Bon Marche (49 page)

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, enough of this.” His voice took on the stern tone of the commander. “Lieutenant Dewey, make ready to shove off!”

“Yes, sir!” Another salute.

Lee followed Jackson aboard the lead flatboat as broad backs pushed the heavy vessel into the ice-chocked river. A small crowd on the banks cheered, and Lee Dewey made a mental note to include that in his daily diary of the campaign.

VI

C
HARLES
was perplexed. Three times that morning he had asked the black grooms about the whereabouts of his son, Lee. Each time the answer was the same: “Ah ain't seed 'im, Mistah Charles.”

The master of Bon Marché went looking for Franklin. “Have you seen Lee today?”

“No. I was just going to come to find you to ask the same question.” Franklin frowned. “I've been doing nothing all morning but taking care of his duties.”

Dewey shook his head. “That's not like Lee at all. Perhaps he's ill. But it's strange that I haven't been told anything.”

He made for the mansion, where he found Mattie in the drawing room before the fireplace.

“Have you seen Lee this morning?”

She turned a tear-stained face to him. “He's gone, Charles.”

“Gone? Gone where?”

Mattie reached out, handing him a crumpled note from Lee:

Dear Father and Mother, I don't expect that you will understand this, but I am joining General Jackson's expedition. I have been given a minor commission and am to act as the division's documentarian. Father, it hurt me to have to undertake this venture in this manner, but your intransigence in the matter of General Jackson left me no alternative. This is something I must do! Be assured that I will be in no personal danger; I will not be armed. Pray for the men who will be doing the fighting, and for the country they will be defending.

“Did you know of this beforehand?” Dewey roared, waving the note in Mattie's face.

“No!”

“When did you learn of it?”

“Just a few minutes ago when I found the note there on the mantel.” She pointed.

“And you sit there like a ninny, doing nothing! Didn't you think I'd want to know!”

Mattie was silent for a moment. “I was afraid—Charles, your rage terrifies me.”

“Can you assure me you had nothing to do with this?”

She didn't reply.

“Answer me!”

“I think I already have.” She fought to keep her own temper in check.

He crumpled up the paper, hurling it into the fireplace. “Well, whether you knew or not is not important at this moment.” He started for the door. “I'm going to get him back!”

“Charles!”

Her scream stopped him.

“If you go after him now, he'll hate you for it. Can't you for once bury your prejudice about Andy and see this for what it is? Lee needs to be his own man.”

“Man! He's nothing but a boy!”

“You persist in seeing him that way, don't you? And that's exactly why he's gone!”

Dewey glared at her, the veins at his temples throbbing. “If I thought for a minute that you engineered this—”

Mattie sprang to her feet, rushing at her husband, putting her face close to him. Incensed. “Charles, you're an impossible bastard! As far as I'm concerned, you can go to hell!”

34

L
IEUTENANT
Lee Dewey blew on fingers numbed stiff by zero cold, trying once more to draw with a knife-sharpened charcoal. He had wanted to do some pen sketches of the first night encampment of General Jackson's infantry, but his ink had frozen solid.

He stood back now, away from the pitifully small campfires, studying the volunteers who had answered Tennessee's call to fight the British. More accurately, they had answered Jackson's call, coming from all corners of the state: farmers, mostly frontiersmen who had brought their rifles with them, knowing—as did their commander—that the smooth-bored muskets issued to the regular army simply didn't shoot straight. These were men who understood arms; who had counted on their rifles for life itself as they had carved out little pieces of the West for their own.

Tough men. Not professional soldiers, but men motivated to keep what they had suffered for. Ambitious men. Individualists who shared Andy's pride in the nation as they saw it: an “open” America, cleared of the English and Spanish and French, cleared of savage Indians, all of whom stood in the way of their personal free expansion, and the expansion that would certainly be needed for their children and grandchildren. Caring not at all for the proclamations of a central government back east somewhere. Fashioned on the same lathe as the general himself. Willing to fight now because he had asked them to fight.

