Long Knife (77 page)

S
UNLIGHT WAS BRILLIANT ON THE STONE WALLS OF
C
ONVENTO DE
la Incarnation, but inside in the hallways and cells it was eternally dank and cool.

Holding the letter in both hands against her bosom, Sister Dolores moved down a long corridor lined with closed doors. Her heels clicked on the polished stone floors and echoed the length of the corridor.

Poor crazy Sister Terese, she was thinking. I’m sure she doesn’t understand what these letters say. She sits and nods and seems to listen but her eyes never change and she says nothing.

Sister Terese was a nun of the order, but in truth was as much a patient as a nun, simple, vague, ethereal, and all but helpless. She had been in the convent longer than any of the present sisters—since the 1780s, according to the records, and was treated as a special case, being supported by a grant from His Catholic Majesty. She had been the victim, it was rumored, of some unexplained tragedy in the wilds of New Spain. Her mind had been broken by it somehow. A portrait miniature of her had been among her possessions, and was now in the convent library, and it showed that in her youth she had been exquisitely beautiful in an aristocratic way. Sister Terese, now gray and frail and sixty-six years old, with a few long gray hairs growing out of her puckered upper lip, was a subject of wonder and speculation among the new postulants and novices every year, but with familiarity the mystery would evaporate and she would be simply “poor Sister Terese,” a saintly and useless little inmate who neither read nor sang nor did any of the hard or complicated duties of the convent. Rather, she only prayed fervently in her room or went about in a beatific daze, making little or no sense when she spoke unless she was talking about her room, the food, the flowers in the garden, or butterflies on the flowers. One or two letters would come to her each year from her
niece, Señora Maria Josefa de Leyba Sarti in Madrid, and in recent years it had been Sister Dolores who undertook the task of reading the gossipy, innocuous letters to her.

“Now,” Sister Dolores said, seating herself on a stepstool beside the cot upon which the frail gray nun sat with folded hands, “here is what your niece Maria Josefa says to you:

“’Dear Aunt, I write to you again so soon because something very interesting and puzzling has been brought to my attention. At a ball with Ramon I was approached by an officer who some time ago had served at St. Louis, and asking me if I were not a daughter of Governor de Leyba he said then, surely you knew the great American General Clark who died recently. Determining that he meant our dear Don Jorge Clark—as I understand he had one or two brothers who were of high rank—I said I knew of his death but would hardly call 1780 recent, upon which the officer corrected me, saying no, Señora, I have read that he died only two or three years ago, quite old and ill. I am surely at a loss to explain it, dear Terese, but the gentleman was so sure of his information that I …”

Sister Dolores looked up in astonishment. The old nun had risen from her cot and stood tottering, at this moment beginning to fold at the knees and waist, her mouth wide open, emitting a strange, strangling wheeze, her eyes seeming to bulge nearly out of their sockets. As Sister Dolores rose in alarm to help her, Sister Terese drew herself down into a crouch and fell sideways on the stones of the floor, where now an animallike whimper, broken by rasping inhalations, issued from her. Sister Dolores, skin crawling with fright, struggled to raise her from the cold floor and called for aid. In a moment the door was flung open by another astonished sister and the clattering footsteps of others were approaching in the corridor.

They took turns constraining Sister Terese on her cot for the next two hours, by twos, with a big-boned, wide-eyed postulant, who had been a peasant girl, leaping forward to hold her down when her fit renewed itself most violently. They could not imagine where in her bony little body she was finding this strength. They caressed her brow as they held her down, and the Superior came in and prayed grimly for a while at the foot of the cot.

By evening the little old woman had exhausted herself, her incoherent sounds had trailed off, and suddenly she fell into a deep slumber. Sister Dolores remained to sit a vigil by her bedside, praying with the light of one candle shining on her broad
and placid face. At midnight she left the room, relieved by a sturdy novice who stationed herself on a temporary cot in the corridor, ready to summon help if poor Sister Terese should awaken unruly again. There was no sound heard from her room for the rest of the night.

Before daylight, Sister Dolores arose in her cell, went to the chapel and prayed, then came down the corridor. She awoke the sleeping novice and they eased the door open and went in, preceding themselves with a candlestick. They recoiled, gasping, at the sight that lay within.

Sister Terese lay naked on the cot, her hands clenched on her breast, her white body a pathetic bundle of ribs and swollen joints and loose skin hanging on bone, her flat, withered dugs sagging on her rib cage. Her cropped white hair stuck out in sprigs. Her sunken eyes were shut and her mouth was open, a dark hole. On the floor where she had cast them off, a dark puddle of cloth, lay her habit and wimple. Her old bronze crucifix that she had carried to New Spain and then brought back hung on the end wall of her cell overlooking the dismal and shocking scene, the tilted face of the Christ seeming to study the emaciated old body with unutterable pity.

