by David Nevin
He saw Lewis and his manner changed. He crouched lower, looking about as if for allies, at a window as if considering flight. He wadded the foolscap and thrust it under his coat.
“Mr. Callender?”
“I’m not—I’m not wanted! You can’t do anything to me!” Voice high and squeaky.
“For God’s sake, calm yourself,” Lewis snapped. “I’m Captain Lewis, President Jefferson’s secretary.”
“Oh,” Callender said, “oh.” His head rolled back, his shoulders moved, tension fleeing. He grinned, the change in expression not an improvement. “So,” he said, “sent his lackey, did he? And about time, too, about Goddamned time!”
He slapped the table with both hands. “Ellen!” he bawled. “Porter!”
A pretty girl with yellow braids crossed over her head and bare arms said, “Now, Mr. Callender, I told you—”
“It’s all right. My friend’s buying.”
She glanced at Lewis. He nodded. She set a foaming glass on the table. Callender downed half with a swallow, set it down with a crash. “Ellen! Another!”
Well, Mr. Jefferson had said the man might not be in very good shape. James Thomson Callender was an editor with a roaring style that he employed heart and soul for the Democratic persuasion, struck Federalists hip and thigh to the cheers of his fellows, so the powers that be convicted him of sedition in arrant violation of the Constitution, imprisoned him for a year under the harshest possible conditions, and fined him two hundred dollars, a fortune for such a man. Paying it had stripped him of press and all he owned.
Unfortunately he had served the whole year before the Democrats were elected, so the most the new administration could do was refund the fine. The president had ordered it repaid immediately, but the marshal in Richmond, an arch-Federalist who had jurisdiction over the monies, was relying on a technical reading of the law to resist the order.
“He had a real grievance,” the president had said, “but the trouble is it’s gone rather madly to his head. He wants repayment immediately, which obviously I can’t order until the law is sorted out. Worse, though, he wants an appointment. Postmaster of Richmond! He’s totally unsuited, and the Federalist holding the position has done nothing to warrant discharge. Anyway, he’s doomed to disappointment. It seems he has conceived a passion for a young woman of social position and feels that as postmaster he’ll have a chance for her hand. I happen to know her father; he wouldn’t let Tom in the door.”
The president had tossed a small sack across the desk. “Here’s fifty dollars in gold out of my pocket. Take it to him as a gesture to tide him over and explain the situation.”
Now, watching this gross, unshaven man drain his glass at a swallow and belch thunderously, Lewis thought how sad that such a creature should fix on a society belle of Richmond as his ideal wife. This innate sympathy vanished, however, when Callender opened his mouth. “About time, by God. Did you bring me my money?”
Lewis started to explain.
“And the commission,” Callender said, not listening. “That’s what counts. I told him what I wanted, sent a letter; and by God, I expect to get it. Y’understand? Ellen! Another!”
Lewis returned to the explanation. Nothing had been decided on appointments, but the postmaster in Richmond probably would not be changed unless malfeasance on his part could be proved. As to the money, the president was advancing from his own funds a sum to ease Mr. Callender’s discomfort until the fine could be remitted. He drew the sack from his pocket and Callender snatched it from his hand and shook its contents onto the table.
“Fifty dollars! Hell, man, that won’t do. Fifty dollars ain’t going to solve my problems.” He shoved the sack into his coat pocket. “Now, you listen to me. I’ve earned what I want, I’ve paid for it, I suffered, Goddamn it, a year rotting in prison, year out of my life, year of suffering like you can’t Goddamn imagine. I’ve paid the price and now I Goddamn well want what I want. Now! You got my commission in your pocket, good, give it to me. You ain’t got it, you better get on your horse and go tell your master if he knows what’s good for him, he’ll—”
“‘If he knows what’s good for him’?” Lewis asked.
