From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “Well, sir, finding myself and my friend John Gabriel Jones elected Kentuck’s delegates to the Virginia Assembly—” Henry’s eyebrows lifted. George continued. “We went to Williamsburg and found the Assembly already adjourned. So I’ve brought straight to you what I was taking to them.”

  Henry shook his head and stretched out his hand. “Welcome to the governing business. Though I can’t say you’re a bona fide delegate, as Kentuck’s no county of Virginia.”

  “Her people desire that she be. They’ve petitioned. I’d intended we should come just as deputies, to negotiate for admission to the state. But the people did things their own way while I was detained elsewhere. Withal, I have petitions praying Virginia’s protection, and one disputing Colonel Henderson’s claims on that country.”

  Henry regarded the ceiling for ten seconds, as if adding sums, then looked back to George and said, “There’s many a faction, besides Henderson, who’d deny Virginia has any proper pretension to that country.”

  “That I well know. I’ve heard every side of it.”

  “The Assembly won’t sit again till October.”

  “Aye,” George sighed. “Meantime, Indians are swarming on the settlements, egged on by the British, and I doubt there’s fifty pounds o’ gunpowder in all o’ Kentuck. That can’t wait much longer. We need powder, and that’s why I’ve come straight to you.”

  Again the governor studied the ceiling. “You put your mother state in a delicate spot, George. It would be a stretch of our power to arm Kentuck; some would say an intrusion on country not our own. That’s serious.”

  “Kentuck’s a part of Virginia under the old charter.”

  “True. But don’t forget, we’re shrugging off a king, and maybe with him our claim to some territory. There’s northern states in the Continental Congress who say the West ought to be the common property of the united colonies. And don’t forget, even Henderson’s isn’t the only land company claiming rights in it.”

  “Not to mention the Indians,” grinned George, “if ye mean to name everybody who has a say-so.” His grin vanished as quickly as it had come. “I know full damned well, sir, that I’m putting the state on a delicate spot. But without powder, we’ll all be killed or driven out. If that happens, y’ve got no defense on your rear at all.” He had deliberately put that in military terms, and now stared hard at Henry. He knew the governor fancied himself a military man at heart, and, as governor, he was commander-in-chief of the Virginia state forces, and would be determined to show good strategic sense.

  “I don’t know if you’ve read Virginia’s new constitution, George.”

  “In fact, sir, I have.” His old mentor George Mason had penned it.

  “Then you know the limits on my powers in such matters as domain. I’m no dictator, by any means. Whether Virginia asserts her claims to the western country, the Assembly will have to decide, when they sit again in October. I’ll see that it’s a first issue of business. But till then I guess you can’t know whether you’re to be a true delegate or not.”

  “That’s not important to me, sir. Defense is.”

  “You surely know my sentiments on Kentuck, George. I think it’s worth claiming.”

  “It would be Virginia’s greatest wealth.”

  “Here is what I can do, George. I’ll write a letter to my Council, favoring the gunpowder. You’ll take the letter to them at Williamsburg. Make as much persuasion to them as you’ve made to me, and you’ll likely get your ammunition with little delay—probably as a loan to neighbors in distress, though, I fear, not as a provision to Virginia citizens. How much powder are you thinking of?”

  “Five hundred pounds at least.”

  Henry pursed his lips. “Five hundred. Better ask for a thousand, then.”

  “And the expense of guards and transport,” George added. “That’s all through hostile country, as y’ know.”

  Henry touched his temple with two fingertips, put his glasses down from his forehead onto his nose, peered over the glasses at George, and then replaced them atop his head. “They’re likely to contest you soundly on that.”

  “They had better not,” George said with heat. “Not if they mean to have Kentuck.”

  Henry cleared his throat. Then he pulled a bell cord to summon his secretary. He smiled and relaxed. “Stay for supper, George. It does me good to see you. You Westerners are like fresh air to me. Where’s your other delegate, your Mister … Jones, was it?”

  “Gone home to the Holston, to fight Cherokees till the Assembly sits again.”

