Wilkinson handed the telescope back up to William, and there was a cynical half-smile on his mouth. “I don’t know, friend Clark,” he said. “As y’re aware, His Excellency is a cumbrous body, and yon fort might decay before he decides to knock it down.”
G
ENERAL
W
AYNE DECIDED NOT TO ATTACK THE
B
RITISH
stronghold, but, instead, simply to scorn it out of existence. He encamped his army within plain view of it, building the usual breastworks and setting up his cannon to bear on the fort. He put his troops to work then destroying the British trading post and all the Indian dwellings that lay under its “protection,” and to burning all the grainfields and trampling vegetable gardens under hoof. By now all the remnants of the whipped Indian force had vanished. General Wayne, accompanied only by his aide, Lieutenant William Henry Harrison, then rode within a stone’s throw of the fort’s walls and casually inspected it all around. This action so infuriated the British commander that he sent a messenger out to Wayne under a white flag, demanding to know why an American army had come to stand so insolently close to one of His Majesty’s posts, as he knew of no war between the two countries. Wayne sent back a note telling the Englishman to quit his fort and get out of American territory. But he would not attack the fort. He did not think it was worth starting another war with Great Britain.
* * *
T
WO DAYS LATER, TO A DIRGE OF DRUMS AND FIFES, A FUNERAL
ceremony was performed over the graves of the two American officers and twenty-six men who had died in the attack in the fallen timbers. One of these officers was William’s tentmate, Lieutenant Towles, who had died somewhere deep in the timbers with a tomahawk in his chest.
The cannon fired three rounds to conclude the ceremony, and then, baggage wagons creaking with the additional burden of a hundred wounded, the army left its camp and began to retrace its route, from fort to fort, back through the Ohio country toward the winter quarters at Fort Greenville. General Anthony Wayne was certain that he had at last completely defeated the Algonquian Confederacy. Most of the officers were not so sure.
D
ISCOMFORT AND HUNGER SET IN WHEN THE ARMY WAS
back in Fort Greenville; a supply train and herd of beef cattle had been badly delayed. William was exceedingly gloomy in his billet, the empty bunk beside his reminding him of Lieutenant Towles’ death. The diet of pan bread and bear’s oil, the lack of liquor or tea or coffee, kept his stomach sour and growling. Firewood and clothes and shoes were constantly damp, and half the garrison was sick; every assembly sounded like a coughing chorus. The troops wounded at Fallen Timbers were mending slowly on the poor diet. William thought of the tons of good Indian food that had been destroyed. He filled his off-duty hours by writing in his journal, and grew every day to hate army life ever more. There had been letters from the family awaiting him at Fort Greenville, letters expressing concern over Brother George’s expatriate scheme, which saddened them and offended their patriotic sense even though it seemed to be restoring his spirit and keeping him sober for the most part. William’s own sympathies were with George; he himself had become disillusioned with everyone else’s brand of leadership—with that smugness of Anthony Wayne, with that witty cynicism of General Wilkinson.
These dreary days, when Wayne was dead certain he had defeated the Indians once and for all but most of the officers were certain that he had let real victory slip through his fingers, William thought often of resigning his captain’s commission and going to join George’s phantom legion, an army with a cause. There was something more noble, more worthy, William thought, in going to war against the corrupt tyrants of Spain than in helping Congress methodically push Indians out of their own
lands. It was, after all, this same Congress that had refused year after year to honor George’s war debts until it had at last wiped out his great loyalty. In the night hours William struggled feebly to retain the precepts of his parents, their faith in God and Country. His diary pages for Fanny grew still more cynical. Fanny’s letters were low and bitter, too. She had a new son, Benjamin, but never saw her husband.
Such doubts and discontents had been gnawing at William’s morale in the gray weeks at Fort Greenville when, one day, a joyous shout from the parade ground signaled two cheering arrivals.
The first was expected—long expected. It was that overdue supply train, with its flour, its liquor, its medicines, and, above all, its herd of beef cattle. “Mmm—OOOooo! I’m just
dying
to be beef roast for th’ soldier boys!” someone yelled, running alongside the beasts.
