From Sea to Shining Sea (82 page)

On the far side of the room, at a long plank table used for flour sacking, two big men sat in the tiny light of a candle, and one of the men was George. He was carrying on a slurred tirade which rumbled in the vast space. The other man’s head was on his arms, as if he were asleep. Bottles and jugs gleamed in the candlelight. Over it all lay a faint silvery pall from one tiny slatted vent high in the gable. On the floor near the grinding wheel lay a large heap of the sacks that usually were on the table; a rumpled blanket was over them, as if they had been used as a bed. Just then some bottles on the table clattered and fell over as George brought his fist down on the tabletop with a shout.

“INGRATES! Hear me, Freeman?” So, the big silent man was Freeman, one of George’s old troopers, who now was the mill supervisor. Freeman responded nothing, obviously being unconscious, but George went on: “Ingrates! Ingrates, Mister Freem’! Ingrateful! Wou’na given y’ even a hund’ acres ’cept I hounded hounded HOUNDED!” He banged the table again, then swept his arm sideways and sent jugs flying. They bounced and rolled hollowly on the plank floor. “Ouch. Ruined me, Freeman. RUIN’ ME! But f’ what th’ state owes me … I’m not w.… not worth a … a SPANISH DOLLAR! Spanish. Hey, Freeman … Know why ’is mill is shut, eh? Know? Eh? ’Cause o’ Span’sh! Bedamn SPAN’SH! Shut up God damn Mississippi … Miss … Span’sh treaty. It’d shut up Miss’pi TWENTY-FIVE YEARS! Kentuck’d die. DIE! But East’ states want a
treaty. Hell with Kentuck. Hell with Illinois! Hunh. Hunh! Indians be ruin us anyway … No council wi’ th’ Indians … Fall on us any day now, Mist’ Freem’ but but this time, Long Knife won’ help. BY GOD NOT!” He hoisted a cup to his lips and snorted into it and sucked its contents and banged it on the table while reaching for the jug. “Long Knife re … retired f’m savin’ countries, Mist’ Freem’. Long Knife likes Indians better’n Long Knife likes gov’nors. Tell ye that, man. FREEM’!” He reached across the table and grabbed Freeman’s vest and shook him violently, yelling, “Pay ’tention God damn Freem’! Y’r commander’s talkin!” Freeman, his balance dislodged, sagged sideways and fell on the floor like a sack of rocks. George sat blinking through the candlelight at the place where he had been sitting then began to laugh. “Ha! ha, ha! Begod, one thing ’bout you, ol’ Freem’! Ye do know when t’ quit! Ha, Ha! Ha, ha, HAH, HA HA HA HEEE!” The laughter brought on an awful, racking, wheezing cough then, and finally he said, “But I don’ know when t’ quit. But I do now, bejesus. I do now. I quit savin’ countries. No more … Hullo. Hullo, who’s ’ere, eh? Who … Dickie? Billy? Billy.”

William had climbed up and come around barrels and machinery, and he stood now beside the heap of Freeman’s body and looked at George in the candlelight, and up close now George looked so horrible that William could only swallow and move his lips and blink in shock and disbelief.

George’s eyes were red-rimmed, bloodshot; his eyelids were puffy. Reddish stubble darkened his chin and sunken cheeks; his skin was pasty, and agleam with oil and sweat and smudges. Dried blood encrusted his forehead and speckled his filthy, torn, vomit-stained linen shirt. His hair hung lank and greasy down the sides of his face, part of it snarled with lint and twigs and sawdust. His big hands, now on the tabletop, were black, as if he had been digging in ashes. Worse even than the dirt and dishevelment, though, was the dullness, the stupidity, in that face that always had been keen, intense, or merry, throughout William’s memory. He had seen George intoxicated before, or, rather, thought he had; he had seen him flushed and animated and jovial with liquor a few times, at home on holidays and furloughs, and had even seen him teary-eyed with sentiment or snapping mad in arguments, pointing for emphasis with a glass of sloshing whiskey in his hand. But never had he seen him stupefied, slack-lipped, wobble-headed, puke-stained, as he was now, with the bloody abrasion on his forehead, probably from
falling, and the stunned, unfocused eyes making him look like a pole-axed ox.

