Long Knife (5 page)

Dr. Ferguson was quiet for a while as the wagon rattled on down the mossy road. Then he exhaled and clapped his palms on his knees. “Well,” he said. “I tell you, Jack. There’s one to amuse your grandkids with someday.”

“Damned savage deserves that rotten limb,” grumbled the young man. “Probably his nasty poultice that infected it.”

The surgeon gazed at him, thoughtfully. “Well, there’s no way of knowing, but I doubt it. Anyhow,” he sighed, “that’s some souvenir for ’im, it surely is.”

A
FTER SUNSET THAT EVENING, FOUR FINE FIDDLERS FROM
L
OUISVILLE
came up to Clark’s Point to join the drummers and fifers. For an hour into the night, marching around the house by torchlight, they serenaded the general, with music gentler and more elegant than the martial tunes they had played in the afternoon.

He lay between clean sheets on the bed in his bedroom, feeling very weak. Lucy had set a chair beside his bed and she stayed there quietly in the candlelight, talking with him when he wanted to talk, going to fetch things when he asked for them, and seeing that his visitors did not stay long enough to tire him. The Gwathmeys had come up, his eldest sister Ann Clark Gwathmey and her husband Owen Gwathmey, who in the face
of the general’s suffering was for once not complaining about his boils. They beamed at the general and hardly knew what to say. At last he raised his hand and said, “Is my little sweetheart here?”

“Aye,” said Ann. “On the porch. We weren’t sure as you’d want a child in.”

“Would you fetch ’er here, please?”

The girl, just ten years old, was brought to the bedside, wide-eyed, freckled, and red-haired, coming with a strange, awkward step which betrayed a conscious effort to restrain her customary joyous rush to him.

“Ah, Diana!” His eyes lit up and he held his hand to her.

She worked her mouth for a moment, then said, “I came to see you.”

“I’m real glad, Missy. Now, I’ve a hard day, and I’m not the best company. But tomorrow maybe I’ll tell you a good story.”

She smiled and tugged at his hand. The strange terror of the moment was suddenly gone. “What about, Uncle George?”

“Why, maybe I’ll tell you a story of an Indian chief named Two Lives. And maybe he’ll sit with us and help me tell it.”

Her blue eyes shone and she turned to her mother for confirmation. “That sounds real fine, doesn’t it?” said Ann Gwathmey. “Now you run on out, and ask Georgie to come in.”

George Gwathmey, tall and the most studious of the general’s nephews, loved to talk by the hour with his uncle about the biography books they shared, biographies of kings and conquerors. But this evening the lad sat saying little, politely trying to keep his eyes from straying to that part of the bedsheet under which the left leg should have been outlined, apparently awed beyond words of the ordeal his uncle had survived in the afternoon. The general tried in vain to talk of Frederick the Second to put the young man at ease, but it was with little success and the effort was taxing on his mind, which seemed now to yearn toward wandering and reverie. The last visitor was another favorite nephew, George Rogers Clark Sullivan, who was anything but tongue-tied, and showed promise of talking the old soldier into his grave. Lucy sent the youth away before long, and the general half-dozed for a while. He dreamed of dancing with young ladies in a room lit by scores of candles, a room which sometimes seemed to be in Williamsburg, sometimes in St. Louis, and sometimes in Kaskaskia, though all the young ladies he danced with in the dream had the same face, with the same dark and downcast eyes. Then he awoke, the music was
still playing outside, and beyond the barrier of pain in his thigh he imagined he could feel his foot moving to the dance.

Then he remembered that the foot was no longer there. Awakening to that knowledge brought back an awful poignancy. As a young man he had keenly enjoyed dancing, and almost all of his genteel memories, the few he had, involved occasions when there had been dances. He thought now about the absence of the leg, and wondered what had been done with it. But he didn’t ask. He was sure that such a question would shock Lucy too much.

She, who had been watching him closely, leaned near, her chair creaking, and dabbed away tears that were coursing onto his temples. She realized that she had never before in her life seen a tear on his face.

A messenger came, bringing the compliments of Senator Breckenridge with a promise that he would come to visit in a few days. Lucy thanked him, and as it was too late for him to return home, went out to arrange bedding for him on the front porch.

