Long Knife (27 page)

“But it is not so! I abhor the practice of employing savages
in warfare! Sir, I truly suspect—I would wager—that the whole body of my accusers are persons who are in my debt and would love to see me ruined so that their obligations would be nullified!”

George ran his tongue over his eyetooth thoughtfully. All this was as Gibault had hinted, and perhaps there was a way to verify it. “M’sieur Cerré, I don’t want to hear any more of your story at this time. Will you please retire to the antechamber over there and close the door, and wait until I summon you. This little matter can be dealt with justly, I think, if you’ll let me do this my way.”

Within fifteen minutes, all the citizens who had complained against Cerré had been assembled in the parlor. They numbered about a dozen, and sat or stood, fidgeting. George came in and took a seat behind the desk. “We’re here now,” he began, “to hear various charges made against the merchant Cerré …” A babble of nasty voices went up in the room, and George silenced it by striking the desk top with the side of his fist. “Before you begin, messieurs—one at a time—I believe the accused has the lawful right to face his accusers. Cerré!”

The antechamber door opened; Cerré stepped out and glanced over the gathering. A look of contempt formed on his face and the startled accusers began to squirm and look frightened. One or two edged backward toward the door, and slipped out.

“This ‘trial’ is in session,” George said. “Now who will be the first to record his complaints against Monsieur Cerré formally?”

A dense silence followed, then the shuffling of feet and the clearing of throats. Cerré stared from one to another. None spoke. The merchant’s countenance grew colder and colder. One by one, eyes on the floor, the people got up and crept out. Soon there was only one remaining, near the front of the room, a lumpish fellow in peasant smock. He looked up and saw Cerré staring at him; his eyes bulged and his Adam’s apple worked. When he glanced over both shoulders then and saw that all the others had left, he turned pale, got up, and lumbered toward the door, knocking aside two chairs in his haste.

Now Cerré stood looking across the empty room at the open door, his lips drawn thin, hands clasped behind his back. He turned slowly. “Well,
mon colonel?”
he said. George gripped the edges of the desk top with both hands, stared back at him for a minute, then leaned back and laughed.

“As I see it,” he said, “the case is closed.”

Cerré was delighted with the Virginian’s system of justice. Within another half an hour he had taken the oath of allegiance to the United States, and ten minutes later was drinking brandy with George and discussing cheerfully the many ways in which his travels, goods, and influence might be used in support of the new Franco-American alliance.

G
EORGE WAS SURPRISED IN THE NEXT FEW DAYS TO FIND THAT MOST
of the citizens of Kaskaskia were as delighted with the handling of Cerré’s trial as was Cerré himself, and the young commandant’s reputation as Solomon soon augmented his renown as a benevolent conqueror. The citizens and traders continued spreading his praise far and wide among the Indians, and within a few days he had heard from chiefs of another half-dozen tribes, some as far away as the Great Lakes and four or five hundred miles west of the Mississippi. He began to plan a great council, to be held at Cahokia because of its importance as a center for Indian trade. There would also be an opportunity to see Joseph Bowman there, and perhaps to make a diplomatic call on Lieutenant Governor de Leyba at St. Louis across the river.

He delayed the departure, however, until the return of Father Gibault and Doctor Laffont from Vincennes. They arrived, as they had promised, on the first of August. Their joyful report was that the people of Vincennes, after reading George’s proclamation and hearing about the state of harmony in the Illinois villages, had embraced the American offer almost unanimously, and had signed the oath of allegiance. The priest handed this document, covered with the signatures and marks of the Vincennes people, to George with a shy pride like that of a child presenting its parent with a handmade gift.

George sank back in his chair with a great sigh of relief. Now the whole Northwest territory, with the exception of Detroit and its environs, was, in a tenuous way at least, under American occupation. He smiled and silently gave thanks for the success of the expedition. But that was followed immediately by a strange sense of apprehension. Apparently it showed on his face; Father Gibault leaned toward him, asking, “What is troubling you, my son?”

