From Sea to Shining Sea (67 page)

“I
WAS
HERE
IN
’78,”
SAID
THE
INNKEEPER
,
POINTING
HIS
pipestem at John Clark across the table, “when that boy o’ your’n was here tryin’ to recruit his army. And never in my days have I seed Fate so stubborn against a man. Every single day I expected to see that lad just give up and go home.” The innkeeper had a greasy-looking head of graying auburn hair and a narrow, stubbly, undershot chin that canted to the right as if it had been knocked off center. He set the stem back between his teeth with a click, puffed, and went on: “But he had a way with people, and he could get the unlikeliest scoundrels all het up about doin’ great sarvice. I’ll say this, things were mighty quiet around here for a while after he’d left, as ’e’d signed on and took with ’im most every tavern-wreckin’, eye-gougin’, horse-stealin’, bear-rapin’ outlaw and general ring-tailed roarer from the whole countryside. I remember tellin’ ’im, ‘Colonel Clark, sir, y’ve got y’rself as felonious an army there as ever walked, and they’ll fair chew up y’r enemies and spit out their bones, if they don’t do th’ same to you first.’”

H
AVING
BEEN
ICE-LOCKED
FOR
A
WEEK
IN
RED
S
TONE
SET
tlement with their boats and cargoes, some of the rivermen were restless and unpleasant. At night they could be heard going roaring drunk up and down the street of the little town, breaking emptied jugs, kicking dogs, cursing each other with jovial familiarity or acid belligerence, and sometimes kicking each other if there were no dogs within reach. As a breed, these rivermen seemed to fight more with their feet than with their hands.

“Wonder why that is,” John Clark mused to Edmund one afternoon as they sat drinking rum near the door of the-public house. Outside, two big riverboatmen were trying diligently to crush each other’s private parts with spectacular, grunting kicks.

“I reckon,” Edmund observed, “it’s ’cause they won’t lay down their jugs long enough to free up their hands.”

That evening, though, in the dining room, a pair of burly flatboat pilots did show that their feet were not their only weapons. John Clark and his sons were sitting with Greathouse over a supper of venison stew, when the door leading down the guestroom corridor burst inward, torn off its hinges and splintered, and with it came the two pilots, locked together in a stamping, scuffling, careening embrace and emitting a double-voiced snarl that made them look and sound like some two-headed, four-footed beast trying simultaneously to tear off its own limbs and dance itself to death.

This apparition reeled across the room until it struck the end of the Clarks’ table and fell upon it, smashing crockery and sloshing venison stew in every direction.

And then the diners, sitting aghast and dripping stew, watched one pilot bite off the other’s underlip with bloody, seesawing teeth, while his victim broke all the fingers of the biter’s left hand.

“Of such,” said the innkeeper after the brawlers had been clubbed unconscious and repaired with splints and bandages, “was a considerable part of your son’s army made, Mister Clark. Less wonder ’e caught th’ British, eh?”

John Clark wiped stew off his weskit, gazed at the wrecked, blood-spattered table, and shook his head.

“Or else
more
wonder,” he replied.

A
NN
R
OGERS
C
LARK
WAS
AWAKENED
IN
DARKNESS
BY
DISTANT
shouting and running feet. Fanny was snuggling close to her in fright, and Mrs. Clark for a moment could not remember where she was. The bed was musty and the corn shucks of the mattress rustled under her. It had been ages since she had slept on corn shucks, and it seemed as if years had fallen away and she was a young woman back in Albemarle County. Then she remembered: Red Stone.

Under the voices there was a strange, deep, shuddering, grinding sound, so faint at first that only gradually did she become aware of it.

“I’m scared, Ma. What is it?”

“Maybe just a little earthquake, Fanny girl. Nothing to be scared by.” She hugged Fanny and patted her shoulder. If it was an earthquake, it was doing little quaking.

She saw a line of lamplight under the door and heard the board floor creak somewhere. The people of the house were getting up. Good. “Stay here, darlin’. I’ll go see.”

She slipped out from under the quilts into the icy air and, shivering, groped with her feet to find her slippers. She drew a woolen robe on over her nightdress, patted her cheeks to give them color, and made her way to the door of the bedchamber and opened it. Mr. and Mrs. Howell, her hosts, were up. He was pulling on a cloak in the lamplight and she was laying new wood in the fireplace. Mr. Howell smiled.

“Good news for ye, Ma’m. Th’ ice is a-breakin’ up.”

