From Sea to Shining Sea (69 page)

Little by little the weight came toward him from under the ice. It was dreadfully inert, not struggling at all. He felt he was pulling up a dead body.

There were familiar voices around now. He got Fanny’s blank pale face above the surface and simply tried with the last of his strength and consciousness to hold it above water. The horse seemed to be sinking now. William’s head was going blank. Now he could not tell whether he was holding anything or not; all was numbness and shuddering. Then there was nothing.

F
OR SEVERAL HOURS THAT NIGHT, IT WAS DOUBTFUL THAT
Fanny would survive. She had regurgitated water and had kept up a shallow kind of breathing, scarcely perceptible under the violent shuddering. Mrs. Clark and William had come around quickly, though both had suffered severe chill and shock.

After they had been hauled out of the river, all three had been wrapped in blankets and coats and carried with difficulty to the cave. There their limbs had been rubbed and their frozen clothing removed, a huge bonfire had been built, and they had been dosed with whiskey. Pneumonia had seemed likely for all three, but by midnight William was able to sit up before the fire and drink broth, weak but not ill. God, he thought. George was in ice water for days, going to Vincennes. God!

As soon as she was able to move, Mrs. Clark got up, wrapped in blankets, and went to the place beside the fire where Fanny lay. She lay down beside her and drew all the blankets around them so that her body would warm her daughter’s. She looked at the delicate features, at the face white as paper; she listened to the slight, gurgling breathing; she held the frail and clammy little body along her flank and willed her own warmth into it. She thought briefly of the gray, icy, churning moments when they had been on the very edges of their lives, and she thought of that hand that had come down to pull her back to life and air. Once again Billy had acted, and they were all still alive.

She lay holding her daughter and thinking about that thin edge over which a life can fall so easily. She thought about how fragile life is but how tenacious it could prove to be as well. Incidents that might kill a body one day can be survived another day.

I’ve seen it so often, she thought, seen that guts and will are all we have to protect us from the fateful things.

So much I’ve seen in half a century. So much.

Come now, Fanny. Come, baby girl. Guts and will, that’s all ye need. And if ye’ve not enough o’ your own, have mine. That’s what I’m for, my baby.

W
HEN MORNING CAME
, F
ANNY WAS STILL BREATHING
. A
ND
she had color in her cheeks now, but it was the flush of fever. She could whisper, but talking hurt her throat. She wanted to know however she would be able to ride. William came up with an answer. He had once heard Brother George describe a wooden frame that the Indians used to trail behind a horse to carry loads, even sick and wounded people.

And so he and Edmund went out into the piercing-cold woods with axes and ropes, and cut saplings to make a
travois
. The family and slaves then breakfasted on hot pone and reloaded the animals, and set off up the bank of the Monongahela for the last dozen miles to Fort Pitt, with Fanny jouncing along wrapped like a mummy in blankets and strapped on the
travois
. They stopped once about noon to make a hot broth for the girl, then continued on, and by midafternoon they could see the mouth of the Monongahela and look up at the cabins and stone houses of Pittsburgh and the long earthworks and palisades of Fort Pitt, and smell woodsmoke of the town.

“Thanks be to heaven,” John Clark said. “We’ll have care for our darlin’ inside an hour.”

The site of Pittsburgh was imposing and solemn. The winter-stark mountains crouched behind it; the town lay clustered on a prominent wedge of land in the Y formed by the joining of the Monongahela and the Allegheny rivers, and the fort brooded above the village like some grim old castle: high earthen redoubts and salients now snow-covered; earthen walls topped with
long rows of pointed logs, ditches and dry moats, thick log blockhouses, crenellations with the dark muzzles of cannon sticking through them to command the rivers and the roads. There was something terribly lethal about such a structure in the eyes of Ann Rogers Clark, and even though its walls meant shelter and security, she did not like the look of a fort. She thought of her sons who, so recently as soldiers, had had to hurl themselves at such monstrosities in the course of that long war.

They rode toward the hulking place from the east, and it was silhouetted by the glare of the setting sun off a wide expanse of river ice. Edmund pointed. “The Ohio,” he called back to the other riders. “Yonder’s our Ohio River!” There it was, the road to their faraway new home in Kentucky.