“Nothing, nothing,” George demurred. But what he wanted to say was,
It was too easy somehow
. Everything has been charmed and it doesn’t seem real. Have we earned this success, he wondered, or has it been given to us?

Well, he thought then. Perhaps neither. We are still earning it, I suspect.

G
ABRIEL
C
ERRé HELD A BALL ON THE EVE OF
G
EORGE’S DEPARTURE
to Cahokia. For the first time in nearly three years, George had the pleasure of holding women in his arms, feeling them sweep and turn in the movements of the dance, feeling the suggestion of their supple backs within the confines of hooks and stays. Their bold and merry eyes stirred his blood; their laughter was full of invitation. Several of them, who spoke a little English, made inquiries about when he would return, and whether, when he did, he might be disposed to attend any entertainments in their homes. It was obvious that the leisure moments of his stay here, if there should ever prove to be some leisure moments, could become cozy and pleasurable. These Frenchwomen, it seemed, could be quite forward, and he had become the main object of their attention in these recent peaceful weeks. None of them made any deep impression on his heart, but he did make note of two or three of them who had left him in a state of lingering excitement. All in all these French and Creole ladies seemed too fickle and spoiled and frivolous for his taste. The women he had most admired in his youth were the young pioneer women, with their attitudes of self-reliance and commitment and courage. Few of them were as attractive or provocative as these. But they were, he felt, of superior character.

He whirled about the floor now, in this same ballroom at Cerré’s house which he had invaded only a month before, and that seemed like a vague dream now, an incident from the life of someone else. Now he was well-fed, clean, comfortable in fine fabrics, awash in polite words and lilting music, beguiled by flashing eyes and by the intricate messages on young women’s smiling mouths. Cerré fussed about in the far end of the room with his stout wife, being the proud and perfect host, now and then catching George’s eye and saluting him with an expansive wave of the arm. George momentarily studied the delicate neck, tawny shoulders, and scented bodice of the auburn-haired maiden whose weight now swooped and swung cradled on his right forearm; she was a daughter of some trader, whose name escaped him at the moment because he had not yet mastered its strange pronunciations; and the trader, resplendent in a coat of forest green velvet and white summer breeches, watched from a wall chair, smiling the smug but nervous smile of a father intent on giving a daughter away to the right man. In this sense,
George mused, gazing down now at the voluptuous creature in his arms, it’s not unlike being back in Virginia.

“Vous êtes heureux, m’sieur?”
she inquired, in a squeaky voice that somehow did not seem to go with her ripe body and adult face.

“Très heureux,”
he replied, understanding that simple question. “Yes, I am very happy, mademoiselle.
Et vous?”

“O, mais oui,”
she squeaked.

I wonder, he thought, if the Spaniards try so avidly to pass off their young women. Surely not. I understand they protect them jealously.

We shall see soon enough, when we go to Cahokia, he thought.

And that wan, vulnerable face, which he had seen only once, in that month-old dreamlike moment, the face of de Leyba’s young woman, appeared once again in his mind’s eye.

He was amazed that he remembered it so well.

“W
ELL
, G
EORGE,” SAID
L
EONARD
H
ELM, SITTING BY THE CAMPFIRE
a few miles north of Kaskaskia, picking little chains of triangular green burrs off his trouser legs and flicking them into the flames, “it’s going to be a while, ain’t it?”

“It is, and I surely do hate to divide us up.” He sighed and looked around the camp, where some forty Americans and French volunteers sat by their cooking fires in the dusk at the foot of the river bluff. Part of the force would split off here in the morning and go eastward toward Vincennes, where Captain Helm would assume the command of Fort Sackville and begin making treaties with the Wabash Indians. The rest of the troop would accompany George up the Mississippi Valley Road to Cahokia, where he would stay at Joseph Bowman’s garrison and treat with the Illinois tribes. “I’m going to miss you, Len.”

“Same here, George,” Helm said, masking his sentiment and his anxieties by turning back diligently to the removal of the burrs, which he had picked up while dismounted at a drinking spring earlier in the afternoon. George watched him, quietly, thoughtfully.