George was trying to rise now; his hands were clattering among jugs and cups and clay pipes as he tried to lift himself. “Thought saw Dickie, I …” And then his eyes began pouring tears. “Bu’ he’s gone … poor green …” George was half-standing now, his contorted face lit from under the chin by the candle, a little silver daylight from the high vent limning his shoulders and the crown of his head, and he swayed backward, then forward, and back, then pitched forward face down among the crockery. The candle was snuffed under him.

William went around and dragged him off the table and hauled him to the pile of sacks, struggling with his inert weight, and there he covered him with the blanket. Sobbing, he went down to the creek and wet several sacks and climbed back up and tried to clean George’s face with them. Even unconscious, George would not lie serene. He thrashed and flopped and wept and moaned in nightmares, twice calling something that sounded like “trees,” pouring sweat until his shirt was sodden. William was afraid to leave him for fear he would move around and fall down the ladderwell to the skids below. Nearby, Freeman snored on in the slumber of an ordinary drunk.

At last, in mid-afternoon, George lay quiet, though still sweating. William put his ear to George’s sour, stinking shirt front and listened to his heartbeat. It was thumping like a deep, erratic drum, but nearly drowned out by the volcanic burblings and growlings in his guts and his shallow, sometimes gasping, breathing. William once had heard of a man dying from intoxication, back in Caroline County, and wondered if George could be at such an extreme. It was clear that he had been saturating himself all during his absence. His breath was putrid.

It was raining on the roof. William, feeling empty as a used barrel, left George then and galloped down through the half-built, half-deserted town of Clarksville to the ferry landing. He found Davy Pagan there under an awning on the boat, smoking a pipe and watching the rain sizzle on the gray-green river. He told Pagan what he had on his hands. The old ferryman was not surprised, saying, “’E looked as ’e was headin’ f’r a real rum-buzzamaroo.” He sniffed, and William realized that he was crying.

Pagan agreed to help William carry the general down to the ferry and take him across, but suggested they wait till evening. “Ain’t nobody ever seen our gen’l like this,” he said, “and nobody orter.”

And so at dusk they led General Clark’s horse down with something in a blanket draped over it, which Pagan told his Negro oarsmen was bagged meal, though they knew meal sacks did not groan and retch and wear boots.

And the ferry crossed the broad river in the rain of night, and then from somewhere, in a moment, Pagan conjured a wagon, driven by someone William recognized as another old Illinois veteran. “Pray God th’ jug’s not got a holt on ’im,” Pagan murmured to William in the drizzly darkness. “A true ’ero’s got a long way t’ fall.”

“I’ll pray. Thankee, Mister Pagan, and good night now.”

Pagan put his forefinger to his lips. “I’m blind and deef. Havven’t seen the gen’l for a month, y’see?”

And the wagon went up the public road eastward along the night river toward Mulberry Hill with its cargo in a wet wool blanket, and William rode alongside, heart full of ashes, leading George’s stallion, and prayed that the jug had not really got a hold on George in those four awful days, but feared that it had. “A long way to fall,” old Pagan had said, and William thought those words over and over as he took George home to his family.

“Thank you, Mr. Clark,” said Colonel Anderson. He gripped John Clark’s hand hard, and both men’s eyes reflected that kind of embarrassed bond that exists only between a virgin’s father and the man who desires to possess her.

“We’ll all be proud to have you in the family, Dick,” John Clark said. It crossed his mind that he would again, after four years, have a son named Dick.

“Nothing compared with my pride in being of the Clarks,” Anderson said.

“Now I reckon a toast is in order,” John Clark said. “Billy, would ye pour for us?” William, who had stood witness to the consent, went to the decanters, which were on a mahogany buffet by the wall. Opposite the wall was George’s room. As William
poured their drams, he was aware of the room beyond the wall, aware that George was in there, that he had shut himself in upon learning that Anderson was arriving, and said he would come out after he had left. “But Elizabeth’s invited him to stay through Sunday,” William had told him. “Then I’ll be out after Sunday,” George had replied. “Look, Billy, lad, I’ve no grudge against the man. It’s just that he’ll want to talk Indian affairs. Well, he and James Wilkinson are the Indian Commissioners now, they’ve replaced me, so I take that to mean my Indian policies are nothing now, so therefore why should he get advice from me? No. Y’ll just have to say I’m indisposed. As I will be.”

