Long Knife (4 page)

He didn’t know how many days had passed since that great pain had pierced his head and he had fallen on the hearth. He had lost track of the days since his friend Two Lives the Puan had found him. He had been in and out of a hell of fevers and deliriums and nightmares.

Now he knew where he was and what was about to happen.

The room was steamy. Water was boiling in a black kettle in the fireplace. The surgeon, Dr. Ferguson from Louisville, stood beside the table rattling his instruments and scowling at the infected leg. His face was flushed and there was a sheen of sweat on it.

Dr. Ferguson looked up and saw the general’s one open eye peering at him.

“General Clark, I had better get started. The longer we wait, the more danger for you …”

“Just stand where you are, sir. When the music arrives, you may begin. Only then.”

The surgeon passed an imploring look around the room, from one of the general’s relatives to another. His sister Lucy was there, and her husband, Major Croghan. They looked at each other, then back to the surgeon. “Wait,” said Major Croghan. It was quite obvious that, even flat on his back, half paralyzed, full of infection and fever, his speech scarcely intelligible, the general remained in command.

The doctor shrugged, raised both hands, palms upward, and let them fall to his sides. Then he turned and whispered to his assistant, a stout young man with yellow eyelashes. The assistant bent to the surgeon’s bag and brought forth some long,
black leather straps and belts with loops and buckles. Without a word, he went to the table, passed the longest leather across the general’s chest, and was stooping to draw it under the table when the patient suddenly flung it off with his left hand. “Put those away, lad,” he warned. “I shall not need to be trussed up like a goat for this.”

With a sigh of exasperation, the surgeon came close and bent over his face. “May I suggest, General, that it is for your own safety? I have seen men leap under the knife and throw themselves clean off the table …” Hearing this, Lucy Croghan pressed her knuckles against her mouth and made a small strangling sound.

“Lucy, come here,” the general said, groping in her direction with his left hand. When her hand touched his, he drew her close to the table and held her by the wrist. She was a tall, sturdy, long-nosed woman, her red hair fading to gray. “Hear me,” he said. “Have you ever known me to lose the control of myself? When sober, I mean,” he added with a pained chuckle. “Trust me, Lucy, I am as sober now as I have ever been. Have that man stay clear of me with his bloody harnesses, then.”

The doctor shrugged again, and motioned to his assistant to put away the leathers.

The door opened, throwing bright daylight across the ceiling. George Rogers Clark Floyd, one of the general’s many namesakes, stood silhouetted in the doorway. “Yes?” said Major Croghan.

“Sir, the musicians is here.”

“Is Dick Lovell there with his old drum?” asked the general.

“The same, sir,” said young Floyd. “Right on the porch.”

“Ah,” said the general. “Then I reckon I am ready, Bones.”

“Have them play,” Major Croghan said, “until told to stop.”

The door closed. Dr. Ferguson raised the nightshirt to expose the ghastly leg. He cleared his throat, waved away some flies, took up a large knife and tested its edge with his thumb, picked up a bone saw, some steel clamps, and a cauterizing iron, and went to the fireplace. He swished the implements in the boiling water and put the end of the cauterizing tool in the coals.

Outside could be heard the murmur of many voices, and one voice snapping drill commands. Then a slow rattle of drums sounded around the house, and fifes joined in. The general squeezed and released his sister’s wrist, and with a grim, onesided smile began snapping his fingers to the cadence of the
music. “Dickie Lovell drummed us through to Vincennes,” he said. “We’d not’ve made it without ’im.”

“I know,” said Lucy.

“The tourniquet, if you will,” the surgeon said, advancing on the table with the steaming tools before him. He paused and looked at the general. “Will you reconsider and have some whiskey, General Clark?”

“For once, no, thank you.” He kept snapping his fingers.

“It would be no disgrace, you know.”

“Damn, I know that. Who claims it ever is?” Some of the big men in the room laughed nervously. They were a rugged breed but genteel, and, at this moment, very much on the edge of their emotions.

The surgeon smiled. “As you wish, then.”

