From Sea to Shining Sea (43 page)

“July the fourth! It is …”

Is it? Is it? Johnny thought. By heaven, it is! Two years since independence!

And from the throats of the hundreds of prisoners holding their captors captive, three brave cheers burst forth; a seagull soaring over veered off in fright.

T
HAT NIGHT THE OFFICERS IMPRISONED IN THE GUN ROOM
could not keep from smiling at each other, laughing wistfully. Even though the air was so hot and dense that the lantern scarcely burned, they were happy.

“Didn’t I say so?” Lieutenant Hoag burbled. “The one way off this
Jersey
is by way o’ the dead-boat! Ha, ha!”

“Lord in Paradise,” Johnny groaned, looking misty-eyed, “I wish I was with ’em! Independence! God Almighty! What a day!”

“Independence, you say?” Hoag snickered now. “Why, friend Clark, if you escaped off this boat, you’d be married, by a deathbed promise, to a shrew you can’t even abide! You’d call
that
independence? Ha, ha!”

“T
HERE SHE LAYS
, J
OE
,” G
EORGE SAID.
“K
ASKASKIA
.”

“Perty as a virgin,” said Bowman. “And little does she know.”

It was the evening of July fourth. The blood-red sunset on the far side of the Mississippi Valley reddened their flushed faces. George was awestruck by his first sight of the great river.

The Illinois Regiment was lying, legs burning with exhaustion, stomachs gnawed by two days’ marching without food, in the waving meadow grass on a bluff overlooking the angle where the Kaskaskia River flowed into the gigantic Mississippi. In the angle was the town, a cluster of gardens and streets and well-built houses of stone, timbers, and plaster. Above the village were grainfields, pastures dotted with cattle and sheep, an Indian village of dome-shaped huts, a quaint and massive Old World Windmill, and the river road fading northward up the Mississippi through the evening haze toward the smaller villages of Prairie du Rocher and Cahokia. Across the Mississippi from Kaskaskia, on the Spanish side, barely visible at this distance, lay the tiny village of St. Genevieve.

The whole valley was lavender, red, gold; the Mississippi was a broad brassy ribbon with a red path of sunflecks coming across it. And beyond were the low purple bluffs of Spanish Louisiana. “Imagine it, a pocket o’ civilization out here ’twixt Noplace and Nowhere,” George said.

“Yup. And imagine: It’s a-gonna be our’n, ’fore the day of independence is over.” Joe Bowman was one of that brotherhood who called themselves the Sons of Liberty, and he was deeply stirred by the timeliness of their arrival. To him it was another of George’s propitious arrangements, like the eclipse. It was useless for George to protest that he had expected to invade the place a month earlier; Joe was convinced that George had worked it out for the Fourth of July.

Leonard Helm lounged at George’s left, and he was studying the village through a spyglass. The troops, mostly stripped to their breechclouts to catch any breath of evening air on their sweaty bodies, lay or sat in the grass along the brow of the bluff, kneading their leg muscles, tending their feet and their weapons, and looking down on Kaskaskia, light-headed, famished, rapacious, thinking their private thoughts of attack, plunder, revenge.

“I feel like th’ wolf fixin’ to swoop down on th’ fold,” Helm murmured with a mean grin, still squinting through the glass. “That there,” he said, pointing to a large house fortified by a high stone wall, “so that’s their fort, eh? Don’t look like much of a fort t’ me. And the Sewer de Roachblob, he lives in that big house inside, eh? What I’ll do is I’ll haul that mother-scalpin’ skunk-fart of a French Tory whore’s son outer that house and I’ll nail his cock-bag to th’ big elm tree thar, that’s what I’ll do.”

George shook his head and clucked his tongue at Helm’s language. This was the vengeful attitude he had nurtured in his men to get them down the Ohio and across the Illinois plains to this destination. You can get a lot of mileage out o’ hate, he thought. They were in a simple raiding and plundering mood. But what they had to do now was not going to be quite that simple, and it was time to tell them so. “Now, fetch me all the officers. I need to talk to ’em before we go down there,” he said.

