From Sea to Shining Sea (64 page)

John Clark had long anticipated that this day of their departure
for Kentucky would be a joyous and eager day, but the house seemed full of ghosts. And he could not stop thinking about Dickie. And though neither he nor she had said anything about him for weeks, except in their private prayers, he was sure she was thinking about Dickie too.

Door hinges squealed somewhere and footsteps came up the hallway, hard heels on hardwood. John and Ann Rogers Clark looked toward the door as if eager for someone to interrupt this awkward silence.

Edmund bustled into the room, tall, red-haired, sturdy, and cheerful. He wore a coat of brown wool and leather leggings flecked with mud to the knees, and carried his three-cornered hat in his left hand. He saw how morose his parents were. “Eh! No more o’ this mopery on your birthdays, you two,” he boomed. “And on th’ day you set out for Paradise! Well, everything’s loaded but what ye be sittin’ on. It’s time.” He extended a hand to his mother and she rose to stand, majestic as a queen, almost as tall as he was. John Clark put his hands on his knees and stood up too, come to life at last.

“Cupid,” he bellowed. The rangy servant appeared in the doorway, his head tilted. “Give me a hand here, and be lively. We’ve got a thousand miles to go!” The Negro bent and grasped one handle of a trunk, and John Clark grasped the other. They lifted it from the floor and looked into each other’s eyes for a moment, and each saw the glint of tears. Cupid had been in this house as many years as they had.

Edmund grabbed both handles of another trunk and hoisted it onto his thighs. “Eddie,” his mother said, “get York to help ye with that, ere y’ split your gut.” He ignored that, and staggered out with the load, chanting:

“Fare ye well, Virginia, and hullo, Kentuck! Here come some more Clarks!”

Three loaded wagons, roofed with tarpaulins stretched over ashwood hoops, stood in a row on the muddy driveway in front of the entrance. From under the canvas came the murmur and laughter of the girls, who were making their nests amid the baggage, sheltering from the sifting cold rain. Saddle horses were tied behind the wagons. Mrs. Clark squinted against the rain as she came out of the house, and passed a gaze around the big trees, which were still about half-clothed in autumn colors. Then she looked back at the house with its two rows of white-shuttered windows. “I will say I liked living in a stone house,” she said.

“Aye, Ma,” grunted Edmund. He heaved the trunk onto the
back of the second wagon and came around to help her up onto the front seat. “But there’s many a stone house, and I daresay ye’ll be the rare lady who’s got herself a grand house made o’ mulberry logs, bright yellow mulberry wood. And it’s a fine-built place, too. Jonathan cut no corners. George likes it so well he said he might come live there with’ee.”

“Huh! Fancy
him
settlin’ down anyplace!” She was arranged on the hard seat now. York, big, pudgy, now fourteen, was on the seat beside her, importantly posed, holding the reins with one hand, an umbrella in the other. He gave the umbrella to her and she held it over her head, looking balefully at the waterdrops falling from its edge. “O’ course it
would
rain on this day,” she muttered.

Now the last of the baggage had been lashed on, and most of the voices had fallen to mumbling.

“Well, what are we waitin’ on now?” she demanded. John Clark, going forward to take the reins of the lead wagon, answered aside:

“For Cupid. Went back for some o’ his things.”

“Slow as ever,” she sighed. She gave a rueful look at York, who had never seen Mrs. Clark act so crotchety. “What in tarnation’s he got, anyways, but what ’e can carry on ’is back?” The answer came when Cupid emerged around the corner of the house. He was wearing three coats and apparently several layers of old clothes. Mrs. Clark suddenly laughed. “He is carryin’ it all on his back!” Swaddled like a mummy, Cupid had some difficulty clambering aboard the wagon, the girls laughing at his exertions.

William suddenly appeared from somewhere, hatless, a shock of wet red hair sticking to his forehead, yelling, “Ready? Ready! I’m set to go to Kentuck!” He grabbed York by his coat and pulled him down off the driver’s seat, vaulting into his place and snatching the reins.

“Eh, Master Billy,” York whined up from the driveway, “I wan’ to drav.”