The other arrival, unexpected, showed up first as a rap on William’s door an hour later. “Come in,” he called, turning from his writing box to see who was coming in off the muddy compound.
The stranger, an ensign, stepped into the room so stiffly he appeared to have a ramrod down his back, shut the door with a strange erect pivoting motion, and took his hat off before facing William. He was not tall, but his compact figure gave an immediate impression of hickorylike strength and hardness. He was mud-caked as high as his thick-muscled thighs, and markedly bowlegged; even though his muddy heels were smartly together, his knees gave each other an inch or two of leeway. His face was not really handsome, its mouth being small and severe and his round ears jutting like handles, but the eyes, winter-sea gray and deep-set under a massive forehead, were utterly startling. The lids were long-lashed, heavy-lidded, almost sleepy-looking, but the quick gray eyes themselves had that all-perceiving acuteness in them that William had seen only rarely, in certain scouts. One glance at them and William somehow was aware of the untidiness of his own room and person. They were a bit like old Daniel Boone’s eyes, but the face was not relaxed and happy as Boone’s was; it seemed instead to have been cut from granite and then polished to a girlish smoothness. The man’s hair was thick, auburn, pulled tightly back behind his prominent ears and queued in back. Now this man, this tight bundle of force, gave a formal little bow and said, as William rose from his chair:
“Captain Clark, Sir? I am Meriwether Lewis.”
* * *
T
HIS STRANGE YOUNG SPECIMEN OF AN ARMY OFFICER, IT
happened, was to be William’s new billet-mate. It was news not immediately to William’s liking, as Meriwether Lewis at first glance seemed an odd combination of prig and spartan. He was as orderly as a housemaid; worse, there was as much tension about him as about a drawn bow. William mused on him, wondering if he slept at attention. He watched from the corner of his eye as Ensign Lewis opened a portable bookcase to display a collection of books of sorts that had bewildered William in the years of his own education: Plutarch, Plato, Aeschylus, and the like, giving William to believe that atop all his other miseries, he was to be locked up in a room all winter with a man of inferior rank and superior education. William thought again on the notion of resigning his commission, and wondered how long it would take him to get out.
But soon, to his pleasant surprise, William began to find Meriwether Lewis somewhat interesting.
Quite
interesting, even, and a bit more personable than his initial rigidity had suggested. The first good sign was that when William asked him what name he went by, the answer was “Lewis.” Good. It would have been awkward sharing a room with a fellow one had to call “Meriwether,” or “Merry,” or such a thing. And then it transpired that Ensign Lewis knew a good deal about the Clarks. He had, in fact, been born in Albemarle County, not ten miles from the old Clark farmstead where Jonathan and George had been born. And only five miles or so from Thomas Jefferson’s estate. The Lewises were close friends of Jefferson. Lewis had, furthermore, schooled under the Maurys, who had educated Jefferson.
It soon became apparent, too, that Meriwether Lewis was not a prig or a sissy. Though he was of the land-rich and distinguished Warner Hall Lewises and the influential Meriwethers, he was at twenty years of age the protector of his family; his mother Lucy Meriwether Lewis Marks was the widow of first one officer and then a second, and this solid lad had thus been the head of his family since the age of seventeen.
Anecdotes and recollections began to bound back and forth between the two young officers so fast that each had two exciting questions and a story backed up behind his throat while the other was talking. “
Your
father rode against Dunmore over the gunpowder affair? Blast my eyes! So did mine, and my brothers, too!” And so on it went, the excitement building.
“My parents, come to think of it, went to your sister’s wedding, just before I was born—or just after, I’m not sure. What year …”
They talked about their families, faces alight with fondness and humor, told anecdotes about them, purging themselves of their homesickness. They talked about the army, and Lewis’s wholesome concept of duty was so refreshing that William vowed down inside himself to stop being so cynical about it, and felt much better at once. Lewis, just before getting his orders to come here, had been serving under Jonathan’s old commander, Light Horse Harry Lee, at Red Stone Fort, part of the force President Washington had sent out to quell the Whiskey Rebellion. William at last got a full and understandable account of that remote and rumored disturbance.