The assistant had turned the stick to tighten the tourniquet. The surgeon drew an invisible line with his fingertip across the thigh. The leg was big-boned, sinewy, and slab-muscled even now; the knee and ankle were gnarled and enlarged by rheumatism and arthritis. The doctor thought of the legendary marches this officer had led on these once-magnificent limbs. He faltered, surprised that he felt a lump in his throat and a stinging of his eyelids. What a pity, he thought. Then he swallowed hard and with a deft pulling stroke of the hot knife laid open the skin and sliced an inch deep into the stringy thigh muscle, then stepped back to give his beefy assistant room for the expected struggle.

But the general did not lunge, or even twitch. His great frame stiffened; his back arched; then he let out a long shaking breath and lay ready again, his eye on the rafters, his thumb and middle finger still snapping in time to the solemn music. Shaken through by a strange surge of love and admiration, the doctor blinked, gulped, returned his knife to the red-welling cut, and continued his work. Lucy Croghan stood trembling at the head of the table with a clean piece of cotton cloth and wiped the sweat off her brother’s forehead and out of his eye sockets. She could not bear to watch the cutting, but gazed past the surgeon’s bent head and out the window, looking at the crowd that had gathered in the clearing.

The people surrounded the house at a respectful distance, most of them bareheaded in the afternoon sunlight: gaunt-faced old veterans, young blue-coated militiamen, barefooted children, red-nosed pioneer women with their arms folded across their waists, slaves in ragged gray, hawk-faced Indians whose lean
brown shoulders and haunches gleamed with bear grease in the sunlight. They had materialized as if by magic from miles around at word of General Clark’s trouble. Two drummers and two fifers posted around the house kept up their grave, persistent cadences. The solemn drums and whistling fifes evoked a sense of battlefield apprehension in the sun-drenched clearing. The senior drummer, Dick Lovell, a forty-year-old farmer, small and hollow-cheeked and wiry, had the honored post at the front door. Now and then he would remember that terrible winter march of ’79, would feel the unspeakable cold in his bones, and would shudder, and tears would stream from his eyes. He loved this old soldier in a way that one loves not even his own brothers, and he tapped his drum with his heart full of prayer, as if his music were the one thing that could keep the general alive. After all, General Clark had summoned him in particular for this occasion, and for Dick Lovell it was a sacred duty.

After some time it seemed to dawn on the entire crowd that although the amputation must be well in progress by now, they had not heard a single outcry from the house. They began to glance at each other’s faces and saw the swimming eyes and the working throats, and suddenly a heartening cheer went up all around the house, then another, and then a third.

The demonstration was over that quickly, and the waiting resumed, but now the entire circle of people felt themselves bound together in a certain kind of pride that they had never experienced before.

The three cheers had sounded through the window at the most critical time for General Clark: just as the surgeon had cleared the muscles away to expose the bone to the saw. As the hideous instrument had begun to whine into the thighbone, laboring through the very armature of him as if he were but a piece of broken furniture, the full comprehension of his loss had swept through him, increasing the pain against which he thought he had so well braced himself. In that moment he had felt at last overpowered by a tide of despair, thinking: Now as everything else has been taken away from me it appears they must divide up my own personal carcass and carry it away piece by piece … And with that bitter thought he had been ready to scream out like a weakling or simply let go and die.

But then, through the drum taps and the shrilling of the fifes, there had burst into his consciousness those rousing American huzzahs—just like the cheers his men had given when they
raised the American and Virginian colors over Fort Sackville thirty years before.

Those cheers from the friends and the strangers in the yard saved him. Though he had for years considered himself ready, even eager, to die, he thought when he heard those cheers: I can’t let all these people think a little thing like a leg could do me in. And so he returned as he had so often in his life to draw upon that reserve of fortitude which lay beyond the known mortal limits, and steeled himself once again for the grim business of enduring.

