From Sea to Shining Sea (73 page)

“How comes it we’re under way so early, Jonas?” William asked suspiciously.

“Just eager, I reckon. We all like Louisville a lot.”

“But …”

“Now, come on, Master Clark. I know y’ be some real river rat, but Mister Greathouse
can
run his boats without waitin’ for you t’ wake your sleepy head up. Ha. Ha!”

“N
OW, HUSBAND
,”
SAID
M
RS
. C
LARK
, “I
MUST ASK YE TO
step out for a spell, and I want you to stay by the door there and keep menfolks out, because I’m going to clean up these daughters o’ yours. Bundle up, for this likely will take us a couple o’ hours.”

“What!” He looked indignant, but he was happy and eager because he would be in Louisville this day and see his new home. “I’m to stand out in the cold and guard a door for ye, just so ladies can primp up?”

“John dear, this will be a sight more than primping. We’re going to clean right to the bone, and dress fresh from th’ skin out, for I’m not going to take riverboat vermin into our new house, nor am I going to step my daughters ashore in a new city lookin’ anything less than the princesses they are. Now, have Cupid come here and stoke up this fire, and send Venus in. I expect we’ve got to boil ten bushel o’ clothes, ere we get rid of all the creepy crawly creeturs that’s joined us on our migration.”

John Clark chuckled and went to fetch the servants. And soon the passenger quarters were full of soapy steam, naked, groaning, gasping girls, stewing petticoats, trunks spilling over with clean linen, clothing fragrant with camphor and cachets, and the smells of hot curling irons and scorching hair. Mrs. Clark assigned the girls each to search the other’s body hair for anything that moved, and to wash each other’s ears without mercy. The men of the Clark party and the crewmen smiled and winced and shook their heads at the chorus music of anguish, smoked their pipes, watched the high, gray bluffs glide by, and yearned for the comforts and pleasures of the town. The snow had turned to a cold rain, which hissed on the green surface of the broad river. “Ere long now,” Edmund was telling his father, “we’ll pass an island and the river will bend to the right, and there’ll be a few cabins, and looking down that bend ye should be able to see high up on the left just a glimpse of your new house. Just th’ roof is all. I hope they get finished with their tortures down there in time that they can come out and see it too.”

Suddenly William’s voice came down, chilling them: “I see a craft back there, followin’ us down. Can ye make it out, Mister Manifee?”

Instantly everyone was peering up the river, remembering the glow in the sky they had seen last night, remembering the noises that had alarmed them and caused them to slip from the mooring before daybreak.

It was a small vessel, just a speck in the sizzly mist of rain on
the river. Mr. Greathouse brought up his telescope and told all his crewmen to check their powder and keep their eyes peeled for canoes along the banks. “I’m damned if I let a pack o’ Shawnee stop me when I’m this close to Louisville. I come too far. Boys! Heads down when we run the narrows by th’ island!” It seemed likely that an ambush might have been set up there, where the barge would be in close range of either riverbank or island, and that the vessel now following would swoop down on the stern just then.

John Clark rapped on the door of the passenger quarters. “Get them dressed quick,” he called in. “There’s trouble a-brewin’!” Alarmed voices responded from within.

The great boat slid along at the river’s ponderous and unhurriable pace. The craft astern was gaining, its mist-blurred shape growing larger. “Odd,” Greathouse said after a while with his glass to his eye. “Oars. That’s no canoe, it’s a skiff. Just one man a-rowin’, it looks t’me.”

And a little later, as the barge was entering the narrow water to the left of a brushy island, all the men down behind rails with their rifles ready, scanning the close dark shores, a faint voice came down the river. It was from the little boat.

“He’s hollerin’ for help,” William said.

“Mebbe a decoy,” Manifee muttered. “They do that. A fool would heave to in the narrows here and wait to help ’em. Looks like they timed it thataway.”

“That is a white man,” Greathouse said. “Maybe a hostage decoy. Keep mid-channel, Jonas. Watch those shores, laddies! Master Clark, get down ahind of somethin’, if you please.”

Now Manifee was the only exposed figure on the superstructure, standing there alone and in plain sight in easy musket range of either side. It took guts to stand there, but it was necessary to keep a man on the sweep; to run aground in an ambushed bottleneck would be the worst kind of blunder.

Shivering, blinking rapidly, expecting anything, William crouched behind the siderail with his thumb on the flintlock of his rifle and watched the reddish willow-slips and yellow-brown reeds of the island glide by. The island was long, more than a mile, it appeared, and every drift-log that loomed in the corner of his vision looked like a concealed canoe. From behind the barge now, the white man’s voice was more distinct.

