“Have ye heard, Parson, that my nephew George has become a builder?”
The teacher pursed his lips, and raised his eyebrows skeptically. “A builder?”
“A builder?” Jonathan said.
“Aye. Seems he’s about to erect the largest structure west of
Fort Pitt. He came visited me last month, to brush up on points o’ joining and leverage and so on, that I’d taught ’im long since.”
“I didn’t know that,” Jonathan said. “He told me nowt about a building. What’s it to be?”
“Why, a fort. A log fort. He has a contract to build it. He’s doing right well, that lad is. Smart.
Smart!
” He always added that emphasis when he was teasing the Parson about George.
“A fort wheerrr?” the parson inquired.
“Why, a settlement on the Ohio, named, ah, let me recollect. I believe Wheeling, he said.”
Jonathan shook his head. “I’ve heard there’s much Indian alarm lately thereabout. I didn’t know he was to build the fort, though I’d heard the people wanted one, so they wouldn’t have to go all the way to Pitt if there’s an outbreak.”
“I tried to discourage him from going out,” George Rogers said. “But y’ know him.”
“Aye,” said Jonathan. “Advice runs off ’im like rain off a loon.”
“So did education,” said the parson.
“But he’s certainly smart,” repeated George Rogers. “
Smart!
”
“How smart’s a man who goes out there at a time like this?” said Jonathan. “There’s bad unrest there, so I read and so I hear.”
“That gent by the doorr theerrr,” said the parson, inclining his head. “That Captain Lewis, d’ ye know’m? He asserts thot thrrr’s been Indian sign as farrr doon as Albemarrrle.”
“It’s spooky out along the mountains,” Jonathan said. “Imagine how it must be way out there past ’em.”
“Well, I don’t like the thought o’ that lad bein’ in an Indian war,” said George Rogers. “But he’ll take care o’ himself as well as any man could, I’ll say as much.”
“From what Pa tells of ’im,” Jonathan muttered, “he’s gotten so Indian ’imself, I’m not sure but what he’d be on their side.” It had been a spiteful thing to say, and his Uncle George’s expression made him regret it at once. Now and then Jonathan would blurt out something like that and get an unexpected glimpse of his own envy of George. He forced a chuckle. “I’m jesting, though, o’ course. I pray for ’im every day, as we all do. Hey, lookee here at the fob he brought me from the capital! He toured way up to Woodstock to say hey to me.” Jonathan was proud to be able to say that. One thing certain was that he loved and admired his younger brother far more than he envied him. And the thought of him out there in the dark heart of the Indian
country was fearsome. “I spent two hours trying to talk him out o’ going. I told him about all the out-country families I’d seen come back over the mountains scared for safety. I told him he’d be foolhardy, and more fool than hardy, to go on out. Told him to stay and come back down for the wedding. Make the family happy. O’ course I didn’t know then that he had a fort to build. But he just laughed, said his usual litany how he had that country in ’is blood. How he was goin’ to make Clark a name out there. Bet me I’d be out there myself someday, and the whole family likewise. There’s no arguing with ’im.”
“My argument,” said George Rogers, “was with my boys Joe and John. He had ’em in such a buzzel they wanted to go with ’im. I told ’em, ‘Talk to me about it in five years, when y’re both weaned proper.’”
“The oonly argument I iver had wi’ Master Georrrge,” said the parson, “tha’ is, the oonly thing ’e iver said tha’ I could no’ answer, was, when I’d caught ’im sky-gazing in the classroom, ’e said, ‘Sir, if ye truly believe in freedom o’ thought, then why does it botherrr ye if I sit heerrr having a guid time wi’ my mind?’ Heh! Fair said, eh?”
Jonathan looked in surprise at his old teacher. The parson had never told that story before, nor had he ever spoken of George with a tone of fondness in his voice like that. It’s almost, he thought with a shiver, the way folks start talking respectfully about a man who’s dead.
And he remembered his last sight of George, George riding up the road, leading his packhorse, turning to wave back, the huge, shadowy flank of Massanutten Mountain dwarfing him. And Jonathan remembered having had an awful premonition at the time that that would be his last vision of George. But of course he had not told that to the family. And Jonathan didn’t believe in omens anyway. Such things, Parson Robertson had taught him, are not valid parts of an enlightened rationale. “I’ll outlive ye, Jonathan,” George had told him once, pointing westward. “Open places are healthier.”
