From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “What Johnny? Our Johnny?” cried Mrs. Clark, clapping her hand to her throat.

  “No! Our Johnny! My brother Johnny’s at our house! Y’ must come! He’s brought back … Oh, y’ll never believe this! He’s brought back another … He’s brought a real British general this time! The Hair-Buyer one! George captured ’im, he did, and’s sending ’im to Williamsburg, all chained up! And other officers. And the Grand Judge of Detroit, he caught him too! George did! He caught the whole murderin’ pack of ’em! Oh my God, come hear Johnny tell it all! Come on! Come on!”

  THE ROGERS HOUSE LOOKED LIKE AN ARMED CAMP. A guard troop commanded by Captain Williams was posted around a row of old brick slave quarters where the prisoners were being kept for the night. There was a crowd of neighbors, curious to see the notorious scalp-buyer and to hear the incredible news from the West.

  Johnny Rogers looked strained and thin from the journey, but he was happy and bubbling with marvelous tales of the victory. When John and Ann Rogers Clark arrived, Johnny stood straight as a Prussian to greet them, his eyes shimmering with tears. And then they all, the Rogerses and the Clarks, sat in George Rogers’ library and listened to Johnny try to tell the story, and it was apparent from his breathlessness and the tears that kept coming to his eyes that he was so moved by what had happened that it was hard for him to talk. He told them of George’s plan for the attack on Vincennes, about the nearly impossible march he had undertaken, and about the role the Willing was to have played in it. He told of the grueling voyage of the gunboat, the Indian attack in the mouth of the Tennessee, the rescue of Myers the courier from Indians, the frustrating effort to keep the Willing on the right way. And then:

  “When we got that bedamned boat in sight o’ the fort at last, can you imagine what we felt seein’ the American and Virginia flags a-flying over it ’stead of the Union Jack! I was so bumfuzzled for a time there I couldn’t understand why those flags were up. I wondered if it was a trick, that the Hair-Buyer’d put ’em up to trap us! I didn’t believe it could be Cousin George. I mean, after all, I’d just come a-rowin’ up through that drowned land, and it was ice water as far as ye could see, I mean that, and I still don’t see how a mortal man could ha’ got there, I swear to the Eternal God I don’t, but there they were, they’d taken that blamed fort the day before, and there they sat guarding more prisoners o’ war than they had men to guard ’em with! Redcoats, a whole company of ’em, and companies of French Canadian militia from Detroit, and all the principal agents in the scalpbuying business. O’ course I was mortified I’d missed the whole fight, but so overjoyed they’d not lost a man.

  “Ha, ha! Oh, listen, they had those British in a corral, and they were hanging nooses in the trees around ’em, and lookin’ at ’em with wolf eyes, and twirling tomahawks careless around ’em. O’ course, George had given orders no prisoner was t’ be hurt, but they didn’t know that, and they were so scared they looked like they were poopin’ peach pits—Excuse me, ladies present, that’s a saying Leonard Helm used about ’em, and it just slipped out there, careless-like.

  “Speaking o’ Helm, that old rascal, he was so pent up from being a prisoner all winter, he got George to let him take a force up the Wabash to hunt some British reinforcements that were due down from Detroit. And damn my eyes if Helm didn’t surprise ’em and surround ’em, and without firing one shot! He captured forty more soldiers, and more Indian agents, and ten boats bearin’ forty thousand pounds’ worth o’ military provisions and Indian trade goods, all stuff they were planning to use to hire Indians for their spring offensive. But, ha HAAA! There won’t be a spring offensive now! And in one o’ those boats was Philip Dejean, the Grand Judge of Detroit, who’s about as important a scoundrel as Gov’nor Hamilton ’imself. Lord have mercy, people! I can’t wait to see Patrick Henry’s face when we ride in with this catch! Oh, what that Cousin George has done! Why, there’s not been the like of it ever! I … I … What have I forgot? Have I told ye—Oh! That Myers we picked up. He had messages from the Assembly, congratulations to George for takin’ Kaskaskia last summer. Late, it was, but George read it to th’ troops in the fort there. And he asked ’em to think back to the start of it all, back at the Falls, and then he told ’em they’d probably done more good out there, just those few of ’em, than all the armies marching up and down the coast. And, listen, I wish ye could have seen their faces. They were just comin’ to realize it, I guess. Then he told ’em they were a company of heroes, every man a hero, and his voice, you know, caught, like, and I looked and he was cryin’. And they threw their hats in the air for ’im. God, I still get shivers.” Johnny’s own voice broke now, and his eyes were brimming, and for a moment he couldn’t speak, but just sat shaking his head at the wonder of it. All the Clarks were blinking rapidly and breathing deep breaths and shaking their heads slowly, envisioning their son and brother across the thousand miles. Billy looked as if he were in a trance, his eyes glazed, looking at Johnny Rogers’ mouth as if he could will more of those wonderful words to come out of it.

