From Sea to Shining Sea (74 page)

The major was from the Hanover County Andersons, practically neighbors back in old Virginia. He had been to the Clark house with Jonathan long ago, but Elizabeth had been just a child then and couldn’t remember him. He was probably fifteen or twenty years older than she. Yet there was something about that careful dignity of his, and about the way he had looked at her when he met them at the wharf, something that had made her feel a way she had never felt before: a kind of strange, wild, mischievous impulse to snatch his hat off and put it behind her back until he lost all his dignity and ran after her begging for it,
blushing. She had had that impulse to make him blush, but of course she would never have done such a naughty thing, as she was the most proper of John Clark’s daughters. But now that awful, wonderful old horse up there was doing it for her, making that princely officer blush.

Well, it was such a funny and unexpected thing, all so light and silly, and Elizabeth found herself so uncommonly amused and titillated by it. Somehow the meeting of this princely officer, here in this rough new town in the magnificent countryside, had cast her into a storybook mood, like something in a novel, in which the most fetching people always appear just at the most exciting times.

“Now here we go up to Mulberry Hill!” announced Edmund, who sat on the driving seat beside Major Anderson. The wagon was turning off the muddy public road onto a side road, an uncommonly pretty side road, rather like an avenue, with a footpath and two rows of young locust trees on each side of the carriage way. A high, handsome wooden gate was visible at the far end. John and Ann Rogers Clark were now craning in their seat, their mouths open. “Oh,” she was saying, “it’s impressive, and it’s Jonathan’s doin’s, if I know him!” She looked as if she couldn’t make up her mind whether she would laugh or cry.

“It’s so,” said Edmund. “His crowning touch, just before he left. He thinks people should know they’re comin’ someplace uncommon, and by Heaven, they will know it, won’t they?”

“Aye, but the
land
!” John Clark exclaimed. “Look at this
land
!” To the right of the avenue were fields already cleared, and on the left was a deep hardwood forest, with poplars and walnut trees and oaks five feet through the trunks. “Stop here, please, Major! We want down.”

The wagon stopped and the rest of the caravan stopped behind it—the furniture wagons, the wagon with the servants, the wagon with the poor, bandaged Elliots in it, the horses that William Clark and Bill Croghan were riding. Gaping like a wondering child at the vista of the great river far below, old John Clark climbed down from the wagon and helped his wife and daughters down, and then he walked slowly, softly off the road and into the wet spring grass among the locusts.

“Feel that! Smell that,” he exclaimed. “Step on this soil and it breathes up at you!” Beside one of the locust trees he knelt on the ground. With his big hands cupped he scooped up the dark, moist soil, and crumbled it between his thumbs and fingers, murmuring, “Mmmmmmh! Mmmmmh!” And then he brought it up in his palms and put his face in it and breathed of it.
“Down here,” he said. And they all understood him and knelt near him. Elizabeth, imagining that Major Anderson was looking at her from back at the wagon, now felt the ground-damp soak cold through to her knees. With crumbs of earth still on his face, John Clark said, “O Almighty God, help us to be good custodians of your fruitful soil. Amen.” And then he sat back on his heels and exclaimed with a wide-eyed smile, “Looks to me like, after you put a seed in that ground, you’d better jump back! Ha, haaaaa! Now! Let’s go up and taste that spring water!”

The spring was likewise to his taste, and now they were within a few yards of the house, and the girls simply broke away and made a run for it. It was an imposing place, so long and steep-roofed that it looked more massive even than their great stone house in Caroline. The yellow-gray logs were two to three feet broad, yet dove-tailed so precisely at the corners that they might have been done by a clockmaker. There were porches front and back, and at each end stood a great stone chimney. The house, springhouse, smokehouse, servants’ row, stables, and the stone kitchen house were all enclosed by a white-painted five-plank fence, the only painted fence they had seen either in Louisville or on the ride out. All the windows of the house had glass panes and thick oaken shutters. “Lordy, it could be a fort!” William cried from somewhere.

“Mama, you should be the first in the house!” Elizabeth called from the broad front porch, “as it’s to be your domain!” To Elizabeth it had always seemed that way; her father’s domain was the land. From here on the porch now, Elizabeth was seeing the vista that George had first seen: the splendid woods and meadows sloping away down into the great broad river valley, the high, dark bluffs opposite, the white water of the Falls downstream.

And up the flagstones of the doorpath came her mother now, tall and important as a queen, though her skirts and sleeves were smudged with soot and ointment and blood. John Clark came walking at her side, in that way of his with his hand at the small of her back so that it seemed he was leading her and at the same time following her. Bill Croghan was coming up the path behind them, and Lucy had run to join him, and, Elizabeth saw, he was walking her in that same protective way. Down at the wagon, Major Anderson was off the wagon and among the honor guard as they dismounted. In her fancy now Elizabeth foresaw herself walking with Major Anderson touching her waist just so—and suddenly felt the heat of a flush on her own face.

Their steps resounded in the wide central hall. “Just like home!” John Clark exclaimed. There was the sideboard halfway
down the hall. And though the house was of hewn logs, the doors and banisters were all planed and rabbeted and fluted. It was plain that Louisville had fine craftsmen already.

“Just
like
home?” Ann Rogers Clark retorted. “It is home!” They made a quick tour of the three stories. On the top floor were two garret bedrooms with dormer windows. These would be the girls’ rooms. Elizabeth stood in a dormer window and looked down at the soldiers near the wagon. Major Anderson was standing in front of the dray horse, stroking its throatlatch, and it looked as if he were talking to the animal. Fanny was sitting in the window seat of another dormer, crying, “Oh, a body can just see all the world from here!” Footsteps were thundering everywhere in the house, and Ann Rogers Clark’s voice was saying, “… must get the rugs in, just right away.”

George’s belongings were in one downstairs room, Bill Croghan’s in another. Mrs. Clark stood looking in at her son’s worldly posessions: a chest, a trunk of books, a cot, an extra pair of boots, one uniform on a clotheshorse, a jug, a writing box, a sheaf of maps on a field desk. It’s not much property for the main gent of a territory, she thought. But then he’s never had a place to light, always been on the move. George was gone now, had been gone for more than a week, Major Anderson had told them, off on some business of the Indian Commission. John Clark stood beside his wife in the doorway of the spartan room, and said, “It’s going to make me very happy to have that boy under our own roof a while again after these dozen years.”

I
T WAS ANOTHER WEEK, AND ALL THE FURNITURE WAS IN
place, when George came riding up the road one rainy day with a squad of hard-looking men-at-arms, all mud-spattered and haggard and unshaven, returning from Vincennes. “Welcome at last to Kentuck, old family,” he boomed. He was grinning a grin that looked more like a grimace; there was something pained in his eyes. He wrapped his mother in a teary-eyed bear hug, and held her that way for a long time, patting her back and swaying her from side to side. Then he hugged his father, then William, and with his arms over Edmund’s and Bill Croghan’s shoulders praised them for getting the family down safe. Lucy kissed his stubbly cheek and then fussed that he was as stickery as a raspberry patch. Elizabeth hugged him and told him he had surely found for them the most perfect homesite in all the country. “Ah, you’re more beauteous than ever,” he told her, “and kind with your words, which makes ye twice so.” Fanny squeezed
him around the waist, her eyes squinted tight with the effort of the squeeze, and said:

“I can see from my window, the place where you want your house to be, on that dark promontory above the Falls. You should want to live closer to us!”

He laughed, and held her at arms’ length. “Promontory!” he exclaimed. “What kind o’ language is that for a girl o’ twelve? Well, listen, Fanny, I’m too busy to build a house yetawhile, so I’ll be livin’ as close as ye’ll want: I mean right here.”

Then they had their old style of a reunion, with toasts at the sideboard. He sent his riders around to the kitchen house to be fed, then he toured through the house with the family, cheerfully acknowledging how they had placed everything to make it a home, carrying a brandy in his hand, asking them how they liked this and that. But his mother could see that he was distracted, that there was something glum underneath; he was behaving as if he were just letting them have their jollity out and trying not to spoil it. At last, having him in a corner somewhere, she asked him if there was something heavy on him.

“Aye, mostly to do with the Indian business, but never you mind it.”

Later, though, when he was alone with his parents, he told them.

Coming back from Vincennes, he and his riders had combed the lands along the Buffalo Trace, and they had queried all the friendly Indians in the vicinity.

And then somewhere near the Forks of the Blue River, he said, they had turned up some horse bones, and the remains of a saddle with the initials R.C. branded in it. “Dickie’s saddle,” he said. His mother closed her eyes, her face paling. His father’s jaw muscles clenched. George said:

“It doesn’t mean we should stop prayin’. It might mean though that the prayin’ won’t ever be answered.”

W
ILLIAM
C
LARK STOOD SWEATING, ARMS FOLDED, WATCHING
the furious Shawnee and listening to his hissing and snarling and shouting. The tension in the council house was like a finger on a hair-trigger. William eased his hands secretly over the butts of the pistols in his belt, his father’s fancy pistols. He was aware that he was in greater danger than he had ever been in before and probably ever would be in the future—as there very well might be no future. William had talked his father into letting him come with George to the council with the Shawnees here at Fort Finney, and now he was almost wishing his father had not let him come.

The large council room smelled of new wood, tobacco, and the body musk of seventy Indians, Delawares and Wyandots as well as Shawnees. Brother George and two other Indian Commissioners, General Butler and Mr. Parsons, sat behind a table at the end of the room, and a dozen white soldiers and officers stood along the side walls, all drawn tight as fiddle strings, their eyes darting over the crowd of seated savages.

The shouting Indian, a tall, sinewy Shawnee chieftain, was standing in front of the treaty table, practically on tiptoe, his nostrils distended and his eyes sparking, holding in one hand a peace belt of white beads and a war belt of red beads. Under a breastplate made of rows of colored quills, his chest was rising and falling rapidly. He was talking so fast and so hatefully that spittle was bubbling in his mouth-corners. The translator was having trouble keeping up with him, but the gist of his tirade was plain enough to William and to everybody: He was telling the Commissioners in effect that they could take the terms of their treaty and go bury them where the dog buries his waste. This outburst was stunning; it was the first breach of ceremony in all the days of the council. The negotiations heretofore had been serious and tough, but amiable. The Delaware and Wyandot chiefs, and the old toothless Moluntha, chief of the Maykujay Shawnees, had listened respectfully to the Indian Commissioners, and had kept the younger hotbloods, such as this one, under control. They had acknowledged that their warriors’ raids into Cain-tuck-ee were causing distress not just to the whites, but
to their brothers in the peaceable tribes. They had professed a yearning to lay down the tomahawk. They had agreed that many white women and children they held captive were guilty of nothing and should be returned to their families. It had all been amiable, and William had met and learned to respect many of the Indian chiefs and chieftains, and had even joined with braves and squaws in the incredible excitement and abandon of one of the evening entertainments, a kind of copulation dance, in the Indian village near the fort. But just this morning George had cautioned: “It’s going too well. They’d be fools to swallow the damned terms we’re offering. The old chiefs are doing what they can. It’s always the old ones who want peace. But mark my words, the young buckoes are going to raise hell before pen touches paper!”

And now this young chieftain, whose name was Ke-hene-pe-li-tha, was poised over the table, shouting, hissing, snarling at the Commissioners, and the seventy Indians in the room seemed to be rising an inch off the floor they were seated on, while the three Commissioners sat on their chairs with their faces set grim.

Ke-hene-pe-li-tha was saying that the Long Knives had grown too proud after throwing down the King of England. He was saying that the Shawnees would never give up the land east of the Miami River as the treaty said they must. “We do not understand dividing this land, some for you, some for us,” he was shouting. “The Great Spirit gave it all to
us
!” William remembered George’s story of Logan and the unseen lines on the land.

Ke-hene-pe-li-tha now protested the part of the treaty that said the Shawnees must leave five chiefs as hostages until the white captives were collected and brought here for liberation; he said the Shawnees had never given hostages, that their word was enough. William heard the “
ah-hai-ee, ah-ah-hai-ees
” of approval the excited Indians were murmuring everywhere in the room. He watched George.