He had to keep his face toward the river because he could not let the officers or men see his face now. He felt like dropping to his knees and crying in despair.
But there was a presence beside him. Bowman was there on his left. Someone else was on his right now; it was Captain Worthington. They were waiting for him to say something. So he said it.
“At last, gents. The Wabash. The last barrier between us and Hamilton. We’ve done it, boys. We’ve crossed the Illinois in winter. A thing supposed to be impossible. Congratulations to us all.”
They were looking at him through the sides of their eyes, unsure what to say to this. Finally Bowman cleared his throat. “Hamilton’s a gone gosling, sure enough,” he said, evidently still feigning eagerness, then he added, “What ought we t’ do first, George?”
George took a deep, shuddering breath. It was obvious they weren’t going to let him give up. It was still his show and they still believed he could do something and so, now without the inner fire of vainglory, he still had to do something and it still had to make sense. So he started talking.
“Put a detail to making a raft,” he said. “Big enough for, say, four men. We’ll send it across yet today to reconnoitre the far side for a good landing place. If they find ground to walk on, we’ll have ’em sneak up to th’ town and liberate some boats, just in case something’s befell th’ Willing. Ed, you divide your company up and have ’em cut ash and hickory and find bark to make canoes. Everyone else can go hunt, dig roots, find slippery elm bark, anything edible except our horses. I doubt there’s much game on this shore, but there might be at least one deer stranded here—th’ Good Lord usually arranges things like that for times like now. Keep everybody busy, gents. As my Ma says, ‘Idle hands make evil thoughts.’ If I’ve forgot anything, think of it yourselves. Hop to it, then, my friends.”
They went away, and now they were not pretending eagerness; their voices were lively and full of authority. Soon every man was busy.
It was odd how that had worked out. Their needs had saved him. He remembered another one of his mother’s sayings. It was back when she’d birthed Fanny, her tenth. Someone had said it was about time she gave up mothering and rested. “Nay,” she had said. “I’ve started something, and now I wouldn’t stop if I could, and I couldn’t stop if I would.”
It was funny how one always came to understand her sayings by and by.
BY THE NEXT MORNING, TWO SERIOUS TRUTHS WERE EVIDENT: There was virtually no game in the area, and the Willing had not reached her appointed station on the Wabash below. Hunters combing the flooded woods for miles around had determined the first fact; the scouts in the pirogue had come up the river to tell him the other.
One of the privates had a theory about this, and his fellows egged him on until he came and told George about it. “The rain falls forty days and forty nights, as y’see, sir, and th’ animals go two by two lookin’ for an Ark, and thar sets th’ Willing, so they just take ’er an’ head for Ararat!” And the soldier turned away, prancing like a leprechaun, slapping his knee while George and the onlookers roared with laughter at his wit.
The starving troops now worked feebly but steadily making two canoe frames from peeled, split ash. There was no birch in the vicinity, so they peeled great limber slabs of bark off various kinds of trees and tried them. Inner bark of elm seemed to be about the best, and men with tomahawks, knives, awls, and leather thongs were sitting around in the rain working with numbed fingers, tailoring bark to cover the frames, while others experimented with candle tallow and pounded bark fiber to make a substitute for pitch to seal the seams. The canoes were shaping up rough-looking and flimsy, but apparently they would have to serve, along with the pirogue, to do the ferrying the Willing had been meant to do. George kept returning to the river to watch for the four scouts who had gone out the day before on their raft. At last the shout of a sentry upstream heralded their return. They were in a sorry condition. They came paddling ashore weakly on logs, their feet and arms in the cold river water, looking like half-drowned rats. They were brought staggering up to a bonfire, and as they warmed themselves and drank hot sassafras tea, they made their dreary report. Unable to find any land on the other side except a low hill surrounded by water, they had paddled farther up toward the town until, at dusk, the current had broken up their raft. They had spent the entire night awake, lying on old logs in the backwaters, half in and half out of the water, staying together only by holding each other’s hands, keeping their souls together only by joking and praying and singing Len Helm’s drinking song. George clamped his jaws and listened to this piteous account.
