“Bear in mind, every girl is someone’s precious daughter. Like my Annie. And likely she’s also someone’s sister. Would y’ have her trifled with?”
There. Put in those terms, it struck Johnny hard. He put his head down and pondered as he worked, and hoped his father had had all his say about that.
John Clark would never have thought of giving so long a speech just standing up in front of people. Speeches were for natural talkers, like the Rogerses, or for burgesses, or for licensed rectors. But when John Clark was working he was thinking, and if the thoughts he had seemed likely important enough to help his sons be worthy, then he could talk as long as anyone.
“There,” said he, “that about does our pig. Let’s get all this up to the kitchen and smokehouse, for it’s a long way from ready for our Annie’s wedding feast, hey, boys? And that day’s not afar off. How y’ feelin’ by now, Billy my boy?”
“I fee’ bettuh, Papa.”
“Aha. Fine. And y’ve learnt something, isn’t it so?”
“Aye, Papa.”
“So here’s our pork, thank the Lord. I wonder if any venison will come our way.” He cast a glance at Edmund, and a sly smile.
“Watch me,” said Edmund, eager to please. “I’m out ’fore daybreak tomorrow.”
EDMUND CLARK HAD SET HIS MIND TO WAKE HIM UP AT four, because he had a promise to keep.
He dressed in darkness while his brothers breathed and snored and muttered in their sleep. He did not put on shoes, because he could move through the woods more quietly without them. He reached up in the darkness and felt for his rifle, and with a soft grunt lifted it down, then his powder horn and bullet bag. He could see the rectangle of the dormer window, and bright stars. He went out of the room and down the hall and down the stairs, feeling his way with his bare feet. He lifted the latch of the back door and went out into the night air and closed the door behind him, trying to be stealthy as an Indian.
The grass was frosted underfoot. The air was crisp and cold and the night was silent. He could smell the smokehouse where the pork was hanging in hickory smoke, and the smell of it made him salivate. There was a patch of yellow light in the kitchen house door and he could smell pone baking. Old Rose was already up, as always before anyone else, getting the breakfasts ready. Edmund knew he could go in the kitchen house and Rose would exclaim and wrap him in a musky hug and give him something hot to eat, but he went on past the kitchen house. George had told him that it’s better to hunt hungry.
Edmund walked on dirt road past the smells of stables and pigpens and tobacco sheds. He came to the end of the road and walked on grass for a way, then climbed over a stile and walked on a long way through a meadow under the cold stars, toward a darker line that was the edge of the woods. He entered the woods and walked with one hand before his face to fend off twigs. A few feet away a slow, regular huffing sound began, and became faster and faster until it was a pulsating rush: a ruffed grouse drumming. He noted where its nest was; he would come here in daylight and get it. Deeper in the woods an owl was calling. Hoo hoo-hoo, hoo hoo-hoo, hoo hoo-hoo, hoo-aw! Edmund went on, feeling the ground slope gradually down as he crept toward the Mattapony River. There were places where deer came to drink at daybreak. George had begun bringing him down when Edmund was six, and he had learned all such places.
“EEEEEEYOW!” came an insane scream out of the darkness directly in front of him. Edmund recoiled, heart thumping, but he knew the woods sounds too well to be afraid; it was merely the wild preamble to a barred-owl’s statement, which now came hooting down from a high invisible limb as Edmund walked under, shaking his head. Those idiotic-sounding birds had used to make him think Indians were ready to leap on him, when he was smaller and hadn’t yet got used to them.
The Indian legends in this region were old; it had been settled for years. Grandpapa John Rogers had been one of the surveyors. But the first white man to walk here had been Captain John Smith of the Jamestown Colony, more than a hundred and fifty years ago, when he had been brought through as a prisoner of the Youngtamund Indians. In Edmund’s mind, Captain John Smith looked like George, but in old-fashioned clothes, because it was George who had always been with him in those woods and told him all the old stories. And now George was out where the Indians were still dangerous, and, like Capt. John Smith, walking in places where white men had never walked before. Edmund thought that would be a strange and wonderful feeling, and wondered if he would ever get a chance to feel it. George had told him it made a man feel honored.