Sister Dolores grabbed the clenched hands to awaken her, tongue ready to scold her for this revolting and profane behavior which no grief or mental aberration could excuse in such a house of holiness. But the arms were cold and rigid under the loose wrinkled-silk skin and could not be pried away.

Sister Dolores fell to her knees and crossed herself. “Holy Mary Mother of God,” she breathed. “She is dead!”

When they were preparing Sister Terese’s body for interment they had to break the bones of the hands to open them and free their grip on her necklace.

In the left hand they found her crucifix pendant. In the right was a strange small silver medallion bearing the figure of an athlete.

O
NE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-TWO YEARS AFTER
G
EORGE
R
OGERS
Clark sent to the Virginia auditor his vouchers and account books detailing the expenses of the Western campaigns, an assistant state librarian named E. G. Swem obtained permission to examine seventy large unopened bundles of papers that had been found lying in the dusty chaos of an unused room of the Auditor’s Building at Richmond.

Setting up a long table under a good light and donning a green eyeshade, Mr. Swem carefully opened a few of the packages, whose papers had turned brown and flaky. He looked in wonderment at some vouchers selected at random. Most were written in the same bold copperplate hand with flourishes and sure strokes at the end of each line.

$800

Sir

At Thirty Days sight of this my first of Exchange, Second of same Tenor and Date not being Paid Please Pay to Mr Charles Gratiot or to his Order the sum of Eight Hundred Dollars for Sundries furnish’d the State of Virginia and charge same as per former advice from—

Sir your very Obdt
most Hum Servt

G. R. CLARK

G. R. Clark? Swem thought, an old inkling of half-remembered history nudging in the back of his mind. Oliver Pollock?

He sneezed in the dust, then took up a stained, blotted itemization written in that same hand on a limp yellow square of linen paper:

Mr. Swem sneezed again, and blew his nose into a handkerchief, almost too engrossed to heed what he was doing. Vaguely recalled details of that old story came back to him as he sorted through the papers. Long ago Mr. Swem had read the memoir of the Western campaign that General Clark had written at President Madison’s request, and he could remember particulars of that incredible march to Vincennes ….

Here now was a voucher in a different hand, on a stained, crumbling strip of paper scarcely three inches wide, evidently torn from the top of a full sheet of paper:

T
HE TALE YOU HAVE JUST READ IS AS MUCH HISTORY AS NOVEL.
I
T
is true to the documented facts of the events it describes, to that degree revealed in the letters and memoirs of its principal characters. All the characters were real; their lives were intertwined as told.

I am not one of that recent breed of novelists who believe that great license may be taken with history; I have not written in any encounters that could not have happened. The military actions, treaties, and friendships of George Rogers Clark I have reconstructed from the journals and papers of Clark himself, of Joseph Bowman, Leonard Helm, General Henry Hamilton, Francisco Vigo, Lieutenant Governor de Leyba, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, the hero’s illustrious brother William Clark, and of other participants in these events.

As is anyone who would tell this story, I am indebted to Dr. Lyman C. Draper, who spent thirty years of his life in the nineteenth century ranging through the country, tracing and collecting documents relating to the career of General Clark. Those documents, now resting in fragile condition at the Wisconsin State Historical Society in Madison, have been used by perhaps a dozen writers who have sought to retell the conquest of old Northwest Territory in the nonfictional mode; many of them have done it well, and I attach a bibliography hereafter for any reader who would wish to follow it. Dr. Draper interviewed many persons who had known General Clark in their lifetimes, and was so moved by his historical quest that he wrote to a correspondent:

“I do not wonder that you sh
^d
have your heart’s memories and affections deeply stirred within you when such a man’s worth and services were brought to your notice. The life services
of Gen’l Clark have so long been a subject of profound study with me, that I have long learned to reverence him as I never have any other public character.”

I echo those sentiments. Living in an age in which literature focuses so much on self-indulgence, cynicism, brutality, and weakness of character, I find myself braced and inspired by Clark’s story, despite its tragic outcome.

My imagination has been at work on George Rogers Clark since boyhood, when I was nearly overwhelmed by a painting by F. C. Yohn of the surrender of Vincennes, used as an illustration for
The Youth’s Companion
. At that time I began to people the event in my imagination. Being something of a ridge-runner at that age (and still), I was able to conjure all the sounds, the sights, the sensations of that audacious wilderness venture simply by seeing the illustration. In 1976, the Bicentennial year, interest was awakened when a friend, Ruth F. Banta, wrote to me on behalf of Indiana historians and asked if I would be able to do a dramatization of Clark’s life. Now, a man past the age of forty, I have spent the last two years applying the same imagination to that same story. If this novel fails to recreate the feelings or actions of its characters as they really were in those days exactly two hundred years ago, my imagination is to blame.

