And then, as he turned back to the fort to resume his administrative tasks, he saw the house where he had interrupted the ball the night before—it was the home of the prominent trader Cerré, he had learned, a man absent on commerce at present, a man apparently disliked and envied by many of the Kaskaskia townspeople, to judge by comments made by certain of the Frenchmen during the course of the morning, a man rumored to be strong in the British interest. Looking at the house now in the daylight, its doors closed and guarded by one of his own sentries, George remembered another face, one which had impressed itself on his mind even though he had had no time to think of it; he saw now the frightened, perfect oval face of the black-eyed Spanish girl who had been standing with Don Fernando de Leyba in the ballroom just before the young governor had come forward to speak. Seeing both of their faces in his mind’s eye now, he was struck by their similarity, and, while he might have supposed that the girl was de Leyba’s wife or lover, he now felt a notion that they seemed like brother and sister. Could that be? he wondered.

  The question became lodged in his mind now as he passed through the gates into the fort.

  And then, strangely, when he tried to envision the girl again beside de Leyba, he saw her instead seated beside himself on the porch of a great house overlooking the Ohio River Valley. That image came and then went in a moment.

  “Huh,” he muttered softly, and shook his head. Daydreams of an overweary fool, he thought. No time for that now.

  14

  KASKASKIA, ILLINOIS COUNTRY

  July 8, 1778

  THE MURDERS AND ASSASSINATIONS OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN AND the depredations and ravages, which have been committed under those orders and policies of Governor Hamilton, cry for vengeance with a loud voice,” George dictated.

  “Les meutres et assassinations des femmes et enfants et les degats et ravages, qui ont été comise crie vengence a haute voix,” the translator said slowly, and the scrivener’s pen scratched furiously. George sat at the desk with his fingers steepled and searched the ceiling for the next phrases of his proclamation, which Father Gibault and Doctor Jean Baptiste Laffont had agreed to carry to Vincennes. Father Gibault, long fingers interlaced over his abdomen, eyes closed, sat in a large chair at the side of the room, nodded and listened. He had told George that the Vincennes inhabitants were so resentful against Rocheblave and the British that certainly they could be simply talked into joining the American side. George had come to have complete faith in the judgment of the priest in the four days of his occupation of Kaskaskia, and had decided to let the priest and the influential physician attempt their mission.

  “Since the United States has now gained advantage over their British enemies …” he said.

  “Les etats unis ayant appresent gagné la de sus sur leurs ennemis brittanique …” recited the translator.

  “… and their plenipotentiaries have now made and concluded treaties of commerce and alliance with the kingdom of France …”

  “… et leurs plenipotentiaires ayant actuellement faite et conclus des traites de commerce et alliance avec le royaume de la France …”

  “… His Excellency the Governor of Virginia has ordered me to reduce the different posts to the west of the Miami with a company of troops under my command, in order to prevent longer responsibility for innocent blood …”

  “Trop vite, m’sieur!” groaned the sweating writer.

  “What’s he say?” George asked the interpreter.

  “He says more slowly, mon colonel,” said the translator.

  Father Gibault laughed, a resonant, happy laughter that filled the room. He was looking at George now and shaking his head. “Ah, you Americans,” he said. “Always such a hurry!”

  “Well, Padre, I just haven’t learned to think slow like you people.”

  “George, George, my son, you don’t need to write all this out for me. I know what to tell them!”r />
  “Ah, no, you don’t,” George laughed. “It has to be in my words. It has to be official. Shame on you, anyway, a priest dabbling in political matters.” He had been delighted to discover the priest’s jocose nature, and they had fallen into a habit of joshing each other.

  “Oh, mais non!” protested the priest. “I have nothing to do with temporal affairs, I assure you, George. But,” he added, putting his palms together in prayer and assuming an expression of piety, “I will give them such hints in the spiritual way that will be very conducive to the business!”

  George laughed in delight. He had never suspected that a Roman Catholic priest could be droll and sly. George was, except for moments when he had to embroil himself in the infinite details of administering to this conquered territory, happier than he had ever been. A messenger had returned from Cahokia the day before with news that Captain Bowman was in control of all the upriver villages and had not lost a man in the effort. Bowman had ridden all night to cover the sixty miles to Cahokia, detaining every person met along the way, and thus had gotten inside the town before his presence was even discovered. The Cahokians had gone into a panic at the cry that the Big Knives had arrived, but soon had had their fears assuaged by the Kaskaskians in the expedition, who told them of all the happy events at Kaskaskia. Then Bowman had assembled all the Cahokians and had given them a speech which George wished he could have heard: He had told them that although resistance was out of the question, he would prefer their friendship; and that they were at liberty to become free Americans as their friends at Kaskaskia had, or else move out of the country, except those who had been engaged in inciting the Indians to war. The Kaskaskians had dispersed among the Cahokians, and soon cheers of “Liberty!” and “Freedom!” had echoed throughout the town, and within a few hours Bowman and his men were snugly quartered in the old British fort. A large number of Indians encamped outside Cahokia had vanished into the countryside, but nothing had been heard of them subsequently.