They rode on, now through cleared fields with rustling cornstubble sticking up through the snow, along rail fences, past farmhouses and stables and orchards on their right, and wharfs and rickety piers jutting into the frozen Monongahela on their left, with flatboats and galleys iced-in fast. A curtain of smoke hung over the whole area, yellowing the sun, and away to the westward, down through its hills and bluffs, ran the frozen mirror of the Ohio, out and out into the frontiers. Now they began to encounter sledges on the road, heaped with firewood, pulled by steam-snorting oxen. Down by a boatyard on the riverside, a plank-saw rasped slowly, steadily. Now to the right, almost under the shoulder of the fort, some outdoor fires billowed blue smoke, and amid the smoke stood perhaps a dozen cone-shaped tents, the camp of some visiting Indians. Men on horses came past now, some dressed as gentlemen, some looking half-soldierly, others wrapped in skins like savages; these people stared at the Clark entourage, at the
travois
carrying the swaddled figure, at the Negroes straggling behind. Some of the men would tip their hats as they rode by; others would simply stop and gawk, particularly at the pretty faces of Lucy and Elizabeth; still others appraised the handsome Virginia horses they rode, or peered closely at the men’s faces. It was a way men had got about them since the war, a constant lookout for old comrades.

“Billy,” said Edmund, “trot on into the fort by that postern gate there and find us the whereabouts of a doctor, quick, now.” He turned to his father as William sprinted away across the snow. “A shame that General Irvine isn’t still commandin’ the fort. He was a physician himself. But I’m sure there’ll be one here. And if not, Ma can take care of her here. She knows more remedies than any doctor, d’ye ask me.”

They watched William disappear inside the gate.

And not half a minute later he reappeared, still running at full tilt. “What the devil?” muttered Edmund. “He hardly took time to turn around.”

“Lucy!” William was calling. “Lookahere!”

And then they saw another figure come running after him, full tilt out the gate with cape flying. Lucy was craning to see what this was about, and then she recognized the running man; her blue eyes widened and her mouth went into a little O. She threw her right leg over the horse’s withers and slid off to the ground in a billowing of skirts, leaving old Rose alone, terrified, on the horse. She ran forward past her father and past Edmund, then past her brother William, all propriety forgotten, and now Bill Croghan was laughing as he ran toward her, and they fairly collided in the road, arms around each other, Bill Croghan swinging her in a circle and then setting her on her feet and holding her and looking into her eyes and smiling still bigger, then blinking and swallowing and finally saying, as the rest rode up exclaiming wonder and greetings, “Lucy girl, Lucy girl, oh my God, oh, you beauty!”

It was clear that his days of calling her “Little Brother” were over.

The Clark entourage was herded into the fort in a hubbub of greetings and questions, requests and commands. George, in preparation for their arrival, had sent Bill Croghan up to Fort Pitt to greet them and escort them down the Ohio. George himself had been unable to come because in his role as Indian Commissioner he was arranging a midwinter council with the Ohio tribes. He and Croghan had been occupying Mulberry Hill, keeping it warm and its pantry stocked, when they were not on the trails surveying or meeting with Indians. “It’s a splendid place. George says the first Christmas there will be the best Clark Christmas ever,” Croghan reported. “He’ll be there for it, he vows.”

The most pressing business now, though, was Fanny, and Croghan had good news: Here at the fort this very week was one of the best physicians on the Continent, one of General Washington’s own army surgeons, Dr. Jim O’Fallon. “He was at Valley Forge with us,” Croghan said, and he sent an orderly running across the parade ground to fetch the doctor from his lodgings.

There would be quarters aplenty for the patient and her family. The fort had barracks and houses enough for several companies, but since the disbanding of the army after the war, only twenty regular soldiers were here, under command of a major.
The major was almost frantic in his concern for the Clarks’ comfort; he had been a junior officer under Light Horse Harry Lee, and to him Jonathan Clark was no less a hero than George.

