Except … John Clark now sat his horse in the drizzle, gazing down the street toward a large riverside house built of flatboat lumber: the one place where gentlemen went in secret. A fairly new establishment in the growing river town it was, with a general downstairs entrance for soldiers and riverboat men, and a more elegant and discreet upstairs section, with a hidden entrance, for pillars of the community. John Clark did not go to inquire there. First, because he would not have set foot on the premises; second, because he truly doubted George was there or ever had been. But as it was the one place he had left unexamined, it stayed in the back of his mind to nag him as he rode back up to Mulberry Hill. George had been, after all, in a worse mental and emotional state than anyone had ever seen him in. In that condition, might he not have gone there?
For the next three days, John Clark told no one of George’s disappearance. It was discussed only within the family. Might he have ridden off toward Harrod’s Town, toward Lexington, even, God forbid, toward faraway Richmond, the source of his troubles? Might he have set out alone, in his condition, to go there and confront the governor in person? It did not seem likely. What seemed certain, though, was that if he had left Louisville alone for anyplace—Vincennes or Boonesboro or simply out into his old hunting and fossil-digging grounds—he would be in extreme danger. George himself had warned everybody that unless the government called for the great April Indian Council he had arranged, the tribes would feel they had been tricked, and return to the war path. If George was out there alone … That thought had haunted the family, and William in particular. William kept remembering the trail to Vincennes, and that spot along the way that George had pointed out, where Dickie’s saddle had been found.
William had been unable to get that out of his mind, once he had thought of it. What if some like tragedy should befall George, somewhere out there in that expanse of wilderness, some swift, violent surprise, some treachery, a musketball or arrow from ambush, a knife flashing in firelight.
“I don’t think we should lay idle any longer,” William argued on the fourth morning. “I think we should get some riders from the fort and go a-lookin’!”
“But we’d have to, well, ah, explain things,” old John Clark protested. “And then if it turned out he’s been right in Louisville the whole time …” He was thinking more and more about the brothel. About what a disgrace to the family it would be if a hue and cry went up, and a searching party went out, and then it would be revealed that George, all the time, had been wallowing with whores. Or, even worse, what if he should turn up in some friendly Indian camp, among poxy squaws? John Clark did not, of course, discuss these dreadful possibilities in the family, but he was thinking them, and they troubled his devout Episcopalean soul—and Ann Rogers Clark knew he was thinking them. “No,” John Clark said now to William. “I sh’ll ride down to town again today. Likely I’ll find him right there someplace.” His voice trailed off in a sigh.
“Why don’t I go?” William said. In his mind he had decided he would have to take this matter into his own hands. “The fields are too wet to work in. I’ll ride down to town, Pa. I’ll look around. And don’t worry, I won’t say things.”
“I say let Billy go, John,” Mrs. Clark declared suddenly. “He can track a butterfly through a whirlycane, and by my faith, I want t’ know George is safe! That’s foremost! I swear, John Clark, y’re so cautious, ye’d ha’ been a Tory, if I hadn’t prodded at you to set your mind! I say let Billy go look!”
John Clark was, in a way, glad to let William take up the search. He himself had been exceedingly tired and depressed by his day of inquiries.
An hour later William was riding past the house from the stables when his mother stepped out of the back door and called him. She looked him over with a shrewd eye. “What kind of rig is that for a trip to town?” She asked. William was in leggings, moccasins, and hunting shirt, with full saddlebags and canteen, and his rifle on his arm. “Do ye swear to me you’re going to Louisville?”
“I swear it,” he said, and she could see that he was not lying.
He rode down the avenue through the fresh, damp smells of soil and foliage. Each locust tree was draped with long, creamy-white clusters of blossoms. Somewhere off the road the drumming of a grouse started, a slow putt … putt … putt in the air speeding up to a quick flutter. William turned onto the public road then, dug in his heels, and tore down toward Louisville at a fast canter, flinging mud behind him.
It was true that he was going to Louisville. But not as his father had. He was going straight to the fort. He was going to get Captain Dalton or Captain Stribling or whoever was on duty and tell them his fears. It wouldn’t be necessary to tell about the drinking, just that George had disappeared. These officers had served with George; they would comb the territory for him if they knew he was out there somewhere by himself. Or maybe they would already know where he was. Militiamen were always on the roads between the settlements, and if any had seen George going anywhere, the captain at the fort would know of it.