They came and knelt around him on the slope. He pointed to a solitary farmhouse on the near bank of the Kaskaskia River, where, according to his spies, boats were available for ferrying the troops across the Kaskaskia to the town. They would sneak down the slope and capture the house as soon as darkness had fallen, he said. Then they would try to ferry all the troops across to the town before midnight. Bowman would take part of the force to surround the town, while George would lead the rest straight through the streets to the fort, which he expected he could seize by surprise. “If I do, I’ll signal with a pistol shot and one hellacious yelp,” he said. “If not, and ye hear battle, then you’ll come in and help me storm the fort.

“Now,” he said. “Here it is about Kaskasky, once we’ve got ’er, and listen damn good to this, my boys, ’cause we fly or we fall, on what I tell ye now:

“Make every man understand that I’ll not tolerate one act of plunder or savagery of any kind. There’ll be no scalping, there’ll be no looting, there’ll be no raping, or even an ungentle gesture at any woman, girl, sheep, or even bitch dog in that town. We’ll use only what force we need to keep the civilians out of our way, and there’ll be no intercourse of any kind with the inhabitants until I say so.”

The captains were flabbergasted. “No looting?” exclaimed Helm. “Th’ boys won’t like that! Takes th’ fun out of it. Not to mention th’ profit.”

“Fun enough later. And profit’s for merchants, not soldiers,” George said. “One other caution, most important: we’ll take pains never to reveal how few we are. We must never bunch together where we could be counted. If we can, we must seem a thousand. We can negotiate only from a dominant posture—and that’ll be no mean trick where we’re outnumbered ten to one.”

The officers looked at each other. They hadn’t talked much about numbers, but they had thought vaguely about them.

“What d’ye mean, ‘negotiate,’ George?” Bowman asked.

“I mean, first, their surrender. Then, this.”

He reached inside his pouch and drew out a handbill about the alliance with France. It had come by courier to the island last month.

“It means,” he explained as they studied it with curiosity in the waning light, “we invade them as enemy. Then with the help of God, and that news there, and what wisdom and humanity we have, we turn their loyalty around. Then we won’t be outnumbered by enemies, y’ see? Simple: we just make friends of ’em.”

They looked at him in the twilight, looked at him perplexed and astounded, squinting and scratching their jaw-stubble, digesting this new and complicated responsibility he had put upon them. This was no plain old raid; it was like some fancy diplomatic jiggery-pokey as well, as Helm put it.

This Clark was the damnedest thing, as they had been saying aside to each other all the way along this thousand-mile beeline. He always knew more than they did and he was always making things bigger and more interesting than anything they’d ever done before. It was confounding. But it gave them shivers, and for some strange reason it made them all feel more important than they had ever felt before.

“In about ten minutes we’ll start moving down to the farmhouse,” he said. “So tell your boys what I said, and warn ’em any breach o’ those orders is on pain o’ death. And …” Now his voice went softer, vibrating with that warmth he could turn on at just the right times, like a smile you could hear in the dark. “Thankee, gents. I sure picked my people right. Let’s be about it, now.”

B
OWMAN’S MEN HAD ENCIRCLED THE TOWN AND WERE
crouched, mostly naked and still wet from the river crossing, in the dark fields and along the roads, waiting in the dew-damp midnight air, hearing the creaking and croaking of katydids and frogs and the whine of the mosquitoes that were thick in the air around them. They waited and wondered whether anything at all was happening. So far they had not heard even a dog bark.

Suddenly a pistol shot rang out from amid the dark silhouettes of the village houses, followed by Colonel Clark’s great voice yodeling:

“
Eeeeeeeeeyaaaaaa, hoooey! Rocheblave is ours! Come to town, and make some NOISE!
”

J
OHNNY
C
LARK SAT WITH
L
IEUTENANT
H
OAG AND
C
APTAIN
Coffin at the table under the smoky lamp, eyes cocked toward the ceiling, sweating in the airless heat, listening to the angry voices of the British officers in the quarters above. They could not make out the words through the thick planking, but they could hear in the inflections that much scolding was going on; they could hear in the tromp of boots and the creaking of boards that many men were coming and going, and that a great deal of floor-pacing was being done by the staff officers of the
Jersey.