Those little burrs carry seeds, George thought. They hook onto clothes or animal fur going by, and they take a ride to some new place where there aren’t any burrs and fall there and take root and become like they were in the old place. It’s like people coming to new places in boats across an ocean or down a river, where they try to make a new world for themselves like
the old one, but with more space. The way we came to this continent from England and France, he mused, or the way we came down these rivers and made the Kaintuck settlements, or the way the French and Spaniards made these settlements here in the Mississippi and Wabash valleys.

People can think all that out before they go, and can design a boat, and bring familiar things along to make their new life somewhat like the old one, he thought. But how do burrs get smart?

He asked Helm what he thought about that, and the question made Helm stop and really examine a burr he was holding, as if he had never really seen one before.

“Bamboozles me,” he said after a while, flicking the burr into the fire and looking long and seriously into the flames after it Finally he grinned. “I’ve seen fruit seeds in bird shit Them seeds been smart too, I reckon, but I think if I was a seed, I’d figure me out a nicer way to git around.”

George chuckled and shook his head.

He really was going to miss Leonard Helm.

D
ON
F
ERNANDO DE
L
EYBA WAS IN FINE SPIRITS
. W
ORD BROUGHT
up the river from Kaskaskia day by day supported his good first impressions of Don Jorge Clark. And he had already had the pleasure of sending to Clark a bateau of American military stores which had come up the river from Oliver Pollock, the American agent in New Orleans. Colonel Clark and his shabby followers obviously were in great need of these goods, which had arrived at St. Louis before Clark had appeared at Kaskaskia.

De Leyba had a few days earlier written a long letter to Governor Galvez in New Orleans, describing Clark’s astonishing arrival in the Illinois; now he was continuing his exuberant
appraisal of the young American’s progress. Putting quill to paper, he addressed the letter:

Señor Governor General,
My Dear and Most Respected Sir:

Colonel Clark deserves the greatest courtesy from all the inhabitants of this district since they are debtors to him for his pleasant manner, clemency, and upright administration of justice. Although his soldiers are bandits in appearance, he has them under the best of control. I am expecting this gentleman’s visit from day to day. I shall show him all the courtesy I can and expect to have the best of dealings with him.

I remain with all respect at your Lordship’s service. My dear Sir, the hand of your Lordship is kissed by your most devoted servant,

FERN
^do
DE LEYBA
Lieutenant Governor, Upper Louisiana

  He folded the letter, melted wax over the fold, and was impressing his ring into the wax when the sound of walking horses and feminine voices came through the open front door of the mansion. Draining off the remains of a glass of Madeira, he rose, a little tipsy, from his desk and went toward the vestibule. He had been sipping the wine throughout his afternoon of correspondence, not heeding how often he had refilled his glass. Must regulate that a little better, he thought. His wife had been growing concerned over his tendency to be inebriated by the early evenings.

He stepped to the front door to greet the entourage. His wife, Maria, his sister, Teresa, and Lieutenant de Cartabona reined their horses in at the mounting block. His daughters, Maria Josefa, now nine, and Rita, six, in white cotton dresses and sun hats, were behind them in a tiny, two-wheeled cart pulled by a pony; the rear was brought up by four of the lieutenant’s mounted militiamen. Black footmen went out, helped the ladies to dismount, unloaded from the cart a picnic basket from which hung the corner of a soiled groundcloth, and led the horses and pony out of sight toward the stables. The little girls ran squealing to their father, who stooped to embrace them and hear their excited account of their outing. Maria embraced him then, an expression of distaste fleeting over her face when she
smelled the miasma of wine about him, then took the children into the house. Teresa stood near Lieutenant de Cartabona, who remained mounted. Fernando noted how often and how tenderly these two looked at each other. It was not entirely good, in his opinion. Cartabona was a charming fellow, and apparently alleviated Teresa’s ennui here in these humid summer months, but he was a soldier of limited leadership qualities and had, before Teresa had begun to command his attention, built for himself some reputation as a gambler and rakehell. Only through the strict tradition of chaperonage could de Leyba permit them to spend so much time in each other’s company.