Lest I be suspected of trying to pass off some fiction as fact, I must specify that there is one dimension of this story in which my imagination has had to invent particulars where documentation is scarce: the outcome of young Clark’s romance with Teresa de Leyba. That the two were betrothed is generally accepted as true by most scholars of the man’s career; that the betrothal was dissolved and Teresa de Lebya died a nun in a Spanish convent in 1821 is recorded as a historical fact. But to tell no more of this one great affair of his heart than exists in known records would leave too large a hole in the fabric for the novel reader to forgive. Therefore I have written between those sparse recorded lines, to tell their love story as it could have happened in view of their characters and customs and the vicissitudes of communication during such a conflict in that vast and hazardous wilderness. As no known letters between the lovers survive, I have invented them, three by Clark and one by Teresa, as well as one from Father Pierre Gibault and one from de Cartabona relating to the pair. A letter from Clark to de Cartabona, and one to Teresa from her niece, complete these. All other letters in the book are genuine.

The hardest test of my imagination was to get inside the mind of this vigorous, principled, and audacious character, to portray the inner being of a true hero as he went from vision to triumph to despair. Fortunately, I was given hints in his own words. Many of his thoughts and conversations in this novel are borrowed directly from Clark’s own language, as found in his report to George Mason, in various letters, and in the memoir which he prepared in 1789 and 1790 at the request of James Madison.

I followed this same procedure in trying to dramatize the scenes involving Henry Hamilton, Fernando de Leyba, and others whose writings were available.

The reader may well wonder at my leap across the years 1781 through 1809 in General Clark’s career. I have given only glimpses of those long, discouraging years, and have chosen to do so because I believe it is the storyteller’s duty to distill the most powerful and significant moments out of life, to make the most essential statements and color the distinct contrasts. In the case of George Rogers Clark, the contrast between his triumph and his tragedy makes the essential statement.

Biographical details of those middle years are complex and impressive: While in Virginia in 1781, trying once again to raise an army for his coveted campaign against Detroit, he was engaged in a defensive battle against the troops of Benedict Arnold, conducting the only successful American ambuscade against Arnold’s forces. Once again in that year, the Detroit campaign fell through because of circumstances beyond his control, even though he had the blessing of Commander-in-Chief George Washington, who wrote to Governor Thomas Jefferson:

As the British-Indian alliance continued to harass the settlements of Kentucky to and beyond the end of the Revolution,
Clark was prevailed upon to lead retaliatory expeditions in 1781, 1782, and 1786. Troop desertions marred the 1786 campaign, and an elaborate defamation plot engineered in the East by the infamous powergrabber James Wilkinson capitalized on that failure and succeeded in removing Clark from leadership. An appalling story could be written on that complicated treachery, which involved a series of fraudulent, forged, and anonymous letters. False rumors that drunkenness had destroyed Clark’s leadership abilities were also circulated in the East by ambitious men jealous of Clark’s influence in Western lands.

Clark resigned as the government’s western Indian agent and principal surveyor for the Virginia state line late in the 1780s and retired to the home of his parents at Mulberry Hill near Louisville to prepare a memoir.

In the 1790s, when Spain kept the lower Mississippi closed to Kentucky trade and the new United States government refused to intercede, Clark as usual took matters into his own hands. He pledged his allegiance to France and assumed command of French Republic forces in the West. This venture, highly unorthodox but not illegal, gave his enemies more ammunition to fire at his reputation.

Meanwhile, Henry Hamilton, whose defeat was Clark’s greatest triumph, fared better in his twilight years. After being released in a prisoner exchange, he returned to the Lakes region, served as lieutenant governor of Quebec, and later concluded his career as governor of the Bermudas.

During the next few years, Clark was the companion and mentor of his younger brother William, and secured for him his appointment as co-leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition to the Pacific. It was, ironically, an expedition George Rogers Clark had turned down in 1783 in order to remain and protect Kentucky settlements. It must have been one of the few satisfactions of his later years that that magnificent adventure was led by a Clark.

Still another story could be told of George Rogers Clark the naturalist and archaeologist. He was the first to advance the now accepted theory of the origins of the Mound Builders civilization. And John James Audubon sought him out as the authority on bird species in the West.