All this had gone on through the night of July 4 and into the wee hours of the morning of the fifth, and now it was midmorning, and the activity had resumed. In the meantime, the mood of the prisoners had been just the opposite. Almost all night long, songs of liberty had been heard coming from the enlisted men’s confines. The prisoners had stayed awake most of the night singing, and telling and retelling the wonderful story of the escape, each witness relating what he had seen and heard of it from where he had stood, until a detailed picture of the whole incident had been assembled, and then that whole story had made the rounds several times. It was that the men of the corpse detail—a sergeant from a Maryland regiment, and the rest privates from various states—had been talking about the Day of Independence while carrying the corpses across the deck, and when they had descended the ladder to the docking raft, their
heads still full of the word “Independence,” they had found the dead-boat crew quite off guard. The privates, as if by some wordless mental message, had glanced at each other and at the crew, then at the sergeant. The sergeant, looking up and seeing that no sentries were watching, had given a nod, and at once the prisoners had grabbed the boat crew, choking them and taking their knives and cudgels and using these on them, then had leaped into the boat, taking the oars and shoving away. Two sentries on deck had heard the scuffle, and had called for help and aimed their weapons at the boat, only to find themselves pressed back from the rail by a mass of prisoners. A guard officer then had aimed his pistol down at the boat, but his shot was deflected when Americans on deck lurched against him. And then most of the prisoners had joined to create the diversion that had tied up the whole guard detail until the boat was out of range.

The question whether the fugitives had reached shore safely in their little boat had never been answered, but, said Johnny:

“Unless they’re brought back aboard this stinkpot and seen by our own eyes, there’s not a man aboard will believe they didn’t make it. A man believes what he wants to believe, and by heaven, I choose to believe they’re safe and happy right now in some patriot’s kitchen, feeding for the first time in a year on something other than Royal swill an’ shoddy!”

“That I choose to believe too,” said Captain Coffin. “Hey! Liberty! Ha! By th’ powers, my soul is free, going thither and yon with those spunky boys!”

“Well and good,” said Hoag. “But I wish our Royal keepers upstairs there would finish puttin’ blame, and get about the business o’ running this jail. It’s three hours since they should have let us on deck for air, and I for one am about to suffocate.”

There followed a long, thoughtful pause. Johnny said at last:

“Now, y’ don’t suppose they’d …”

“Don’t even say it,” warned Coffin. “
Absit nomen, absit omen.
”

But the word of it came down an hour later, in the form of a proclamation from the ship’s captain: as punishment for yesterday’s incident, and to maintain a better degree of security aboard H.M.S.
Jersey
, said the proclamation, all prisoners, officers and men, would be forbidden henceforth to go above decks. Johnny thought of the sunshine and the gulls against the blue sky, and felt as if a vise were closing on his chest. No more sunlight and fresh air to cure his lungs.

Hoag mopped his face with an already sodden rag and looked about at the sweat-slick faces around the table.

“It’s July, gentlemen,” he said. “After July comes August.”

“H
URRY
, J
OHN
C
LARK
!
H
URRY
!
” T
HE RIDER WAS YELLING AT
the top of his lungs before he was within a hundred yards of the house, scattering chickens and geese both ways out of the road. And as the family rushed out of the house from the breakfast table, the rider was telling the news even before he had reined down his frenzied horse. The story gushed from his mouth like beer from a stoven barrel, and it was such a tall tale they were sure he was making it up.

Their George had swept down on the enemy outposts in the west and captured them all without spilling a drop of blood, friend’s or enemy’s. That was about all he knew of it, and he repeated it three times for them.

“Not a bit o’ bloodshed, praise be to God!” Ann Clark exclaimed.

“You can hear it all from gents who been there,” panted the rider, “if y’ hurry up to Fredericksburg!”

“Fredericksburg?”

“John Montgomery. Be through there today likely, on his way t’ Williamsburg! He’s got their commander, escortin’ him to prison!”

“Their commander? George caught their commander?”

“Yeah! Aye, the uh, the one … a commander. Isn’t that grand! Hey! I got to ride! I’m takin’ the news on down the road. You should go to Fredericksburg, sir and madam! Oh, oh, y’ should!”

“Eddie, fetch Mister Burrus here a stirrup cup. Cupid, water his horse.” John Clark was all but turning in circles, looking dazed.