Long Knife (76 page)

Colonel Mercer stood directly in front of the wheelchair now, his shadow cast by the weak fall sunlight lying across the general’s laprobe. His two aides flanked him, and one of them held a sheathed sword. Mercer turned, took the hilt of the sword and pulled it out, the fine steel chiming faintly as it came free.

“Now, sir,” said Mercer, placing the naked blade in the hands of the old general, who laid it across his lap and held it and gazed down at it. “General George Rogers Clark, as a Virginian, I have long been inspired by your foresight and daring, and by the unspeakable hardships you and your soldiers endured to protect the West. To think on your deeds has always moved me to great humility. Last February it was my honor to introduce a bill in the legislature which would provide you with a pension for the rest of your life, and to order the manufacture of a fine weapon especially made for you as a symbol of our regard. I am happy to say that the bill passed through both houses of the legislature in one day. You may not be able to understand the enormous satisfaction this measure provided to my humble soul, but …” Mercer’s voice broke, and General Clark looked up from his contemplation of the blade to see Mercer’s chin trembling. “I take great pleasure to read to you the following letter from His Excellency James Barbour, governor of the state of Virginia:

“‘Sir—The representatives of the good people of Virginia, convened in general assembly, duly appreciating the gallant achievements during the Revolutionary War of yourself and the brave regiment under your command, by which a vast extention of her empire was effected, have assigned to me the pleasant duty of announcing to you the sentiments of exalted respect they cherish for you, and the gratitude they feel at the recollection of your unsullied integrity, valor, enterprise, and skill. Having
learned with sincere regret that you have been doomed to drink the cup of misfortune, they have requested me to tender you their friendly condolence. Permit me, sir, to mingle with the discharge of my official duty an expression of my own feelings.’” Mercer cleared his throat and read on.

“‘The history of the Revolution has always engaged my deepest attention. I have dwelt with rapture upon the distinguished part you acted in that great drama, being always convinced that it only wanted the adventitious aid of numbers to make it amongst the most splendid examples of skill and courage which any age or country has produced. I feel a conspicuous pride at the recollection that the name of Clark is compatriot with my own. I, too, most sincerely sympathize with you in your adverse fate, and deeply deplore that the evening of your life, whose morning was so brilliant, should be clouded with misfortune. The general assembly of Virginia have placed among their archives a monument of their gratitude for your services, and, as a small tribute of respect, have directed that a sword should be made in our manufactory, with devices emblematic of your actions, and have also directed that four hundred dollars should be immediately paid, as also an annual sum to the same amount. I lament exceedingly that any delay should have occurred in this communication. You will readily believe me when I assure you it arose from the tardiness of the mechanic employed in completing the sword. It is now finished and is sent herewith. I shall take pleasure in obeying your commands as to the transmission of the money to which you are entitled. You will have the goodness to acknowledge the receipt of this as soon as your convenience will permit. I am, sir, with sentiments of high respect, your obedient servant, James Barbour.’”

Mercer stood, swallowing hard, rustling the paper as he folded it. Major Croghan, standing directly behind his brother-in-law’s wheelchair, stroked his jutting chin, then smudged a tear from the corner of his eye with his thumb. Lucy Croghan and young Diana Gwathmy glanced at each other, their eyes brimming and anxious. A cold breeze rattled the bare branches of trees in the yard.

George sat with the new cold steel held in both hands, its blade lying across his right thigh and the stump of his left. The end of the hilt was fashioned in the style of an eagle’s head. A gold-braid tassel was knotted to a lanyard hanging from the guard. On a small oval plaque of silver in the handle was engraved
a picture representing General Hamilton surrendering his sword to Colonel Clark at the gate of the fort at Vincennes, an angel flying over them blowing a trumpet. On the blade just below the hilt there were engraved words of tribute too small for him to read with his failing eyes.

In the stillness he was seeing his little detachment of ragged, emaciated, frostbitten, mud-stained volunteers dressed in motley rags and rain-soaked hats, and their faces: Bowman, McCarty, Williams, Worthington, Helm … And behind him the little drummer boy Dickie Lovell rattling away solemnly with his sticks. He seemed to hear the drum, seemed to hear a distant fife, seemed to hear the gurgling flow of the flooded Wabash, the imagined sound making him feel cold. And then, that sound he would never forget, the
huzzahs
of his beloved victors.