“By my eyes!” breathed a listener, taking his blanket off his shoulders and draping it over one of the scouts, “I thought I had a hard night!”
The smaller of the two bark canoes was finished, and put in the water, and with a few minutes’ more caulking and plugging, floated without leaks. Immediately George sent Captain McCarty and three of his men up the river in it to make another attempt to steal boats. But they returned within an hour, reporting that they had been stopped by the sight of four large campfires on the shore a league upstream, and figures clad in red—whether Indian blankets or British uniforms they had not been able to tell at a safe distance.
“Well, then,” George said with a sigh, “use what daylight’s left to go on down and try to find the Willing. Tell Cousin Johnny that I’m mighty impatient for ’im.” He sensed some troops standing nearby and knew he’d better lighten up his tone of voice. “Tell ’im,” he said, “that the pair of elephants might be enough to feed the regiment.”
The troops could still laugh a little. He was glad to hear that.
THE NEXT MORNING, FEBRUARY 20, WAS MISTY, AND THE air was close down to freezing. Even the dull report of the morning gun up at Fork Sackville caused little cheer. The men sat huddled in their blankets, their eyes hollow and haunted. There was much coughing, little talking.
But in the French company they were talking. Captain Charleville came with a worried expression and told George that the people in his company were having a democratic discussion about trying to return to Kaskaskia. George hopped to his feet. He strode into the French camp. Within two minutes of fast talking, he had reminded them that they had volunteered to come with him, laughed off their notion of retreating, and told them to go out and hunt food for their comrades if they were so eager to go walking. They were ashamed to meet his eyes, and were bewildered by his cheerful but forceful manner, and soon they had faded into the woods in every direction with their muskets. “Now,” George said to Charleville. “My thinking is, democracy is a fine thing, in its place, but this isn’t the place. So long as they’re scattered out there in the woods, they won’t be holding assemblies, if ye see what I mean. Good day, Cap’n.”
Now there was nothing George could do yet but try once more to work up the spirits of his own men. He went around the camp talking up the certainty of success, boasting about the canoes, talking about the imminent arrival of the Willing, rubbing his stomach and assuring them that with so many hunters out there would soon be meat. He decided that if no turn of fortune had come by tomorrow, he would have the first of the horses butchered. But he kept this decision to himself.
At noon, things began happening. The sentry on the river bank decoyed ashore a passing boat carrying five French hunters from Vincennes. They were astonished to see the Americans here, and told George there was not the least suspicion of his presence. They said most of the inhabitants were chafing under Hamilton’s hauteur and were still sympathetic toward the Americans. The repairs on the fort were nearly finished, they said. They also said they had seen two small boats adrift a little way up the river.
George detained the Frenchmen as politely as possible, in case they might have thought to go back to Hamilton and betray his presence. He gave them the opportunity to join his army and to contribute their boat and their provisions to his regiment, hinting that they would be much happier if they did. They shr
ugged, and, with wan smiles, they volunteered everything. George sent Captain Worthington up the river in the newly finished canoe to seek the drifting boats. At that moment a gunshot was heard somewhere to westward, and soon one of the Virginians staggered into camp with a small doe across his shoulder. The whole camp was suddenly alive and in the highest spirits. One small deer among a hundred and thirty starving men meant scarcely a couple of bites apiece, but, cut small, organs, brain, tongue, and all, and extended through a gruel of roots thickened by the flour and goose fat the Frenchmen had contributed, it was as welcome as a feast.
While it was cooking in a kettle, Worthington returned, having found one of the drifting boats.
Not much, a cup of slop and a found boat, George mused. But they’re a change of fortune and the boys’ve got spirit again. Now we’ve got two boats, a pirogue, and a bark canoe on hand.
