“Aye,” Mrs. Clark exclaimed with a shivery laugh, “and with the extra pairs, we could’ve put one or two o’ the horses on skates, too.”
The whole family roared with laughter at the notion.
“And,” Fanny chimed in, “we’d all have been at Fort Pitt by now, we would!”
“Well, I reckon so,” exclaimed William. “By heaven, if we ain’t a vacant-headed family I never saw one!”
“LORD, THIS IS A MISERY,” GROANED ROSE, HUGGING LUCY Clark from behind for warmth and support as their horse clopped monotonously along on the windswept ice.
It was late afternoon, the snow was in violet shadow, the sky was fading. The womenfolk had exhausted themselves mounting and dismounting, and now simply stayed on horseback whether crossing land or ice. Their bones ached with cold; their feet hung numb at the horses’ flanks. They had wrapped their faces in shawls. The men, leading the horses, were slump-shouldered with fatigue. Edmund knew of a cave in a bluff within a mile or two. He was pressing to get them to it before nightfall.
The column was long strung out now. Some of the Negroes were as much as a quarter of a mile behind, limping and moaning prayers, sometimes falling on the ice and then just sitting there lamenting, giving up. Cupid had taken the responsibility for the rest of the servants at first, and he frequently had retraced his steps to go back and harangue and haul at these poor souls until he’d gotten them back on their feet. But at last Cupid himself had run out of grit, and now was just stumbling along hugging his own misery to his bosom, ignoring his flagging brethren.
Mrs. Clark was riding the last horse now, with Fanny shivering behind her. William had given his mother the reins and gone up the column to talk with his father.
She turned her head and glanced back at the straggling Negroes. She saw them strung out almost out of sight around the river bend, dark figures on the gray ice in the purpling twilight. She saw small objects lying on the ice near them and knew they had sunk so low in apathy that they were dropping their belongings. She saw Cupid weaving and stumbling along, paying them no heed.
“Got to go back and light some fire under those wretches,” she told Fanny. “Elsewise they’re just goin’ to sit down and perish.”
She tried to rein the plodding mare around, but she wouldn’t respond.
“C’mon, now,” she snapped, yanking the reins harder. The mare started; she began to pivot to the left, but lost her footing. Her hind hoof skidded from under her and she fell sideways onto her hindquarter. Mrs. Clark and her daughter both yelped as they tilted toward the hard ice.
The mare’s heavy fall broke the ice. Two cracks angled away toward the riverbank and then a third crack shot between them, and a three-cornered slab of ice tilted down under the struggling horse. Fanny screamed. The floundering mare whinnied and flailed with her forehooves, and more pieces of ice caved in. Mrs. Clark felt herself slide sideways off the animal, back into the frigid dark water, and heard Fanny’s scream end in a dreadful gulp. Mrs. Clark was twisting around to clutch a handful of her daughter’s clothing when her own head slipped under the shocking-cold water.
The shock was so stunning that she wanted to gasp her lungs full of air. But it would be water. She was almost paralyzed immediately, but her hands were trying to seek her daughter down in the airless current under the ice. Something powerful smashed against her hip and pressed her down; it was the panicked mare thrashing in the water.
Then something tugged down on her arm. She grabbed; it was a piece of cloth. Fanny’s dress. She held onto it with numbing fingers. The current was tugging at the weight in it.
Mrs. Clark opened her eyes to gray murkiness, to vague, large, moving shapes. She groped with her free hand for the surface. She could not tell which direction was up or which was down. She wanted to take the fatal inhalation. But she couldn’t. If she gave up, Fanny would die.
I didn’t expect the whole thing to end this way, she thought: Things shouldn’t end when they’re just starting …
WILLIAM HEARD THEIR OUTCRIES AND THE WHINNYING OF the mare, and as he turned to look back he heard the sudden wails of the Negroes.
He saw the horse floundering, surrounded by breaking ice and churning water; he caught a glimpse of color disappearing into the water; his mother’s cloak. He turned to run back to the place but slipped and fell on his side. “Pa!” he was yelling as he scrambled back on his feet. “Hurry!” He was closest to the mishap, but a hundred yards or more from it, and he knew that mere seconds in the water and under the ice would mean the end of his mother and sister. An awful sense of helplessness filled his breast even as he ran; he seemed to be moving with a dreamlike slowness and, as in a dream, could not seem to make himself move faster.
