From Sea to Shining Sea (84 page)

“Now, here we be.” George led out onto a rocky, sandy shoal, sparsely vegetated with willow and shrubs, and stopped in the sunlight. Almost straight above was the Point of Rock, as George called it, the place where he hoped to build his house if his fortunes ever improved. Farther along the shore were the few little buildings of Clarksville, and the mill. “See where we are?” George said, sluicing sweat off his brow and chin with thumb and fingers. He was not even breathing hard. But he did sweat copiously at these times when he was coming out of a long wet spell, William had noticed that.

Now George was squatting on a flat rock in the sunshine, spreading out the piece of paper and looking upstream and down. He weighted the corners with a chalky seashell or a piece of fossil, raised each arm to mop his temples with his rolled shirt sleeves, then signalled for William to squat beside him. William already knew, as George had taught him, that there were seashells in the rock here because once this threshold of rock that made the Falls had been the bed of an ancient sea. The discussions they had had about how that could have been, and about where the sea might have gone, had stretched William’s mind out of shape for weeks. There was no question about it in William’s
mind: his brother could see more of what lay before his eyes, and then make more fascinating speculations beyond what could be seen, than just about anybody. There were a lot of interesting people around Louisville, but anybody’s company, after a spell in the company of George’s mind, was pretty ordinary.

On the sheet of paper was George’s drawing of his plan for a boat canal around the Falls. His finger tapped a place on the paper. “Here’s where we are. Now, y’see, up here the boats would come in. A jetty would run right off there, and they’d come into here ’stead o’ going into the rapids. Down there where I showed you the first lock’d be, that gate would be closed and this stretch would fill up with water to the same level as the river above the Falls. Then when the boats got to the gate, th’ water would be let out till they were down five feet, and then the gate would be opened, and they could float out to the second lock. And so on. As for boats coming upstream, why, they’d come into the low end o’ the canal, the low gate would be shut behind ’em, like I said, that’d fill up with water till they could float up to the next, and so on, till they’d just come out right here at this level and row right out onto the upper river. See how simple it is?”

“It’s so simple it’s got me amazed. First time I saw those Falls, I didn’t reckon there’d ever be a way to get a boat by ’em except pull ’em right up the rapids by tow rope.”

“Aye. And that’s about ten times as hard and tricky as it looks to be. Here’s the point, Billy. On all the miles o’ river, from New Orleans up to Pittsburgh, there’s only been
one place
where boats had to be unloaded, portaged, or what have you, and that’s right here. All the rest is navigable. Now if I build a canal and locks here, I’ve solved the one obstacle on this whole waterway. What little toll I’d charge would be cheap compared with the labor they hire to unload or portage, but it would pay for the canal in a few years. And it would sooner or later enable me to pay off all those bedamned creditors. Besides that, it would make Clarksville a great port, and all my old boys that’s got grant lands up here would benefit from it. As they well deserve, as it was them that won this land. And my mill would have plenty of business, too. You’d see me in charge o’ my own destiny once again. For I’ll vow, Billy, I
have
to work my way out o’ this bind. Since apparently the State’s never going to do me justice, I’ll have to do it for myself. Well, I’m used to that. I’ve fought my way out o’ worse straits than this!” He set his jaw and looked up and down the Falls.

William studied him and felt full of hope. As long as George had a hope and a plan, it seemed, he could resist the bottle. And he seemed to generate his own hopes and plans.

“Y’ know, Billy,” George said over the rushing of the Falls, “when me and my good boys shot these Falls under an eclipse that June day back in ’78, I was so scared I thought I’d wet th’ boat and sink it.”

“Ha, ha! I’ll bet!”

“And I thought then that someday something would have to be done about this obstacle. So that’s why I did up this scheme.” He pointed down at the drawings. “I’ll tell you. Everything I’ve ever done started out as a night-ponder. Like that night at Harrod’s Town during the siege. Yep. Everything worth doin’ starts out with one person by himself, scratchin’ his head and sayin’, ‘Hmmm.’”

“I reckon that must be so. Maybe I ought to scratch my own head now and then and say, ‘Hmmm.’ Ha, ha!”

“Ha, ha! You better! Women, too. Look at Lucy. I bet when she first saw Bill Croghan, she scratched her head and said, ‘Hmmm.”

