From Sea to Shining Sea (63 page)

“Don’t! Novels will make ye silly! Life’s not like novels! Rowr!” And they would laugh at him and call him an old curmudgeon.

But one night he had drunk more than usual and his eyes were sad, and he had more to say. He gave his usual tirade against novels, but then he went on.

“If my life had been like a novel, it would’ve ended in the spring o’ ’79. Those happiest of my days. That’s th’ way novels end. I’ve seen a few of ’em, looked at ’em till I flang ’em down in disgust. A novel would’ve ended me right there: Victory, without one soldier’s death on my conscience. All the Indians quiet. Spring a-comin’, and me sailin’ ’round to the Missipp, to see my good friend the Spanish Governor, and my beauteous sweetheart. Larks and bluebirds singing all about. Sunlight on th’ river. Frenchmen serenading at their oars, me looking forward to an easy capture o’ Detroit. Aye, that’s how a novel would’ve ended me. But”—He scowled and shook a big forefinger. “Lives don’t stop at a nice place like novels do. Lives go muckin’ right along till all th’ glory’s gone. There’s always another battle. Friends and brothers and cousins die, and get killed useless-like. Government never sends what ye need. All your allies go in debt and get bitter. Your friend the Spaniard dies, and your poor orphaned sweetheart’s sent back to Spain while you’re far away chasin’ Shawnees.”

He paused, his mouth drawn down almost into a pout, his red-veined eyes scowling into the fire. He was quiet for a long
time as the girls waited for him to finish what he was saying. Finally, Elizabeth the romantic said:

“George? What
of
your sweetheart?”

“Sweetheart? Oh! Well, maybe that novel would end with him and his sweetheart sittin’ on a porch—a big, high porch with white pillars, looking over a river—watching the sun go down over the water.”

Lucy was looking at George curiously, shrewdly, sucking the inside of her cheek, but Fanny was laughing.

“No, George!
You’re
the one that’s silly!
Your
sweetheart, big silly general! The one you said they sent to
Spain
!”

“Silly, am I?” He drew back, looking comically indignant. He wished he hadn’t mentioned Teresa, and wondered if he’d spoken her name. “Silly, am I? Well, that proves what I said, for I’ve been tellin’ ye a
novel
!”

L
IEUTENANT
R
ICHARD
C
LARK
WAS
A
DAY’S
RIDE
OUT
OF
Louisville on the Old Buffalo Trace going toward Vincennes in a cold drizzle, and he was beginning to wish he had waited a day or two for an escort. George had always told him never to travel between the forts without a squad of men at least, because there were people aplenty, red and white, who would prize a scalp that had come off a Clark’s head.

Evening was coming on now and this strange, rolling, dipping, tranquil landscape grew eerie in the misty gloom. Dark shapes seemed to shift just off the eye-corners, and Dickie stopped his horse every few hundred feet to try to sort out something he kept thinking he detected in the margins of his hearing. But when he would stop, it would stop, and he had begun to believe that what he was hearing, if really anything, was the echoes of his own progress.

The Trace, trampled out for hundreds of years by migrating buffalo herds, was an easy road to follow and to ride. It was almost a highway—a wide, grassy, scrubby swath through the hardwood forest. Dickie had traveled it twice with George before the war’s end, and several times since with detachments of militiamen. And now this was his first time alone, and he wished he had been more careful. A road like this was always watched, and he felt—he could not shake off the feeling—that whoever the watchers were along here right now, they were watching him. But the watchers, if there really were any, were invisible. He could not tell whether they were following him, or in ambush somewhere ahead of him, or in the gloomy thickets to right or left of the Trace.

He was in the valley where the forks of the Blue River met, and not far ahead of him, though he could not see them through the mist, he knew there lay a range of steep hills full of caves and sinking rivers. George had shown him several caves just off the Trace where a man might come in out of the rain, build a fire, even keep his horse in shelter with him. Dickie was thinking of one of these caves in particular, one whose mouth was protected by a natural parapet of earth and a thicket of trees that would hide from bypassers’ eyes the glow of a fire built inside. He wanted to get to that cave tonight if he could because his clothes were wet and he was getting chilled, and if he was going to have to hole up in the vicinity of some unseen Trace-watchers, he wanted it to be in a place where he could defend himself.

