From Sea to Shining Sea (51 page)

At noon, things began happening. The sentry on the river bank decoyed ashore a passing boat carrying five French hunters from Vincennes. They were astonished to see the Americans here, and told George there was not the least suspicion of his presence. They said most of the inhabitants were chafing under Hamilton’s hauteur and were still sympathetic toward the Americans. The repairs on the fort were nearly finished, they said. They also said they had seen two small boats adrift a little way up the river.

George detained the Frenchmen as politely as possible, in case they might have thought to go back to Hamilton and betray his presence. He gave them the opportunity to join his army and to contribute their boat and their provisions to his regiment, hinting that they would be much happier if they did. They shrugged, and, with wan smiles, they volunteered everything. George sent Captain Worthington up the river in the newly finished canoe to seek the drifting boats. At that moment a gunshot was heard somewhere to westward, and soon one of the Virginians staggered into camp with a small doe across his shoulder. The whole camp was suddenly alive and in the highest spirits. One small deer among a hundred and thirty starving men meant scarcely a couple of bites apiece, but, cut small, organs, brain, tongue, and all, and extended through a gruel of roots thickened by the flour and goose fat the Frenchmen had contributed, it was as welcome as a feast.

While it was cooking in a kettle, Worthington returned, having found one of the drifting boats.

Not much, a cup of slop and a found boat, George mused. But they’re a change of fortune and the boys’ve got spirit again. Now we’ve got two boats, a pirogue, and a bark canoe on hand.

He called the captains in for a conference. They sat before him, hollow-eyed, hollow-cheeked, faces looking like skulls in the dim light of the sheltered campfire, their shoulders wet with rain. But they were smiling, feeling the miracle of digestion, and waiting to hear what he had to say.

“Get ’em ready,” he said with that old cocky grin. “We’ll start ferrying across the Wabash first thing in the morning.”

A
RED-TAILED HAWK SOARED IN THE COLD AIR A THOUSAND
feet above the river. In the east the sky was yellow and the horizon was blue-gray. In the west the sky was deep, clear blue and a last star was fading. Far below the hawk there spread miles of lowland covered with water on both sides of the river, and where no currents ran there was white-edged ice. The ice held the tops of bushes and reached in among the tree trunks of flooded forests. In the east the ice reflected the yellow of the sky and in the west it was gray.

The hawk flew eastward over the river and then dipped its left wing and began drifting northward in a wide arc, descending. It passed high over a town that stood on a plain surrounded by floodwater and dimpled with frozen ponds. A thin film of chimney smoke hung in the still air over the town and over a large Indian village north of the town. Near the town, on a low bluff where the plain met the river, stood a fort with a blockhouse at each corner and a gate facing the town and an arrangement of log buildings inside its palisade. Smoke rose from the chimneys of the buildings in the fort. As the hawk drifted silently over the fort and swung southwesterly out over the river, men in red coats were walking across the frosty ground inside the fort. A circle of Indian tents and a corral of horses filled a part of the parade ground.

The hawk’s wide circle back down above the river brought it over a wide, flooded plain three or four miles wide, about a league below the town. It was water unbroken by ground or even by trees or shrubs. Huge stretches of it were covered by thin ice, and a path had been broken through some of this ice. The hawk veered east from the river and saw a long line of men below in the water, moving slowly, slowly toward the town, breaking ice as they went. Two boats and two canoes were moving alongside the men. The hawk soared high over the line of men and then tilted in the sky and sailed toward the southeast.

G
EORGE’S VISION WAS GOING STRANGE, FROM THE HUNGER-FAINTNESS
and from the pain of his bones and flesh in the ice water. Everything would go blinding bright, then dark, then
bright again. Sometimes the horizon would seem to slant. Once he looked up and saw a hawk high in the blue morning sky, then it divided and became two hawks, then one.

It was bad here that there were no bushes or trees to grab for support, and worse that there were none to be walked past to give a sense of progress. There was no way to conceive of distance or time, only the slow, disorderly splashing, gasping, coughing, blowing, moaning, and the intermittent racket of Dickie Lovell’s drum behind him. The drummer rode on the shoulders of a big sergeant. The horizon, that thin, low, blue line of land they were struggling toward, stayed the same. There was no
diddle lully day
; no one had breath for singing.

The men had awakened this morning on a little island with their wet clothes frozen to the ground. Then he had given them a speech of praise that had brought tears to their eyes, and to his. He had pointed across this stretch of water and told them it was the last obstacle between them and the Hair-Buyer’s fort, and then he had led them straight into the icy floodwater again to start this last three or four miles to Vincennes.

And now they were in the middle of this endless sheet of water and he was doubting that they would be able to make it across. For the first time, he was doubting whether
he
could make it across. It was the first time in his life that he had doubted that his body could do his will. It had always had the power to go where he would drive it, no matter how much it hurt, but now he could scarcely force it to move and he felt that at any moment it would simply seize up and stop here in the middle of this infinity of ice water.

He pulled out his pocket watch, and when he got it in focus he saw that they had been in the water for an hour. He looked back. Some of the men were now staggering two and three abreast, the weaker supporting themselves on the shoulders of the stronger. Some of the big men were carrying two knapsacks and two rifles now while their unburdened fellows concentrated on making themselves move. “Oh help me, I’m cramped up!” a voice would cry, and a boat would tilt as that man was dragged aboard like a water-soaked log.

The torturous stepping and quaking went on for another eternity and when George looked at his watch again only ten minutes had passed. He put the watch away, determined not to look at it again. The sun was coming up and it was the first sun he had seen in the nineteen days of the march, but it gave no warmth.

He glanced back again and now in the faces he could see
fear—the stark, strained fear of collapsing and going under. Now his concern for them was almost a panic. He could feel his own dependable body failing, his head whooshing, his heart fluttering, his spine stiffening into a shaft of ice, and was sure they must be closer to the end of it than he. There seemed to be a mile yet to go, and there would be hearts stopping before that mile was made.

“Boats!” he shouted. He jabbed his finger ahead toward the distant woods. “Quick! Make land! Unload! Come back for people! Fast, now! Master Lovell, lay on those sticks!” The pickaback drummer hammered away till he was red in the face. “You flankers! Here!” Two rugged riflemen, each six and a half feet tall, splashed toward him. “Go on ahead,” he gasped. “Walk tiptoe, or walk on water, or something, but be ten feet tall and keep yellin’ back that it’s getting shallow.”

“Aye, sir,” said one. “But what if it ain’t?”

“Say so anyway, man. They need to hear it. Off ye go!”

The boats were far ahead now. George was nearly frantic for his people; their sounds from behind him were so piteous and extreme now that he could not bear to look back. The two tall scouts kept calling back, “Gettin’ shaller! Yayhoo! Gettin’ shaller!” But he could see the water was to their ribs now; it was getting deeper. There were a few little bandy fellows in this troop who didn’t stand to the armpits of those two men; they’d be head-under by the time they got there.
Boats!
George thought. “BOATS!” he yelled.

And then he saw them coming back, oars and paddles flashing fast; they came by with water gurgling and broken ice gnashing around their bows, and voices back in the line were yelling for them. “Here! Git Isaac! He’s a-foldin’ double!” “Boat! Oh, God damn, hurry! Help this whoreson ol’ Shad here! His eyes gone blank!” “Hey! Man here whose feet don’t reach bottom! Got some room?” And then the boats, loaded hull-down with men stacked like cold fish in their bilges, sped past again, their panting rowers hurrying to get them ashore and come back for more. George wanted with all his soul to grab a boat and hang on and ride those last few hundred yards to shore, but he knew he couldn’t do that and still look them in the eyes. No. There were still too many in the water still coming along because he was.