A look of intense cunning. “Damn right. I know plenty about him. He ain’t so damn noble; he ain’t so perfect. Folks talk like he’s some kind of god or something. Well, I can tell you he’s mortal man. I know things and I can put ’em out, too. I’ll publish the whole rotten story if I don’t get what I want! Fifty dollars! Just a down payment on keeping me quiet, you tell him that—”
Lewis reached over and caught his shirtfront, lifted him half across the table, beer glasses crashing to the floor, drew back his fist to smash this rotten bastard into oblivion—
And stopped himself. Callender was squalling, patrons were staring, he saw the girl with the braids duck into a back room to call the owner. What, the president of the United States sent his secretary to a public tavern to thrash somebody? This was the new administration’s style?
“Mr. Callender,” he said, “you’d do well to watch your tongue. And I think you can forget hopes of an appointment.”
Callender crouched in his chair, glaring like a rat. “I’ll make him pay,” he hissed. “You tell him, I’ll make him pay.”
Lewis walked out. He needed to wash his hands.
Mr. Jefferson got a look on his face that reminded Lewis that he was the president of the United States. There was a gentleness about him usually, an easy good humor, a kindness. It wasn’t that you doubted his authority but rather that you didn’t think much about it. But now it was beyond doubt. Lewis had reported on his meeting with Callender.
“Strange,” the president said at last. “The old adage that good deeds make enemies seems to prove out. He’ll make me pay? Who knows what he means—I suspect he has a very twisted mind, not improved by a year in Federalist jails. At any rate, that ends our efforts to help him. Have nothing further to do with him. If he calls on you, grant him no audiences. Understand?”
“Yes, sir!”
In some obscure way Lewis was relieved; but as he left Mr. Jefferson’s office, the familiar darkening took hold. He felt lonely, as if he understood no one and no one understood him, and the world was sweeping along and leaving him untouched and perhaps a bit baffled, which somehow seemed his fault though he knew it wasn’t. It was a cruel feeling and he knew too well that he couldn’t afford to let it take real hold. His boots echoed on marble floors, and his hands were clenched into fists.
Then at the center hall of the mansion he spied Mrs. Madison sitting in the sun on the south balcony overlooking the swamp and the river. On sudden impulse he decided to join her. He liked Miss Dolley. She was kindly, wise, good humored and he always felt better about things when he talked to her.
She said she was tired; she’d been planning the big diplomatic dinner to be held next month, and Mr. Lemaire was finding her role a bit difficult to accept.
“The Frenchman?” Unconsciously Lewis’s fists doubled. “Maybe I should speak to him.”
She glanced at him quickly. “Ah, Merry,” she said, “no, that won’t be necessary.”
Clearly changing the subject, she asked if he liked his role as the president’s secretary.
He started quietly enough, of course he was honored and all that, but then like a field dike giving way in a freshet it all came tumbling out, wrath and longing and sort of a grief. He didn’t belong here, didn’t fit. He didn’t understand the way people talked, what they meant. There were always implications that seemed to escape him. He was direct, a soldier, he expected things to be as they were and to deal with them. He missed the trail, deep woods, eye cocked on the weather, watching for sign, touch of danger in the air, never knowing what might happen, and then, quiet things too, the way the camp was at night when he walked the perimeter in the dark and checked the sentries. That’s where he wanted to be, in the West, in the open—
And then, much to his surprise, he found himself telling he
r of the expedition, how Mr. Jefferson had planned one back in 1793 and he’d supposed when the call came this time that that was what was afoot. Imagine, walking a couple thousand miles into the unknown, land no explorer had ever seen, it would be like Columbus casting off from Genoa, Marco Polo striding across Asia! A magnificent dream … but there hadn’t been a word.
Then, a real fountain he was, pouring out his heart, how he’d proposed himself to command that early expedition, how he’d told Mary Beth Slaney and she’d laughed …
“Well,” Miss Dolley said, “she was just a girl.”
“Yes … she’s grown now. Married. Has a baby.” He wondered if he’d betrayed anything, for Miss Dolley gave him a sharp look at that. He hurried on. “So you see, when I got his letter, I figured—well, I mean, he wouldn’t put plans like that in a letter, you know, that anyone might see; but I figured why else would he ask me? I don’t know nothing about being a secretary.”
“Well, maybe he does plan an expedition. I know he’s interested in the West. Talks about it all the time.”
“But then, why don’t he say so?”
“Maybe for a national expedition the leader needs a—oh, how to say it? Like a national point of view, so to speak. National attitude, comfortable dealing at the national level.”
“Waiting for me to prove myself, you suppose?”
“I don’t know, but it’s reasonable, don’t you think?”
He felt a boundless surge of energy and had to be off, and in a moment he was walking fiercely along a rough path toward the river, boots ringing against stone. By God, it could be! The president wasn’t going to send a damned novice out to cross the whole continent, not the sort of fellow who didn’t know any better than to go up on the Hill and threaten Mr. Randolph’s clerk, for goodness sake. You’re going to send a man across the continent, you don’t know who he’ll meet and you better be able to count on him not to act the horse’s ass.
Faster and faster he walked, the river gleaming up ahead. He always felt better when he talked to Mrs. Madison.
18
DAVIDSON COUNTY, TENNESSEE, FALL 1801
“There’s going to be trouble,” Andrew said. Rachel Jackson didn’t answer. She saw he had that grave look that meant bad news; and for her, as he well knew, there was only one kind of bad news that really mattered: his departure.
“Spanish are acting like mad dogs,” he said. “Word’s coming up that they’re fixing on closing the river again—stopping our trade, bottling us up like flies in amber.” He smacked fist into palm. “Idiots! They still think they can split the West off from the East! Can you imagine us a separate nation, pulling our forelock to the Spanish crown so they’ll let us use a river that’s rightfully ours in the first place? It’ll never work. So I’ve been thinking …”
She started getting that frantic feeling. He was going away, she was sure of it, she could see the signs even in the restless way he paced. The next round of circuit court was a month away; she’d been counting on that month to get herself ready. But now she was sure he would tell her something had come up, some new crisis, this time with Spain apparently, and he must go in a week or, worse still, tomorrow. Her heart began to beat rapidly and she pressed her hand to her chest. He gave her a sharp look, and she shook her head and managed a shaky smile.
Obviously the pressure on her soul went back to the terrible scandal, but why baffled her. It wasn’t that anyone would say anything now, years later; and she knew she’d made a sterling reputation of her own for kindness, repaying Jesus for her rescue. But those days had torn her heart.
She was sitting in her wickerwork chair on the brick courtyard Andrew had had laid for her between house and her garden, which now was carefully banked for winter, seven varieties of roses, and that just the start of the flowers. The teapot was empty, its flame snuffed, the platter of sugar bread bare. Early morning sun gave a golden cast to the white planks of the house, laid vertically, seams covered with narrow lathing. Hunter’s Hill was a marvel of elegance and luxury, as one of the few frame houses in a country where logs were still the standard. Andrew paced and talked, his body long and lean with that deceptive strength of the mountain man … .
Did she remember David Allison coming down from Philadelphia and whirling through like a dust devil, buying land and selling it to speculators at home, prices rising from the sheer energy of his purchases? He’d seemed so happy, always laughing, looking ready to dance. He was as golden in Tennessee as he had appeared to be in Philadelphia.
But she knew the story, for she kept the books, one ledger for the farm, another for their land deals with location and cost per acre and offers they’d had and rejected. Land was the heart and soul of business in the West. Everyone dealt, looking for prices to rise, profit in spinning parcels here and there, swapping this for that with something to boot, buy on credit at five cents an acre for land out in the forest and sell on credit at ten cents. Before too long that land would be going for three and four dollars, cleared and plowed and fenced with split rails.
Rachel Jackson knew her value in this equation, for the home place she ran was the base on which all else stood. It ran well because she saw to it. Sowing and reaping were timely, yields were high, cotton was coming as a new money crop since Mr. Whitney invented the gin over to Georgia. They had their own gin now, doing cotton for their neighbors too. Her vegetable gardens fed the plantation; now was canning and drying time. The hickory odor of the smokehouse lay on still morning air. They had milk cows and beef calves for slaughter and sheep for wool and were known for breeding stock. Fine hogs ran loose like dogs.
It was a good frontier farm; she reckoned Pa was proud of her, looking down from heaven. He’d been a great frontiersman. He’d led the first party into West Tennessee, sited Nashville on the Big Bend of the Cumberland when the Indians controlled the land and a settler had to struggle to hold his own little homestead with blockhouse and stockade, and she could see him nodding his big head when she told him that for all the luxuries Andrew showered on her, all they really needed from the outside was salt and tea and bar iron.
The mercantile business Andrew had started with Jack Coffee was more complex. They had a store at Clover Bottom hard against the Cumberland, where folks swapped their produce for strap leather, axes and knives, gunpowder and lead and the weapons to use them, factory-made calico and bonnets, pins and needles and medicines and salves and ointments, tea and coffee and sugar and salt, and all the things people got to hankering for when they built their places up to do more than just keep them alive.
There was frightful expense in bringing in such items—purchase in Philadelphia, wagon freight to Pittsburgh, flatboat down the Ohio to Louisville, overland to Nashville. Goods selling at three times Philadelphia prices still left little profit. Receipts were in barter, hard money being a precious commodity out here on the western edge of the nation. People brought in cotton, wheat, corn, tobacco, pickled pork, skins, furs, and all else for which a market might be found.
All this must be loaded on flatboats and sent down the Cumberland to the Ohio and then on to the great river for the long float to Louisiana. The boats would hold at Natchez, and if they could get through the Spanish officials they’d float to New Orleans, doorway to the world market. Some produce went to states back east and some went on to England and Europe, Tennessee wheat and corn feeding armies locked in slaughter in places with names she couldn’t pronounce. Which was all right. They were far from Tennessee; she didn’t have any trouble pronouncing names here.
The firm built its own flatboats, forty feet by twenty-four; downriver the boys broke them up and sold the lumber. She imagined half the houses in New Orleans were built of Tennessee flatboat lumber. Then the boys walked home, six hundred miles on the Natchez Trace, each man with his own piece and always in large groups. It was as good as a man’s life to walk that Trace alone or with two or three; and you wouldn’t never know if it was Indians or highwaymen, white of face and black of heart, th
at got them. Every bit of this had to be paid for. A shipper never made much profit, but worse, could be badly hurt if the Spanish made trouble, which one way or another they usually did, slapping on new tariffs, palms out to be greased, some miserable little official with his britches frayed waylaying honest folk with honest goods. It just made your blood boil!
That was the Spanish problem. If the river really were closed, land prices would collapse, ruining them and countless others, and there would be no market for her careful husbandry. Of course, the very idea of such a threat came to Andrew as a challenge, a call to duty. He had burning dreams and the sense he was destined to lead, Tennessee and maybe more too. The idea horrified her and yet she could hardly doubt it. He’d done so much already—congressman, senator, judge—everyone out here on the far frontier looking to him. It distressed her but it reassured her all at the same time.
Anyway, this was the man who had defied all convention to take her to Natchez when Lewis Robards had threatened her, who’d come galloping down the Natchez Trace to wed her the moment word came of the divorce, who’d stood like an oak against the storm of consequences to save her life and her sanity. Did she really expect him to see naught beyond a 640-acre fenceline? He was a national man … .
Yes, she remembered David Allison. Andrew had gone to Philadelphia to offer seventy thousand acres, bottom price twelve-and-a-half cents an acre. David offered twenty cents but payable in notes. Andrew took the notes over to the John B. Evans Company and endorsed them in payment for supplies to stock the store. But scarcely was he home before word followed that David had failed, his empire had collapsed, he was in debtor’s prison, the notes were due, and Andrew must pay. It had been an agony that had possessed them both and left them still in debt. Allison had died after a year in debtor’s prison, poor sad man who’d made such trouble for so many, might he rest in peace.