Oh. They were waiting for him to reply.

He looked up at Colonel Mercer’s shadowed face, his bared head. Then he took a deep breath. His voice came out quaking and feeble.

“You’ve made a very handsome address. This sword is very handsome, too. When … when Virginia needed a sword, I gave her one.” He ran his fingers along the gleaming blade. “I am too old and infirm, as you can see, to ever use a sword again, but …” now everything before him blurred through a curtain of tears, “but I am glad that my old mother state hasn’t entirely forgot me … I reckon I was imprudent to get so indebted in her public affairs … But a country was at stake, and I suppose I’d do the same again, if I had similar field to pass through … So, now, I thank Virginia for the honor, and I thank you, sir, for your kindness and friendly words.”

He sat there in the silence, his thoughts drowned in bittersweet emotion.

Then Diana’s hand stole down over the shawl on his shoulder and she kissed him on his bald scalp. “I’m proud of you,” she whispered.

He smiled. “Aha. Aye. I was a good boy for you, was I not?”

I
T WAS UNSEASONABLY MILD.
D
IANA
G
WATHMEY HOPED IT MIGHT
be a sign of an early spring. For nearly two months the winter weather had kept her Uncle George confined inside his downstairs room of the Croghans’ big Georgian house, but now they sat together on the terrace as they had during her visits for so many years. She was nearly twenty now, and engaged to be married soon to a respectable young gentleman named Tom Bullitt, but as she had done for half of her lifetime, she still came every other week to visit her uncle and sit by his side, do needlework and keep him company.

It was different now. For the last five years there had been no more of their tender and intriguing conversations. A massive stroke in 1813 had destroyed his speech and scrambled his wits and he had lived on these last five years as a huge, silent ruin.

The stroke had ended his long career as Commissioner of the Illinois Regiment Grant, had robbed him of his last great pleasure, reading, and left him inert and helpless as a newborn baby. His great old wreck of a body simply would not cease to function and his heart beat on day after day, month after month, year after year. So now Diana would sit with him in silence.

But she knew her visits were not wasted. When she arrived at Locust Grove and came around in front of his chair and stooped to show him her face, his toothless mouth would open slightly as if he were smiling, and a little life would show in his eyes. She would sit on a low stool close by his wheelchair, on his left, and he would stroke the hair on her head by the hour, and sometimes he would make strenuous, futile efforts to speak.

Her friends sometimes asked her if it was not tedious or boring to spend those hours sitting by the side of a speechless old hulk. “No,” she would say, and that would be her whole reply,
because she could not have explained why it was a good thing for her, and why she always anticipated the visits, and why these hours filled her with such warmth and serenity instead of the depression one might have expected.

“Why didn’t he have a wife, if he was so great and so handsome?” her friends would say. “It should be a wife sitting by him all these years, not a niece.”

“He didn’t get married because something happened to the only lady he loved,” Diana would try to explain from her limited knowledge. “And then, too, I suppose, he could think of courting no one else afterward because of his poverty.”

The sun was going down now. It was growing melon-colored and descending toward the bare treetops. Diana did not know how well Uncle George could see, but she knew that he would tend to face the sun as it went down.

With the lengthening of the afternoon came a chill in the air, and the terrace bricks gave up the little warmth they had absorbed from the February sun.

He won’t want to go in till he’s seen the sunset, Diana thought. But he’ll need a blanket or a heavier shawl. And so will I.

“Excuse me, Uncle,” she said in the stillness, and rose from the stool, squeezing his hand and laying it on the chair arm, then crossed the bricks toward the door and went in.

The old man’s heart hurt because the girl had gone away.

The sun, now a cooling, indistinct orange disc, eased down through a violet haze.

As he watched it sink, the crown of a distant cloud began creeping up to obscure the bottom of the disc. Little by little, the sun was eclipsed.