“The duty I’ve really prayed for,” Lewis said, “is one of exploring. From the Mississippi to the Pacific. Mister Jefferson wants to send a French scientist, Michaux. I’ve asked permission to go, but … So far, nothing.”
“The Pacific! Aye! He’s intended that a long time, I know. Once he asked Brother George to do it. George and I have talked on it a lot.”
“I’ve dreamed of it,” said Lewis, “since I was old enough to walk.”
“Michaux is with my brother now,” William exclaimed. “If y’d come home with me on a furlough, we could see ’im!”
They agreed on it. They would go at Christmastime.
Gone was the prospect of a gloomy winter in Fort Greenville. William was happy as a boy again. It became apparent that Lewis was a woodsman and naturalist of considerable experience, with a hungry fascination with natural science reminiscent of Brother George. Fate had brought to William, when he needed it, a friend to stretch his mind and warm his war-chilled heart.
And a few weeks later, when the chiefs of the Seven Nations came down to talk peace with General Mad Anthony Wayne, and the Indian wars were, truly, concluded for a while, William Clark and Meriwether Lewis knew they would indeed be free to go down to Mulberry Hill for Christmas. They drank to it.
“To a long friendship,” said Lewis.
“To a great friendship,” said William.
G
ENERAL
G
EORGE
R
OGERS
C
LARK
,
COMMANDANT OF THE
French Legion of the Mississippi, was in the public house at Louisville with Andre Michaux, outlining details of the Spanish defenses at New Orleans with old comrades who were secretly officers of the Legion, when a messenger leaped off a boat at the wharf and ran up the street. He appeared in the doorway of the
pub, looking left and right in the dim light, then slipped in among the rough soldiery and handed a piece of paper to Michaux. The Frenchman perused the sheet, then shut his eyes and, with a sigh, let his chin fall to his chest.
“Yes, what?” George said, and Michaux handed him the paper without looking up.
President Washington, it said, had learned of the plan to invade Louisiana. Enraged at Citizen Genet’s plotting right under his own nose, appalled by this violation of American neutrality, the President had outlawed the plot, demanded Genet’s recall to France, and ordered General Anthony Wayne to build a fort on the Mississippi to keep the French Legion from going down the river. Michaux, too, would have to go back to France.
George slumped in his chair.
Well, he thought. There goes my last dream o’ glory.
He slapped a gold coin down on the table. “Hey, take that over and buy us a jerry-boam o’ French brandy. Be sure it’s French. I intend for the Legion to go out with a roar.”
S
O THAT LAST GRAND SCHEME HAD FAILED, TOO
. B
UT NOT
entirely. The Spaniards in New Orleans, learning how close they had come to being invaded by an army of angry frontiersmen, decided to lift their restrictions on American shipping. General Clark’s army, without even marching, had at last opened up the mouth of the Mississippi. Now all Kentuckians could prosper from the trading down the river.
All, that is, except General Clark.
F
OR THE FIRST FEW HOURS THERE HAD BEEN INTERVALS WHEN
the pain would ease for a while and Elizabeth had been able to breathe and think a little, and the midwife had cooled her face and neck and shoulders with damp linen, but now there were no intervals, and the enormous pain was not only always there, it was growing worse. She felt as if a hand as big and strong as God’s own hand had closed around her waist, trying to pull the lower half of her body off. For a while in the beginning she had felt that the baby inside her was alive, and for a while she had been able to hear Richard’s voice out in the hall talking with the doctor. But now she was sure that the mass inside her was not alive, but was a mass of death, like a tombstone or something, and that the death in it was trying to spread out and invade her heart; and as for her beloved Richard, she could not hear him anymore; she could not hear anything except a terrible harsh sound like furniture being scooted across the floor in an empty house, and the room kept getting darker
and darker. She wanted her mother to come, bearing a lamp.
Then there seemed to be a cooling wind, a wind the color of silver, and there was no pain anymore. The silver wind seemed to be blowing over the roof of the house, above her bedroom, but yet at the same time she was in the silver wind, or was the silver wind itself. Gray wings caressed the silver wind, and there was a familiar, lovely sound.