Only the horse’s head and neck were out of the water. William threw himself forward when he was ten feet away, and sledded and crawled forward on his belly to the edge of the broken ice. He saw a swirl of cloth a few inches under the water and grabbed for it. He pulled. The weight pulled him. The current was strong. He tried to press the front of his body against the ice for traction, to hold the weighted garment until his father or someone could arrive, but it pulled and he was sliding. He would have to let go, or be pulled into the water.
He held on. If he let go now, he knew, his mother would be carried under the ice and that would be all. Fanny, he presumed, was already lost. He sobbed and held to the cloak, and finally, when he could hold himself in check no longer and slid over the broken edge into the water, he grabbed the horse’s bridle with his free hand.
The beast fought frantically against this new weight that was pulling it down. The water churned. William kept his head above water and gasped from the shock of the cold.
Now he could pull. He hauled at the wet cloth, drawing it toward him, lifting. His teeth were chattering and the cold seemed to be sapping all his strength at once, but he kept pulling and lifting, and suddenly his mother’s stricken face appeared above the water beside him; she immediately began drawing for breath with desperate rasping sounds. He released her cloak and cupped his hand behind her neck to keep her head up. She was trying to say something.
“Fanny … Fanny … Here …” She was pulling something and William realized then that she had a grip on Fanny’s clothing.
He guided his mother’s free hand to the horse’s bridle, and she clutched at it. He released her neck then and grabbed for the garment she held. He pulled. He groaned and pulled, vaguely aware of his father’s voice now nearby.
Little by little the weight came toward him from under the ice. It was dreadfully inert, not struggling at all. He felt he was pulling up a dead body.
There were familiar voices around now. He got Fanny’s blank pale face above the surface and simply tried with the last of his strength and consciousness to hold it above water. The horse seemed to be sinking now. William’s head was going blank. Now he could not tell whether he was holding anything or not; all was numbness and shuddering. Then there was nothing.
FOR SEVERAL HOURS THAT NIGHT, IT WAS DOUBTFUL THAT Fanny would survive. She had regurgitated water and had kept up a shallow kind of breathing, scarcely perceptible under the violent shuddering. Mrs. Clark and William had come around quickly, though both had suffered severe chill and shock.
After they had been hauled out of the river, all three had been wrapped in blankets and coats and carried with difficulty to the cave. There their limbs had been rubbed and their frozen clothing removed, a huge bonfire had been built, and they had been dosed with whiskey. Pneumonia had seemed likely for all three, but by midnight William was able to sit up before the fire and drink broth, weak but not ill. God, he thought. George was in ice water for days, going to Vincennes. God!
As soon as she was able to move, Mrs. Clark got up, wrapped in blankets, and went to the place beside the fire where Fanny lay. She lay down beside her and drew all the blankets around them so that her body would warm her daughter’s. She looked at the delicate features, at the face white as paper; she l
istened to the slight, gurgling breathing; she held the frail and clammy little body along her flank and willed her own warmth into it. She thought briefly of the gray, icy, churning moments when they had been on the very edges of their lives, and she thought of that hand that had come down to pull her back to life and air. Once again Billy had acted, and they were all still alive.
She lay holding her daughter and thinking about that thin edge over which a life can fall so easily. She thought about how fragile life is but how tenacious it could prove to be as well. Incidents that might kill a body one day can be survived another day.
I’ve seen it so often, she thought, seen that guts and will are all we have to protect us from the fateful things.
So much I’ve seen in half a century. So much.
Come now, Fanny. Come, baby girl. Guts and will, that’s all ye need. And if ye’ve not enough o’ your own, have mine. That’s what I’m for, my baby.
23
MONONGAHELA VALLEY
November, 1784
WHEN MORNING CAME, FANNY WAS STILL BREATHING. AND she had color in her cheeks now, but it was the flush of fever. She could whisper, but talking hurt her throat. She wanted to know however she would be able to ride. William came up with an answer. He had once heard Brother George describe a wooden frame that the Indians used to trail behind a horse to carry loads, even sick and wounded people.