T
HE
THAW
WAS
NOT
ALL
GOOD
NEWS
TO
G
REATHOUSE
AND
the other boatmen. Slabs of drifting ice during the night had jammed against pilings and moored boats. Dawn’s light revealed a jagged, shifting mass of pan ice stacking itself three and four feet high among the vessels, grinding and shuddering in the river current. Some of the big flatboats were being tilted up as the ice shoved heavily under them; others lay hull-down in the ice, being slowly squeezed until their seams gaped and popped. Two large freight boats, one of them belonging to Greathouse, were becoming keel-hogged as the ice jam wedged under them and lifted their bows.

Through the morning of a gray-warm November day, scores of boatmen swarmed over the boats and the dangerously slippery ice, wielding axes and pikes, prying and hacking at the blue-green ice, rigging tackle and windlasses with desperate ingenuity to pull boats this way and that, shouting curses and warnings with the same ferocity they had given to their drunken binges in the past week. As if this were but another kind of brawl, the rivermen kept themselves fired up on jugged fuel while they worked, and a few who overvalued their sense of balance had to be fished, blue and gasping and suddenly sobered, out of the icy water.

By twilight the crisis was past. Three large vessels had sunk in the shallows and would have to be raised. Several others would require extensive caulking before they would be serviceable.

“Ask the Lord,” Greathouse said to John Clark, “not to freeze up the river again until that’s done. I doubt ye want to winter here or at Fort Pitt when y’ got a new home a-waitin’ in Kentucky.”

The Clark family’s belongings were loaded onto a repaired flatboat at daybreak two days later. John Clark sold his three wagons on the spot, to a teamster who was hauling hides and furs west. The Spanish squeeze of the lower Mississippi had increased the freight traffic up through Redstone, and wagons were at a premium.

Much of Red Stone’s population was down on the riverfront to
see off the family and the first flotilla of boats to leave since the freeze. The girls picked their way through the mud of the riverbank and tottered cautiously up the gangplank while the villagers called their names and bade them farewell. Mrs. Clark then marched slowly up the plank, steadied by the noseless man, who reached a long arm to her. “Thankee, Mister Manifee,” she said, stepping onto the plank deck.

She stood there blinking in the chill of morning, now and then waving vaguely to the waving figures on the shore. Ropes and pulleys creaked, booms swung overhead, bundles and kegs, crates of chickens, bags of seed, slung in rope nets, were raised from shore and lowered into barges, as boatmen sang out loud, firm directions: “Hold, hold, hold. Easy now, easy now. Off left, off… there she be! Lower awayyy.”

The boat smelled of fresh pitch, oakum, woodrot, stagnant bilgewater, animal dung, smoke, hemp, tobacco, tannin, and fish, and that singular dank pungency that is simply and unmistakeably old riverboat.

The Clark men came aboard then, and finally, Greathouse, whooping orders to cast off. Thick ropes were thrown through the air and thumped against wood. Goats bleated, chickens squawked, horses whickered, people yelled. Men on shore leaned on long poles thrust against the boat hulls, and slowly, slowly, shoved them out into the current. The boats began to move silently on the green water, at the river’s own pace, and the little fort and town grew smaller, smaller, at the foot of the long gray hill.

John Clark stood close to his wife and they watched the people move on the distant shore, watched the plank rudder at the end of the twenty-foot hickory sweep adjust ponderously left and right in the burbling water to guide the vessel toward midstream. Two barges and a smaller flatboat of Greathouse’s fleet lined themselves up astern. A whiff of wood smoke from the chimney of the flatboat shanty whirled down. The girls were leaning with their arms on the gunwales, studying the water below thoughtfully. William was already on the roof of the shanty with the noseless Mr. Manifee, who was manning the sweep, talking with him about the river and learning about steering. The Clarks had not seen much of William at Red Stone; he had been schooling himself all day, every day, on boat building, ropes, knots, river navigation, loading cargo, manifests, caulking, and the terminology of river shipping.

Greathouse came out of the shanty looking anxiously at the sky, which was bright with a thin, shimmering overcast. The air
was bitter cold, full of the hint of snow and more freezing. “When ye so desire,” he said, “there’s hot water for tea or toddy.”

“Thankee,” said Mrs. Clark. “Again, Mr. Greathouse, how far to Pittsburgh?”

“Not twenty leagues,” said Greathouse. “We’ll put in there tomorrow midday, I reckon, barring anything unforeseeable.”