“Wait! Help me! Help us.”

“By th’ Eternal,” Greathouse’s voice said, “that’s Cap’n Elliot, sure as I breathe! Got womenfolk with ’im. Jack! Jaybo! Stand ready to take ’em on when we clear this island.”

Elliot! John Clark thought, remembering his old acquaintance, thinking of the poor dingy woman and child in the door of the log house yesterday, thinking of the fireglow in the sky. He stood up and started along the deck toward the stern, still holding his pistols in his hands.

“Pa!” Edmund hissed. “Down!”

John Clark bent a little at the waist but went on to the stern. Then he knelt there between two crouching riflemen and watched the little boat, watched it catching up, saw Elliot’s desperate but exhausted labors at the oars, watched the other huddled figures in the skiff.

And at last the downstream end of the island slipped astern, and Manifee put the sweep over to swing the big boat a little toward midstream, and the two crewmen at the stern stood up and put down their rifles, and the one called Jaybo picked up a coil of rope to throw to the little boat. “Here, Cap’n,” he called. And as the skiff drew close, Manifee’s voice muttered low and harsh:

“Oh, God damn. Oh, help them poor …”

John Clark and William were standing at the stern now and they winced at the miserable spectacle in the little boat.

In the bow lay a large, curved, fire-blackened lump. By its shape, and by the white teeth showing where cheeks had been burned away, it revealed itself to be the burned body of a man, drawn up in the shape of a stillborn infant. In places where the charred skin had been pulled loose, the cooked meat of muscle tissue showed through red and gray and brown.

Captain Bob Elliot had caught the thrown rope. His face was sooty and blistered; much of his beard and his eyebrows were singed away. The rags on his body were full of burn holes, and wherever skin showed, it was covered with huge blisters. He grimaced, teeth white in his blackened face, each time he hauled at the rope; his hands were like raw meat. The butts of the oars were black with dried blood and shreds of skin from his hands.

In the stern seat, looking at the barge with glassy eyes, were the woman and girl. They were sooty and abraded, hair hanging in wet strands, naked except for torn, burned cotton chemises gray-black with ash and clinging with wet to their bony bodies in the cold rain. The woman and little girl hugged each other for warmth and gaped at the big riverboat with their jaws hanging slack, as if they lacked the strength even to close their mouths.

And as they were being lifted one by one from the rowboat onto the barge, John Clark went, with tears in his eyes, to the shanty door. He went in. His wife and daughters were waiting
inside, all dressed in clean clothes, faces pink, worried, wondering what all the commotion was outside.

“Ann,” said John Clark, “brace yourselves now. Here come some poor wretches, and we’re going to have to make your room a hospital.”

Within fifteen minutes, all the Clark girls were working like nurses under the direction of their mother, sweating, their fresh dresses wilting in the hot room and stained with blood, soot, ointments, and tears.

Bob Elliot told the awful story to John Clark while Mrs. Clark was cleaning his burnt limbs and smearing them with one of her homemade salves.

The body in the boat was his brother. This brother, with three Negroes, had been at work behind the hill, clearing brush for spring planting, when Mr. Clark had come. “When he came down, learnt Mary’d turned y’away, he scolded ’er proper. She fixed ’em vittles, then took Sally t’ bed. Whilst they were at table, in bust the door. Shawnees. Tommyhocked ’em. Didn’t see Mary and Sally inside the bed curtain. Thank Merciful God. They slipped out the back door, hid down by th’ riverside. Dark by then. Murderers looted and scalped and set th’ house on fire. It was all on a blaze when I come upriver in th’ skiff from huntin’. I … I had to lay low till they all went screaming away. I was all of a despair, thought Mary and Sally was in there.”

He swallowed and blinked, breathed hard, gritted his teeth as Mrs. Clark spread ointment on his face, then went on.

“But thank Merciful God we found each other. Long time it was ’fore th’ house fell in, fire burnt out. I dug my brother out, what y’ seen there of ’im. Couldn’t find th’ darkies. Put ’im in the skiff an’ rowed since midnight about.” He stopped and swallowed several times, groaning in his throat. “Nothin’ left, Mr. Clark. No house, tools, furniture. Nothin’.”

“Nothing, you say? Your lives y’ call nothing? Shut your eyes now and pray thanks, Mister Elliot, for your precious lives.”