  “Hm. Active fellow; I’d like to have met him. You’ll convey my regards to your good family?” He seemed to have forgotten his supper invitation, and George was glad, eager to go. Home was in the next county, and he hadn’t been there in nearly three years. Home! He could feel it pulling on his heart; he could see his family around a candlelit table. “Five hundred pounds of powder!” Henry mused as the secretary entered. “That’s a tall order, George. But we can’t afford to leave any quarter unguarded.”

  THIS TIME, JOHNNY WAS NOT IN THE DRIVEWAY TO GREET him as he galloped up, but here came little Billy tearing down the middle of the road toward him, yelling, “Georgie! Georgie,” and followed by a tubby little black boy, two barking bird dogs, and two sisters, Lucy and Elizabeth, their skirts flying. Billy looked as if he were determined to get run over, and in an instant George realized that the rascal expected to be snatched up and swung onto the horse’s rump as Johnny had used to be.

  I hope Ma isn’t watching, he thought. He slowed the horse just slightly and headed him to Billy’s left, and leaned far out and down as he swept past. His left arm caught Billy around the waist and snatched him off the ground. It almost knocked the breath out of the little fellow, but he was deliriously happy, hugging to George’s side and yelling like an Indian. They trotted up to the front door trailed by the children and dogs. Billy was grinning triumphantly down at York between Indian yelps, and the little blue-black child came running along rolling and buffing, his eyes wide with amazement. George saw his mother in the door with a little girl who must be Frances Eleanor beside her, and his father was riding in from the tobacco fields. Edmund came sprinting after him, coming at an angle across the field, at every third step springing over a row of plants. George lowered Billy to the ground, where, still in a frenzy of rowdy exuberance, he pounced upon little York and the two tumbled and grappled and growled like a pair of bear cubs, the dogs leaping over and around them.

  “God be praised,” his mother said as he dismounted, “you’re still amongst the livin’!” And she hugged him hard, and she saw the old bloodstains on his sleeves, and hoped it was from butchering meat.

  And then the family swept, clamoring, into the great, cool hallway, where the old business of getting reacquainted could start all over again.

  “I saw a lot of cattle in the north pasture, Pa.”

  “I’M RAISING BEEF FOR THE GRAND ARMY. TWO HUNDRED head I have now.”

  “Good. It’ll take a hundred of ’em to feed Jonathan. Where is he?”

  “Last letter said they were marching to Georgia. But that’s been weeks.”

  “He’s a captain,” Edmund said. “Y’ought to see how grand ’e looks in a uniform!”

  “I’ll bet! A captain in the Regulars! Now, that is grand! And where’s Johnny?”

  “At drill, up at the Bowling Green,” said Mrs. Clark. “If he’s not home, he’s either at drill, or up to his usual pursuits.”

  “Ha, ha, ha! Not over that yet, eh?”

  “Indeed not. It’s worse. He thinks he’s got to get in a lifetime of sparkin’ ere he goes to war. As if he doesn’t expect to come back.” Mrs. Clark’s voice caught as she said this. “Well, ye know how he goes on about things.” George saw the little glint of desperation in her eyes before she firmed herself. When Johnny went to war, that would be three she’d have to pray for.

  George knelt and nuzzled Elizabeth. Her face was so perfect, with its little nose and
halo of black curls, that it made George’s heart ache. Then she blinked shyly and smiled at him, and he could see that it was she who was in the toothless stage now; the tip of her pink tongue showed in the gap between her eyeteeth. Lucy had teeth now, but she had reached the gangly phase and looked rather like a boy in a dress. Her nose was even longer, and had a scab on its bridge, among the great freckles. She looked as full of mischief as an imp of Satan. “Hey, sweetheart,” he said to her. “You’re still my favorite redheaded sister, I hope.”

  “I’m your only one,” she said, a little impudent, it seemed.

  “You are?” He acted shocked. “No, you must be mistaken. I have one with no front teeth.” She smiled finally, at that.

  “Georgie!” Billy cried. He was up on the stairs now, with York standing below him at the banister. “Georgie, can I wear your hat?”

  “If you can find it. I don’t know where it got to.”

  Billy held it up, smiling wide, and put it on. It came down over his eyes and he had to tilt his head far back to look down at them in the hallway. Everybody laughed at him, and George said:

  “Later I’ll show y’ a few things about that hat. After I have another drink.”

