From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Now Croghan began examining his own arms and legs, looking at each with a careful detachment as if he were a healthy doctor and this diseased limb his patient. “Mine’s a bit messier,” he said, “but not so bad as some I’ve …” He went into a spasm of coughing and sank back gingerly on his cot. “Pardon me. Must lie down a minute.” He lay there coughing and pouring sweat. His tongue began a dry clicking against the back of his palate. Jonathan, alarmed, raised himself painfully up on his elbows and called for a water boy.

  The water carrier came. Like most of the aides, he was someone who had had the pocks already and was not afraid to be among those sick with it. He was a private, perhaps nineteen or twenty, short, with a pit-scarred face. He was gentle. He raised Croghan’s head and put a cup to his lips. “Thankee,” Jonathan said for his friend.

  “Aye, sir.” The lad stood back and for a moment stayed and waved his hand back and forth over Bill Croghan, stirring up the flies, which immediately settled again. There was just nothing that could be done about the flies. Even if there had been a slave available to stand over each patient with a fly-whisk, the buzzing multitude would have prevailed. They droned through the shed, darkening the air by their numbers. They fringed the eyes, mouths, and sores of every man who was unconscious or too lethargic to raise a hand.

  Croghan was sleeping now, it seemed. Jonathan looked at him for a while, then sat up painfully and waved a rag back and forth over him. He looked around the dolorous scene in the stinking, murmuring, suffocating gloom under the old shed roof. There might have been two or three hundred men in this shed. As an infantry officer Jonathan could make a fair guess of numbers of men standing or marching, just at a glance. But lying in rows on pallets, all inflamed limbs and putrid flesh in sweaty, wadded, bloody, or yellowing sheets, under the blurry gaze of his swollen eyes, they were uncountable.

  And this was just one of the sheds.

  It occurred to him after a while that he was sitting here, moving his arm, waving flies away from his friend. He would not have thought he could sit up and do anything.

  But doing this for Bill Croghan, he realized, somehow made him less aware of his own torment.

  GOVERNOR HENRY HAD PREDICTED EXACTLY HOW HIS PRIVY council would respond to George’s request for gunpowder for Kentuck. It was well received—up to a point. Bedecked in a new scarlet coat he had bought for the occasion, George stood before the eight councilmen and argued vehemently. These men all knew his brother Jonathan and they knew of George’s connections with Henry and Jefferson and George Mason, and so, despite his youthfulness and his somewhat overpowering frontier directness, they listened very respectfully to him, and without much quibbling agreed to write a requisition for five hundred pounds of gunpowder. But, they stressed, it was only a loan to needful friends, and George would become liable for it in case the Assembly should later refuse to receive Kentuck as a county of Virginia.

  George agreed to that, and they wrote him an order for the gunpowder. Then he told the Council that it was out of his means to pay for safe transport of the powder, and asked them to authorize that it be sent at public expense. Here, as Henry had predicted, they balked. Just providing the powder, they said, was an act for which they might be faulted. “For us to ship it,” Benjamin Harrison protested, “might be seen as an overt act of intrusion in a dubious place. Please, young sir, understand this. We’ll say all we can for the admission of Kentuck when the whole Assembly meets in October. That country’s of supreme interest to us. Whatever caution we have to exercise, don’t think we undervalue the West. Please.”

  George looked around the elegant council room, at the sleek and august members of the Council, and saw by the regretful cast of their countenances that mere argument was not going to move them further; they were determined to play safe. But he knew, too, how Virginia coveted its old charter rights to the rich western country.

  If they can’t be talked into going out on a limb, he thought, I reckon they can be scared out onto it.

  He set his jaw and, fixing a steely eye on them one by one, he stood up slowly. He remained, leaning with his knuckles on the table.

  “Very well, then,” he said in a flat, cold tone. “If Virginia can’t give us protection, I’m sorry to have to say I’ll need to seek it elsewhere. I have no doubt there’s plenty of factions willing to give it. I’ll say this,” he declared, suddenly picking up the gunpowder requisition by one corner and flipping it toward them across the table, “if a country’s not worth protecting, it’s not worth claiming. Gentlemen of the Council, regrets—and good day, sirs.”