Elizabeth and Fanny were kneeling beside a bunk, washing and soothing Mrs. Elliot, while Lucy administered to the stunned little girl Sally. These two were not burned badly, as it was Mister Elliot who had dug in the coals for his brother. But Mary Elliot was too much in shock to speak yet, though she was trying to say something. Every time she would clutch Elizabeth’s arm and form her lips to say something, she would be so overcome with weeping that she could not say it. Elizabeth soothed her, tucked a blanket closer around her, gave her broth to sip. And when Ann Rogers Clark came to see how she was, Mary
Elliot was calmed enough to speak. She had lost her voice through exposure, but she could whisper.

“Forgi’ me. Forgi’ me, Ma’m.”

“Forgive ye what, poor dear?”

“I turned y’ away … turned y’ away from my door. I knew … I knew who your husband was. My Bob spoke so often how grand ye were. How grand your house is. In Virginny. How ye took ’im in, lent him horses. O, forgi’ me! I’d not seen grand folk in so long. I, I was backward. ’Shamed o’ th’ dirt. Hard bread. Spoiled meat. I just got so backward, got confused. ’Shamed. I told Bob’s brother I been, and he call’t me fool. I’m true sorry, Ma’m.”

“Oh, hush now. O’ course no man’d understand that. But I do. So you needn’t say another word on’t. Now rest easy and don’t try to talk.”

John and Ann Rogers Clark stepped out onto the rain-wet deck a little later. She was sweaty and dishevelled and stained for her arrival at Louisville. But of course that was unimportant now. The body of Captain Elliot’s brother lay wrapped in canvas and rope. William was up with Mister Manifee again. Edmund and Bill Croghan were standing at the rail watching the shore. They were quiet and grave. “Next bend o’ the river we’ll see the fort at Louisville,” Edmund told them. “We all forgot to look at the mulberry house back there. How the Elliots?”

“Barrin’ pneumonia, pray the Almighty, they’ll be all right,” said Ann Clark. “John, do I have your permission to take ’em in?”

“Take ’em in?”

“At Mulberry Hill, till they’re fit again. There’s room, if the house is as grand as all I’ve heard.”

“Oh! Oh, surely. I’ve already told Mr. Elliot they may.” He shook his head and gazed toward the shore. “He explained t’ me why she shut th’ door. She—”

“Aye. She told me, and begged our pardon.”

“Begged our pardon!” John Clark exclaimed, looking high over the bluffs and shaking his head. “Begs our pardon! While if she’d let us in, we’d surely all be dead in the ashes by now, like him!” He glanced down at the lump of canvas, and they looked, paling, just now realizing this. “Don’t ever say it to ’er,” John Clark added, “but th’ poor awkward thing was the salvation of us. Aye, she can stay with us the rest of ’er days, is what I say. Let’s bow our heads now and give thanks.”

*     *     *

“J
UBILATION
! W
HAT A LAND WE’VE COME INTO
!” J
OHN
Clark exclaimed as the army wagon rolled eastward up the slope from Louisville toward Mulberry Hill.

“Papa,” said Elizabeth, “am I just under a spell, or are those trees twice as big as Virginia trees?”

“I’ll swear they look it,” he said, reaching across in his excitement and squeezing her hand.

The seats in the army wagon were planks parallel with the wagon’s sides, so the passengers rode going sideways, facing each other. It was an odd feeling to ride that way. Elizabeth sat opposite her parents and between her sisters. She really did feel as if she were in some kind of an enchantment. It was like living in a novel. This morning there had been that terrible business with the fear of Indians and the rescue of the Elliots, and then they had landed at the wharf in the raw, sawdusty town of Louisville, and there had been that sudden great bustle of people down to greet the family of General Clark, and that princely Major Anderson bringing down the army wagon from the fort to carry them in, and now here they were going up through the gigantic landscape with an honor guard of mounted soldiers, and people running alongside calling happily to them.

But now the big horse pulling the wagon loosed wind again, loudly and richly, and Elizabeth had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. She could sense Lucy and Fanny almost bursting with hilarious embarrassment too. Here they were parading along like a royal family, and that big oaf of a dray horse just a-pootin’ and a-flutin’ as if it meant to keep this all from being too elegant. And that Major Anderson who was driving the wagon, he was trying to look so dignified through it all, tall and fair and fine-featured as a prince he was, but Elizabeth could see that his neck and ears were a flaming red, because of what that horse kept doing so unabashedly. Animals are so … so …
indifferent
, she thought. Elizabeth loved horses, and she loved this particular one especially now.