They laughed and slapped each other’s shoulders. “That’s exactly how it happened,” William whooped. “She tells it so herself!”

O
N
THE
MORNING
OF
J
ULY
18, L
UCY
WAS
AWAKENED
FROM
A
profound sleep by a variety of unaccustomed sensations in her lower abdomen and loins, just one of which was a pressing need to answer a call of nature. For one moment, as she rose reluctantly against the languid gravity of sleep, she half-dreamed of a long-ago Christmas morning when she had lain in her younger sisters’ body-warmth just like this needing to get up for this same reason, but reluctant to leave her reveries of Bill Croghan …

BILL!

Her eyes popped open with the rush of realization.

She was married to Bill Croghan! The memory of their wedding night just past explained her strange feelings down there, and the body lying warm beside her was Bill’s! She stared dopily at the ceiling remembering his incredible ardor of the night. It was no wonder she had slept so deeply. That scoundrel had exhausted her. She lay for a moment realizing, from the light in the room, that it was very late in the morning—perhaps it was even afternoon—and recalling with a wild confusion and something like shame the way they had been last night—or, rather, this morning it had been, as the wedding celebration had run
into the small hours before they had been spirited off by their guests to this bed.
Merciful Heavens
, she thought,
what came over us! Why, I was like a … like a … well, never mind like a what, but a redheaded one!

Bill Croghan had not let the guests get him drunk, and he had been keen and strong and good and clean-mouthed and exciting, and he had laughed once at her and said, “Lucy, darling, understand me that it’s been a long wait!”

She smiled a little now, thinking,
Well, if that’s what it’s like, and we can do it whenever we please, it’s hard to imagine we’ll be wanting to do much of anything else.

Oh my. Am I wicked to think like this about it?

I wonder if I’d dare tell Bill what I think of it.

But, well, as Mama says, she’s read the Bible three times through and’s never found anything forbids a body liking it. Not if you’re married.

And I’m glad I am.

Now she looked over at him. He was lying on his back, breathing evenly, eyes closed. She looked at his eyelashes and the shape of his nose, and studied his lips, in ways she had never been able to before because he had always been awake. The bright light in the room showed clearly the smallpox scars under his cheekbones, the little healed craters on his forehead, and her heart compressed with love and pity when she thought of him suffering back then, and she wanted to kiss the little scars.

I wonder if he’s awake with his eyes shut
, she thought, and she whispered:

“Mister Croghan, dear, are you awake?”

His lips moved into a smile.

“I’m sound asleep, dreaming I’m in Paradise.”

Then he stirred suddenly and his arm was over her and his right eye was looking at her right eye, so close it was big and out of focus. “Do you know what a honeymoon comes from?”

“Silly! From getting married.” They were not whispering now, but murmuring.

“I mean the custom.”

“I could guess: ’cause you’re sweet as honey, and you moon over me.”

“Hm, hm! All right. But it’s this, that long ago, when men had to get wives by capturing them, then they’d have to go hide from her father for a month—a moon—and they would eat honey all that time.”

“Get wives by capturing ’em! Well, I’ll declare times have changed, then, as here we lay in my father’s own house!”

He chuckled and nuzzled her neck, and his hand came up and he pushed his fingertips through her curls. She began to wonder whether he was going to try to do it to her again now, and she began to wonder what she would do about the business of needing to use the chamber pot with this man right here in the room with her. He said, while stroking her hair:

“Soon you’ll have the nicest house in all Kentucky.” He had shown her the plans he had drawn of it. It was going to be a grand house of brick with four chimneys. In the meantime they would be living in a wooden house in town. But all that was some time off, and right now she had a more urgent consideration and didn’t know what to do about it that wouldn’t seem too awkward. Her mother had failed to tell her about this absurd little matter, and she hadn’t even thought to ask.

If he tries to do it when I’m like this, I’ll bust
, she thought. Outside the window a mockingbird was making all sorts of ridiculous noises, and it seemed as if it were making fun of her and her secret dilemma.

But just then Bill solved it. He kissed her on the mouth and said, “Excuse me, my darling, but I must leave the room for just a while,” and he sat up on the side of the bed and began pulling on clothes.