Edmund could hear a spring purling in the darkness off to his left and knew which one it was: the one that seemed to come right out from between the roots of a big beech. He went to it and stretched out on the moss and drank, shivering, smelling the decaying leaves. Edmund never had to carry a water gourd when he went hunting because George had shown him where every good spring and brooklet lay for ten miles in every direction. George had learned every inch of the Mattapony and Pamunkey river land helping old Grandpapa Rogers survey. Edmund could just barely remember Grandpapa Rogers: a lean, long-legged man with a face dark as one big freckle, hair and eyebrows white as snow, and eyes like two dots of blue sky. There were as many stories in the family about Grandpapa Rogers as there were about Georgie, and Mrs. Clark often would say that the two had been cast in the same mold. Grandpapa Rogers had been a very bold man, and one of the proudest tales about him was about the way he had defied the powerful Colonel Byrd and eloped with his daughter—that story about the whippoorwill call, that Mrs. Clark could not tell without getting a quaver in her voice. It was one of Edmund’s favorite stories, and it glowed in his imagination like a legend of knights and ladies.
The woods were thinner here, and Edmund could see a paleness ahead which he knew was the river, reflecting starlight and the first rose-gray of morning. The leaves under his feet gave way to grasses and reeds now, and he walked now and then in shallow, chilly water, his feet sinking in cold ooze, the smells of muck and decay rising. He was in the marshy place now, where frogs dinned in the springtime and all the kinds of web-foot fowl lived and where in the summer the air was so thick with mosquitoes that a body couldn’t hear anything else.
Edmund walked through the cold water knowing he was leaving no spoor to frighten the deer, and he soon felt the land rise a few inches. He perceived a large tree he had had in mind, and stopped there, and stood with his back to it. There was a forked sapling in front of him and beyond it lay the river. A fish jumped in the river, then again, and again. There were no insects in this season and so the fish, Edmund reckoned, must be jumping for the sheer joy of it. The sky was paling downriver to the east and the trees on the banks began to separate from the gloomy background on the far shore and become distinct, one by one. The river steamed in the cold air.
Now it was almost light enough to see gunsights, so Edmund put the rifle butt on the ground and tilted the powder horn over the muzzle and poured a charge down the barrel. The weapon was about as long as he was tall. He felt in his bullet bag for a lead ball and patch. He put the ball in the oiled cloth, and pushed them down the barrel and tamped them firmly in with the hickory ramrod. Then he slid the ramrod back into its groove and lifted the rifle, and opened the flash pan to trickle in the priming powder. He eased it shut, felt the flint to be sure it was tight, then rested the gun-butt on the ground again and began waiting, shivering. Cold is just one of those things that be, George had taught him, and you have to make yourself believe it doesn’t feel any worse than warmth, or otherwise you couldn’t stand it. Edmund listened to the gurgle of the river and the other little sounds: a muskrat in the reeds, the croak of a heron, another owl far off, the hush of a tiny breeze as the air stirred with the coming of morning. Edmund gazed downstream and thought of how this river ran into the York, some twenty leagues down, and thence into the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, where, the family stories said, the Rogerses and the Clarks had first landed in the Colony, some three or four generations ago. All that ancestral lore was
vague in Edmund’s eleven-year-old mind, but he was ever aware of it, and especially when he gazed down the Mattapony in the direction of the sea.
Edmund now heard his own empty stomach skitter and grumble as he waited and shivered. The surface of the river was like silver now and the stars had faded out. It was true what George had said: to be cold and hungry made one a keen hunter. And now Edmund heard the faint sounds he had been listening for: the sound of steps in the frosty dead leaves.
He raised the rifle to rest the heavy barrel in the fork of the sapling, and put his hand over the icy steel flintlock.
Then he saw the buck come out of the edge of the woods and walk gracefully through the reeds to the water’s edge, raising its knees high, pausing, stepping again. When it was silhouetted against the surface of the river, Edmund pulled back on the flintlock and felt the strong spring compress, and kept pulling back until he felt it cock. The deer turned its head both ways, downriver first and then upriver so that it was looking straight toward him, but if it saw him it mistook him for a part of the woods, and lowered its muzzle to the water, its branched antlers now silhouetted against the silver stream.