William passed ox carts and wagons on the road, carrying logs and lumber and bundles and people toward and away from the raw new town. He sped past log houses and stone houses and pole shacks, brush fences and split-rail fences, acres of smoking brush piles, and stumps and girdled trees and plowed ground with fresh green sprouts of corn coming up in rows, and to his right, beyond the trees and thickets, there was the great, rain-swollen, beautiful Ohio, with scows and flatboats coming down bringing new people, just as he and his family had come two years ago. And down there now he saw the ferry coming ashore, the ferry operated by old Davy Pagan of the Illinois Regiment, the ferry to Clarksville and the Vincennes road.
William reined in suddenly. There, by Heaven, was something that could bear looking into. He wheeled the horse and galloped down to the edge of the ferry road, dismounted there, and waited.
Davy Pagan waved at him from the tiller as the Negroes gave the oars a last hard pull. A boy on shore caught ropes thrown from the ferry boat and hitched them around pilings as the prow bumped against the landing.
The old ex-sailor was wizened, but still spry as a monkey, and his good eye twinkled at the sight of a Clark. He scrambled forward among horses and cows, and hopped ashore to squeeze William’s hand. “Why,” he said, “happy I am t’see ye, m’lad! Goin’ over to th’ mill, air ye?”
“Why, no. No, Mr. Pagan. Actually, I came down to inquire”—he led Pagan off the road by an arm—“by any chance have y’ taken my brother over lately?”
The old salt was halfway between nodding and shaking his head, and obviously was having to ponder what should have been a most simple answer. So William said: “You have, haven’t ye?”
Pagan glanced at the ground and then scratched his hat, as if a hat could itch. “Well, lad,” said he, “the gen’l asked me not to tell. But he’d not’ve had me lie to his own kin, I reckon. Aye. I took ’im over, ’twas three nights ago. Way late. I’d not make a night trip for anyone else.”
“How was he? Where was he headed, Mister Pagan?”
“How was he? Well, let me see, lad. He was, ahm …”
“Intoxicated?”
“Now there’s a fine word, milord, an educated word, a gentlemanly word, and I like it ye said it y’rself; aye. Pickled like a pig’s foot, I might ha’ said, but I like your phrase better.”
“And did he say where he was going? To Vincennes, maybe?”
“Why, no, sir, he didn’t say. But his horse, it’s up at the mill, m’lad. Aye. At ’is mill.” His face suddenly fell, then he looked up and was squinting as if in pain.
“Poor, poor, poor,” he seemed to be muttering, but just above a whisper, as if to himself. “I’ll be goin’ over again afore noon,” he said, “if the drayman I’m ’spectin’ gets here by then. Would y’ like to go? I sure do hope so.”
THE MILL STOOD ON A STEEP BANK OF SILVER CREEK, A clear stream that ran down through the Illinois Regiment Grant Lands and fell into the Ohio at Cla
rksville. A dam had been built upstream from the mill, and a wooden sluice brought water from the reservoir to pour over the huge millwheel. George had designed the machinery inside so that the great driving axle could be meshed to drive either a grinding-stone or a set of gang-saws with only a few minutes’ adjustment. But now neither was working. The sluice had been diverted from the wheel, and the only sound was of falling water.
George’s horse, in a pole corral, nickered as William rode up. William dismounted and wrapped his reins over a pole, and went up a muddy slope to the plank door in the stone wall, pushed it open, and entered the cool, cavernous mill, which smelled sharply of new wood. It was unusual not to hear the rumbling of the machinery. But the high, gloomy space was not silent. Under the muffled sound of falling water there was a voice, deep, growling, sometimes rising to a shout. William peered about in the half-dark. The voice rose and fell in the patterns of oratory, but the words were indistinct, muffled in their own echoes. Something thumped; there was another shout, another thump, then the sonorous rise and fall of the voice again. William made his way over the oak-beam tracks by which logs were skidded into the sawpit, and put his hand on a ladder that led up to the grain-mill on the next story. As he climbed up, he could hear the voice more clearly; it was George’s voice, and sounded as if he were in an argument with someone, a violent argument, though there was no voice replying. Glad he had brought his pistol, William hauled himself up the last two rungs of the ladder and peered over the dusty floor at a strange and pitiful spectacle.