“Soon enough,” said William. He was fourteen now, but already taller than his father. “But on a big start-out like this’n, got to be a Clark man drivin’ every wagon, don’t y’see?”

York made a toad mouth and bulged his eyes. “Thowt I
was
a Clark man.” Then he shrugged and went back to hoist himself over the tailgate.

“
Gee-ya
!” came John Clark’s voice from the lead wagon, and it began rolling forward.

“
Gee-ya
!” William whooped, flicking the reins, and the second wagon lurched away from the house.

“
Gee-yah
!” Edmund’s voice bellowed behind, and the third wagon came along.

The convoy rattled off among the rain-dripping trees, and one by one the Clarks looked back at the big stone house where the family had lived for a quarter of a century.

The creaking wagons were not two hundred yards from the empty house before Ann Rogers Clark called out:

“John, stop here!”

“Ah, sure, Annie. I was stoppin’.”

The three wagons came to a halt. Faces began peering out from under the canopies. Mrs. Clark was clutching her skirts and climbing down the wheel to the ground. “Everybody out,” she commanded, and made her way onto a graveled path that led among the massive trunks of an oak grove, and in a moment everybody, men, girls, and slaves, had got off the wagons to follow her. John Clark caught up with her and walked beside her with his right hand at the small of her back. Raindrops dribbled off the oak leaves. She led the procession to the small glade where scythed grass lay wet and yellow. In the middle of the glade stood a new, small slab of granite, on which was chiseled:

The family and servants formed a semicircle in front of the stone while the fine rain dampened their heads and shoulders. When Mrs. Clark saw that all heads were bowed, she stuck her elbow in her husband’s ribs. He cleared his throat.

“Our Almighty Father, look upon us with favor as we make this last visit—like as not it’ll be our last visit—with our beloved son and yours, Johnny Clark, who ought to be with us now in the glory of his youth as we set out for the Kentuck.”

He paused. Several pairs of eyes peeped at him to see if he had finished already, but he continued.

“We ask Thee also, our Almighty Father and Supreme Director of All Things, to protect his brother Richard, whose whereabouts in that wilderness You only know. But if Ye’ve already gathered him unto your bosom, where Ye hold this beloved Johnny Clark, then may our two fine sons walk the gilded streets of Thy Kingdom arm in arm, and may they forget the worldly
strife that flung ’em untimely to You. And may they remember us, who remember them every day without exception.”

He paused, his breath whistling slightly in his nostrils, then said, “Amen.”

Fanny pulled a branch with oak leaves and acorns from a low limb and placed the cluster on the grave as they left.

For years during the war they had had to live overshadowed by the unknown fate of Johnny. Now they knew where Johnny was. But months ago Dickie had vanished somewhere along the wilderness trace between Vincennes and the fort at the Falls, and nothing had been heard of him since, and now that mystery hung over the family, like these heavy gray rainclouds, dampening the joy of their departure to the new land.

T
HE
WHEEL
RUTS
OF
THE
ROADS
WERE
FILLED
WITH
A
SOUP
of red-clay mud. It balled up on the horses’ hooves and clogged the wagon wheels and sucked at the boots of anyone who stepped down into it to put a shoulder to a mired wagon. The mud was slick as grease and sticky as glue at the same time. Gobs of it would slither down the back of a slow-turning wheel and fall with a
flob, flob
sound back into the ruts, to be picked up again by the next passing wheel. The horses were caked with muck to their shoulders, and balls of it clung like berries to the hairs of their long tails. The men had mud smears up to their lapels, even on their hat brims, because of their struggles with wheels and horses and harness.

They made only fifteen miles the first day, slowed by mud, and by neighbors who came down to the road to say farewell. As the evening grew gray, they reached a familiar zigzag fence of split rails and soon turned up the road to the home of George Rogers. Quarters had already been created for the mud-caked travelers, in Joe’s empty room and the upstairs ballroom, and the servants were bedded in the old slave quarters where Governor Hamilton and his fellow prisoners had been kept, so long ago. Johnny Rogers was here, handsome, and still unmarried, helping his father run the plantation and his building trade.