  “Johnny,” said Mrs. Clark, in that rich, plangent voice of hers, “tell us how he is. Is he well?” She was thinking of how much he must have suffered in those three weeks. One day of that sort of exposure had put men in their deathbeds with pneumonia, she knew that all too well, and this was her son they were speaking of. “How does he look?”

  The question caught Johnny off guard, and his eyes met hers, then fell away, then came back.

  “Why, why, yes … Yes, he’s well. He’s th’ happiest man I ever saw in all my days. He’s …” He saw George’s face in his mind’s eye now, and saw it in the light of her question, and realized only now that George had looked more like a man of fifty than of twenty-six. But he did not say that. He said, as cheerfully as he could, “Well, it’s no wonder, Auntie, he and all his boys were lookin’ some’at scrawny last I saw of ’em.” And hollow-eyed and stooped and trembly and coughing their lungs up, he did not tell her, adding instead: “It’s nothing a few weeks o’ that good English salt beef and brandy and chocolates they captured won’t cure. Ha, ha! And th’ summer sunshine, yea, by Heaven! I bet he looks as good as ever by now. When he gets back ’round to St. Louis and sees that sweetheart o’—”

  He stopped himself. George had told him not to mention Teresa de Leyba to them, that he would do that himself someday, that they would likely take it wrong that he was betrothed to a Spanish Catholic. Damn, Johnny Rogers thought. It’s what comes o’ talking too fast.

  “What?” Elizabeth exclaimed first. “Georgie found him a sweetheart out in the prairie? What is it, another squaw?”

  “Betty,” her mother said sharply. “Now what’s this, Nephew?”

  He looked around, half-smiling, waving his hands casually as if to dismiss it all. “Just a lady from one o’ those towns. Ah … I’ve got letters from ’im for you all. Maybe he mentions ’er, I don’t know. Say,” he asked, to change the subject, “where’s Dick?”

  “Oh,” said John Clark, “why, he’s probably out there by now. He joined wi’ John Montgomery and a company to go join George. I’m surprised if you didn’t pass ’em on th’ river, or someplace.” His voice trailed off. He wondered why they hadn’t passed somewhere along the way.

  “Well,” George Rogers said now, with a sigh. “Ann. John. That’s what your son has done, and I suppose I’m as proud as you are. I’m proud o’ my son Johnny here, too, I’ll declare before God!” He crumpled his mouth in a teary smile, gazing at Johnny.

  “Oh, Lordy,” Johnny exclaimed. “Proud o’ me? I thought when I showed up so late that George’d hate me out o’ the family for failin’ him! But y’ know what he said to me? He said, ‘Cousin, don’t bother your head a minute about that. I floundered round in that bedamned river myself and I know it’s a miracle ye got here at all. Only a Rogers could ha’ done,’ he said to me. And I reckon he meant it, for ’e made me a captain and put me in charge o’ his Royal Excellency th’ Scalp Buyer.”

  Th
ey were all still for a few moments, both families wrapped in their thoughts, all aware of a wide, deep oneness encompassing their two families, in which cousins became brothers by what they had undertaken together, by the trust they had invested in each other.

  Billy sniffled. His eyes were overflowing and the tears ran down his nose and his nose was running onto his lip. Almost strangling, he said:

  “I jus’ love George.”

  Johnny Rogers made a little groaning sound in his throat. “Aye, Billy. I do too.”

  They all breathed hard for a while, then Fanny said, “He lives in a palace, doesn’t he, Cousin Johnny?”

  “A palace?”

  “Yes, and the Conquered wait upon him hand and foot, don’t they?”