So now he spurred his horse into a canter and prayed silently that if there were people stalking him, they were not between him and that cave.

T
HREE
HOURS
LATER
, D
ICKIE
WAS
BEGINNING
TO
SMILE
AT
the fears he had been feeling earlier. He lay in his blanket upon a pile of dry leaves on the floor of the cave, stomach full of venison jerky and johnnycake, two swallows of rum from his canteen making his eyelids grow heavy as he gazed at the small flames licking the end of an oak chunk in the coals of his fire. Tethered in the mouth of the cave a few feet away stood his horse. The oak burned with very little smoke, and that smoke rose to the ceiling of the cave and flowed up and out through the cave mouth into the night, as well-draughted as in a flue. Dickie could hear the rain still hissing in the leafless woods outside and snugged down further into the blanket, his pistols by his hip, his head propped on his saddlebags, and he was glad he had come to this cave instead of trying to make a camp in the open somewhere. Compared with those cold, wet woods, this cave was a paradise.

That thought entertained his sleepy mind for a while. He thought of home in Caroline County, the big, snug, handsome stone house he had been born and raised in, the beds with their clean sheets and fluffy goose-down comforters, and wondered what his mother would feel if she knew he was as blissfully grateful for these comforts of a cave as he had ever known to be for those of the house. The thoughts of his home and his mother made him homesick now, gave him a pang of longing for the family.

They’re all there but me, he thought. Even George is there.

He could remember those years before the war when he himself
had always been there and only George had always been missing, always out here on this side of the mountains. He rolled onto his back and watched the dying fire gleam on a trickle of moisture along a contour of the sooty, irregular ceiling of the cave. Farther back in the cave he could hear the tiny, echoing
ploip, ploip
of water dripping from the ceiling into a little pool. He tried not to think of the skeleton he had found back there. A human skeleton with a broken skull. That was one trouble with caves. They were such good places that every Indian and every renegade knew where they were. He tried not to think of this. He thought instead about how good it would be to see old George when he came back, and to hear the news of home. George had gone back for the purpose, among other purposes, of persuading the family to come out to Louisville town and settle on the beautiful lands he’d claimed for them, and Dickie was sure George would persuade them. George was some persuader.

Dickie remembered the night they had talked about making him an officer and about all the things they would have to do to hold the territory, and how true that had been, everything George had said. Dickie had been in several smart battles since he had joined George, and George had won them all, and had kept the territory together—all with virtually no help from the state. And Dickie had indeed become, as George had said he would, the travelingest lieutenant this side of the mountains.

Dickie was thinking these warm thoughts about George and the family when he went to sleep in the cave with rain falling outside in the dark.

He dreamed he heard a horse nicker, and it awakened him, and in the last small flare of the oak-wood fire he saw a devilface shining above him. His heart slammed once in his chest and a cry mounted to his throat but before he could grab a pistol the face moved quickly and Dickie felt a blade come through the blanket and between his ribs, and he felt it go into the core of his life.

C
HRISTMAS
CAME
. T
HE
C
LARKS
ALL
WALKED
OUT
TO
THE
oak grove to put a wreath of pine and holly and mistletoe on Johnny’s grave, on the white wooden cross with his name on it. A stone was being carved, but it was not ready yet. Then they went back for their last Christmas feast in the big stone house. George had divided his tracts of land near the Falls of the Ohio and had deeded the ones on the south bank to his father and to Jonathan. John Clark’s new farm in the West would be where the spring poured from the ground near a mulberry grove on a
hill. Jonathan would set out with George and Bill after Christmas, when they left with their surveying party. He would take a work party of skilled Negroes and they would start next spring to build John and Ann Rogers Clark a fine two-story house of mulberry logs. George showed them a drawing of it that he and Uncle George Rogers had designed. When John Clark sold the Caroline County place here, they would come across the mountains and down the Ohio, and their new home would be waiting for them, on the richest piece of land George had ever seen. “And I’ve seen a lot of land in my days.” There were thousands of people going every year to Kentucky now. And the Clarks would be the foremost family among them.

