From Sea to Shining Sea (81 page)

Before anyone could speak, the doors were flung open. “Harry, you’d
better
prosecute me,” George growled, pointing his finger at him like a pistol. “Let the
facts
come forth. They’ll not condemn me without a
trial
!” He started to close the doors, then instead advanced and snatched the papers out of Innes’s hand, and stalked back into the library. The last thing he saw before banging the doors together again was his mother’s face, full of mortification and pity.

He swallowed three more glasses of brandy in quick succession, while reading the proclamation through a second time, stung to the heart, muttering aloud its incredible words: “’Authority wrongfully supposed’? ‘Violence’? ‘Punishment’? ‘Culpable’?” He thought back over the decade in which he had exerted every cell of mind and body to maintain the defense of Kentucky against impossible odds, against the hostility of British and Indians, against the shortsightedness and indifference of the state’s own leaders; he thought of the interminable Indian councils, of
his spirited harangues to his troops, of the long, excruciating marches, of the constant shortages of men and money, of the slanders made behind his back in the East, of the allegations of his sottishness, of his economic ruin. All this, he thought, to end up condemned out of hand as a criminal against his beloved state! The governor obviously had taken someone’s apocryphal account of the incident and swallowed it whole.
And gave me no chance even to speak the truth! he thought. By the Eternal, he was in a hurry to throw me to the wolves!

He poured down more brandy while he brooded, and he might as well have been pouring it on a chafing dish; it leaped and fluttered like an alcohol flame over his despair and his simmering contempt for Governor Randolph. Now he snatched paper from a desk drawer. As he dipped a quill in ink, he heard his mother’s voice querying outside the locked door. “I won’t see anyone!” he yelled. “I’m not fit!” And, not hearing the words of her reply through the roaring of his emotions, he scrawled:

George was gone from Mulberry Hill. Nobody knew where he had gone, but they all knew the state of mind he was in, and they were very worried about him.

He had stayed in the library alone the rest of that day after Judge Innes had left. One by one the members of the family had rapped on the door and entreated him to come out for something or other, and one by one had been told to leave him at peace. Then, very late, after they all had retired to their rooms, they had heard, through the hiss of April rain, hoofbeats going at a gallop from the stables down the avenue to the public road.

They found the library door open, wads of paper strewn over the floor, these proving to be awkward starts of letters to Thomas Jefferson, addressed to him in Paris, with salutations, then first lines scratched out. All the liquor decanters were empty; the room reeked of whiskey and tobacco smoke, and vomit dribbled from the sill of an open window. The pantry door was ajar and
two jugs of liquor were gone. George’s room was open; his saddlebags and pistols were gone, as was his old buckskin coat from the Revolution. Cupid came to the back door to report: “Mas’ George woked me up to saddle his stalyum, nen he rad off so hawd ’e make dust in ne mud!” Prodded, Cupid admitted that George had looked like the Devil himself, and added, “Seem me he been awful fragment wi’ corn spirits, come near fall off th’ stalyum!”

The next day, John Clark put on a rain cape and rode down to Louisville, ostensibly to inquire about a shipment of seed that was due, but mainly to inquire, discreetly, whether George had been seen. As the city’s founder and most celebrated citizen, George could hardly move in Louisville without half the population knowing he was in the town and where.

John Clark went from the land office to the wharf; from the town hall to the apothecary; from the public house to the fort; finally he even made unannounced calls at the doctor’s office and the homes of a few merchants. He idled briefly or discussed business matters with them all, but his casual inquiries indicated that George either had not been through Louisville at all, or, if he had, he had gone through by night. There was hardly anyplace where he could have been in secret.

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.”

T
HE MILL STOOD ON A STEEP BANK OF
S
ILVER
C
REEK, A
clear stream that ran down through the Illinois Regiment Grant Lands and fell into the Ohio at Clarksville. 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.