  Johnny looked at her for a moment and then smiled at her. “Well, Fanny, last time I saw him, he’d been living mostly out o’ doors. But I … He just might be in a palace by now. Or a mansion, at least. If I had my say, he surely would. And, as for the Conquered—Well, they be right out yonder in the slave sheds, and they’re bound hand and foot as they deserved to be. They’re not very happy. A lot o’ folk out beyond the mountains took the liberty o’ spittin’ on ’em as we passed through. Would you all care to go have a look at ’em, and maybe a spit?”

  John Clark swallowed. “Well, I’ve never once spit on a man, though I’ve felt my mouth fill up a time or two. But I would like to have a look at this Hair-Buyer, yes, I would. A hair-buyer,” he murmured as he rose from his chair, his hands braced on his thighs to help himself up. He was shaking his head sadly. “God pity a world where an Englishman would do that!”

  THE GUARD CAPTAIN THREW OPEN THE DOOR. “ON YOUR feet, Gov’nor,” he yelled in. “Your betters are here!”

  There was a rattle of chains and a voice growled, “God damn you, yokel bastard Williams! I’ll have your head if you speak once more like—”

  The officer was chained to the bedpost. He began to rise, confused, at the sight of this well-dressed family, of the regal woman and pretty girls. He had a pencil in his grimy hand, and some white cards fell to the floor as he moved. His face was dirty and haggard, long jaw dark with stubble, his red coat and white breeches were dark with filth, and his sandy hair was dishevelled and specked with bits of chaff.

  Williams commented as they entered, “He still won’t eat humble pie, Mr. Clark. He’s as squawkin’ arrogant as a gander.”

  The Englishman was standing now, looking hard at the family. The room was bright and bare. Its walls were whitewashed brick and its floor was packed dirt. The only piece of furniture in the room was the cot. “I beg your pardon, ladies,” he said, bowing slightly, “for my language. I didn’t expect…” Then he fastened his eyes on John Clark’s face. “Your name is Clark?”

  To John Clark it was so much like that moment last year at Fredericksburg. “Clark it is. And you’re the Englishman who buys scalps? Good God, man!”

  The prisoner flinched, but kept his head up and stared at John Clark’s dark eyes. His own cold blue eyes were terrible, lined with pain and sunken with fatigue, and blazing with intensity. He was already quite certain who these people were before him. “I, I must presume you’re Colonel Clark’s family.”

  “I’m his father. This is his mother, Ann. And what children as aren’t yet off to war.”

  Hamilton bowed slightly to Mrs. Clark, not wanting to meet her eyes. He let out a long, slow sigh. “Well, I don’t know what to say to you. If it pleases you to stand there and look at me, the spectacle your son has made of me …”

  “Believe me, sir, it’s no pleasure,” said John Clark.

  “Colonel Clark brought the world down around my head. I could despise him. And you. But as I thought when I first laid eyes on him, I only wish he’d grown up a Loyalist instead of a Rebel.”

  “He did grow up a Loyalist,” John Clark interrupted. “It was the likes o’ you, sir, that changed him to a rebel.”

  Hamilton took a short, sharp breath. It was apparent that he was not going to get sympathy here. He said:

  “If you have any influence in this Commonwealth, Mister Clark, I pray you will convey to your government my protest about the ill use I’ve had as a prisoner of war.” He raised his arms to show his chains.

  “Sir,” said Mrs. Clark, “one of my sons is a prisoner of war on one of your prison ships these two years past. I wonder me how he’s been used.”

  Billy had pressed between his parents and now stood with his head cocked, looking at Hamilton. In the silence he said:

  “My brother George catchered you.”

  Hamilton compressed his lips and looked down at the gawky, freckled boy. He nodded, his eyes seeming to look a thousand miles.

  “He told me he would,” Billy said. “And ’e did, sure enough.”

  “That is correct, Master Clark. But the war is not done with yet. We shall see what becomes of your brother.”

  Billy set his own lips, then looked up at his father.

  “May I spit on ’im, Papa?”

  “No, you mayn’t. Clarks don’t spit. No matter who at.”

  “D’ YOU SUPPOSE,” JOHN CLARK SAID TO JOHNNY ROGERS later, “that if he was back at Detroit, he’d still pay scalp bounties? I mean, he doesn’t seem a man repentant of his sins.”

  “I don’t know, Uncle John. He was humble, oh, really humble, when he was with George. Stayed in his shadow every minute, I guess afraid he’d get killed by chance. But th’ moment we put chains on ’im and started back, he’s been a snot like this.”