Jackson's men.

Beholden to no other commander.

Uniforms, if the word could be used at all, were as diverse as the men: homespun cloth in nut brown and dark blue, buckskins, Indian blanketing, anything serviceable that might also keep them warm. A very few of the officers, young Dewey among them, affected a formal uniform of white breeches and waistcoats, signifying only that they had enough money to employ a tailor.

In the matter of uniforms Jackson saw the value of being little different than his men, of being indifferent to any formality of rank as expressed in mere clothing. The lanky leader made do with unpolished boots with floppy tops that flapped against his bony knees, a simple short cloak made of blue homespun, a leather hat pulled down over his long hair, and broadcloth trousers into the waistband of which he had jammed his dueling pistols.

But those who saw him never doubted for a minute that they were in the presence of the commanding general!

Lieutenant Dewey, in spite of his cold fingers, tried to sketch the men, seeking to preserve an accurate image of Andy Jackson's followers.

A corporal came up to him, saluting. “Sir, General Jackson requests that you join him.”

Dewey returned the salute, making his way to Andy's small tent. The general was there alone, seated at a field table, wrapped in blankets.

“Well, young Dewey, what are your impressions of the first day of our adventure?”

Lee smiled. “I'm wondering, sir, whether I'll ever be warm again.”

“Oh, you will be, once we get to our destination and engage the enemy.” He chuckled. “Warmly, I would hope.”

“Yes, sir.”

Jackson gestured to a second chair at the table. Lee sat down.

“I wanted to spend a few minutes with you,” the general said, “to discuss, for your documentation, the purpose of our being called to arms, and my views on the situation.”

Dewey nodded, settling himself for a monologue.

“We are called to reenforce General James Wilkinson”—at the mention of the name, he grimaced—”at New Orleans. The original request from the War Department was for fifteen hundred men. Twenty-five hundred of the finest Tennessee has to offer quickly volunteered—and I can tell you that the rest of the country is not so fortunate as to have such ready volunteers. When we departed this morning we were two thousand seventy strong, infantry and cavalry.

“The situation is such. Lieutenant Dewey, that I will be subordinate to General Wilkinson.” Once more his face was screwed up in disgust. “It's not a role I would have chosen for myself.”

“The same General Wilkinson who was associated with Burr?”

“Indeed. The War Department, in its wisdom, keeps him in command.” His ire was raised. “It's one of the numerous idiotic decisions being made in Washington these days!”

Jackson paused to regain his composure. “Yet, I must accept this decision, no matter how personally galling it may be. I ask nothing for myself, Dewey. I'd have been content with the compensation of a sergeant. All I ever asked was a chance to fight!”

“Yes, sir. What do you anticipate when we get to New Orleans?”

“I wish I knew. Right now my job is to push this army forward, to make as much haste as possible, in spite of the ice on the rivers.”

Lee had heard one report that, like the Cumberland, the Ohio was choked with ice. They were moving north on the Cumberland into Kentucky, where that river flowed into the Ohio, and then south again to reach the Mississippi. A circuitous route to Natchez, Mississippi, their initial target. Coffee's cavalry, on the Natchez Trace, would ride nearly five hundred miles. The men in the boats would go twice that far to reach the same goal. And more.

“Let me tell you this,” General Jackson was saying, “whatever challenge we find, we'll show them what Tennesseans are made of!”

II

I
T
was well after nightfall when Charles staggered into Bon Marché, nearly frozen, leading his limping horse. He had ridden off along the banks of the Cumberland in pursuit of his son, forcing the horse unmercifully, covering nearly twenty-five miles that way.

Then the horse had bowed a tendon in the right fore. His chase was ended.

He had no choice but to walk back home.

Four different times he had stopped to build a small fire to warm himself and the suffering animal. In his haste, he had brought no food, no provisions of any kind. He had to keep moving or freeze to death.