“Eh, well,” John sighed, gazing back. “Fare thee well, Virginny.” He turned to her. “What would’ee have, Annie? Tea, I’d reckon?”

“Nay, John.” Her eyes were misty. “Meseems this is the time for a toddy.”

“Well said. Two toddies, then, Mister Greathouse.”

“Make that three, sir,” said William’s voice from above.

T
HE
M
ONONGAHELA WOUND IN GREAT LOOPS THROUGH
the grim mountains. At each turn another silvery curve would come into view, smooth as glass, or sometimes boiling over shallows and shoals. Manifee’s tutelage of young William went on like an apprenticeship. “Y’ can misgauge an outside bend like this all too easy,” he would say, “and swing too wide. Be under that bluff afore y’ knowed it. Watch this now.” He put his chest against the sweep and lunged toward the starboard side, forcing the rudder hard to port. William gasped; there was a rocky shoal just alongside and, thinking Manifee hadn’t seen it, he expected them to be aground at once.

But the vessel responded so sluggishly that it was past the shoal before the bow began to come around. And William saw that if Manifee had waited a moment longer to jam the sweep, they would indeed have run under the bluff on the outside curve of the bend.

Manifee handed the sweep over to William that afternoon, telling him to steer according to what he thought he’d learned, but to look lively and be ready to do anything he was told to do whether it looked right or wrong.

As the afternoon wore on, William made no mistakes, and Manifee did not have to shout at him once.

“I do b’lieve y’re born to it, lad,” said the noseless man.

M
OST OF THE
M
ONONGAHELA SHORELINE WAS STEEP WIL
derness. But on the bottomlands and low bluffs they would see a cabin now and then, a faint pennant of chimney smoke, the yellow-brown stubble of a harvested corn patch dotted with dark tree stumps, a skiff or pirogue drawn up on the shingle, a horse
or cow, a man carrying a hunting rifle, a woman carrying a pail. In some of these clearings there stood only chimneys. John Clark now stood at the starboard gunwale with a mug of steaming toddy, watching the landscape slide past and the afternoon deepen. One of the slaves scooped a shovelful of horse dung from the foredeck and pitched it over the side into the river, then another, and another. Its smell was dense and rich in the chilling evening air. The horses stamped hollowly on the thick deck planks as the slave moved among them. Then John Clark felt the sting of snowflakes on the side of his face.

“Damnation!” Greathouse had appeared beside him and was squinting into the snowfall. It was not a blizzard, of the sort that had struck the Clarks in the mountain pass, but it was a nearly opaque cloud of drifting whiteness which obviously was going to make further progress this afternoon impossible. The small, hard snowflakes hissed into the dark water and vanished. “Steersman,” he growled, “put us in at the Willow Island.”

“I’ll take ’er,” Manifee said to William. “This next is a bit tricky.”

“I’m a-willin’ to try,” William said.

“Give me it,” Manifee said, snatching the sweep and scowling, so suddenly in a changed mood that William was startled, speechless, afraid he had somehow annoyed his new friend and teacher.

John Clark had seen and overheard this and, when William came morosely down from the roof, took him aside.

“It’s just something y’ll have to learn, Son,” John said, putting an arm over his shoulders. “Takin’ charge o’ things is a delicate business. Sometimes y’ve just got to stay in the second place.”

T
HEY WERE TIED UP IN THE NARROW BACKWATER BEHIND A
long, sandy island that night, all sleeping or sitting in the fetid confines of the overheated deck shanty. What affability Greathouse had exhibited earlier was gone. Now he was unhappy and was making no effort to hide it; here they were halfway between Red Stone and Pittsburgh, blinded by snow and darkness while the river froze around them. The boats might or might not be damaged by this new freeze, but it was a distinct possibility that they would.

The family lay awake a good part of that night, uneasy in this unfamiliar circumstance, hearing water gurgling under them, hearing seams creak, thinking they could hear water trickling in the hull. Greathouse was up at all hours, sighing loud, exasperated sighs, stepping over and on sleepers, clinking a rum bottle
every hour or so as he refilled his cup, letting in blasts of icy air every time he opened the shanty door to go out and check the freezing. It was a bad night, which ended just before first light when Greathouse stumbled in, issued a stream of riverman’s profanity and announced that they were “froze God-damned fast,” heaved himself onto his cot, broke wind loudly three or four times to the embarrassment of the womenfolk, and then passed out.