And so he and Edmund went out into the piercing-cold woods with axes and ropes, and cut saplings to make a travois. The family and slaves then breakfasted on hot pone and reloaded the animals, and set off up the bank of the Monongahela for the last dozen miles to Fort Pitt, with Fanny jouncing along wrapped like a mummy in blankets and strapped on the travois. They stopped once about noon to make a hot broth for the girl, then continued on, and by midafternoon they could see the mouth of the Monongahela and look up at the cabins and stone houses of Pittsburgh and the long earthworks and palisades of Fort Pitt, and smell woodsmoke of the town.
“Thanks be to heaven,” John Clark said. “We’ll have care for our darlin’ inside an hour.”
The site of Pittsburgh was imposing and solemn. The winter-stark mountains crouched behind it; the town lay clustered on a prominent wedge of land in the Y formed by the joining of the Monongahela and the Allegheny rivers, and the fort brooded above the village like some grim old castle: high earthen redoubts and salients now snow-covered; earthen walls topped with long rows of pointed logs, ditches and dry moats, thick log blockhouses, crenellations with the dark muzzles of cannon sticking through them to command the rivers and the roads. There was something terribly lethal about such a structure in the eyes of Ann Rogers Clark, and even though its walls meant shelter and security, she did not like the look of a fort. She thought of her sons who, so recently as soldiers, had had to hurl themselves at such monstrosities in the course of that long war.
They rode toward the hulking place from the east, and it was silhouetted by the glare of the setting sun off a wide expanse of river ice. Edmund pointed. “The Ohio,” he called back to the other riders. “Yonder’s our Ohio River!” There it was, the road to their faraway new home in Kentucky.
They rode on, now through cleared fields with rustling cornstubble sticking up through the snow, along rail fences, past farmhouses and stables and orchards on their right, and wharfs and rickety piers jutting into the frozen Monongahela on their left, with flatboats and galleys iced-in fast. A curtain of smoke hung over the whole area, yellowing the sun, and away to the westward, down through its hills and bluffs, ran the frozen mirror of the Ohio, out and out into the frontiers. Now they began to encounter sledges on the road, heaped with firewood, pulled by steam-snorting oxen. Down by a boatyard on the riverside, a plank-saw rasped slowly, steadily. Now to the right, almost under the shoulder of the fort, some outdoor fires billowed blue smoke, and amid the smoke stood perhaps a dozen cone-shaped tents, the camp of some visiting Indians. Men on horses came past now, some dressed as gentlemen, some looking half-soldierly, others wrapped in skins like savages; these people stared at the Clark entourage, at the travois carrying the swaddled figure, at the Negroes straggling behind. Some of the men would tip their hats as they rode by; others would simply stop and gawk, particularly at the pretty faces of Lucy and Elizabeth; still others appraised the handsome Virginia horses they rode, or peered closely at the men’s faces. It was a way men had got about them since the war, a constant lookout for old comrades.
“Billy,” said Edmund, “trot on into the fort by that postern gate there and find us the whereabouts of a doctor, quick, now.” He turned to his father as William sprinted away across the snow. “A shame that General Irvine isn’t still commandin’ the fort. He was a physician himself. But I’m sure there’ll be one here. And if not, Ma can take care of her here. She knows more remedies than any doctor, d’ye ask me.”
They watched William disappear inside the gate.
And not half a minute later he reappeared, still running at full tilt. “What the devil?” muttered Edmund. “He hardly took time to turn around.”
“Lucy!” William was calling. “Lookahere!”
And then they saw another figure come running after him, full tilt out the gate with cape flying. Lucy was craning to see what this was about, and then she recognized the running man; her blue eyes widened and her mouth went into a little O. She threw her right leg over the horse’s withers and slid off to the ground in a billowing of skirts, leaving old Rose alone, terrified, on the horse. She ran forward past her father and past Edmund, then past her brother William, all propriety forgotten, and now Bill Croghan was laughing as he ran toward her, and they fairly collided in the road, arms around each other, Bill Croghan swinging her in a circle and then setting her on her feet and holding her and looking into her eyes and smiling still bigger, then blinking and swallowing and finally saying, as the rest rode up exclaiming wonder and greetings, “Lucy girl, Lucy girl, oh my God, oh, you beauty!”