  HE WAS THIRTY MILES UP THE ROAD TOWARD CAROLINE County, Dickie riding alongside him, when galloping hoofbeats approached from behind.

  He was not in the least surprised that it was a messenger from the Council. He had been expecting one.

  The Council had reconsidered. The gunpowder would be sent at public expense. He could hire boats and guards and pick up the powder at Fort Pitt and take it down the Ohio to Kentuck; Virginia would bear the expense.

  He had won. His mother state now was committed to the defense of Kentuck.

  “And I’m damned relieved on it, too,” he confessed to his family when he finally got home in August to visit. “Nobody but Virginia has the right to that country, and I’d have felt half a traitor going to anyone else for help.”

  BUT AUGUST COOLED INTO SEPTEMBER, AND SEPTEMBER yellowed into October, and when the Assembly convened in Williamsburg, George still had not been able to get the powder and leave for Kentuck. There had been delays and more delays. Gunpowder was the scarcest thing in the thirteen colonies, where everything was scarce because of the British blockade of the seacoast ports, and whenever a quantity of powder was earmarked for George’s Kentuckians, it would somehow be diverted from Fort Pitt to the army in the East. While George was waiting, his fellow Assemblyman John Gabriel Jones came up from the Holston Valley and helped George try to recruit guards to transport the powder, if it ever became available.

  They could have formed most of their squad from among George’s brothers and cousins, if eagerness had been the only criterion. Dickie wanted to go, but his father refused to let him. Johnny was willing to go, though his strongest yearning was to join the regular army and serve under Washington; he had seen how well brother Jonathan had looked in uniform, and fancied what a figure he himself would make in all that brass and braid. Cousin John Rogers had already made up his mind to join Washington, and when the summer slipped by with George still detained in Virginia, he finally went away and enlisted. But the one most rabid about going west with George was Cousin Joe Rogers. He hung around the Clark home imploring George to take him along, and rode with him down to Williamsburg twice.

  The Assembly was fighting a controversy that George had forced upon them through Patrick Henry: whether or not to give Kaintuck a county government and assume responsibility for its defense. Governor Henry and Thomas Jefferson wanted George to advance his argument to the whole Assembly, and to educate them on the present circumstances of the region. There were foes aplenty to the annexation, two chief ones being Colonel Henderson’s Transylvania Land Company and Colonel Arthur Campbell, County Lieutenant of Virginia’s westernmost county, who coveted the expanses of Kaintuck as a natural extension of his own domain, Fincastle County.

  George seemed always to be on the road between home and the capital, and though he was desperately anxious to get out over the mountains before winter, he made the most of the delays, and his family made the most of his unusual long visit. He had to tell at least one frontier story every night he was at home. He began teaching little Billy the basic elements of surveying. Ann Rogers Clark one day paused at her spinning wheel, where she was making cloth for army uniforms, and heard George coaching Billy in the yard below the window.

  “Now let’s hear that geometry again. A rectangle is what shape?”

  “Like a dog standing up.”

  “And a triangle is?”

  “Like a dog sitt
ing down.”

  “And a circle is?”

  “Like York’s belly!”

  And then the wonderful sound of their laughter together.

  To Ann Rogers Clark, the spinning wheel had become like a prayer wheel. Before George had come home, she had prayed for him over it. Then she had prayed for Jonathan after she received his letter about Charles Town’s preparations for attack. She had prayed thanks after his letter telling of the victory, then had begun praying for his life again when news came of the smallpox plague in Charles Town. And when his next letter came, saying he had had the pocks and gotten well, she had given thanks for his life but also had begun praying for herself, for the strength and wisdom she would need when he came home. No Clark or Rogers had ever had the pocks before, and she went around wondering how badly scarred he’d be, wondering whether she should say anything, whether she would be able not to stare at his face, whether she would cry. Yet for all her dread, she was always at windows, looking down the road, listening for the sound of hooves the way Billy had always used to listen for George’s return.