William poured the brandy and felt all too sure that, beyond that wall, George was pouring brandy too.

As Davy Pagan had said, it was a long way to fall. And George had fallen long and hard that first time. It had lasted for weeks, even after William had brought him home from the mill. There had been no controlling him. “If they all believe me to be a jugsucker,” he’d say with a bitter laugh, “I might’s well live up to my reputation. Reputation’s mighty important, don’t I know it!”

Sometimes he would try, and try valiantly, to shake off the hold that liquor was getting on him. Sometimes the family would get him dried out a bit, and he would profess shame, and pray alongside his father and mother, and go to church meetings with the family, and go on long hunting and exploring trips with William, to places where no liquor was.

But sometimes, after he had kept himself sober for a long time, he would come to table all glassy-eyed, enunciating words so carefully that he was incomprehensible, and they would know then that he had been nipping again, in the pantry, in his room, and was trying to seem sober to please the family, for he knew they hurt for him.

What saddened them most to see was how he would feign contempt for public affairs. Public service had ruined him and broken his heart, so he would pretend he was utterly indifferent to it. He had resigned as principal surveyor of the bounty lands, leaving Bill Croghan in that post. When the Indian councils he had arranged for April had gone neglected by the new Indian Commissioners, and the Wabash tribes and Shawnees had resumed their marauding, there had as usual been delegations of people coming to ask him to lead again. To their entreaties he had just smiled in a mocking way and replied, “You’d better not give me an army just now, because if I had one I’d be tempted to lead it against the Capital rather than the tribes.” As a private man he found that he could say just about whatever he pleased,
and he enjoyed, when he was a little in his cups, the freedom to mock the state government. But they all knew there was a bitter pain behind that mockery, and he was only protecting his own wounds when he talked that way.

Aye, William thought as he capped the decanter and picked up the tray with the filled glasses. He’s into it in there again, I’m sure.

And just then he heard through the thick wall the dull
thuds
of a body falling down.

God, George.
Oh, God.

G
EORGE SAT IN HIS ROOM AT HIS PARENTS’ HOUSE AT
M
UL
berry Hill, a candle burning on his desk, a fire in the hearth nearby, and an unopened jug sitting on he mantel. He was writing. Sometimes he would keep the jug there during his dry spells just as a challenge, to see how long he could keep himself from breaking the wax seal. The longer he managed to do this, the stronger he felt he would become. Sometimes he would look at it and almost grow dizzy at the thought of opening it. But he would resist. When he was sober he was aware how his problem worried his parents and he would resist for their sake. Sometimes he would think that if he were far away from them, he would start opening jugs and never stop until he had found permanent peace six feet under the ground. But most of the time he would try to stay sober, try to think his way out of his problems, try to find a way to resume the ascent he had begun during the war.

It was hard to leave the jug sealed this night. Ben Logan had come to see him, and had left him with the feeling that any hope of being relieved of the war debts was really in vain.

Governor Randolph had asked Logan to get together all the records of the expenditures in the western campaign, so that Virginia’s war debts could be settled up with the United States. The governor, aware of what he had done to George, had been afraid to ask George himself, and so had written to Logan, who then had brought the letter to George. Now that his fury toward the governor had cooled, George felt he could write to the governor in a cordial way and explain, once again, the matter of the vouchers. In the years since the war, Virginia had maintained an Accounting Commission, with traveling officials and bookkeepers, to try to determine the liabilities. George wrote, as calmly as he could:

He put down the quill, shook his head, poured sand over the ink and then funneled it back into its jar. He looked at what he had written and decided it would be useless to elaborate still again. That was all that could be said about it. Now there remained only to comment once upon the sorry manner in which he had been treated after the Bazadone affair.