Here and there in the clearing around the house lay huge piles of slash and brush and stumps. Some of these had been partially burned. As the skiff came ashore, John Clark saw that the log house was very large and sturdy, almost a fort, with rifle slits instead of windows. Its door was of oaken plank put together with iron straps. This would be a sound house to stay the night in, he thought, his mind turning to that Indian canoe. Elliot’s built himself a real fortress here. No wonder, being as he’s right across the river from Shawnee country. It’s odd, he thought, nobody’s come out of the house, what with all our boats over there. I wonder if anybody’s home. He stepped up onto the hewn-log stoop and rapped on the door. He thought he could hear footsteps inside, and one querying syllable in a child’s voice. A cold swirl of wind from the river brought chimney-smoke to his nostrils. But no one came to the door. He waited. He looked at the gun slits in the walls, feeling that he was being watched through them. He knocked again. “Hallooo, there,” he called. “I’m John Clark, from Caroline County, come for to see Captain Elliot! Are ye there, Bob Elliot?”
A latch clacked on the other side of the door, and the heavy door swung slowly inward a few inches. A woman’s face, of pretty features, was looking at him out of the gloom, with the wary eyes of a cornered animal. John Clark lifted off his hat and bowed. “Good day, Ma’m. Are you Mary Elliot?” She nodded, and the door opened a bit wider. Now he could see that her comely face was dirty, her hair lank and loose. Her gray linsey-woolsey dress was smudged with ashes and grease. A dirty little girl’s face peeped around from behind her hip. “I’m your husband’s friend, John Clark of Caroline County,” he said again. “Is ’e here, please?”
“Gone a-hunting,” she said in a small voice.
“Eh. Well. Say, then. Has the captain ever spoke of me to you? He used to stay with us.” She nodded but said nothing. John Clark continued, now beginning to wonder if Elliot had married some sort of a half-wit: “My family’s in yon barge. My wife, three girls, and two sons.” He paused. At this point, any Virginian would be offering hospitality. But it did not appear that she was going to do so. Instead, she looked more alarmed and wary than ever, even closing the door by a few inches. “D’you expect your husband yet this evening?” he pursued.
“I don’t know.”
He looked to the left and then right, feeling awkward in the face of this cool and uncouth reception, wondering how Captain Elliot could have bragged as much as he always did about so backward a woman. At last he turned to her again, noting the fright in her eyes, and asked, “Is everything all right here? Is there anything I can do for you?” She put her fingers over her mouth and shook her head, and it looked as if her eyes were going to spurt tears. The little girl still hung back and peered around as if he were an ogre of some sort. Well, by the Eternal, he thought, I can see we’re not welcome here. “So, Mrs. Elliot, I’ll just say good day, and please tell the captain we came to pay respects. Please tell him that, won’t you?” She nodded again. He doffed his hat and bowed once more, trying to keep the annoyance from showing in his face. He thought of offering to pay for lodging, but decided that the poor thing must be so addled that it might not turn out well at all.
He had Jaybo row him back to the keelboat. “Let us be getting on down the river,” he said, scowling now. “There’s still daylight.” And as they moved away from the Kentucky’s mouth, he described the strange encounter to his family. They were disappointed, having expected to spend a night on dry land, in a solid cabin with a blazing fire. The girls’ imaginations were running wild. “Suppose there was a savage in her house, holding her a hostage?” Fanny asked. “And she was just afraid to speak or let you in?”
“No,” John Clark replied, “I asked her if she was all right.”
“Tell ye what I think,” said Elizabeth, with a sort of smirk. “I think there was a man in there, all right, but her paramour, more likely.”
“Shame, Betty, to presume so about a poor strange woman,” said Mrs. Clark. “Do those novels make you think thataway?”
The keelboat drifted on down the river in deepening twilight. At one point William thought he saw the Indian canoe along the north bank, but by the time he’d fetched a spyglass there was no sign of it. A few miles farther down, Greathouse pointed out a sandbar at a distance off the south bank where the boat might be anchored offshore for safety.
That night, as the Clarks were getting ready to get into their bunks, John and Edmund and William having a glass of the fine spirits Wilkinson had given them, they looked up suddenly at the sound of feet on the roof above their heads. They could hear Greathouse up there, exclaiming about something. They threw open their door and climbed the ladder to the roof.
