Long Knife (68 page)

“The men are in a growing rage,” said de Cartabona. “They hear the sounds of murder out there,” he swung the decanter out to indicate the countryside, “and are helpless to put a stop to it”

“Sí
. But it would be suicidal to go out there. The Ingleses and their savages are five times our number. But Francisco, we defeated them today!” Again the saliva gurgled in his throat, and he fell silent.

“Will they attack again?” Teresa asked. She was not certain that she could endure another day of the noise and bloodiness. Her brother did not know it, but she had been forced to crawl under a table and bite down on the cloth of her sleeve today to keep from coming unhinged when the wounded were brought in. Her jaws still ached from that long, desperate clenching.

“I think not,” the lieutenant said. “They failed today at Cahokia and here. Their army is disintegrating, retreating up the river. Their Canadians desert, ashamed, and surrender to us for amnesty. They were no army, but a crowd of opportunists, with neither bravery nor honor.” De Cartabona contemptuously spat a mouthful of the Madeira into the bushes. “No, they’ll be gone by morning, I’ll wager, with the scalps of those poor innocents out there!” Teresa shuddered at the mention of scalping. “Half of our people at a time are posted on guard,” the lieutenant continued. “Now, by your leave, Excellency, Señorita, I bid you good night.” He saluted, bowed, and left them.

The dear fool, Teresa mused. He could still call me by my name, but never has, since George came …

George, she thought, with an exquisite pain in her heart, as if a velvet noose were being squeezed around her heart

“What, Teresa?” her brother said.

“What?”

“You sigh. One who loves you must always inquire into your sighs.” He squeezed her hand.

“I didn’t know I had.”

“It is about Jorge, I suppose.”

“Yes, brother.”

“And what about him? Will you share your thoughts?”

“Will this hideous warfare never stop, Nando? While it goes on I see him but a day or two in a year! He is forever leaving, to tie up some leaking corner of his ungrateful commonwealth!”

Dios!
he thought. How well said!

“But,” she continued, “he is my husband.”

“Teresa. I must forbid you to say that until it is so in the eyes of the Church!”

“Please don’t get excited. It is so in the eyes of Our Savior. How does your wound feel?”

He gripped her hand again, tiredly. “It’s a small matter. Pray only that there shall be no infection.”

“Do not even speak of it. You were foolish to stand up in the open. But I am proud that you were brave.” She sighed. “Bravery and foolishness! Of these, men are made.”

I should not let her speak with such disrespect, he thought. But she is so right! “Listen,” he said after a while in a pained whisper, “do you know why I did expose myself?”

“Why?”

“I imagined him watching the battle. Don Jorge. And I wanted to be worthy of his respect. Ha! Does that amaze you? No doubt you must think me a fool among men!”

“No. I understand you. Remember, I too exposed my life for him.”

De Leyba sat, thoughtful. “Yes. And finally I understand that.”

They watched the moths tumbling through the torchlight. They were wrapped now in the richness of their feelings.

“Now,” de Leyba whispered after a while, “I am most grateful to him for this. For this understanding. Do you know how difficult it is for a Spanish man and a Spanish woman to comprehend each other?”

“If not impossible.”

“For example I have never said to you how I love you, my sister.”

“Nor have I told you how I love you.”

They held hands and their eyes grew dim. The crickets filled the night with their piercing sound. There was no more gunfire to be heard.

“You know, do you not,” he said in a strangled voice, “that when Maria decided to die, she also decided to blame him for it.”

“Yes, I think I knew that.”

“It was the financial ruin. She thought it was a matter of shame.”

“And she thought my love for him was a matter of shame equally.”

He smiled sadly. “Anyone who did not know us, Teresa, might say he had wounded us both very badly.”

“Sí
Or
anyone who did not know
him.”

“Look at the moths,” he said after a while. “They throw themselves into the flame until they singe their wings. And then they do it again. Can you guess whom they remind me of?”

“Yes, Fernando. Of you and me.”

He nodded and was quiet for a while, watching them. Then he said, “Do you know, dear sister, this may prove to have been the best day I have ever lived?”

J
OHN
M
ONTGOMERY FELT THAT HE HAD RENDERED ENOUGH SERVICE
, for the time being, to Virginia. He had come with Colonel Clark against Kaskaskia almost two years before; he had conducted the prisoner Rocheblave back to Virginia for him; he had exhausted himself trying to recruit a force for Clark’s expedition against Detroit in 1779; he had struggled to command the Kaskaskia garrison amid the faithless and corrupt Creoles and had now in the spring of 1780 participated in the defense of the Illinois country against the British and Indians. Lieutenant Colonel Montgomery was a prominent citizen of western Virginia, and was more than ready to return to his family there. He had thus respectfully and regretfully submitted a request to be relieved of duty. One evening a few days after the battles of Cahokia and St. Louis, George summoned Montgomery up to Cahokia. They sat down on opposite sides of a table covered with maps. The young commandant looked haggard and thin;
Montgomery knew he had been kept sleepless with the chills and fever of malaria, as had half the people in the valley, and by his anxiety to get down to the Ohio and intercept Captain Bird’s offensive there.

“John, you’ve served hard and well, and you deserve a leave. But I need you, man, for one more little task, and I’ve no one else can do it.” George watched Montgomery’s face grow wary. “Will you say yes now, John, or will you require me to persuade you over a cup o’ rum?”

Montgomery drew a hard dry hand down his stubbled sharp chin with a rasping sound, squinted, prodded among his molars with his tongue tip, stood up, flung his felt hat across the room, turned in a circle with both fists clenched at his sides; then his shoulders dropped, he sat back down at the table, laid both palms on the maps, and stared at George.

“I’ll take the rum,” he said. “But o’ course, I canno’ refuse you—I mean, if it’s anything less’n six more months.”