All this time, Clark was so plagued by financial difficulties brought on by his commitment to the Revolution that he found it impossible to own property or even receive an inheritance from his father’s estate. The efforts of George, Jonathan, and
William Clark to obtain justice in that matter would make a story so relentlessly dismal that surely few readers could endure it. We may presume that the last forty years of his life tried his faith and fortitude harder even than the rigorous feats of his youth.

In discussing my interest in George Rogers Clark over the last few years, I find that almost everyone presumes that by Clark I mean William Clark. Somehow William’s legend has got what is known these days as the better publicity.

I suppose there are two factors contributing to the obscurity of the Clark whose exploits won for America the rich Midwest:

First, the printing presses which ground out what became the history of the Revolution were east of the Alleghenies. Clark’s brilliant deeds on the other side of the mountains were so distant from the instruments of publicity that they might have been conducted on the moon.

The other reason for his obscurity is, ironically, one which should reflect all the greater glory on him: his victories were almost bloodless. He was an officer who, using surprise and bluff and mercy as his weapons, made great conquests without killing hundreds or thousands of human beings in the process. He secured the Northwest Territory in 1778 and 1779 without losing a single man in combat. With that kind of cleverness he assured his place as the hero history forgot.

It was exactly two hundred years after George Rogers Clark’s bloodless capture of Kaskaskia when I drove down to the Ohio to see the places where he spent his last years. I had just completed the first draft of this novel; I was spent; my imagination was charged with the events of his career. I live, as I have almost all my life, in the heart of what used to be the old Northwest Territory, so it was a short and beautiful trip down through the Southern Indiana hills to the Louisville area.

I wanted to go first to Clarksville, on the Indiana side of the Ohio River, to find the place known as Clark’s Point where the first chapter of this novel was set. I knew there was a stone monument there marking the site where his log house was thought to have been.

My map having no notation on it of a Clark Memorial, I stopped at a Shell service station and made inquiry of its proprietor, whose petroleum-smudged face gleamed oily in the July sunlight.

“A what? Memorial?”

“Yes. A marker that’s supposed to show where he lived in his old age.”

“Where
who
lived?”

“George Rogers Clark. The founder of this town, and of Louisville.”

“A monument, eh?” He seemed to be anxious to get back to draining crankcases.

“Yes. A stone marker.”

“Only monument I know of is over to Jeffersonville. Take this road, veer right till you hit Tenth Street, then go left. Somebody there could prob’ly tell ya. Might be the same guy.”

A succession of such encounters followed as I drove among shopping centers, roller rinks, mobile home parks, chain restaurants, filling stations, discount stores, and ice cream shops where men and women with listless eyes and overstuffed shorts waited in line to be served. I had talked with a dozen persons before I found a youth in an auto parts store who had gone to George Rogers Clark School and knew where the monument stood. He gave me directions to the place on the flood wall along Harrison Street where the marker stood. The sun was low when I reached the site.

The marker stood across the street from a row of modest residences. The evening was full of the snarling racket from a chain saw somewhere nearby. The words on the monument’s bronze plaque were dwarfed by the spray-painted declaration, “I hate Debbi.” Cars rolled by on the street; the river flowed below. Two tanned blonde girls rode by on bicycles, looking back to smile and giggle at the sight of this man standing on a flood wall gazing at a monument. The air was dirty. Upriver and downriver, great steel bridges spanned the Ohio. Smokestacks jutted into the horizon. Louisville’s tall, square downtown buildings crenellated the skyline to the south. High-tension lines spanned the river, like a string of Eiffel Towers. There was no Falls of the Ohio anymore, nor any Corn Island; locks and dams and erosion, I knew, had smoothed them out many decades ago. The wide river was slate-gray, fast and eddying. Trotline fishing floats were strung along the near shore. The roadside was strewn with empty beer six-packs. Traffic droned and whispered by; spillways of the hydroelectric plant across the river hissed and hushed. Rock music was coming from somewhere.

My imagination strained against all this to see the Ohio from Clark’s Point as the old soldier had seen it in my first chapter. I was about to give up. But the sun was descending just as I
have described it; the broad river curved away south and west; the wooded ridges diminished into the hazy distance. And then, I’ll swear, a flock of martins swooped down past me toward the river. Yes, it was the same evening I had described from my imagination. The detritus of the twentieth century had faded momentarily to let me see through my real eyes what my imagination had seen through the failing eyes of that embittered old hero.

A panting black and tan beagle came by and explored me. A man and a woman in a pickup truck drove into a lovers’ lane among the horseweeds and parked and watched impatiently for me to leave.

The sun had set. The gray haze in the west held a fading rose stain. My pilgrimage had been a success after all. It was time for me to fold up my imagination and go.