It was clear that his days of calling her “Little Brother” were over.
The Clark entourage was herded into the fort in a hubbub of greetings and questions, requests and commands. George, in preparation for their arrival, had sent Bill Croghan up to Fort Pitt to greet them and escort them down the Ohio. George himself had been unable to come because in his role as Indian Commissioner he was arranging a midwinter council with the Ohio tribes. He and Croghan had been occupying Mulberry Hill, keeping it warm and its pantry stocked, when they were not on the trails surveying or meeting with Indians. “It’s a splendid place. George says the first Christmas there will be the best Clark Christmas ever,” Croghan reported. “He’ll be there for it, he vows.”
The most pressing business now, though, was Fanny, and Croghan had good news: Here at the fort this very week was one of the best physicians on the Continent, one of General Washington’s own army surgeons, Dr. Jim O’Fallon. “He was at Valley Forge with us,” Croghan said, and he sent an orderly running across the parade ground to fetch the doctor from his lodgings.
There would be quarters aplenty for the patient and her family. The fort had barracks and houses enough for several companies, but since the disbanding of the army after the war, only twenty regular soldiers were here, under command of a major. The major was almost frantic in his concern for the Clarks’ comfort; he had been a junior officer under Light Horse Harry Lee, and to him Jonathan Clark was no less a hero than George.
The quarters were Spartan but clean: a large room for the Clark men, another for the women, and a small, attached room for Fanny. Dr. O’Fallon arrived at once, a charming Irish fellow who seemed to have great confidence in himself. He was a physician of the leeches-and-garlic school of medicine. Finding her pulse high, he immediately bled her with the repulsive parasites, leaving them on her arm until they were swollen like plums. He then put salt on them to loosen their hold and remove them, and daubed the leech bites with a disinfectant paste of gunpowder and whiskey. Then he made a hot, stinking poultice of mashed garlic
for her to breathe through, and prescribed that she must sleep sitting up, wearing a necklace of garlic cloves.
So far he’s done just what I’d ha’ done, Ann Rogers Clark thought, so he must be a fair proper physician.
It soon-became apparent that Dr. O’Fallon would lavish even more attention on his patient than her own mother would have. He came to the quarters a dozen times a day to see how she was. At first everyone presumed that he was simply showing the usual solicitude the Clarks had come to expect from old comrades-inarms of their famous sons. But Elizabeth was the first to suggest that something else lay at the heart of it. “The poor fool’s just gone fond-foolish over ’er,” she said.
“Oh, nonsense,” scoffed Lucy. “Y’re imagining things, like some silly novel reader. She’s scarce twelve yet!”
“You’d never notice it yourself ’cause you can’t see anything but Bill Croghan,” Elizabeth retorted. “But that doctor’s gone simple over Fanny.”
“You’re just green-eyed ’cause ye fancy him yourself,” Lucy said.
“That’s not so. But mark my word, under all that fever-sweat and garlic-stink, he sees somethin’ he likes a whole lot, and she knows it, too. She’s not too sick to see what she’s a-doin’ to him. Why, she asked me not an hour ago if the fever makes her cheeks look pink!”
Bill Croghan pulled his attention away from Lucy long enough to report the news from downriver and dispense advice from George. Dickie had not been found yet, and George was spending all the time he could with an armed squad searching along the Trace for a sign of him. And every hunter and runner and bush-loper who frequented that trail had instructions to keep eyes and ears open and to inquire among the friendly Indians. Still, nothing. “Well,” said John Clark, “we’ll just keep right on praying.”
“We should go downriver in as large and well-armed a body as we can,” Croghan said. “Some bands, Shawnee in particular, have been preying on riverboats this fall. George forewarned me not to bring you down without a sizeable escort. He said too to keep a keen weather eye, and not leave Pitt if an early winter threatens. Unless there’s a general melt in the next week, we’d best resign ourselves to stay here till the spring thaw.”
From Sea to Shining Sea Page 53