“Hey, Jonathan.” Dickie’s voice laughed behind him. “Hullo, Uncle George. Parson, sir.” Dickie was presently a pupil of the parson and felt awkward calling him ‘Uncle’ as he always had used to.
“Hullo, Dick,” said George Rogers. “Thought you’d be abed by now.”
Dickie laughed, and there was considerable aroma to his breath. The parson’s face stiffened when it billowed around him, but Dickie was having too fine a time to notice. “Listen to what
happened up at Port Royal, that I just heard tell of. I think it’s funny as all get-out. D’you remember Roy’s Warehouse, where Pa used to take our tobacco?” He was leaning on the back of Jonathan’s chair.
“Aye, o’ course.”
“D’ye know that when Mister Roy died, his business was sold to Magistrate Miller?”
“No, I hadn’t heard it. What’s funny about that?” Thomas Roy had been a popular man with the planters; James Miller was a royalist, who probably would be high-handed and hard to deal with.
“Nothin’s funny so far,” Dickie went on. “But ol’ Miller, he moved the main entrance from th’ street side around to the wharf side. Ye remember that narrow gangplank up over the Rappahannock, where we’d sit an’ fish while we waited for Pa to get th’ tobacco weighed? Well, that was th’ only way a body could get to ol’ Miller’s office. So here’s th’ funny part: so many planters would get drunk at Roy’s Tavern and fall off that gangplank into the river tryin’ to get to Miller’s office that the Court made him move it back around! Ha, ha, ha! And him a justice himself!”
“Ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha!” Even the parson was laughing.
That was a story Jonathan liked. He could remember well that high gangplank and the murky river flowing far below among the pilings, and could imagine the drunks falling off. But he liked best hearing about a judgment against a Tory.
Uncle George was roaring with laughter too, bending forward and slapping his knee, and his Rogers laughter was so loud that it overrode one of Patrick Henry’s perorations. Henry pulled his spectacles down from his forehead to the end of his nose and stared over them.
“What d’you find so amusing, Squire Rogers?”
“Ha, ha! Hey, nothing you said, Burgess Henry, but a tale this nephew o’ mine just told. Dick, boy, would ye like to tell it to the gentlemen present?”
And so the slightly tipsy thirteen-year-old had a large audience of substantial gentlemen to tell his story to, and told it well, with only a few slurred words. And although Mr. Henry and some of the others had already heard the story, or read it in the
Gazette
, Dickie’s narration was a resounding success, and dispelled some of the disgruntled gravity that Mister Henry had brought into the room. Dickie staggered out to their applause, blushing with a happy self-consciousness. He had actually stolen the floor from Patrick Henry.
* * *
I
N
THE
SMALL
HOURS
OF
THE
MORNING
, J
OHNNY
LAY
WITH
his arms around Betsy Freeman’s magnificent hips, mumbling into her superb bosom that if she would only yield the rest of her charms to him, he would straightaway go to her father and speak of marriage. He knew, deep in his rational mind, that it was a terribly rash promise to make, one that he had never made to anyone else before, but he was desperate with desire, and to possess her wholly at last after these twelve hours of hot pursuit seemed worth any risk. If he could have her now, if he could only penetrate that last few inches to the warm inner mystery of her, then tomorrow he could think about how to deal with the consequences.
It had to be soon. He was as exhausted and uncomfortable as he had ever been in his life. His groin ached unbearably, and though he and his temptress were burrowed deep in the hay of the stable mow, the chill of the October night air on his sweat-damp underdrawers and bare back made his teeth chatter as he poured forth his frantic vows. It was incredible that he could be burning like a charcoal kiln in his loins at the same time his nose rankled with cold and dripped on her chemise. Only that part of him that he held plastered against her was warm.
Egod, but she was a stubborn wench, he had thought twenty times this night. A dozen times he had been ready to give up the siege. But at those moments she had somehow sensed his weakening resolve and allowed him to untie one more ribbon, loosen one more lace, slip off one more shoe, pull out one more hairpin. And now she had drawn from him the promise of promises, and she murmured at last, “Ah, Johnny, Johnny! Oh yes, if ye must,” and she took his hand in the pitch darkness and guided it to some warm, soft, smooth place, which he could not immediately identify because of the numbness of his cold fingers. She gasped and started, and he was afraid it was because of the shock of his cold hand. But she was pushing him away again, for the hundredth time, and she hissed with a chilling urgency:
“Someone’s here!”