George Rogers was sixty-two now, totally white-headed but still ruddy-faced and vigorous. In candlelight at the late meal he mentioned, in his grace, his nephew Dickie, asking for his safety, and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that George Rogers was remembering the years when his son Joseph’s fate had been just such a mystery. Both of them had been lost by following George’s dream, but George Rogers did not say that. Even after all that had happened, George was still his favorite
nephew. That Joe had died in his arms, reunited at last with his own race, had made that bond of uncle and nephew even more profound.

A celebration of John and Ann Rogers Clark’s birthdays was observed at the meal. He was sixty and she was fifty. George Rogers talked wistfully with her for a while about the mischiefs of their childhood, and though the Clark girls were heavy-lidded from the strain of the day’s travel, they came very much to life, as children do when treated to anecdotes of a parent ’s youthful aberrations. “Why!” George Rogers exclaimed in mock astonishment, “d’you mean to say, Sister, that you’ve never told them that you were a mite shy o’ being an angel?”

“I was some’at closer to that ideal than
you
were, Brother George, and I’ll remind ye that when you point a finger at another, you’re pointing three at yourself. Go on any more and I might be compelled to reveal what I know about a certain blazing barn.” And now his own sons and daughters gaped at
him.

George Rogers puckered his mouth, and after a while he said, “It grieves me to see ye go so far away to live, Sister. But seeing what sland’rous memoirs my sons and daughters might ha’ been exposed to, I reckon seven hundred miles might be just about comfortable.”

And they embraced each other, laughing with tears in their eyes.

T
HEY
HAD
HARNESSED
THE
WAGON
TEAMS
AND
WERE
ON
the road by dawn. The rain had continued throughout the night, soaking the countryside. The road now was like a creek of clay soup. The air was chillier; breath condensed visibly.

York drove the second wagon this morning. Young William had saddled his bay and he ranged around like a scout, advising of the condition of the road ahead, which was always bad, and dismounting frequently to help pry a swamped wagon out of a rut or a fast-running ford. He had lost another hat, and his red hair was lank with rain.

They passed through Fredericksburg and crossed the Rappahannock early in the afternoon, stopping for nothing, as they intended to reach Gunston Hall by evening if they could possibly make the distance. They had written ahead to old George Mason about their departure for the West, and he had sent an express back down, inviting them to lay over at Gunston Hall at least one night. He had greetings and messages, he said, for George.

Above Fredericksburg they found the road much improved, some of it having been topped with gravel, some of it with logs.
Late afternoon found them in Prince William County. John Clark hailed his son. “Billy, ride on ahead and announce us to Colonel Mason, so’s we’ll not surprise the good gent. Here. Take my pistols.”

William looked as if nothing could please him more than to run afoul of some highwayman who’d test his mettle. But as he started to gallop ahead, his mother called him. He wheeled and came back. “Billy,” she said, “ha’ ye not a lick o’ sense? Put on a hat, and by heaven, don’t you lose this’n.”

Momentarily a boy again, he went back among the wagons and emerged with his prize fur cap on his head. It was one he’d made himself from a muskrat he’d trapped.

“All right, then,” she said. “I know that’s one ye’ll not lose. Y’re off now, and Godspeed.”

He thundered away, his horse’s hoofs flinging mud, and vanished into the woods ahead. He was a man again.

T
HE
WAGONS
ROLLED
UP
THE
DRIVEWAY
OF
G
UNSTON
H
ALL
in twilight, between giant elms and stretches of level, cropped lawn. Here was the field where George had run and jumped and ridden and won wrestling and foot-racing medals in those carefree days before the war. Under each tree lay a carpet of yellow leaves. Light glowed in the downstairs windows. The house was of brick with four tall chimneys, one of the finest mansions on the Potomac. It was cozy with firelight and candles inside. George Mason, portly and round-faced, sat in the embrace of a scarlet, wing-backed Chippendale chair with his foot up on a gout stool. He groaned and his breath wheezed whenever he reached to shake a hand, but he was cheerful and his eyes twinkled as he apologized for being unable to rise. John Clark sat in a black leather armchair across the hearth from Mr. Mason; Edmund sat reverently next to the oak writing table upon which, he knew, Mason had composed the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the Virginia Constitution. Colonel Mason had come to be known as “the pen of the Revolution.”