He led the horse into the barn, made warm by the heat of the accumulated equine bodies, and shouted to a black forking fresh straw into the stalls. “Take care of this horse. Rub him down well and take care of that leg as best you can. We'll work on it in the morning.”

“Yas, suh.” The slave stared at him, wanting to ask questions about where his master had been, but not daring to.

Dewey stalked out of the barn and half ran to the mansion. In the drawing room, where a welcome fire roared, he found Mattie at the desk, head bent over an account book.

“The damned horse bowed a leg,” he announced angrily.

She didn't look up.

Going to the fireplace, he stretched out his hands to its glow. “Lord, I'm nearly frozen.”

There was no comment.

He turned and glared at his wife. “It might be civil, at the very least, to offer me a hot meal.”

Mattie ignored him.

“It's to be like that, is it?” he growled, moving to the door again, opening it, and bellowing down the hallway: “Horace!”

The butler came running.

“First, some coffee—as hot as you can make it. And then get me something to eat.”

“Yas suh.” He hurried away.

Charles picked up a crystal decanter from the sideboard and poured himself a full glass of whiskey, downing it in two swallows. That accomplished, he stood again in front of the fireplace, peeling off his outer clothing, one piece at a time, as his body warmed.

After several more silent minutes, Mattie rose from the desk, roughly shut the account book, and left the room, her eyes averted from her husband the entire time. She slammed the door of the drawing room behind her.

Dewey sighed. “As hot as you may be,” he said aloud to the flames, “you could never be hotter than that woman is right now.”

He didn't smile.

III

L
EE
Dewey never imagined that so many men could suffer so much without complaint. Though frostbitten fingers and toes were commonplace as the Jackson flotilla left the Cumberland and began drifting down the Ohio, no one complained. Perhaps the men knew that Andy wouldn't tolerate whiners. Certainly he had to be suffering with the rest of them, but he maintained an easy, jolly manner—encouraging, praising, demanding more of the men that they believed was in them. And getting it.

At least on this day the sun was shining brightly for the first time.

“If this good weather keeps up,” the general said to Lieutenant Dewey, “we'll try to move ahead at night as well.”

“Yes, sir.”

Lee wondered how that was possible. The volunteers were exhausted by a day of constantly battling the icy floes on the river, moving them aside with heavy poles that were prone to snap under the exertion.

Now—suddenly, it seemed—the flotilla stopped. The ice had dammed up in front of them. Nothing could move.

Jackson took in the problem immediately.

“Over there!” he shouted to a captain. “Get some men to work on that pile of ice!” He was pointing to a seemingly solid wall of floes, slowly shifting and grinding together, becoming more impenetrable each minute.

Men from the first three boats leaped onto the ice and made their way to the jam. Sliding, falling, swearing, they attacked the icy dam with poles and axes and sledges, their work bringing sweat to their faces even though the temperature was barely above zero.

The artificial dam began to give way, with massive tearing sounds, and the men fled to their boats. But something worse had been unleashed. Giant blocks of ice behind the dam, weighing tons, were freed to race along on the strong current of the Ohio. One of the boats was struck on one side and then on the other by a small frozen mountain.

Planks of the heavy flatboat began to disintegrate under the pounding, tossing the men into the cruel waters. The thundering noise of the ice floes crashing together and the screams of the men became as one.

Young Dewey stared in horror as one of the soldiers was caught between two of the floes, crushed into a bloody nothing as the massive ice pieces rubbed together.

It took more than an hour for General Jackson and his officers to bring the flotilla ashore and to count the dead and injured. Two bodies were dragged from the water, both badly mangled. A roll call found yet another man missing and presumed drowned.

Broken arms and legs were common. Those who had been tossed into the river were stripped of their frozen clothing and warmed beside roaring fires, vigorously massaged by their companions in an effort to bring life back to limbs made immobile in the unequal battle against nature.

Jackson quickly appointed a party to move overland with the injured to seek medical care. The two bodies were to be carried along. The ground was too solidly frozen to bury them where they had died.