The hay rustled loudly as they sat upright, wisps of alfalfa cascading off them. Horses were nickering, stamping, thumping in the wooden stalls.
Voices, several voices, were muttering in the stables not ten feet away. Someone whispered and someone snorted and someone snickered. A sliver of lanternlight fell between the planks. Johnny and Betsy cringed, wanting to grab their discarded garments and dress themselves, but knew their rustlings in the hay would be heard. There was a moment of stillness then, in which
the rapid squeaks of the violins far away in the house could be heard. Then one of the voices said ominously:
“Gi’ me your knife. I’ll get that filly first!”
The words struck a cold panic in Johnny’s breast. He was stiff and numb and aching and absurdly out of costume, but there was no honorable thing to do but take a stance to protect her. In the darkness she was making little gasping groans of terror, and these piteous sounds galvanized Johnny. “No!” he shouted in a quavering croak, and leaped out of the hay into the stable corridor ready to fight to the death for his lady love.
The intruders recoiled, incredulous, at this apparition in hay-wisps and drawers. The horses, whose tails they were cutting off, reared in their stalls and whinnied in stark terror. The lantern fell to the ground and went out. There was a frenetic banging of hooves and thudding of flesh. The commotion spread to the paddock outside the stables, where several score horses belonging to the wedding guests panicked and started running and neighing. The fiddle music in the house trailed off, and doors were banging, voices were shouting. “What goes?” “What?” “Horse thieves!” “Indians!” The paddock fence rattled and threatened to break under the force of lunging horseflesh. Candles and lanterns came pouring out of the house. Someone fired a pistol in the air, doubling the confusion.
It was an old country trick, Johnny realized then, for pranksters to cut off the tails of the horses of wedding guests, and he had interrupted such a prank.
The lights and voices were coming closer. Johnny turned, leaped back into the haymow on top of his terrified paramour, clamped a hand over her mouth, and drew clothes and hay in over them.
No evidence was ever found to determine who had managed to cut the tails off a filly and two geldings in the Clark stable that night. Johnny had seen who two of them were—those two loutish brothers of Betsy herself—but of course he was in no position to reveal what he knew.
While the household and guests were out and about in the aftermath of this disruption, it was discovered that Master Billy Clark was missing from his trundle bed. For a long time the fear reigned that he had somehow been kidnaped by the interlopers, and a rider was sent out to fetch the constable, and a boyhunt was on that very nearly discovered Johnny Clark and Betsy Freeman, who, though nearly naked deep in the hay, were too shivery with cold and fright to consummate their union.
Before daylight Master Billy was finally found, asleep under
discarded clothes in the bridal chamber. It was deduced that he must have gotten up at one in the morning to follow the hilarity in there, then had got lullabyed back to sleep by the groom’s snoring.
At least that was the story of it that the Clark boys made up to josh their brother-in-law with for the rest of his life.
T
HE
PALE
GREEN
LEAVES
OF
A
PRIL
WERE
A
BLUR
AS
THE
horses galloped headlong down the slope into the ravine toward Pipe Creek. George’s heart was in his mouth; his blood was racing toward the awful joy of first combat. Branches swished past his head and lashed his arms and thighs but he scarcely felt them. A great scream was building in his throat, ready to burst forth. Alongside him in the crackling, thudding onrush plunged a bay stallion ridden by Captain Mike Cresap, the veteran Indian fighter. In a sideward glance George saw Cresap grinning like a running wolf. In this creek valley they had overtaken and cornered a Shawnee war party and were flushing them into the open. The Shawnees were running in the cane and reeds, trying to disperse and vanish. Cresap, cocking back his old razor-sharp broadsword, closed on a fleeing brown back and the killer yell pulsated in his throat. The sword whistled as Cresap overtook a sprinting warrior. In the corner of his eye George saw that warrior pitch forward, and at that sight, the cry that had been gathering in his own throat tore out, quavering and thrilling. Before him, darting fleet as a deer, was another warrior. When the Indian glanced back over his shoulder, George glimpsed his ochre-painted cheekbone and raised his tomahawk to aim a blow at it. Coming abreast of the running warrior, George swung the tomahawk, but the brave dodged aside and the blow missed.