So now it was almost time to quit Virginia, and John Clark was as eager as a young man to go to the land his son had shown him a dozen years ago. The father was ready to follow in his son’s footsteps.

A
FTER
C
HRISTMAS
, G
EORGE
RECEIVED
SOME
MAIL
FROM
Richmond. One letter agitated him visibly. His family watched him scowl as he read. The State of Virginia, it said, could not honor his request for payment of the vouchers he had signed out West, because there was no sign anywhere of the itemized accounts he claimed to have sent to the Auditor’s Office in 1779. “By Heaven, I
did
send ’em,” he hissed. “Dickie was there, he’ll swear to it. By George Shannon with a strong guard I sent ’em, seventy packets full, and he brought me back their receipt! Well, we’ll see this gets resolved! Many a good patriot out there’s ruined, myself first, if some fool’s lost those!” He remarked too that the letter ignored his request for his officer’s pay for the duration of the war. Billy saw that George’s hands were shaking.

The other letter was from Governor Jefferson, and this one restored his good humor. “Well, what o’ this! They’re talking at the capital about sending a party of exploration up the Missouri, to seek a water way to th’ Pacific! Think o’ that! And he asks would I like to lead it! Well, if I haven’t dreamed o’
that
a thousand nights!” His eyes seemed to look through the walls and afar off. He was remembering a day at the Missouri’s mouth, his hand in the swift water. Teresa.

“Pacific! The Western Sea?” Billy breathed, his own eyes full of blue distances. “May … Maybe I could go with’ee?”

George winked. “Maybe so, but don’t load on your knapsack yetawhile. From what he says here, there’s not much hope they
can raise a fund for it. It’s another o’ Tom’s great daydreams. Like mine. By time it ever goes, I’ll likely be too old and feeble.”

“No, ye won’t! Not ever! We’ll go, George. I just know it!”

George squeezed Billy’s shoulder with a gruff, fond chuckle. “Ah! Aha! I do believe,” he told the family, “we’ve got us another Westerner here!”

T
HEY
SAT
ON
TRUNKS
IN
FRONT
OF
THE
COLD
FIREPLACE
OF
the library, John Clark and his wife, and looked at each other. The house echoed with distant footsteps and the voices of girls, with knocks and sounds of scooting. The light from the rain-spattered windows was pearl-gray.

He cleared his throat and the sound reverberated in the emptiness of the stripped room. “Eh, well, a cheery birthday to ye, Annie,” he said.

“Likewise to you, John. Cheery it is.” She took a long breath through her nose, then sighed heavily, looking around the room. Pale rectangles and ovals on the smoke-dulled walls marked where pictures had hung for years.

The hair showing under the edge of her bonnet was as much silver as red-gold now, but still as thick and wavy as that of a girl. The rims of her eyelids were pink and moist, and the end of her straight, narrow nose was ruddy. From the hallway now came the sounds of the girl’s voices and footsteps and rustling dresses as they went out the front door for the last time, and John Clark saw a great sadness in his wife’s face at these sounds. He gave a quick sigh then, and slapped his big, callused, blunt-fingered hand down on his thigh. “By Heaven, I do mean cheery!”

Her back stiffened slightly. “Aye, John. Cheery it is.” But this time she did smile. “A birthday is the start of a new life, isn’t that so?”

“Surely is in our case.” He raised his eyebrows, which were thick and black, sprinkled with white, and squinted one eye, and the furrows down his cheeks deepened as he tried to smile, but the smile went away and his black eyes gazed as if through the wall. His hair was almost white, thinning above his freckled forehead, and a few white hairs had fallen on the shoulders of his black frock coat.