  “And a story! About the great MING-o,” Billy cried.

  George paused as he was sniffing a glass of brandy, and a picture flickered in his memory, a sad spectre: Logan, as he had last seen him, a reeking ruin.

  Edmund had been looking at the dark stains and slits that looked like knife cuts on George’s sleeves, but knew better than to ask the question with his father standing here. He was somehow sure they were Indian blood. He watched as George set down his glass and picked up the youngest daughter and held her on his arm, the arm with bloodstained sleeves.

  The little girl looked at the stubble on George’s face and blinked a little in the liquorish smell of his breath, and she looked a bit frightened, but she smiled a very timid smile. “Oh, but you’re a beauty,” he said, “and you don’t really know me at all, do ye?”

  She nodded. “You’re Georgie,” she said.

  “Yes I am! And you’re Frances Eleanor, and the last time I saw you, you were a suckling.”

  “I’m Fanny,” she said. “That is the name they call me now.”

  “You’re Fanny, and you know what? You talk a lot plainer than your brother Billy did when he was your age.”

  “Yes,” she said with adult clarity and gravity. “I should say I do.”

  Laughing, George handed her to his father, saying. “Quick, Pa, send her to the school! She can teach the parson to speak English!”

  “Oh, my, oh my!” Mrs. Clark exclaimed, “oh, I’m laughing so, I’ll be gettin’ all strawberry-blotchy the way I do! Oh, I’m glad you’re home with us! Oh, I’m so happy! But please! Let me get my breath!”

  “I haven’t seen Dick,” George said. “Where’s he?”

  “He’s off to drill too,” said John Clark. For a moment then there was no laughter. It was as if they all had become aware of the not-so-distant war, as if they had heard cannon on the horizon, like the grumble of summer thunder, but they had heard nothing. George took another sip of brandy. It had been a long time since he had savored anything so smooth, and this was like heaven to be here among family, warming his soul with this velvety, fruity stuff. The frontier corn whiskey burned like acid going down, and the trader’s rum that reached those parts left him feeling the next morning as if he’d been scalped in his sleep.

  “I heard on the road,” he said, “that Owen’s the sheriff o’ King William now.”

  “That he is,” said John Clark. “And did ye get my letter that he’s a father?”

  “Aye, I did. I’m an ‘Uncle George.’ That sounds good.”

  “And he’s like t’ be a father again this year, Annie tells us.”

  “Again? Isn’t that wonderful!”

  “Well, I don’t know what’s so wonderful about it. It happens all the time,” said Mrs. Clark. “In this family, anyways. I told that girl …” She paused, glancing at her husband. “Well, never mind what I told her. But I’ll say I’m glad we’ve got no more daughters of bearin’ age yet. What with all these would-be warrior sons to worry about, I don’t have time to worry about but one daughter at a time.”

  “Well, it’s a blessing you don’t let yourself worry about other people’s daughters too, then,” mused John Clark. “I do. I expect every day to see some passing fancy o’ Johnny’s show up on the door stoop with a babe-in-arms and say, ‘Tot, meet your Grandpa.’ Grrr!”

  Here they were all talking about babies again, and Billy was getting impatient, standing up there on the stairs looking down his nose from under George’s marvelously smelly hat. “Georgie,” he cried, “come on! You said you’d show me about the hat!”

  “I will! Soon as I have another sip here, I’ll show you. And you and I got some surveying to talk on, too. Y’ learned to read Euclid yet?”

  “I can read some words!” He reached into the pocket of his weskit, remembering something. “Lookee!” He held up the compass.

  George’s hat was a battered, sweat-stained, rakish thing, but appeared to be just a hat, at first glance, a floppy, very wide-brimmed black felt hat with the right side of the brim turned up and fastened to the round crown. “Now look at this,” George said, reaching up and taking it from Billy’s head. “There’s times I’d ha’ been in a pickle without this wondrous old hat.” They stood around him and watched. “Lookee here at this bone here,” he said, pulling out the sliver that pinned up the brim. “That’s turkey-leg bone, and many’s the time I use it to pick a raspberry seed or some stringy bear meat from ’twixt my back teeth.” He put it back. “Now this feather. Y’ think that’s just a decoration? It’s sure not. Look at the point, all black with ink. That’s th’ very pen I write ye letters with. Now, lookee here, stuck in the brim right here. Needles! One for leather, one for cloth. If I didn’t have those, why, Billy, I’d have to go ’round sometimes with my hind end shinin’ out through a split in my breeches.”