  Lucy and Elizabeth and Fanny were in the spinning room with her. It was the room that had been the nursery, but now it was full of the implements for the making of cloth. “We won’t be a-needing a nursery any longer,” she had told John one day, “so we’ll use the room this way.” She had noticed the quizzical little frown on his brow then, and had answered his unasked question: “Ten’s enough, John. Ye heard what th’ physician said last time. Another would kill me, as like as not. And there’s too many here dependin’ on me, yourself most of all, for me to go dyin’ in labor.”

  With her three daughters cooped up with her in a room for hours every day with the monotony of carding, combing, skeining, and spinning, Ann Rogers Clark found herself more and more in her old role of storyteller. The girls did not actually ask her to tell stories, because they knew what her answer would be: “Stories are for bedtime. Besides, Georgie said he’s going to tell the story at supper of the man who found the whiskey spring. I’d think y’d had enough stories.” So they didn’t ask her to tell stories. But Elizabeth, especially, had developed the art of asking questions that would lead her mother into telling a story before she realized she was telling one. And so Elizabeth’s sweet, shy voice asked now, through the hum and the hush of their industry:

  “Mama, how comes it to be we’re in Virginia, and not in England?”

  “Oh. Well, it was because of your great-grandpapa, I suppose. You know his name.”

  “Giles Rogers.”

  “That’s correct. Now, ye remember who his great-great-grandfather was?”

  “He was the one they burned up.”

  “Yes, he was John Rogers the Martyr. He was also the one who gave the world the first complete English language Bible! Remember what a body did in his life, not just how he died. So, anyway, Giles Rogers, maybe because he was like John Rogers, he disagreed with the King about something, and so he got on a ship and sailed over to Virginia, in 1680, it was, to put some distance between himself and the King. Well, d’you know what happened just when his ship was a-sailing up to Virginia’s shore?”

  “No, Mama,” Elizabeth said.

  “What happened, Mama?” asked little Fanny.

  “I know,” said Lucy, who had heard this many times. “He had a baby in the bay.”

  “Better to say, his wife had a baby. Just as the ship sailed into Chesapeake Bay, why, she had a baby boy. And they named him John Rogers, after the Martyr. And that John Rogers was my father, who got us all started here in this country, and no finer a man ever walked, all will agree. He grew to be very old, eighty-eight years, but he was a strong and happy man almost to his dying hour, and it’s a pity he didn’t live just a few years longer, so’s you’d all remember ’im.”

  “I remember him,” said Lucy. “He had all white hair.”

  “You might remember him. You were three when he passed to Heaven, as he surely did.” She wasn’t sure whether Lucy really remembered him, or had come to believe it from all the tales.

  Lucy said, “He was the one who did the bird whistle for Grandmama, wasn’t he?”

  And so of course Elizabeth and Fanny wanted to hear about the bird whistle, and so their mother gazed up toward the ceiling, through the myriad glowing filaments of lint floating in a late afternoon sunbeam from the window, and started telling another story.

  “My father John Rogers, he became a surveyor. ’Twas he taught it to your brother Georgie. Now this land along the Mattapony was wild land then, and he went all about and surveyed it and got a lot of it, just as Georgie does out west. He had a passion for land. Well, one day he met a young woman named Mary Byrd and fell in love with her, and that made him think it was about time he got married and had a family. But listen! That Mary Byrd’s father, he was a very rich man, and he did not want his daughter to marry John Rogers, as they had different feelings about the King. So he forbade his daughter ever to see John Rogers again. Well! Ye know how such words will set on a headstrong young woman, and she was headstrong, she was. So John Rogers and Mary Byrd schemed how they might keep on seein’ each other, and here’s the way they did:

  “There was a great old willow tree where Colonel Byrd’s land sloped down to the James River. Well, John Rogers would paddle his canoe up to that willow tree, and take ahold of a branch to hold himself there. He was too proud to set a foot on a plantation where he wasn’t welcome. Then he would make a call like a whippoorwill, and he’d keep makin’ that call till Mary Byrd would hear it, and she would come down the bank to the willow tree and get in the canoe, and off they’d float to the other side o’ the river where they could be together! They used to joke to me that they were both birds then, she a Byrd bird and him a whippoorwill bird! She used to tell me that she’d run down to that willow tree a thousand times when real whippoorwills called!” The girls laughed, then waited for more. “Well, the upshot was, they ran off and got married by and by, and when Colonel Byrd heard of it, why, he sputtered like spit on a griddle, and he disowned her. And poor Mary Byrd never saw her family again, which I reckon would ha’ made her woeful sad, but she was so happy with John Rogers that it never showed, if she was. They lived on a plantation they called Worcester, in King and Queen County, and there they had nine children, who are now all your aunts and uncles, except me, and as ye well know, I’m your—”

  “Our storyteller!” cried Fanny.

  “Oh! Bless me! You tricked me into it again!”

  “But that’s not all about the whippoorwill call, Mama,” said Lucy. “Tell what Georgie did when Grandmama passed over.”

  “No, I shall not, not now. I’ve wondered why I’m so uncommon weary this evening, and I just now see it’s because you all’ve got me spinning two kinds o’ yarn at once!”

  THAT NIGHT AS THEY LAY IN BED, SHE TOLD JOHN ABOUT the yarn-spinning in the old nursery room, and he, warmed and mellowed by the brandies he had drunk with George and Johnny after supper, chuckled and began feeling tender. It was cool in the room and warm under the comforter, and he turned on his side facing her and began stroking her hip and squirming. Oh, oh, she thought. And she gently lifted his hand away.

  “It’s been so long, Annie darlin’,” he murmured.

  “Yes, it has,” she said. It had in fact been some four years, since before Fanny was born. “Now, John,” she said with her voice full of loving kindness, as this was not going to be an easy thing for him to hear, “I’ve come to a place in my mind that I guess you haven’t yet. And I guess I must tell ye now.

  “John, my good husband, you know my life’s all yours, don’t you? Of course you know. But it’s what I was telling you about the nursery. We’ve had that body thing for twenty-five years, but we can’t anymore, not lest ye want to kill me.” He was lying very still now, tensing, as he realized she was saying something of great finality. She felt him bracing himself, and she went on: “I know a wife’s to do her husband’s will. And I have done and ’twas my will
, too. But now, no more, John, for if I carry another child, as I would the way you and I are, well, then you wouldn’t have me at all! Because I’d perish! You know what Dr. Tennant said. John, old darling, I adore ye, even more than when we had that, but … now I have to make a declaration of what ye surely know already, and that is, we’ve come past that.

  “I prayee, John, don’t turn from me and sigh, nor make me move to another room. I feel bad enough about it without that. I want to sleep at your side to the end of this mortal life—aye, even beyond it. Please, just hold me and go to sleep. Remember … remember the time we first saw the homestead in Albemarle together? Remember that glorious morning? On the meadow, when we knelt there and saw the place where you’d build our house? Remember how those flowers waved in the wind, and the sun was on us, and us so young?”

  He was still for a while, and she didn’t know whether he was sulking or remembering. But at length he said:

  “Why d’ye ask me that just now?”

  “Well,” she said, and the tears were starting to course hot and wet down her temples, “Because … because I loved you more that moment than ever before or since, I always thought, but … I know I do more now than I di … than I did then.”

  And soon she felt him quaking in the darkness with his great, suppressed sobs, and they held each other and wept silently until they were exhausted, and she went to sleep remembering the flowery green meadow under the Blue Ridge.

  AND IN THE MORNING AT BREAKFAST, WHILE THEY WERE still feeling haunted and bewildered, glancing cautiously at each other amid the lively talk of their children and the clatter of plates and silver, George announced that he heard a rider turning in, and that it must be a message about the powder, and he excused himself from the table and shot out into the hallway. On his heels at once were Johnny, who always imagined messages were for him, Mrs. Clark herself, who had a sudden wordless certainty that it was Jonathan home for his furlough, and Billy, who was just naturally always at George’s heels.