  “Ah. I see. Then methinks ’e’s acting his pride, and maybe he has learned something. What were those, those cards he had?”

  “Why, those are his sketches. He’s drawn scores of ’em in his still hours, comin’ over. It’s like he takes a refuge in drawing. Y’d be amazed how good they are. It’d been a better life for us all had ’e been an artist.”

  “What are they of?”

  “Anything ’e sees. Trees. Countryside. People. He’s got a whole gallery of his old Indian chiefs, all in pencil. If y’d like to see, I’ll have Williams fetch ’em.”

  “No. No, don’t take ’em from ’im.” John Clark had a certain vague antipathy toward artists, stemming from what the Scriptures said about graven images. He had never allowed portraits to be done of his family. Billy had shown some budding talent as a draughtsman which his father did not actually forbid, but did not encourage either. But this had provoked his thoughts, this of a captured killer retreating into the solitary concentration of drawing.

  “Wait,” Johnny was saying. “He drew sketches of most of us. Mine’s over here.” He went to a bureau and lifted a paperwrapped packet out of a scuffed leather ditty bag. “He was kinder to my image than to Williams’,” Johnny chuckled. “Made him look like a proper blood-suckin’ devil. Ha, ha!” He showed the little cardboard sketch around to them. It was a true representation of the young officer, hatless, gazing off to the artist’s right. “I guess that’s how I looked at the tiller comin’ up the Ohio. Watchin’ the north shore for Shawnee. Hm, hm. They tried to raid us one evening, but we drove ’em off. Protected His Lordship from ’em. I was tempted to throw ’im to ’em. Wouldn’t that ha’ been ironic, him scalped by them? Ha!” Then his face darkened. “They got Myers, did y’ know?”

  “Myers?”

  “George’s courier, the one we’d snatched from the Indians hardly two weeks before. George sent him and another man ahead by canoe with messages to Virginia and Congress about the victory at Vincennes. They got just a way past the Falls. There they were found scalped and all the papers scattered and gone. Otherwise you’d have heard of all this some time before. Poor Myers.” Johnny shook his head. “Sometimes a man will look lucky. But ’e’s just marked for later.”

  “Then it’s not wholly safe out there even after all.”

  “Nay, and never will be, I reckon. The Shawnee never came and talked with George, and they’re the strongest ones out there in th’ Middle Ground. But it’s a damn sight
safer than it was. George holds sway out there now. You can’t conceive o’ how reputation works out yonder. Yon Hair-Buyer General was reputed the Great Father and protector of all the Algonquian tribes, but the Long Knife snared ’im and tied ’im up, without a man lost. Ye can’t imagine what an impression that makes in the bosom of a savage. Such force and foxiness are the stuff their dreams are made on. I saw how they gazed on ’im at Cahokia last summer, and that was even before he’d caught Hamilton himself. Listen, Uncle John: out beyond the mountains now, there’s no name’s got a half the power o’ his.”

  “Power in a name,” John Clark mused. He shook his head.

  “What’ll he do now?” Ann Clark asked. “When will he come home?”

  “Auntie, if I was you, I wouldn’t look for ’im till after he’s occupied Detroit itself. That’s his heart’s desire, and when Montgomery gets there with a fresh regiment, why, I’d say Detroit’s going t’ have Virginia’s flag over it inside a month.”

  “But Detroit!” John Clark exclaimed. “Whole armies of Regulars have failed even to get there!”

  “I know. But they didn’t do things the way George does things. And they had no reputation like his to blow ’em a clear path. Believe me, Uncle John. Give him Montgomery’s troops—with Cousin Dickie amongst ’em, too!—and I say Detroit might as well not raise the Union Jack some morning, for they’ll have to pull it right back down before noon!”

  JOHN MONTGOMERY’S BOATS SWUNG TOWARD THE EAST bank of the Mississippi and started up the mouth of the Kaskaskia River. The water changed from muddy yellow to clear green as they rowed into the smaller stream. And then there on their left were the roofs of the town, and beyond and above the roofs stood the vanes of the old windmill. A cannon shot boomed in the town, and smoke rolled away from atop a long, low stone wall. Captain Montgomery, gaunt and sunbrowned, half-smiled, the first trace of a smile Dickie Clark had seen on him for two weeks, and pointed. “That’s the fort,” he said. “Rocheblave’s old house is inside that wall, and that’s where your brother is, if he’s here.”