  “Oh, Georgie, really!” Frances Eleanor admonished. It threw him off for a minute, that prim little voice, and everyone was laughing.

  “Ha, ha! Well, now, this hatband. See how it’s all a braid of thread and thong? Well, when I sit down to mend things, why, I pull out however much I need. I’m a regular seamstress, y’ see! A man’s got to be, out there where all the gels, what few there be, are somebody else’s wives.” He looked up and toward the door, listening for a moment, then went on: “So there y’are, family. Add that this wondrous hat is sometimes my water pail and forage basket, and the only roof over my head for a month at a stretch, and y’ see why I’d be in a pickle without it. I wonder whether it’s Johnny and Dickie comin’. I hear four horses, or is it five?”

  They just now heard the hoofbeats, faint, far down the road, and they looked at him, wondering how he could have heard those hooves already, even while talking. It was uncanny, like a dog’s hearing, or an Indian’s, or …

  Ann Rogers Clark remembered a long-ago day, remembered sitting in a rocking chair in the nursery, remembered Billy listening through the window, as if for summer thunder, and then George riding home.

  The horsemen were Johnny and Dickie, and with them were cousins Joe and Johnny Rogers, all in their militia garb and armed to the teeth. They swarmed in through the front door and began pounding George and hugging him. Leaving the Bowling Green after muster, they said, they had been told by someone that George Rogers Clark was in the neighborhood. What was he up to, they wanted to know. Why was he here? Had he come back to join the army?

  “No,” he said. “I’m on business for Kaintuck, and I’ll tell you what it is in a bit. Listen, I’m off for Williamsburg next week first thing, but I’ve got a lot o’ stories to tell before I go, stories to make your back-hair rise up.”

  Ann Rogers Clark hugged her waist and looked at him, slowly shaking her head.

  Nothing’s changed, she thought. Nothing’s changed.<
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  7

  CHARLES TOWN, SOUTH CAROLINA

  June 28, 1776

  THE DAY WAS DAWNING TO BE BRIGHT AND HOT. THE SUN WAS scarcely out of the Atlantic, peeping over the scrub and huts around Fort Sullivan, just gleaming on the windows of the stately waterfront houses along The Battery of Charles Town across the harbor, but already Jonathan Clark could feel it blazing on his back where he sat under the awning of the officers’ mess. Jonathan was sweaty and dizzy. He had hardly slept; he had been shivering all night and wishing for the warmth of morning; now it was morning and he knew the sun would be almost unbearable again today.

  There were about two dozen officers on benches at the tables, among them this morning General Charles Lee himself, who had come over from his headquarters to discuss Fort Sullivan’s powder supply with Colonel William Moultrie, the South Carolina militia officer in command of the fort. General Lee was giving the fort very little powder. General Lee had made it clear that he did not believe in Colonel Moultrie’s squat, unimposing, unfinished little fort. General Lee expected the British fleet to sail right past it, demolish it with a few contemptuous passing shots, then sail on into the harbor to bombard Charles Town. Lee expected the main attack would be made by the 3,000 Redcoats that had been landed and encamped on Long Island, east of Fort Sullivan, and thus Lee had diverted most of the available powder to his Continental troops, which he had placed between the Redcoats and the city. General Lee wanted to give Moultrie only enough powder for twenty-eight shots from each of the fort’s twenty-six eighteen-pounders. Lee had repeatedly called the unfinished fort a “slaughter pen” and every day since his arrival at Charles Town he had mocked Moultrie’s belief that it could serve any purpose. Their quarrel over this was the current gossip of the American officers. Jonathan now heard Lee say, in that contemptuous tone of voice his officers had come to know so well:

  “What is it you call that, that stuff your little fort’s made of?”