He could see the textures of the bark of the trees now; he was close enough to see that lovely gray-green mottle on the white sycamores and the old gray tatters of hickory shagbark and the smooth silver-gray of beech trunks, and oh, how he wanted to touch them once more, how he loved trees! But the water was to
his chest now; it grew deeper as he strained against it and advanced with this nightmare slowness, holding his powder horn and gun above his head with excruciatingly sore arms and shoulders and prickling-cold fingers. The drum was still rattling back there somewhere, and there were encouraging shouts from those who had already been put ashore, and the boats were coming out again in a great hurry to get those who had had to stop back there because they were simply too short to keep their faces out of the water; but the sky was flickering now, from blue to black, black to white.

And at last there was a sapling at hand, and a floating log, and the column was thrashing and splashing in disarray into the flooded edge of the woods, breaking ice as they came. Some men had strength to climb ashore before they swayed and fell to their knees. Others clung to bushes and waited for the boats to come. Some waded into the shallows, gasping for breath, then found that without the water to buoy them they were too feeble to stand, and fell face-down amid the floating ice chips. With his own last bit of strength, George got one arm under a muttering, praying skeleton of a man and dragged him ashore. Then hands grabbed his arms as his knees started to buckle under him.

And now the boats were out there one last time, a hundred yards out, heaving aboard the last dozen men whose heads and shoulders and upraised rifles still dotted the sheet of water. And then the boats beached and put those last few ashore.

We did it, George thought. We’ll never be the same, but we did it. Not a man failed me. Hot tears began running down his nose.

Dear God I never saw such a people. Thankee O Lord for giving me such as these.

T
HE RED-TAILED HAWK HAD RISEN TO A THOUSAND FEET
again, flying over the ice-burnished flatland. It had veered miles eastward away from the big river, but now far below and ahead of it was another long, wide body of water, another flooded river. Down on that river, nosing slowly upstream among false channels and islands and thickets, moved a sixty-five-foot riverboat, her oars munching thin ice as she crawled slowly eastward.

The boat was the
Willing.
Yesterday afternoon Lieutenant Johnny Rogers, trying to keep to the channel of the Wabash in the boundless brown waters, had mistaken the current from the mouth of the White River for the current of the Wabash and had veered into the channel of the tributary. This morning the vessel was ten miles up the wrong river, creeping farther and farther
from Vincennes, and as yet neither he nor Duff, nor anyone else aboard, knew that they were climbing the wrong river. But the predominantly eastward progress was beginning to make Lieutenant Rogers uneasy. The only thing hereabouts on the map that tended so much eastward was the White River.

He stood on the afterdeck with his cloak drawn around him and squinted and watched the winter sun shimmer over ice and frost and sparkle in his own frosting breath and heard the oars’ crushing and the rattle of breaking ice along the hull.

Have we got off the cussed Wabash again? he wondered. He looked up and saw a speck moving in the sky. A hawk.

I wish I could be up there, he thought. Just long enough to look things over once, that’s all.

N
OW THEY HAD OVERCOME ALL THE OBSTACLES AND THEY
were here, and the fort stood squat and solid as a castle, lit from behind by the descending sun and its glare off the flooded Wabash. But George knew that the odds ahead of them were probably greater than the ones they had overcome already. That fort was well laid out and newly rebuilt, and could be expected to stand off a thousand attackers. Among its garrison was a company of British Regular Infantry, among the world’s best soldiers. Indians in the British pay came and went constantly, and reinforcements from Detroit could be expected down the Wabash at any time as the Hair-Buyer prepared his spring offensive. And Hamilton himself, George knew, was no sloth. That he had descended by surprise from Detroit upon Vincennes was proof that he was both shrewd and bold. That he planned to build an Indian force in the spring and drive all frontiersmen back over the Alleghenies proved that he was ambitious—likely as ambitious as George himself.

And here was George with this weakened force of guerrillas who, except for the cold blue flame of their vengeance, could hardly stand up. Surely most of their gunpowder was deteriorated by the weather. The gunboat, reinforcements, powder, food, and artillery originally calculated into his invasion strategy were not here, and God only knew where they were.

Orthodox strategy held that a fort could not be besieged without cannon and vastly superior numbers of troops. An orthodox strategist right now might look over this situation and advise George, since he could not retreat, to walk up to the fort and surrender. He smiled grimly at this notion.