Far up the river, above the trees and bluffs, a dull red light glowed, as if some large fire were reflecting off the underside of the clouds.
“I would reckon it’s a bonfire o’ those redskins we seen,” Greathouse was saying. “Looks to me as it’s ’bout a mile up, and on the north bank. ’Bout where we last saw th’ canoe.”
“T’me,” Manifee said, “it looks farther. I gauge it’s nigh th’ Kentucky’s mouth.”
Then the man called Jaybo said, “Heck, I know what it is. Ha, ha!” His voice was full of relief. “It’s at Cap’n Elliot’s place, where he’s doin’ all that clearing. He’s just bumin’ slash! You saw it there, Mister Clark.”
It seemed a reasonable explanation, but William was not satisfied with it. “We ought to go back and see,” he suggested. “And then if that’s all ’tis, why, Cap’n Elliot would be home and we’d see ’im after all.”
“We can’t go back up,” Greathouse said. “This barge don’t go upriver.”
“We could take a few men in the skiff,” William said. “Be there inside of an hour.”
“Oh, yes, lad? Come now. That boat won’t carry but three—four men, and if they got there and found Indians, what could they do but get themselves kilt, I ask? Nay. I’m not riskin’ my crew to go look at bonfires in th’ night.”
“Then Edmund and I and Pa could go up, and Bill Croghan.”
Greathouse was silent for a minute, looking at the glow in the distant sky. “I’m the captain o’ this here scow, lad, and I’m the owner o’ that skiff. Now, aside from that, I am not aimin’ to float into Louisville t’morry and meet Gen’l George Clark there and have to tell him, ‘Sorry, Gen’l, but I lost your Pa and brothers by puttin’ them on a night river in a skiff out amongst redskins.’ No, lad. Ye don’t have permission t’ touch that skiff, d’y’ hear me?”
That was that, and it did make sense. But John Clark did not sleep much that night. He kept seeing that frightened, lonely young woman’s face in the doorway and the little girl behind her skirt. And while William was atop the cabin taking his turn at guard after midnight, he kept thinking about that glow in the sky, although it was gone by then. Maybe it was just bumin’ brushpiles, he thought. That does sound likely. And I suppose if there’s been Indian trouble, we’d ha’ heard a shot or two. But still, I’d like to have gone up and made sure.
“Look at it thisaway,” Edmund muttered to him when he relieved the post at two in the morning. “If there was a raid there, we were lucky that woman didn’t invite us. Would ye want Ma and the girls to been in such a thing?”
William thought on that. Somewhere on the south bank a barred owl was calling. Who-who, who-who! Who-who, who-who-aw!
“No,” William agreed. “Sure not, forbid it Heaven!”
“Well, then. If y’d been in the war you’d accept that some lamentable things you can do nothin’ about. Go bunk down. And don’t bump around. Family’s not slept well t’night.”
Who-who, who-who! Who-who, who-who-aw! Another owl called farther upstream.
“All right. Say, Eddie. Listen hard at those owls. Do they sound real to you?”
“I’ll listen at ’em. You go on down and bunk. ’Night, brother.”
About an hour later, Edmund decided the owls weren’t real wh
en he heard one of them sneeze and another strike something metallic. They sounded as if they were on the bank opposite the sand bar. The horses on the foredeck were getting nervous, stamping and blowing. Quickly and silently Edmund went down and roused Greathouse from his bunk and whispered to him in the darkness. Greathouse flung off his blankets.
In minutes the whole crew had been silently awakened, and were on deck with their rifles ready, listening to the night, while Jaybo was reaching out like a cat to untie the mooring lines.
And when the rest of the Clark family arose at daybreak they found themselves already ten miles down the Ohio drifting in midstream through a snow flurry with blanket-wrapped riflemen at every corner of the boat and old Jonas Manifee up on the roof manning his steering sweep, breath vapor coming out of his pigsnout. “Mornin’, Master Clark,” said he. “Reckon we’ll be at Louisville ’fore day’s end. Will you be glad t’ git there as I will? Been a long haul, ain’t it? Started last fall. ‘Member that shivaree we had in the cave by th’ Monongahela, where your Ma and Pa pranced? Gonna miss you folks.”