He called the captains in for a conference. They sat before him, hollow-eyed, hollow-cheeked, faces looking like skulls in the dim light of the sheltered campfire, their shoulders wet with rain. But they were smiling, feeling the miracle of digestion, and waiting to hear what he had to say.
“Get ’em ready,” he said with that old cocky grin. “We’ll start ferrying across the Wabash first thing in the morning.”
18
WABASH VALLEY
February 23, 1779
A RED-TAILED HAWK SOARED IN THE COLD AIR A THOUSAND feet above the river. In the east the sky was yellow and the horizon was blue-gray. In the west the sky was deep, clear blue and a last star was fading. Far below the hawk there spread miles of lowland covered with water on both sides of the river, and where no currents ran there was white-edged ice. The ice held the tops of bushes and reached in among the tree trunks of flooded forests. In the east the ice reflected the yellow of the sky and in the west it was gray.
The hawk flew eastward over the river and then dipped its left wing and began drifting northward in a wide arc, descending. It passed high over a town that stood on a plain surrounded by floodwater and dimpled with frozen ponds. A thin film of chimney smoke hung in the still air over the town and over a large Indian village north of the town. Near the town, on a low bluff where the plain met the river, stood a fort with a blockhouse at each corner and a gate facing the town and an arrangement of log buildings inside its palisade. Smoke rose from the chimneys of the buildings in the fort. As the hawk drifted silently over the fort and swung southwesterly out over the river, men in red coats were walking across the frosty ground inside the fort. A circle of Indian tents and a corral of horses filled a part of the parade ground.
The hawk’s wide circle back down above the river brought it over a wide, flooded plain three or four miles wide, about a league below the town. It was water unbroken by ground or even by trees or shrubs. Huge stretches of it were covered by thin ice, and a path had been broken through some of this ice. The hawk veered east from the river and saw a long line of men below in the water, moving slowly, slowly toward the town, breaking ice as they went. Two boats and two canoes were moving alongside the men. The hawk soared high over the line of men and then tilted in the sky and sailed toward the southeast.
GEORGE’S VISION WAS GOING STRANGE, FROM THE HUNGER-FAINTNESS and from the pain of his bones and flesh in the ice water. Everything would go blinding bright, then dark, then bright again. Sometimes the horizon would seem to slant. Once he looked up and saw a hawk high in the blue morning sky, then it divided and became two hawks, then one.
It was bad here that there were no bushes or trees to grab for support, and worse that there were none to be walked past to give a sense of progress. There was no way to conceive of distance or time, only the slow, disorderly splashing, gasping, coughing, blowing, moaning, and the intermittent racket of Dickie Lovell’s drum behind him. The drummer rode on the shoulders of a big sergeant. The horizon, that thin, low, blue line of land they were struggling toward, stayed the same. There was no diddle lully day; no one had breath for singing.
The men had awakened this morning on a little island with their wet clothes frozen to the ground. Then he had given them a speech of praise that had brought tears to their eyes, and to his. He had pointed across this stretch of water and told them it was the last obstacle between them and the Hair-Buyer’s fort, and then he had led them straight into the icy floodwater again to start this last three or four miles to Vincennes.
And now they were in the middle of this endless sheet of water and he was doubting that they would be able to make it across. For the first time, he was doubting whether he could make it across. It was the first time in his life that he had doubted that his body could do his will. It had always had the power to go where he would drive it, no matter how much it hurt, but now he could scarcely force it to move and he felt that at any moment it would simply seize up and stop here in the middle of this infinity of ice water.
He pulled out his pocket watch, and when he got it in focus he saw that they had been in the water for an hour. He looked back. Some of the men were now staggering two and three abreast, the weaker supporting themselves on the shoulders of the stronger. Some of the big men were carrying two knapsacks and two rifles now while their unburdened fellows concentrated on making themselves move. “Oh help me, I’m cramped up!” a voice would cry, and a boat would tilt as that man was dragged aboard like a water-soaked log.