On the far side of the room, at a long plank table used for flour sacking, two big men sat in the tiny light of a candle, and one of the men was George. He was carrying on a slurred tirade which rumbled in the vast space. The other man’s head was on his arms, as if he were asleep. Bottles and jugs gleamed in the candlelight. Over it all lay a faint silvery pall from one tiny slatted vent high in the gable. On the floor near the grinding wheel lay a large heap of the sacks that usually were on the table; a rumpled blanket was over them, as if they had been used as a bed. Just then some bottles on the table clattered and fell over as George brought his fist down on the tabletop with a shout.
“INGRATES! Hear me, Freeman?” So, the big silent man was Freeman, one of George’s old troopers, who now was the mill supervisor. Freeman responded nothing, obviously being unconscious, but George went on: “Ingrates! Ingrates, Mister Freem’! Ingrateful! Wou’na given y’ even a hund’ acres ’cept I hounded hounded HOUNDED!” He banged the table again, then swept his arm sideways and sent jugs flying. They bounced and rolled hollowly on the plank floor. “Ouch. Ruined me, Freeman. RUIN’ ME! But f’ what th’ state owes me … I’m not w.… not worth a … a SPANISH DOLLAR! Spanish. Hey, Freeman … Know why ’is mill is shut, eh? Know? Eh? ’Cause o’ Span’sh! Bedamn SPAN’SH! Shut up God damn Mississippi … Miss … Span’sh treaty. It’d shut up Miss’pi TWENTY-FIVE YEARS! Kentuck’d die. DIE! But East’ states want a treaty. Hell with Kentuck. Hell with Illinois! Hunh. Hunh! Indians be ruin us anyway … No council wi’ th’ Indians … Fall on us any day now, Mist’ Freem’ but but this time, Long Knife won’ help. BY GOD NOT!” He hoisted a cup to his lips and snorted into it and sucked its contents and banged it on the table while reaching for the jug. “Long Knife re … retired f’m savin’ countries, Mist’ Freem’. Long Knife likes Indians better’n Long Knife likes gov’nors. Tell ye that, man. FREEM’!” He reached across the table and grabbed Freeman’s vest and shook him violently, yelling, “Pay ’tention God damn Freem’! Y’r commander’s talkin!” Freeman, his balance dislodged, sagged sideways and fell on the floor like a sack of rocks. George sat blinking through the candlelight at the place where he had been sitting then began to laugh. “Ha! ha, ha! Begod, one thing ’bout you, ol’ Freem’! Ye do know when t’ quit! Ha, Ha! Ha, ha, HAH, HA HA HA HEEE!” The laughter brought on an awful, racking, wheezing cough then, and finally he said, “But I don’ know when t’ quit. But I do now, bejesus. I do now. I quit savin’ countries. No more … Hullo. Hullo, who’s ’ere, eh? Who … Dickie? Billy? Billy.”
William had climbed up and come around barrels and machinery, and he stood now beside the heap of Freeman’s body and looked at George in the candlelight, and up close now George looked so horrible that William could only swallow and move his lips and blink in shock and disbelief.
George’s eyes were red-rimmed, bloodshot; his eyelids were puffy. Reddish stubble darkened his chin and sunken cheeks; his skin was pasty, and agleam with oil and sweat and smudges. Dried blood encrusted his forehead and speckled his filthy, torn, vomit-stained linen shirt. His hair hung lank and greasy down the sides of his face, part of it snarled with lint and twigs and sawdust. His big hands, now on the tabletop, were black, as if he had been digging in ashes. Worse even than the dirt and dishevelment, though, was the dullness, the stupidity, in that face that always had been keen, intense, or merry, throughout William’s memory. He had seen George intoxicated before, or, rather, thought he had; he had seen him flushed and animated and jovial with liquor a few times, at home on holidays and furloughs, and had even seen him teary-eyed with sentiment or snapping mad in arguments, pointing for emphasis with a glass of sloshing whiskey in his hand. But never had he seen him stupefied, slack-lipped, wobble-headed, puke-stained, as he was now, with the bloody abrasion on his forehead, probably from falling, and the stunned, unfocused eyes making him look like a pole-axed ox.
George was trying to rise now; his hands were clattering among jugs and cups and clay pipes as he tried to lift himself. “Thought saw Dickie, I …” And then his eyes began pouring tears. “Bu’ he’s gone … poor green …” George was half-standing now, his contorted face lit from under the chin by the candle, a little silver daylight from the high vent limning his shoulders and the crown of his head, and he swayed backward, then forward, and back, then pitched forward face down among the crockery. The candle was snuffed under him.