In his mind there was an eclipse of the sun and a great rushing sound, like a waterfall. Faint shouts. Distant roars and rattlings. Singing, or was it a fife? It was too faint under the rushing. And then a sweet chord, like a handful of plucked strings.

Soon there was only a thin arc of red in the haze in the western sky; it grew thinner, smaller, became a glowing dot.

He felt cold. Cold as when brown icy water had flowed about his body, brown water as far as the eye could see.

Diana came out of the house toward his wheelchair, bringing a black wool blanket. He heard her speak to him through the rushing, but it was too late to try to reply. He looked down from where he was and watched her bending to spread the blanket
around the shoulders of a big old man in a black hat in a wheelchair and he wished he could go back just for a moment to thank her for caring so much. Now the girl and the old man and the brick house grew smaller and smaller and the fields and trees and the curving Ohio River with its island and its falls and the old log house on the point on the other side of the river grew smaller, and he followed that red ember of the sun. Somewhere under that same sun Teresa must be …

T
HEY CAME ON HORSEBACK DOWN THE NEW ROADS FROM THE UPRIVER
settlements, or by canoe down the deep wintry-gray rivers, or on moccasined or booted feet through the silent, frozen woods, white men and red, bent on reaching Louisville before Wednesday. Members of the Bar at Louisville voted to go to the funeral en masse, and to wear black crepe on their sleeves for thirty days, and they elected their most eloquent orator, Judge Rowan, to deliver an elegy at the graveside. Those living too far away to reach Louisville before Wednesday sat at their tables at home and wrote letters.

William Clark, now the governor of the Missouri Territory, arrived, having been on the Buffalo Trace Road en route to Louisville on business when his brother died.

The body of the old general lay in a waxed walnut coffin in a cold room at the Croghan house for five days and men and women came through the room to stand and look in at him. The newspapers printed solemn and laudatory recapitulations of his victories and public services, and militiamen in a detachment came and camped at Locust Grove and drilled for the precise maneuvers of a military funeral. Old Davey Pagan, in charge of Major Croghan’s ferry boat, brought many an old comrade across the river from the Indiana Territory where their land grant lay, and his one eye teared when some of them recognized him and remembered to call him the Forepoop Swabman.

On Wednesday the eighteenth of February, the people came to Locust Grove through a bitter wind and blowing snow and gathered in and around the house. A brief ceremony was conducted inside the house and then the coffin was carried out through the snow and along a path through the garden to the family burial ground a few hundred feet from the house. At intervals of one minute, the militiamen fired their long rifles into the air. Dick Lovell, now fifty years old, paced behind the pallbearers through the dry snow, rapping slowly on the muffled drum, remembering how he had tapped this same old drum behind
this same broad and tall man in ’79 through the bone-chilling waters of the flooded Wabash and before the gate of Fort Sackville while General Hamilton handed over his sword, and at the Shawnee towns in ’80, and he remembered as well tapping his drum outside the log house on Clark’s Point across the river nine years ago while surgeons cut away the general’s leg. Dick Lovell could scarcely see where he was going now through his tears, but it was just a matter, as it had always been, of following the progress of Mister Clark.

At the graveside there was a remarkable gathering of people, considering the weather. Several hundred were there, much of the town of Louisville being on hand. Diana Gwathmey stood wrapped in a cloak, eyes smarting from tears and cold, and looked from the long, deep, final hole in the ground to the dark wood of the closed coffin to the faces of people she recognized and people she had never seen before. She wished the Indian, Two Lives, could be among them. But his tribe lived too far away. That heavy, stooped man with straw hair and the profusion of capillaries in his cheeks, that was John Sanders, an old guide and hunter turned merchant. That enormous hulk in deerskins and cloak, his nose almost touching his chin, was Kenton; William Clark, whose deep-set blue eyes had beheld an ocean called the Pacific, stood gulping. Major Croghan stood near the coffin with his incredibly handsome son George Croghan, the hero of Fort Sandusky in the War of 1812; while Lucy Clark Croghan, the general’s sister, stood between and slightly in front of them, stolid but red-nosed and red-eyed as the dry snow whipped through the leafless branches of the orchard.