Edmund snugged the gunstock against his shoulder. There was just enough light to see the gunsights by and he lined them up on a place just behind the deer’s shoulder. He had been shivering but he put a control over it and the rifle was steady. Then he thought the words of his Papa’s prayer. Dear Father, have mercy on this poor beast.
He squeezed the trigger and saw the orange flash and then the gun cracked open the silence of the morning, jolting his shoulder. He smelled the powder and heard hundreds of waterfowl and small birds squawk and splash and flutter and saw them disperse against the predawn light beyond the drifting veil of gunsmoke, and when the smoke thinned, he could see the buck collapsing into the river’s edge.
Edmund was sad in the way it always made him sad to kill a beautiful thing, but the buck had died quickly and suffered only a moment because of Edmund’s skill, and Edmund had fulfilled his promise and this would be what he would add to Annie’s wedding feast.
JONATHAN CLARK, ELDEST OF THE SIX SONS, WAS FEELING THE pull of home. From the next rise, he knew, he would be able to see the roof of the house. The October afternoon sun was on his back and he rocked with the horse’s easy canter. It had been fine weather for riding and he was almost there. Down amidst the dry grasses and reddening sumac of the roadside stood a zigzag fence of split rails that he and his father had built so long ago, when Jonathan was a boy of ten, to mark the corner of the family land. The wood of the fence was silver-gray now from thirteen years in sun and rain, and the bottom rails were rotting, returning to earth as wood must do, but Jonathan could remember the work of that long-ago day: the thud of the maul on the splitting wedges, the tannic tang of the new-riven oak, the pale grain, the sweat, the grunting, the swinging and lifting, and the cheerful voice of his father musing aloud on how a man should live. There was hardly an acre of these hundreds upon which Jonathan had not poured sweat, changing the look of the land, making things grow. Now he was a man old enough at twenty-three to sense the cadence of seasons, the accretion of labors, the erosions of time on the countryside. For four years now he had lived away from here, but he had not forgotten anything. Annie had been six when that fence was built, and tomorrow she would become a wife. Jonathan sucked an eyetooth and shook his head.
The hooves beat rhythmically on the packed dirt, the horse’s muscular barrel breathed and rocked between Jonathan’s thighs. He rode past a man he didn’t know, an old man driving an ox that pulled two rolling hogsheads of tobacco. The man waved, and Jonathan touched the peak of his three-cornered hat in reply.
And now he was on the top of the rise, and there ahead in a flat, broad bottomland lay the Clark family seat: the stone house, the outbuildings and barns, the short row of one-story dependencies in which the servants and field hands dwelt, the pastures and woodlots, the grainfields and tobacco plots and vegetable and herb gardens, the stables and the paddock, the symmetrical crowns of the big, red-leaved oaks and yellow-leaved maples that lined the drive and surrounded the house, all aglow in late sunshine.
There was his home, that solid, orderly piece of the world, to which he always returned with a sense of mellow longing, however much he might grumble about having had to interrupt his work to go and visit as a dutiful son must do. Jonathan was an ambitious man, who hoped to rise by law and public service up to and beyond the place his father held in life, and he aimed to do it without building fences and pulling stumps and raising and selling livestock and crops for the rest of his days. It was his intention to become a magistrate. But in Caroline County certain royally favored families, such as Taliaferros, Taylors, and Buckners, always got those appointments, and so Jonathan had moved to Spotsylvania and then Dunmore counties in search of opportunities. This was the ambition of mind that Jonathan Clark carried upon his tall, square, brawny farmer’s body, and it had taken him away from this place he loved with a love that he realized only when, as now, he was coming home.
Jonathan saw now that he was overtaking a couple of riders—a man astride and a woman on sidesaddle—who were moving down the road at a walking pace. Both wore dark riding clothes that were very dusty. They obviously had come a considerable distance. Jonathan presumed that they were on their way to the wedding. The man carried a long rifle across his saddle and Jonathan could also discern a sword hanging at his left side. The woman wore a cloak and a wide dark hat, but was so small she might have been a very young girl. Jonathan was twenty yards behind them when first the woman and then the man turned their heads and saw him coming.