“George,” she said on returning, “this place is so small. And so remote from everyplace. We shall have couriers and musicians camped all over the premises tonight There’s even a party of Indians hunkered off the porch, waiting to see you.”

“Are there now! What tribe, d’you know?”

“Several. I don’t know which.”

“Is Two Lives still here?”

“I didn’t see him.”

“In any case, say I should like to talk with them. Have them come up. And Dick Lovell, too.”

“Not tonight, no indeed. I forbid it. You have to sleep.”

“Aye, I reckon. But come morning, then. Say I would like to talk with them then. And the other musicians, too, them as stays the night.”

“Yes, my dear. I’ll tell them.”

There was silence for a moment and she stood looking down at him in the candlelight. He turned his head on the pillow, his eyes on her face. “‘My dear,’ is it? By heaven, Lucy, you’ve never called me that …” He settled back, and gazed at the ceiling. “Nor has anyone, I recollect, since Mother. Rest her soul. Well, it has a rare sound to my ears.” He blinked rapidly. He heard the chair creak as she sat down.

“Well, there is a reason. All you Clark boys, I’ll swear, you’re scarcely the kind to inspire endearments. A clan of
blamed heroes, the lot of you. Two generals. Two captains. Two lieutenants.” She shook her head and smiled. “And only Jonathan and William ever had the good sense to settle down and marry. I’ll wager
they
hear sweet words now and then.”

“Aye,” he whispered. “But you know, Lucy, I’d have married, had things been a little different.”

“Mhm. Well, you should’ve. Ought to have this place full o’ your own youngsters.”

“Well, Lord knows you Clark girls made up for me in the breeding department. All four of you. As it should be. As fine-looking a covey of quails as ever I saw.”

He turned his head and saw her gazing at him with her head tilted and a wistful smile on her lined face. He was buoyed by this rare exchange of banter, and touched by the deep, familial affection it veiled. He reached for her hand and held it. “Y’know, Lucy, this country has done right well for itself, having the Clarks.”

She saw the wetness welling up in his eyes again, and bit the inside of her lip to keep from groaning with the richness of her emotions. It was a minute before she could speak.

“Well, listen now, George. You’ll be coming to Locust Grove to live with us, as soon as you can be moved …”

“Lucy, I cannot …”

“Hush now! You should have years ago, instead of coming to this God-forsaken place. That … that …” She glanced toward his truncated leg, despite herself. “… Y’d never ’a’ hurt yourself that way had you been with us. You must come, George. You’ll always have a carriage to take you in to Louisville. And people around who … who care for you …”

His hand squeezed feebly on hers. He was too weary to argue the point with her just now. He knew that she was right, that he would be even more helpless to sustain himself now than he had been. But it depressed him to realize it. His selection of this solitary place to live had been his last gesture of independence. In giving it up, he knew, he would become a mere ward in the fullest sense of the term. Locust Grove was a magnificent place, full of young nieces and nephews, a staff of thirty servants and workmen, a cheerful and busy place. William Croghan was an enterprising man. To visit there was always a pleasure. But to go there and move in as a dependent—why, it would be unthinkable.

While he lay thinking of these dreary matters, the musicians concluded their serenade, and soon they were moving about and
talking low on the porch. The prevailing music outside now was that of crickets and frogs and a whippoorwill. Lucy was beginning to arch her back against weariness.

“Eh,” he said at last. “We will discuss it soon. Now, before you go to bed, Lucy, will you please do me the favor of bringing me a moderate portion of that Jamaica rum from the pantry?” She did not answer, and, looking to see her staring at him with an edge of reproach in her eyes, he added, wincing, “The pain it’s coming on fierce now, sister.”

“And you, who declined it when they were actually cutting.”

“True, Lucy. But there were people watching then. Be a kind lass, now. You might just fetch me the bottle, so I won’t have to trouble you for more in the night …”

Now there’s another thing to be considered, he thought when she was out of the room. Here I can have it whenever I please and no one’s to fret. But what fuss and cajolery there’ll be to have my daily bottle there in a house full of them who cares.