The fifes and drums played on, for still another hour, as the surgeon continued his slicing and sawing, his suturing, his tying-off, and the hideous, hissing cauterizing with its roast-meat smell, and his assistant carried off basins of blood. The general no longer let himself consider this phenomenon of being dismembered; he concentrated on the rhythm of the drums, and on the formidable task of remaining conscious, fearing somehow that if he slipped away he would never be able to come back. It’s nought but pain, he thought. You can’t let people think you’d die of pain. If this butcher bleeds me to death, then that’s out of my control, and so be it. But pain, now, I’m responsible for that … He would look up at Lucy from time to time, and verify her presence. If he did not look at her for a while, his roiling mind would play a trick on him, and he would begin to imagine that the feminine hand that was soothing his brow was not hers but instead the shapely small hand he had held in his own so long ago, the hand of his betrothed, the shy-eyed Teresa de Leyba. Where is she now? he thought. Is she even alive? In this wilderness lives are just swallowed up by distance, and names remembered like myths. Like de Leyba, like Vigo, like Father Gibault, like Bowman and Kenton and Boone ….

Two Lives stood by himself on the fringe of the crowd outside. The brisk, measured music of the fifes and drums went on. Shadows had lengthened in the time the Long Knife had been in the house with the white medicine man.

It is a long time to have pain, Two Lives thought.

He looked around at the people who were watching the house: the settlers, the hunters, the black men, the Indians. People he recognized as relatives of Long Knife came out and sat on the porch, talked to those in the crowd, returned to the house, looking grave but calm.

Standing among these people, Two Lives marveled to remember
that there had been a time, up until thirty summers ago, when he and most of the other Northwest Indians had not even known that there was this person, Clark, the Long Knife. In those days before the Long Knife came, the tribes had believed what they had been warned of by the British: that the Virginians and Kentuckians were all bad, that they were mad to own all the hunting grounds above the Ohio, and that they should all be killed and scalped and driven out.

That was what Two Lives had believed in his first life.

And now indeed the Americans
were
moving in over the Wilderness Road from the mountains of the East and coming in boats every day down the big river, and were building deeper and deeper into the great hunting grounds. So in those warnings the British had been right, too.

I do not understand how there can be two truths, the chieftain thought. I know only that the Americans were greater than the British and Long Knife is the greatest of them.

After a while some of the white men came out of the house of the Long Knife. One of them was carrying something wrapped in a sheet. He put it in the back of the medicine man’s wagon.

Two Lives swung onto his pony and rode from the meadow into the shade of the trees along the road down toward the river. He stopped halfway down the hill and sat on his pony in the humid green shade where the ferns grew, and he waited. Soon he heard the wagon coming down.

He held up his hand. The two medicine men looked at each other and spoke. The young one with yellow eyelashes pulled the reins and stopped the wagon.

The older medicine man stood up in the wagon and waited for the Indian to speak.

“I am Two Lives, of the Puan Winnebago.”

“I know. It was you that brought help to General Clark, eh?”

The Indian nodded, rode close to the wagon, stopped, and pointed at the stained bundle in the back.

“That is the leg of Clark?”

“Yes, it is.”

“What will you do with it?”

“Well, we’ll … we’ll just dispose of it.”

“Two Lives will take it,” he said.

“What, you bloody heathen!” cried the younger medicine man, rising to his feet and raising his whip. Two Lives looked
into the young man’s eyes until they fell and he lowered the whip and sat down.

“Why the devil would you want that leg?” said the older medicine man.

“Hear me: I am alive because of the Long Knife. For more than thirty years I have been alive because of him. My people have been at peace with the Americans because of him. Now he is alive because of me. I should have these bones for my people. You are only going to throw them away.”

The older medicine man looked at the younger one, then at the long bloodstained bundle in the back of the wagon. He turned in the seat and, straining, lifted the bundle. “No,” he said, “I was not going to throw it away. I was going to keep it myself.” The assistant looked at him in surprise. “But,” he went on, “I see that it would be right for your people to have it. Here.”

Two Lives took the bundle. It was heavy. The smell of it made the pony step about nervously. Two Lives and the old medicine man looked into each other’s eyes.

“Good,” said Two Lives. He turned his pony and vanished among the leaves of the forest.