The torturous stepping and quaking went on for another eternity and when George looked at his watch again only ten minutes had passed. He put the watch away, determined not to look at it again. The sun was coming up and it was the first sun he had seen in the nineteen days of the march, but it gave no warmth.
He glanced back again and now in the faces he could see fear—the stark, strained fear of collapsing and going under. Now his concern for them was almost a panic. He could feel his own dependable body failing, his head whooshing, his heart fluttering, his spine stiffening into a shaft of ice, and was sure they must be closer to the end of it than he. There seemed to be a mile yet to go, and there would be hearts stopping before that mile was made.
“Boats!” he shouted. He jabbed his finger ahead toward the distant woods. “Quick! Make land! Unload! Come back for people! Fast, now! Master Lovell, lay on those sticks!” The pickaback drummer hammered away till he was red in the face. “You flankers! Here!” Two rugged riflemen, each six and a half feet tall, splashed toward him. “Go on ahead,” he gasped. “Walk tiptoe, or walk on water, or something, but be ten feet tall and keep yellin’ back that it’s getting shallow.”
“Aye, sir,” said one. “But what if it ain’t?”
“Say so anyway, man. They need to hear it. Off ye go!”
The boats were far ahead now. George was nearly frantic for his people; their sounds from behind him were so piteous and extreme now that he could not bear to look back. The two tall scouts kept calling back, “Gettin’ shaller! Yayhoo! Gettin’ shaller!” But he could see the water was to their ribs now; it was getting deeper. There were a few little bandy fellows in this troop who didn’t stand to the armpits of those two men; they’d be head-under by the time they got there. Boats! George thought. “BOATS!” he yelled.
And then he saw them coming back, oars and paddles flashing fast; they came by with water gurgling and broken ice gnashing around their bows, and voices back in the line were yelling for them. “Here! Git Isaac! He’s a-foldin’ double!” “Boat! Oh, God damn, hurry! Help this whoreson ol’ Shad here! His eyes gone blank!” “Hey! Man here whose feet don’t reach bottom! Got some room?” And then the boats, loaded hull-down with men stacked like cold fish in their bilges, sped past again, their panting rowers hurrying to get them ashore and come back for more. George wanted with all his soul to grab a boat and hang on and ride those last few hundred yards to shore, but he knew he couldn’t do that and still look them in the eyes. No. There were still too many in the water still coming along because he was.
He could see the textures of the bark of the trees now; he was close enough to
see that lovely gray-green mottle on the white sycamores and the old gray tatters of hickory shagbark and the smooth silver-gray of beech trunks, and oh, how he wanted to touch them once more, how he loved trees! But the water was to his chest now; it grew deeper as he strained against it and advanced with this nightmare slowness, holding his powder horn and gun above his head with excruciatingly sore arms and shoulders and prickling-cold fingers. The drum was still rattling back there somewhere, and there were encouraging shouts from those who had already been put ashore, and the boats were coming out again in a great hurry to get those who had had to stop back there because they were simply too short to keep their faces out of the water; but the sky was flickering now, from blue to black, black to white.
And at last there was a sapling at hand, and a floating log, and the column was thrashing and splashing in disarray into the flooded edge of the woods, breaking ice as they came. Some men had strength to climb ashore before they swayed and fell to their knees. Others clung to bushes and waited for the boats to come. Some waded into the shallows, gasping for breath, then found that without the water to buoy them they were too feeble to stand, and fell face-down amid the floating ice chips. With his own last bit of strength, George got one arm under a muttering, praying skeleton of a man and dragged him ashore. Then hands grabbed his arms as his knees started to buckle under him.
And now the boats were out there one last time, a hundred yards out, heaving aboard the last dozen men whose heads and shoulders and upraised rifles still dotted the sheet of water. And then the boats beached and put those last few ashore.
From Sea to Shining Sea Page 39