She did not bring in the bottle, but the glass she bore was, to his pleasant surprise, brimful. She put her arm under his head and raised him to help him sip it. For her sake, he drank it with a seemly delicacy instead of tossing it down. She lowered his head to the pillow and sat on the edge of the bed, looking at him with canny eyes, again with that thoughtful tilt to the head. Lying with hands folded on his chest and the warmth of the rum spreading through him, he studied her aspect, and finally said, “Now, then, sister. Out with it.”

“Oh, something you said. Tell me, George, as a hero: How much of bravery is just a matter of knowing you’re watched?”

He slowly worked his lips into a wry smile. He was delighted and intrigued by her question. “Why, I would reckon, sister,” he said with deliberation, “at least a half.” He was quiet for a minute, then he went on: “Don’t ever tell another soul. But why I had the musicians out there was because if I’d had to holler, their damn screechin’ and bangin’ would ha’ drowned it out. Heh, heh!”

And when she had kissed his forehead, blown out the candle, and left his bedroom to go and rest on the cot by the fireplace in the cabin’s main room, General George Rogers Clark lay pondering that wily question of hers, smiling at it between the onslaughts of pain.

It was true. There were endeavors he could remember which had succeeded simply because, having once launched them so boldly, he could not afford to be seen failing at them.

For the essential business of leading, he thought, is that you have to keep your people believing it can be done, even if your own reason concludes it’s impossible. That’s how I played it, from the very beginning, from the day I first went back East to persuade Governor Henry to let me do it …

T
HEIR HORSES SNORTED STEAM INTO THE COLD, DRIZZLY AIR;
hooves squished in the sodden ground of the meadow; saddles creaked. The two horses seemed to hang close together as if for comfort in the dankness, and now and then George’s left foot in its stirrup was pressed against his father’s right. Both then would rein the horses a few feet apart and continue along the fencerow.

“This will be in corn,” said John Clark, with a sweep of his arm. “Over there I’ll graze army beef for General Washington. Dickie and Edmund had some of the hands out here cutting fence rails last month, as you see. We’ve not had the weather to erect ’em yet.” He fell silent and squinted ahead, absorbed in thoughts of next season.

George glanced at his father’s profile, the long straight nose, deep-set eyes, the skin all freckles and furrows, not wrinkled much yet; he was not yet fifty. His torso and thighs were solid and compact. He seemed quieter and more thoughtful than he had been before George’s westward sojourns beyond the Alleghenies. George had no doubt that worry over his sons’ fates was largely the cause of John Clark’s gravity. Jonathan, his eldest at twenty-seven, and a captain in the Continental Army, had been nearly killed by smallpox and other sickness while serving in the Southern theater; John, barely twenty and a lieutenant, had been captured by the British at Germantown a few weeks earlier and his fate was as yet a mystery.

They came to an angle in the fencerow and George glimpsed, through the trees, the clearing where he had grown his own first crop of tobacco at the age of fifteen. Ten years ago it was, but he could remember the weight of the sun on his back, the rank smell of the dark leaves. Ten years seemed as remote in the past
as the forest gloom beyond the mountains now seemed remote in the distance. Another world. He had crossed a threshold of his life when, poring over crude maps during lulls in the defense of Kentucky last year, he had conceived the idea that the British could be invaded in their own western outposts. Since then he had been carrying that vision with him, and it had occurred in every detail in his imagination, its possibility coloring everything he saw, directing his every action. The other settlers in the Kentucky land, brave and hardy as they were, saw only as far as the end of the day and the edge of the clearing, as if their minds were stockaded; they saw the Indian raids only as something to be endured, rather than stopped or controlled at their source. In that sense, George thought as he glanced again at his father, this stable and patient John Clark is like them. He is cautious and looks forward only from one season to the next.

Suddenly John Clark turned to face his son, even as he was being observed so thoughtfully; there was an anxiety in his eyes. “Has Dickie spoken to you, about joining your expedition out there?”

“No,” replied George. “Nary a word.”

“He’s talked of little else since you came back from Kaintuck. He’s quite fired with your scheme.”

“He would be a good lad to have along.”

“I must ask you to discourage him, though.”