William went around and dragged him off the table and hauled him to the pile of sacks, struggling with his inert weight, and there he covered him with the blanket. Sobbing, he went down to the creek and wet several sacks and climbed back up and tried to clean George’s face with them. Even unconscious, George would not lie serene. He thrashed and flopped and wept and moaned in nightmares, twice calling something that sounded like “trees,” pouring sweat until his shirt was sodden. William was afraid to leave him for fear he would move around and fall down the ladderwell to the skids below. Nearby, Freeman snored on in the slumber of an ordinary drunk.
At last, in mid-afternoon, George lay quiet, though still sweating. William put his ear to George’s sour, stinking shirt front and listened to his heartbeat. It was thumping like a deep, erratic drum, but nearly drowned out by the volcanic burblings and growlings in his guts and his shallow, sometimes gasping, breathing. William once had heard of a man dying from intoxication, back in Caroline County, and wondered if George could be at such an extreme. It was clear that he had been saturating himself all during his absence. His breath was putrid.
It was raining on the roof. William, feeling empty as a used barrel, left George then and galloped down through the half-built, half-deserted town of Clarksville to the ferry landing. He found Davy Pagan there under an awning on the boat, smoking a pipe and watching the rain sizzle on the gray-green river. He told Pagan what he had on his hands. The old ferryman was not surprised, saying, “’E looked as ’e was headin’ f’r a real rum-buzzamaroo.” He sniffed, and William realized that he was crying.
Pagan agreed to help William carry the general down to the ferry and take him across, but suggested they wait till evening. “Ain’t nobody ever seen our gen’l like this,” he said, “and nobody orter.”
And so at dusk they led General Clark’s horse down with something in a blanket draped over it, which Pagan told his Negro oarsmen was bagged meal, though they knew meal sacks did not groan and retch and wear boots.
And the ferry crossed the broad river in the rain of night
, and then from somewhere, in a moment, Pagan conjured a wagon, driven by someone William recognized as another old Illinois veteran. “Pray God th’ jug’s not got a holt on ’im,” Pagan murmured to William in the drizzly darkness. “A true ’ero’s got a long way t’ fall.”
“I’ll pray. Thankee, Mister Pagan, and good night now.”
Pagan put his forefinger to his lips. “I’m blind and deef. Havven’t seen the gen’l for a month, y’see?”
And the wagon went up the public road eastward along the night river toward Mulberry Hill with its cargo in a wet wool blanket, and William rode alongside, heart full of ashes, leading George’s stallion, and prayed that the jug had not really got a hold on George in those four awful days, but feared that it had. “A long way to fall,” old Pagan had said, and William thought those words over and over as he took George home to his family.
To the Clerk of Jefferson County
Sir
This is to Certifie that I am willing a Licence should Issue out of your Office for the marriage of my Daughter Elizth Clark to Col’ Richard C. Anderson
Given under my hand this 1st day of August 1787
JOHN CLARK
“Thank you, Mr. Clark,” said Colonel Anderson. He gripped John Clark’s hand hard, and both men’s eyes reflected that kind of embarrassed bond that exists only between a virgin’s father and the man who desires to possess her.
“We’ll all be proud to have you in the family, Dick,” John Clark said. It crossed his mind that he would again, after four years, have a son named Dick.
“Nothing compared with my pride in being of the Clarks,” Anderson said.
“Now I reckon a toast is in order,” John Clark said. “Billy, would ye pour for us?” William, who had stood witness to the consent, went to the decanters, which were on a mahogany buffet by the wall. Opposite the wall was George’s room. As William poured their drams, he was aware of the room beyond the wall, aware that George was in there, that he had shut himself in upon learning that Anderson was arriving, and said he would come out after he had left. “But Elizabeth’s invited him to stay through Sunday,” William had told him. “Then I’ll be out after Sunday,” George had replied. “Look, Billy, lad, I’ve no grudge against the man. It’s just that he’ll want to talk Indian affairs. Well, he and James Wilkinson are the Indian Commissioners now, they’ve replaced me, so I take that to mean my Indian policies are nothing now, so therefore why should he get advice from me? No. Y’ll just have to say I’m indisposed. As I will be.”
From Sea to Shining Sea Page 63