Long Knife

George stood for a moment enjoying the incredulous expressions on the faces of the young officers, gentlemen, and ladies, then said to Sanders:

“Tell ’em they may continue their dancing, but to remember that they now dance under the flag of Virginia, not England.” While Sanders announced this in his clumsy French, George sent a few of the half-clad, mud-smeared frontiersmen through the room to collect swords and pistols, then turned to go out. But a handsome dark-eyed man, who had been standing in the company of two beautiful women, suddenly left them and came forward.

“Sir,” he said in correct but strained English, “several of us here are Spanish citizens from St. Louis, and we are merely guests here of the French. Are we to be detained?”

George looked at the elegant little man, then said: “If you’ll be patient, I’ll attend to your situation. For the moment I must advise you and all the others not to stir from this house, for your safety.”

George watched, over the man’s shoulder, the younger of the two women who were with him, and felt a bittersweet pang in his breast. She was dark-eyed, oval-faced, transfixed by terror, but beautiful. …

By James Alexander Thom
Published by Ballantine Books:

PANTHER IN THE SKY
LONG KNIFE
FOLLOW THE RIVER
FROM SEA TO SHINING SEA
STAYING OUT OF HELL
THE CHILDREN OF FIRST MAN
THE RED HEART
SIGN-TALKER
WARRIOR WOMAN (with Dark Rain Thom)
SAINT PATRICK’S BATTALION

Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

—F. S
COTT
F
ITZGERALD

T
HE OLD GENERAL FELT IT COMING AT SUNSET ON THAT FINE COOL
evening, while he sat on the porch of his log house on the bluff overlooking the Ohio: a greater melancholy than any he had faced in the thirty years of his decline.

He set his jaw and drew himself up straight in his hickory chair. This awesome, poignant mood had tried to overpower him on many such evenings of late, and he feared it, and wished he knew how to brace his spirit against it. It wasn’t death he feared; he had been impatient for that for years. No, it was this eternity of days passing by, each one finding him more helpless to set things right.

The wild beauty of this place seemed to make it worse than it had been when he lived at Mulberry Hill across the river. Now melancholy seemed to come up the hill through the sighing treetops on the breeze from the broad river. It was in the rippling grass in the clearing and in the deep rushing of the Falls of the Ohio far below. It was in the sight of the sun going down at the end of another summer. Still another summer gone by, with all those injustices still unresolved.

The sunlight blazed directly into his eyes and flashed up at him from the surface of the river, but he did not shield his eyes or turn away. Here on this high place, it had become his habit to stare down the evening sun.

On the brassy glare of the river, above the falls, alongside the Kentucky bank, lay the dark oblong silhouette of Corn Island. There, he thought. Right there on that island it all started, in 1778. A conquest like none the world ever saw. Half a million square miles of domain, taken by a hundred and seventy starving woodsmen, who had the audacity to deem ourselves an army. The memory made him sit straighter; his eyes grew moist and a proud smile played on his mouth. But then, as always, followed the bitterness, and with the bitterness that old undeniable craving. Indeed, he thought. I have not touched any this long afternoon. It’s time.

With his cane he whacked three times on the wall. A Negro appeared in the doorway, lean, grizzled, clad in dingy white cotton. “You call for me, General?”

“Aye, Cupid. First, fetch me a jug of rum out here. Then, if you’d be so kind, sir, lay up by the hearth enough wood for the night. Make it the walnut. I like the smell o’ that. I feel in my bones, Cupid, this is going to be our first real chilling night of the season.”

“I do believe it is, sir.”

The general shivered. It seemed he had never once been warm enough since that winter campaign in ’79. “Then, if you’ll kindly poke the fire up good for me, and light a lamp on the table adjacent, then I should say you’d set me up well enough for a tolerable night.”

The old black man smiled. “You going to read, then?” Illiterate, he was perennially fascinated by the sight of the general looking at one thing, a book, for hours at a time.

“Maybe. But I have correspondence needs doing. If the rum doesn’t take me first …” I shouldn’t have said that, he thought; it isn’t seemly. But, by my eyes, if only they was somebody to whom you could say whatever was in your thoughts … some kinds of things you can say to a nephew, some to a niece, and some to an Indian, and some to your old comrades when they come around, but if you have no mate, there’s some things as just have to go unsaid …

The servant was poised with his weight on one leg, not sure whether he was dismissed; the general seemed primed to say more. His dark blue eyes were squinting through the sun and his mouth was open, as if he had not finished out his remarks.

I wonder if old Cupid could understand my discontent anyhow, the general was thinking. How would a slave take it to be told that his lot is happier than his master’s? But no. You don’t complain to people. Least of all to a servant. He had always believed it was the obligation of a gentleman never to complain, always to encourage, no matter how bleak the prospects might be. “If you’d bring me that rum?” he said instead.

The brick sun now sat on a purple horizon. Beyond the village of Louisville on the river’s far shore, the fields and forests of Kentucky had deepened to lilac, the westerly contours flushed red-gold. That a world which looked so like a paradise could be so full of injustices was a major cause of his melancholy.

Before the stroke it had not been so bad. In those days when he could still move around, still mount a horse, still go hunting and fowling with his nephews, the Croghan boys, still dig for answers in the mysterious Indian mounds; in those days when John Audubon would come and stay and ask particulars about this bird or that bird in the region; in short, until his body had betrayed him and made him a prisoner of his house and porch, it had been possible to put that wretched business out of his mind for days at a time. In the woods, on the trails, on the river, with hearty companions at his side and gun on his arm, the neglect and stupidity of an ungrateful country didn’t matter. But when he could only hobble about on a cane and hurt in every bone socket and sit wrapped in a cloak of retrospection, then the past had a way of growing bigger than the present and he could think only of the way things should have been.