“I should estimate three months at the outside, if you’re swift, as you must be.”

“All right, George. Provided it don’t involve Frenchies an’ Creoles.”

“It does precisely that, John. Sorry.”

“Damn yer eyes! You could a said so ’fore I agreed!”

George smiled and tilted his head, and set the cup of liquor on the table before Montgomery.

“As you well know, John, ever since I first treated with the savages at this very place in ’78, I’ve been warning ’em to keep the peace with us or suffer the consequences.”

“Aye.”

“I’m obliged to stand by that. The scoundrels hired out to the British once again and fell on this place. When we stopped ’em here, they crossed to St. Louis and there they were stopped again. Whereupon they infested the countryside, slaughtered a score of innocent Spaniards, and carried off maybe seventy others. Now they’ve retreated up the Illinois River, leaving their trail littered with the murdered and scalped bodies o’ them as couldn’t make the march. You see our duty is plain, John. If we let this go unpunished, the boasts of the Big Knives will be meaningless to ‘em, and we’re doomed from this day on.” He paused, frowning down at a sketch of Illinois river courses, then looked up and exclaimed:

“John, by my life, I’m jealous of our reputation! I’ve strutted
and bluffed and cracked heads, and waded to my neck in ice water to maintain it!”

Montgomery’s scalp tingled at the crackling tone of voice and the hard blue eyes. He took his cup from his lips and sat up straighter.

George continued: “Since I cannot be on two frontiers at the same time, I must ask you to chase these murderers up the Illinois and punish ’em, while I try to head off Bird in Kentucky. So, I must direct you to pursue ‘em, plumb up to Lake Michigan and the Rock River if you must, strike their towns, and distress ‘em however you may. They’ll be weak, probably having just disbanded by the time you get there. Do it, John. They must learn we’ll retaliate whenever they join the British emissaries!”

Montgomery looked up from the map, where he had been following George’s finger up the great, bent Illinois River, almost to the Indian place called Milwaukee on the shore of the big lake. “You keep saying
I’m
to go all the way up yonder an’ give ‘em a drubbin’. Now, I’m no mean fightin’ man, but I hope you don’t mean to send me up there alone t’do all that.”

George grinned. “I wish I could give a regiment o’ Virginians t’ help you. But as you know, I don’t even have one o’ my own. You take this company of ours, and for th’ rest, French and Spaniards.”

Montgomery groaned and hid behind his forearm in mock horror. George laughed.

“Nay, listen, John. They’re rabid to avenge the massacre around St. Louis. Governor de Leyba offers near two hundred Spaniards, fighting mad. Cahokia can give you enough to bring your roll up to three-fifty or four hundred. I’ll need only eight or ten for my escort back down to Fort Jefferson; the rest are yours.”

Montgomery digested that. “Then Frenchies and Spaniards it is.” He leaned forward over the map, then cocked his head and squinted at George. “And pray tell, who’s a-goin’ to go with you against Bird’s army?”

“I’ll pick up what Fort Jefferson can spare, on my way. The rest I’ll raise in the settlements, if they haven’t gathered already. Maybe four, maybe six hundred. I don’t know what sort o’ men they’ll be—certainly not like our old regiment, from what I’ve seen o’ the newcomers. But they’ll be after savin’ their own scalps, and that is a spur.”

On the fourth of June, George set out in a swift boat for the mouth of the Ohio with a small escort of scouts and riflemen.
Once out on the stream of the Mississippi, he could gaze astern and see diminishing slowly the hazy blue bluffs and tiny distant buildings of St. Louis, once again feeling that intangible web of his attachment to Teresa stretching, slowly stretching, to the measure of oars and the murmur of the great river.

And when the town had dwindled too far to see, he kept gazing at the low, blue line of the bluff. When it receded from sight behind a bend, he released a bittersweet sigh and turned to face forward.

“Lay on, boys. Let’s see if we can make Fort Jefferson by tomorrow evening.”

They looked at each other, blinked in disbelief, and did lay on.

T
WO DAYS LATER
, F
ERNANDO DE LEYBA WAS HELPED ASTRIDE HIS
horse and rode down past the fortifications and through the shell-battered town of St. Louis to the wharf, and there watched his armed Spanish volunteers load themselves and their munitions on board the fleet of boats for their mission of revenge up the Illinois River. They looked grim, determined. He was proud of them and wished he could go with them. But it was all he could do to sit his horse and keep his head up. The pain in his throat felt enormous and corrupt, and he was dizzy with fever. An armed boat with French, Spanish, and Virginian flags in the bow bumped the wharf nearby, and Colonel Montgomery of the Americans debarked, came before de Leyba, and saluted.

“Compliments to your Excellency and your family from Colonel Clark, and from myself.”

“Don Jorge is well?”

“At Fort Jefferson by now, no doubt.” He turned and perused the embarkation, then back to de Leyba. “I wish you could go with us, Gov’nor. George tells me y’r quite an officer.”

De Leyba’s eyes misted. He smiled and braced himself with both hands on the pommel of his saddle. “From him, that is something! I too am sorry, Colonel Montgomery. But mis …” He indicated the yellowing bandage around his neck which, though Teresa had changed it for this occasion, already enveloped him in a smell of putrefaction.

“I sh’ll have your people back here in eight or ten weeks, God willing,” said Montgomery, looking at the grimacing gray face with its swollen red eyelids and sheen of sweat. Montgomery tried to hide his pity.

Short of a miracle, he thought, this poor dandy is seeing ‘em for the last time.

C
APTAIN
H
ENRY
B
IRD, ENCAMPED NEAR THE
S
HAWNEE TOWN OF
Chillicothe on June third, sat in his bell tent and wrote to his commandant, Major Arent de Peyster, who was Henry Hamilton’s successor at Detroit: