Long Knife (73 page)

“Fire!” he bellowed, slapping the hat down against his knee. The cannon spat orange flame and blue-gray smoke, kicked, and settled, its roar echoing from the bluffs opposite, and the Kentuckians cheered as chunks and white splinters of the palisade flew into the air.

“Fire when ready, boys,” he cried. “Work on that gate!”

The cannon roared fourteen more times, as fast as it could be swabbed and reloaded, accompanied each time by the cheers of the Kentuckians, and segment after segment of the palisade was shivered. One of the big log double doors of the gate burst, sagged, then fell to the ground in a cloud of dust. The Indians fired for a while toward the cannon with their muskets, but at this distance the fire was ineffectual and they soon gave it up.

Unobserved from the cannon position, however, several hundred warriors had shimmied over the wall of the fort on the river side, crouched in the cornfield which grew almost to the wall, and crept through the stalks, gaining the woods behind the regiment.

Then, between rounds from the cannon, the Indians within the fort performed a singular maneuver. They marched out of the broken gate and began forming a single long rank on the flatland before the front of the fort.

“By Jove,” George muttered to Colonel Harrod. “I do believe they’re coming out to treat for peace. Hold your fire!” he told the cannoneers. He rode out of the square of troops and guided his horse a few yards down the slope toward the fort, trying to pick out someone among the Indians who would be coming forward as spokesman. The whole area was quiet in the hot afternoon sunlight, long calls of the locusts drawing out.

No Indian came forward with the white wampum belt or flag of truce. Instead, the whole long line suddenly drew their muskets up at the ready, gave vent to a chilling war cry, and began charging up the slope at a dead run, firing as they came. At the
same moment a storm of gunfire began pouring into the regiment from the woods behind the squared regiment, and George, wheeling his steed and galloping back in among his troops, understood the Indians’ tactic. It infuriated him to have been so fooled, but he was not alarmed. The troops on the rear side of the square flattened themselves against the ground and began a brisk return fire which soon had the Indians in the rear all but immobilized behind the trees. In the meantime the line of Indians from the fort came running up the slope in a desperate frontal charge, their shrieks pulsating back and forth along the line. George felt his scalp prickle at such desperate bravery on the part of the Indians. “Damn, damn,” exclaimed Harrod, apparently thinking likewise, “I never seen them charge exposed like that!”

“Aye,” said George as they came closer. “Because you never saw ‘em fighting for their own place. Hey, boys!” he roared, “hold fire till they’re too close to miss!”

“Heyo, laddies!” cried an officer nearby, “don’t shoot till you can singe their eyebrows!”

The horde came on, their feet patting the earth, cries piercing, painted faces looking demoniacal. They came now like an on-rushing wall of pent-up murder. George’s heart was in his throat; the savages were almost upon the square now.

“First rank,” he yelled,
“Fire!”

“Fire!” the command was relayed up and down the line, and nearly a hundred rifles barked at once. Indians pitched forward, spun and pirouetted to the ground.

“Reload! Reload!” yelled the officers to the first rank. “Fire!” they commanded the second rank, which had stepped forward. The rifles sputtered again. The few Indians still coming flung up their arms and reeled; others, who had stopped in confusion or were trying to reload, now turned tail and sprinted or limped, crawled, and squirmed back down the hill, many of them leaving trails of blood.

The company on the rear side of the square, meanwhile, had repulsed that charge entirely and was cheering itself roundly, and at that moment George faintly heard drums and fifes in the distance at the upper ford of the river. He stared toward a line of cottonwood and willow, and saw the flags and ranks of Logan’s regiment at last coming up the riverbank. But George didn’t want him now; the Indians were already in retreat, through another cornfield, invisible to Logan’s regiment, and obviously were making their escape straight toward the ravine
and ford that Logan had just vacated. “Go back, damn you, Ben!” George bellowed, but the distance was far too great, and Logan’s half thousand marched blithely on toward the fort which was by now nothing but a shattered empty shell.

The Kentuckians around the cannon, who obviously felt they had obeyed long and well enough, were breaking their rank now, disregarding the commands of their officers, and running down the slope to collect scalps from the dead and wounded Indians they had just mowed down. They swooped down like vultures on the scattered casualties in the waving grass, wielding their long hunting knives, slashing viciously and lifting hair. George watched this breach of discipline with disgust, watched Logan’s regiment marching gallantly toward an empty fort while several hundred Shawnee, Wyandot, Mingo, and Delaware braves stole unseen around him and swarmed through a ravine which led out of the valley and into the safety of the surrounding high forest land.

The sun was setting now, illuminating the whole disorderly scene with a rich, tawny glow. Shadows of the leaping and hooting soldiers were long and distorted; the distant drums and fifes sounded like some ironic, meaningless air to another war somewhere, as remote and detached from his own battle, George felt, as the eternal movements of Washington and Greene and Steuben and Sullivan in the east. Everything was out of kilter somehow; somehow Logan had been so tardy that he had robbed the force of a decisive victory; somehow these riflemen had just demonstrated a sloppy disobedience which marred their generally commendable performance throughout the day, and it came as a great insult to George in a way he would have been unable to define. He had defeated the Shawnees, of course, and by burning their crops and villages now would forestall any more raids on Kentucky for the year. But the victory was ignoble somehow, a mockery compared to the miraculous victory over Hamilton in ’79 …

Ah, he thought, as the shadows purpled and Logan’s men marched on in the distance, the distant fife-notes somehow off-key, that’s it, I reckon; maybe you just can’t be satisfied that well but once. It spoils you for anything that follows …

These thoughts, unlike anything he had ever considered before, had flickered through his head in a moment, making him feel old and bitter in the midst of what others seemed to be enjoying as a triumph, and as he was bringing his attention back from that reverie he thought he heard someone calling him by
his first name in the distance, beyond the cackling and cheering of the troops: “George! George!” came a young voice into the margins of his attention. He turned in the direction of the sound, as did several of the frontiersmen nearby, and saw an inexplicable sight: one lone Shawnee, in breechclout and moccasins and war paint, running toward him up the slope in a plunging, lunging stride, like some crazed fiend on a sacred suicidal mission. Some of the troops and officers gathered nearby also deduced immediately that an assassin was almost upon their commander; and with the instant reflexes of Indian fighters leveled their rifles at him and fired.

Six rifle balls struck Joseph Rogers in the chest, hurling him backward and blinding him with a silver-blue blot of pain and knocking all the breath out of him.

Joseph lay on his back in the long grass, feeling numb and smashed inside, hearing blood gurgling in his lungs with every attempt to breathe, seeing the evening azure sky overhead go silvery, then black, then silvery, then black. In a part of his mind he reprimanded himself for having forgotten to shout what he had rehearsed:
I am a Virginian! I am a Virginian!

Silhouetted faces under felt hats and coonskin hats and cocked hats loomed between him and the fluctuating sky, and voices came from the silhouettes, talking about somebody being a white man, not an Indian. Then an arm was slipped under his shoulders and he was raised up a little, and there was a face close over him now, and damned if it wasn’t Cousin George, big Cousin George holding his head cradled and looking at him with such an agonized expression in his face that Joseph felt pity for him. Joseph choked back and swallowed the salty blood that seemed to keep filling his mouth up like brine, and took a bubbling breath into his hot wet numb chest and said, “George …” He couldn’t say the rest yet because the brine was filling him up again and he swallowed and swallowed, determined to get it said.

George was looking down on him and said, “In the name o’ God eternal, Joe, why didn’t you slip out last night and come to us? Why’d you wait till
now?”

Joseph kept swallowing and swallowing the brine, looking up into those dark blue eyes, those Rogers eyes, until he felt able to say what he had meant to say. “George,” he gurgled as the sky went from silvery to black one last time, “I am a Virginian.”

“B
UT YOU MUST COME WITH US!
T
HERE IS NOTHING LEFT FOR YOU
here but loneliness and sickness and danger!”

Lieutenant de Cartabona paced back and forth in the parlor of the de Leyba house, emphasizing each word by flinging his hands downward, palms upturned. He had been pleading thus with Teresa for two days. He had used every means of persuasion he could think of, from tender cajolery and logical arguments to dire warnings and, a time or two, outbursts of anger. But Teresa responded the same way to all the different manners of entreaty: She sat looking at her small white hands clenched on the lap of her black mourning dress and shook her head or simply gave no sign of hearing at all.

Now de Cartabona knelt before her, as he had many times, looked into her face, and wrung his hands. “Listen, Teresa. Your dear brother and his wife are dead, God take them. There is no one here to take care of you. There will be no money coming here for your keep. The nieces who are all the family you have left in this world are packed to go to New Orleans on the boat tomorrow. They themselves plead with me to make you consent. They cannot bear to have you stay behind, as you are just as much their whole family as they are yours! For their sakes, Teresa, if no other form of good sense will move thee!”

Only a twinge of pain passing over her brow indicated that she was even hearing him. She seemed to have put a wall of adamant about herself; she seemed to be bearing all this begging as one bears a siege: determined not to surrender to it, waiting with stolid patience for the assailant to go away.

“Think of these things, then,” he pleaded. “It is September. Soon it will be cold. Do you not remember the suffering last winter in this country? We with Spanish blood are not meant to
huddle at fireplaces, shivering and choking on smoke! In New Orleans it is not like that in the winter.

“And then if one survives the winter without dying of consumption, or starving, Teresa, all one can expect in the spring is more war from the British and Indians. They will come down the rivers as fast as the melting snow. And this time we can expect no help from the Americans. Your Clark is far to the east in an Indian war. He will never come here again, and it is foolish to believe …”

“He will!” Her voice was small but emphatic. She laved her hands and shook her head back and forth, eyes squeezed tightly shut, and de Cartabona gritted his teeth with pain and annoyance, not only because she would respond to nothing but her lover’s name but because she had such unshakable faith in him as the savior of any circumstance.

“He will not!” he exploded in exasperation. Even his mute devotion to Teresa was tried beyond patience by her stubborn, blind faith in that Virginian. The lieutenant had sworn to himself that he would protect her with his life, and felt that he had indeed done so in May. It was your brother and I, not Clark, who defended St. Louis, he wanted to shout at her.

“He will be here, Francisco,” she said with finality, getting up suddenly and leaving him for a moment kneeling awkwardly by the divan. She left the room as he was rising, and pulled the door shut after her.

It may become necessary, he thought, to drug her and place her aboard the boat. Could he do that? It was a hateful thought, a shameful thought, but it seemed better somehow than having to force her aboard, screaming and crying, as she probably would be. Obviously she was not going to be persuaded in these remaining hours to go willingly.

Either way, he thought, she is going to hate me for doing this in her interest. That was the worst of it. He had always nurtured a hope that her indifference to him might someday revert to affection if the accursed American finally dropped out of her life. But if he had to do something like this which would make her hate him …

De Cartabona sat at the lieutenant governor’s desk, tracing his front tooth with a thumbnail and looking at the small vial of laudanum left over from de Leyba’s sufferings, when he heard hoofbeats outside the house. In a moment, a servant ushered in one of the American couriers from Cahokia. The man had two letters from Colonel Clark, one for de Cartabona and one addressed
to Teresa. “I shall see that the Señorita gets this,” he said. “Please have a cup of brandy while I see whether I need reply.” He put Teresa’s letter on the desk and broke the seal of his own, as the rough-looking messenger helped himself to a draught of liquor that should have knocked an ordinary man off his feet.

Louisville, 23 August 1780