Ah, she thought, I do have myself a prince!

I
T
LOOKED
DEAD
CERTAIN
THAT
HIS
FIRST
I
NDIAN
FIGHT
would be his last.

Ensign William Clark lay on his belly in the frosty grass, his mouth dry as corn meal, feeling his heart beat on the ground and looking across the Maumee River toward the low-hanging smoke of a huge Indian war camp. It was daybreak. His feet were sore from the all-night march. Around him in the yellow grass and weeds he could see felt hats and rifle muzzles and tense young faces, and a few yards off in a thicket of hazel bushes he could see the horses of Colonels Hardin and Hall and McMullen. Those bushes were the only cover on the plain, and the colonels were meeting in there with the majors and captains to determine what to do about the problem.

Their problem was that they had expected to find a hundred warriors here, and instead had found a thousand or more. Two days ago, here where the St. Mary’s and St. Joseph’s Rivers met to form the Maumee, those hundred Indians had killed twenty of
General Harmar’s soldiers in an ambush, and in a mad retreat the soldiers had been left unburied on the riverbanks. Colonel Hardin had demanded Harmar’s permission to bring 400 Kentucky militiamen back here and bury the corpses and, if possible, find and destroy the Indians. Now they were here, and to their dismay they were facing a major part of Little Turtle’s army. Colonel Hardin’s scouts had seen Little Turtle himself, and the Shawnee chief Blue Jacket, and Simon Girty, the white renegade, in the camp at first light.

So now it was daybreak, and the Kentuckians were sure to be discovered at any minute. They had only three alternatives, all desperate:

They could form a defensive square here on this unfavorable ground and wait to be attacked. Or, they could begin a retreat, with hopes that some of them would survive long enough to get back to General Harmar’s army. But the army was at least twenty-five miles away, and heading in the other direction.

The third alternative was to attack: cross the river swiftly and, by force of surprise, scatter the enemy. In the face of their superior numbers, this would be supremely dangerous. But it would offer probably the only chance of success, and Colonel Hardin being the kind of man he was, it likely would be his choice. Hardin, as the soldiers had come to phrase it, had more guts in his bellybutton than General Harmar had in his whole great boozy paunch.

William lay here now thinking what a contrast this campaign had been to his only other military experience, George’s troubled Wabash expedition of ’86. Back then it had been the general who had wanted to fight and the troops who had wanted to turn back; now the troops were eager to fight, but General Harmar would only retreat.

It was inexplicable, and Harmar had refused even to try to explain it. He had eleven hundred militiamen, three hundred twenty regulars, three horse-drawn cannon, and a troop of mounted swordsmen, and plenty of beef cattle and grain. Harmar, President Washington’s own choice as commandant of the new Army of the United States, had assembled the force in Fort Washington, at the new town of Cincinnati, and two weeks ago had marched them confidently up the Miami River under the proud and approving eye of old General Arthur St. Clair, governor of the new Ohio Territory, to seek and crush the confederacy of Little Turtle at last. This army had advanced far into northwestern Ohio, burning some abandoned Indian towns. But when a captured Indian had revealed that Girty and the chiefs were
gathering near the headwaters of the Maumee, Harmar’s confidence had dissolved. The general had sent out a few sorties, and then, after the ambush two days ago, had turned his whole army around and started back down the Miami toward Fort Washington, to the dismay of everybody. Last night Hardin had literally demanded that the general let him come back to the Maumee to get the bodies of the ambush victims, and so here they were now, Hardin and his mere four hundred facing the force Harmar had been afraid to meet with fourteen hundred.

William glanced to his right now and saw Major Wyllys, one of the regular officers, coming through the grass at a crouching run, all too visible in his blue coat and gold epaulets. He knelt here and there to talk to militia officers hidden in the grass. At last he knelt beside William, flushed and breathy. “At sunrise, lad,” he said, pointing, “on hand signal, no noise,
please.
We cross the river right there. Fountain’s horse troop will go straight into their camp, Colonel Hardin and us on their tails. We’ll have the sun at our backs; that’s good. McMullen will take the right wing;”—he pointed downstream—“Hall the left. Keep your boys tight in; the colonel wants our front no more than a thousand yards from wing to wing, so’s to form quick if need be.”