The quarters were Spartan but clean: a large room for the Clark men, another for the women, and a small, attached room for Fanny. Dr. O’Fallon arrived at once, a charming Irish fellow who seemed to have great confidence in himself. He was a physician of the leeches-and-garlic school of medicine. Finding her pulse high, he immediately bled her with the repulsive parasites, leaving them on her arm until they were swollen like plums. He then put salt on them to loosen their hold and remove them, and daubed the leech bites with a disinfectant paste of gunpowder and whiskey. Then he made a hot, stinking poultice of mashed garlic for her to breathe through, and prescribed that she must sleep sitting up, wearing a necklace of garlic cloves.

So far he’s done just what I’d ha’ done, Ann Rogers Clark thought, so he must be a fair proper physician.

It soon-became apparent that Dr. O’Fallon would lavish even more attention on his patient than her own mother would have. He came to the quarters a dozen times a day to see how she was. At first everyone presumed that he was simply showing the usual solicitude the Clarks had come to expect from old comrades-inarms of their famous sons. But Elizabeth was the first to suggest that something else lay at the heart of it. “The poor fool’s just gone fond-foolish over ’er,” she said.

“Oh, nonsense,” scoffed Lucy. “Y’re imagining things, like some silly novel reader. She’s scarce twelve yet!”

“You’d never notice it yourself ’cause you can’t see anything but Bill Croghan,” Elizabeth retorted. “But that doctor’s gone simple over Fanny.”

“You’re just green-eyed ’cause ye fancy him yourself,” Lucy said.

“That’s not so. But mark my word, under all that fever-sweat and garlic-stink, he sees somethin’ he likes a whole lot, and she knows it, too. She’s not too sick to see what she’s a-doin’ to him. Why, she asked me not an hour ago if the fever makes her cheeks look pink!”

Bill Croghan pulled his attention away from Lucy long enough to report the news from downriver and dispense advice from George. Dickie had not been found yet, and George was spending all the time he could with an armed squad searching along the Trace for a sign of him. And every hunter and runner and bush-loper who frequented that trail had instructions to keep eyes and ears open and to inquire among the friendly Indians.
Still, nothing. “Well,” said John Clark, “we’ll just keep right on praying.”

“We should go downriver in as large and well-armed a body as we can,” Croghan said. “Some bands, Shawnee in particular, have been preying on riverboats this fall. George forewarned me not to bring you down without a sizeable escort. He said too to keep a keen weather eye, and not leave Pitt if an early winter threatens. Unless there’s a general melt in the next week, we’d best resign ourselves to stay here till the spring thaw.”

“To my mind,” Ann Rogers Clark said, “it’s Fanny who determines whether we stay or go. Whether she’s got the pneumonia.”

By the end of a week the rivers had thawed, but Fanny was not well enough to go on.

Greathouse came down the Monongahela two days after the thaw. His boats were leaking badly from the pressures of the ice and had to be unloaded and hauled up for caulking. The Clarks had their belongings near at hand again now, in a rat-infested warehouse by the boatyard. The sky cleared and the temperatures fell, and again the Ohio was frozen hard. Fanny was improving, but still too weak from the bleedings, Dr. O’Fallon said, to travel. “So,” said John Clark, “let’s make the best of it. We seem to be here for the winter. Edmund, next trip down to the warehouse, fetch that nice backgammon board Colonel Mason gave us. I’ll wager, if we practice all winter, we’ll be able to play the breeches off George when we get to Kentuck.”

But they had less time for backgammon than they might have expected. Pittsburgh did not give them much idle time. The town, raw though it looked, had its little society, and the society knew that the Clarks of Virginia were present, with their illustrious name, with their comely daughters. Pittsburgh society was a mixture of the crude and the genteel. It was a funnel for news, gossip, and rumor pertaining to everything and everyone passing to and from the west. And so it happened that the Clark family spent its Christmas of 1784 in the society not of Louisville, but of Pittsburgh. Their host was a Pennsylvanian, Colonel Neville, who had helped George obtain provisions three years before, during one of his futile efforts to raise an expedition against Detroit. A large and merry entertainment was held in the Colonel’s home, and by now Fanny had recovered enough to attend. Dr. O’Fallon was present, and he watched her as closely as if she were still mortally ill. Whenever she was approached by any young buck of the town, or danced with one, the doctor would break away from any conversation he was in to come and
see how she was feeling, or to admonish her against exhausting herself.