“How comes it we’re under way so early, Jonas?” William asked suspiciously.
“Just eager, I reckon. We all like Louisville a lot.”
“But …”
“Now, come on, Master Clark. I know y’ be some real river rat, but Mister Greathouse can run his boats without waitin’ for you t’ wake your sleepy head up. Ha. Ha!”
“NOW, HUSBAND,” SAID MRS. CLARK, “I MUST ASK YE TO step out for a spell, and I want you to stay by the door there and keep menfolks out, because I’m going to clean up these daughters o’ yours. Bundle up, for this likely will take us a couple o’ hours.”
“What!” He looked indignant, but he was happy and eager because he would be in Louisville this day and see his new home. “I’m to stand out in the cold and guard a door for ye, just so ladies can primp up?”
“John dear, this will be a sight more than primping. We’re going to clean right to the bone, and dress fresh from th’ skin out, for I’m not going to take riverboat vermin into our new house, nor am I going to step my daughters ashore in a new city lookin’ anything less than the princesses they are. Now, have Cupid come here and stoke up this fire, and send Venus in. I expect we’ve got to boil ten bushel o’ clothes, ere we get rid of all the creepy crawly creeturs that’s joined us on our migration.”
John Clark chuckled and went to fetch the servants. And soon the passenger quarters were full of soapy steam, naked, groaning, gasping girls, stewing petticoats, trunks spilling over with clean linen, clothing fragrant with camphor and cachets, and the smells of hot curling irons and scorching hair. Mrs. Clark assigned the girls each to search the other’s body hair for anything that moved, and to wash each other’s ears without mercy. The men of the Clark party and the crewmen smiled and winced and shook their heads at the chorus music of anguish, smoked their pipes, watched the high, gray bluffs glide by, and yearned for the comforts and pleasures of the town. The snow had turned to a cold rain, which hissed on the green surface of the broad river. “Ere long now,” Edmund was telling his father, “we’ll pass an island and the river will bend to the right, and there’ll be a few cabins, and looking down that bend ye should be able to see high up on the left just a glimpse of your new house. Just th’ roof is all. I hope they get finished with their tortures down there in time that they can come out and see it too.”
Suddenly William’s voice came down, chilling them: “I see a craft back there, followin’ us down. Can ye make it out, Mister Manifee?”
Instantly everyone was peering up the river, remembering the glow in the sky they had seen last night, remembering the noises that had alarmed them and caused them to slip from the mooring before daybreak.
It was a small vessel, just a speck in the sizzly mist of rain on the river. Mr. Greathouse brought up his telescope and told all his crewmen to check their powder and keep their eyes peeled for canoes along the banks. “I’m damned if I let a pack o’ Shawnee stop me when I’m this close to Louisville. I come too far. Boys! Heads down when we run the narrows by th’ island!” It seemed likely that an ambush might have been set up there, where the barge would be in close range of either riverbank or island, and that the vessel now following would swoop down on the stern just then.
John Clark rapped on the door of the passenger quarters. “Get them dressed quick,” he called in. “There’s trouble a-brewin’!” Alarmed voices responded from within.
The great boat slid along at the river’s ponderous and unhurriable pace. The craft astern was gaining, its mist-blurred shape growing larger. “Odd,” Greathouse said after a while with his glass to his eye. “Oars. That’s no canoe, it’s a skiff. Just one man a-rowin’, it looks t’me.”
And a little later, as the barge was entering the narrow water to the left of a brushy island, all the men down behind rails with their rifles ready, scanning the close dark shores, a faint voice came down the river. It was from the little boat.
“He’s hollerin’ for help,” William said.
“Mebbe a decoy,” Manifee muttered. “They do that. A fool would heave to in the narrows here and wait to help ’em. Looks like they timed it thataway.”
“That is a white man,” Greathouse said. “Maybe a hostage decoy. Keep mid-channel, Jonas. Watch those shores, laddies! Master Clark, get down ahind of somethin’, if you please.”
Now Manifee was the only exposed figure on the superstructure, standing there alone and in plain sight in easy musket range of either side. It took guts to stand there, but it was necessary to keep a man on the sweep; to run aground in an ambushed bottleneck would be the worst kind of blunder.
Shivering, blinking rapidly, expecting anything, William crouched behind the siderail with his thumb on the flintlock of his rifle and watched the reddish willow-slips and yellow-brown reeds of the island glide by. The island was long, more than a mile, it appeared, and every drift-log that loomed in the corner of his vision looked like a concealed canoe. From behind the barge now, the white man’s voice was more distinct.
“Wait! Help me! Help us.”
“By th’ Eternal,” Greathouse’s voice said, “that’s Cap’n Elliot, sure as I breathe! Got womenfolk with ’im. Jack! Jaybo! Stand ready to take ’em on when we clear this island.”
Elliot! John Clark thought, remembering his old acquaintance, thinking of the poor dingy woman and child in the door of the log house yesterday, thinking of the fireglow in the sky. He stood up and started along the deck toward the stern, still holding his pistols in his hands.
“Pa!” Edmund hissed. “Down!”
John Clark bent a little at the waist but went on to the stern. Then he knelt there between two crouching riflemen and watched the little boat, watched it catching up, saw Elliot’s desperate but exhausted labors at the oars, watched the other huddled figures in the skiff.
And at last the downstream end of the island slipped astern, and Manifee put the sweep over to swing the big boat a little toward midstream, and the two crewmen at the stern stood up and put down their rifles, and the one called Jaybo picked up a coil of rope to throw to the little boat. “Here, Cap’n,” he called. And as the skiff drew close, Manifee’s voice muttered low and harsh:
“Oh, God damn. Oh, help them poor …”
John Clark and William were standing at the stern now and they winced at the miserable spectacle in the little boat.
In the bow lay a large, curved, fire-blackened lump. By its shape, and by the white teeth showing where cheeks had been burned away, it revealed itself to be the burned body of a man, drawn up in the shape of a stillborn infant. In places where the charred skin had been pulled loose, the cooked meat of muscle tissue showed through red and gray and brown.
Captain Bob Elliot had caught the thrown rope. His face was sooty and blistered; much of his beard and his eyebrows were singed away. The rags on his body were full of burn holes, and wherever skin showed, it was covered with huge blisters. He grimaced, t
eeth white in his blackened face, each time he hauled at the rope; his hands were like raw meat. The butts of the oars were black with dried blood and shreds of skin from his hands.
In the stern seat, looking at the barge with glassy eyes, were the woman and girl. They were sooty and abraded, hair hanging in wet strands, naked except for torn, burned cotton chemises gray-black with ash and clinging with wet to their bony bodies in the cold rain. The woman and little girl hugged each other for warmth and gaped at the big riverboat with their jaws hanging slack, as if they lacked the strength even to close their mouths.
And as they were being lifted one by one from the rowboat onto the barge, John Clark went, with tears in his eyes, to the shanty door. He went in. His wife and daughters were waiting inside, all dressed in clean clothes, faces pink, worried, wondering what all the commotion was outside.
“Ann,” said John Clark, “brace yourselves now. Here come some poor wretches, and we’re going to have to make your room a hospital.”
Within fifteen minutes, all the Clark girls were working like nurses under the direction of their mother, sweating, their fresh dresses wilting in the hot room and stained with blood, soot, ointments, and tears.
Bob Elliot told the awful story to John Clark while Mrs. Clark was cleaning his burnt limbs and smearing them with one of her homemade salves.
The body in the boat was his brother. This brother, with three Negroes, had been at work behind the hill, clearing brush for spring planting, when Mr. Clark had come. “When he came down, learnt Mary’d turned y’away, he scolded ’er proper. She fixed ’em vittles, then took Sally t’ bed. Whilst they were at table, in bust the door. Shawnees. Tommyhocked ’em. Didn’t see Mary and Sally inside the bed curtain. Thank Merciful God. They slipped out the back door, hid down by th’ riverside. Dark by then. Murderers looted and scalped and set th’ house on fire. It was all on a blaze when I come upriver in th’ skiff from huntin’. I … I had to lay low till they all went screaming away. I was all of a despair, thought Mary and Sally was in there.”
From Sea to Shining Sea Page 56