“Hallo,” he cried as he overtook them, squinting to see if he recognized them. He did not, though the man looked familiar.
They reined in and sat their horses across his path. The man was of sharp features and had large, jutting ears, and he was studying Jonathan keenly, as if trying to recognize him too. “Good day, sir,” said he, and then he smiled, and his severe cold eyes warmed and sparkled. “You’re one o’ John Clark’s, I’ll wager.”
There was little hazard in that wager; Jonathan was a replica of his father, strongly built, rugged-faced like Squire John Clark, strikingly handsome with his dark brows and fair, freckled complexion, but a head taller. Like his father he dressed in somber and serviceable wool, almost like a minister. He wore a plain white stock at his throat, and a black riding cape. The ribbed stockings that encased his powerful and well-shaped calves were gray wool.
“I am, sir. Jonathan Clark is my name, and yours is?”
“William Lewis is who I am,” said the man, extending a hand as thick and hard as Jonathan’s own, “Bill Lewis, an old neighbor o’ yours when you were a lad in Albemarle. Here is my wife, Lucy, whom you might remember as Lucy Meriwether.” Jonathan tipped his hat to her and she smiled and nodded. She was, though childishly short and petite, a very comely woman, with high cheekbones, big, luminous blue eyes so heavy-lashed they looked almost sleepy, a squarish jaw that suggested strength, and a most delicately shaped mouth.
“I know the names Lewis and Meriwether,” Jonathan replied with a nod to her, “from my parents’ talk. But forgive me not recalling if we’ve met. I was a young’un then, and can scarce remember Albemarle folk, save for a few like the Jeffersons whom we saw more frequent. Shall we ride on, Mister Lewis? We’re almost there. D’ye know Tom Jefferson much?” he asked as they resumed their way along the road at a walk.
“Oh yes, quite well,” chuckled Lewis. “I’m in his employ, in fact. I do the financials of his estate.”
“Ah! Is he coming to the wedding, d’ye know?”
“I bear his regrets to your parents and the bride. He’s busier than a dozen men, what with public office now, besides the estate and his science. Say, now, Jonathan, as for this bride. Ann is the sister who was born in Albemarle, I presume?”
“Aye. Eighteen she is now.”
“I remember well the day she was born. It was the
day we brought the news of Braddock’s disaster. Your mother was birthing ’er just whilst we rode in. Might y’ remember that?”
“By heaven, I’m not sure,” Jonathan chuckled. “I remember many a birthing, that’s certain. The fact is, the very first thing I can recollect from my memory is my brother George being born. Rather, I should say, waking up one morning and seeing him there in the bed in my mother’s arm.” He smiled and shook his head, glancing at some cattle in a field that had used to be in barley.
Mrs. Lewis’s voice rang out suddenly, in a mellifluous laugh. “Do you remember, Mister Clark, were your feelings something in the way of jealousy when you beheld that newcomer?”
“Jealousy? Why, I don’t know, ma’am. But … P’r’aps they were. I recall I wasn’t especially pleased.” It seemed an odd query.
“Mmm,” she said, nodding and smiling. “Our firstborn was quite distressed to find an usurper when our second appeared. D’ye remember, Bill?”
“I do,” he nodded, pursing his thin little mouth. This Lewis appeared to be some years older than his wife, and Jonathan had the passing notion that their children would be fortunate if they took their mother’s traits of appearance rather than their father’s. She was truly a fetching creature, with an aura of warm vitality about her that made Jonathan uncommonly aware of the loneliness of his bachelor life. He had always been too preoccupied with making his career to think forward much to marriage. His mind passed quickly over the several young women who seemed interested in him—some of them were very interested—but they all seemed either frivolous or half-alive when considered in comparison with this vibrant little equestrienne whom he had just now met. Jonathan Clark was not fool enough to become infatuated with the wife of a family friend, or anyone’s wife, for that matter. But something in her nature had stirred in him a kind of longing, as if any woman worth considering henceforth would have to be something like this.
From Sea to Shining Sea Page 6