From Sea to Shining Sea (2 page)

He shook his head and frowned. “Jo jee common,” he insisted.

“Mought be he’s right?” black-haired Annie suggested. “He always knows where we all are. Uncanny-like.”

“I know. But … No. George wouldn’t come over the mountains now. Not with harvest so close. Not if ’e grows twenty bushel o’ corn to the acre out yonder, as he claims. Though that sounds a tall tale to me.”

“But,” said Annie, “he’d come home for my wedding!”

“Sure and he might, if he knew of’t. But he doesn’t.”

The boy had abandoned his ball and horse and was standing now at the window with his little hands gripping the sill, looking and listening out over the plantation.

The only people he could see outside were his Papa and Cupid. They were inserting poles lengthwise through two hogsheads of tobacco. These poles would be axles when the barrels were pulled to market by oxen along the rolling-road.

Mrs. Clark and Annie were talking of weddings again, but the
woman, bemused, was watching the boy. It was strange how he always just knew where everyone was. Now and then it proved embarrassing, as when he’d turn up brother Johnny romancing some wench or other under a haymow or in the barn loft. It was strange, that special sense of Billy’s, and it was strange about his dream

Mrs. Clark began rocking her chair again while the baby sucked. She saw how the pressure of the baby’s mouth mottled and wrinkled the tired skin of her teat. Twenty-three years she’d been bearing and nursing her children, and now one of them, her own namesake, was about to marry and begin the same great, absorbing, demanding, body-and-soul-consuming occupation. For Mrs. Clark, this was a bittersweet time. Now she returned her gaze to Annie’s flawless oval face, her wide-set brown eyes, her always-smiling mouth with its full underlip. Her beauty was ripe now. She would begin bearing within this year surely, and with the years those firm teats of hers would darken and wrinkle like these.

“Ye listen now, Annie, as I’m just about to give the very advice my own mother, rest her soul, gave me ere I married your Papa. She said to me, ‘Ann girl, your man will have you with child all the time, if y’ let him. I’ve had nine o’ you,’ she told me, ‘and I love y’all as I love my life, but if I had it to do over, I’d rest a couple o’ years between. Now, only way to keep your man off you,’ she told me, ‘is nurse your babies longer, like the Indian women do.’

“That’s what she told me, Annie, and she spoke true. A man thinks that if ye have a babe at your teat, y’re still too much in motherin’ to lay with ’im yet. A man doesn’t know much about such things, and so if he respects you at all, and I know Owen does, why, he’ll not press ye. He mought go jump on a slave woman, but he’ll leave y’ be, remember that, Annie.”

“But Mama, y’ve bore ten of us,” Annie laughed. “Didn’t ye remember her advice, or what?”

Mrs. Clark’s blue eyes looked at a corner of the ceiling and she nodded and pursed her lips. “I remembered it. After I’d had Jonathan, and then Georgie right away after him, why, me-thought I’d nurse Georgie a long spell and get some respite from that man stuff. I mean, bearing children’s a fine thing, most important thing a body can do, I suppose, and what our Dear Lord fit us out to do, but after two, why, the marvel of it’d wore off, and I remembered your Grandmama’s advice, and I thought t’ try it. But … Well, it would ha’ worked, I reckon, ’cept I couldn’t go through with it. I’d see your Papa was a-wantin’,
lusty man that he is, and I’d feel guilty like some sham dodger, not worthy o’ good John Clark.

“And, too—Damnation, girl, I’ll just out an’ say it: When John wanted me, I wanted John. And so I weaned little Georgie.”

Annie clapped her hands and laughed, red-faced. “Oh, Mama!”

“And so ’twas, by the very next year, ’54 that was, you came along, my darlin’, our first girl, and John honored me by naming you after me. And a blessing y’ve been every day o’ those eighteen years since. So, I guess—”

A gunshot echoed out of the woods.

“KSH!” Billy imitated it, pointing a finger. “Eddie shoot tokey!” Then he turned his gaze back toward the road, down beyond the meadow.

“See?” said the girl. “He always knows.”

“Aye. And indeed Edmund will have a turkey, by Heaven. He never misses.”

“You were but fourteen when y’ married Papa, weren’t you?” said Annie, turning back to marriage talk, her heart’s main concern.

Mrs. Clark put the baby girl on her shoulder and patted her back. “Fourteen. Aye, I’ve been raisin’ children far longer than I ever was one myself. Yes, m’ darlin’, I’m tired and half broken down by children now. But what better could I ha’ been doing, I always say, than bringin’ you ten wonders into this world? If pride’s a sin, then I’m a sinner. And, then, our Good Lord loads us only with such burdens as he created us fit to carry. I …”

She looked at Billy, who still gripped the windowsill, gripped it hard, his sturdy little body poised like a question mark, his copper-red hair ablaze with sunlight. What on earth has got ahold of him? she wondered.

“You’re not a bit broke down!” Annie was protesting. “You’re the most beauteous Mama in Caroline County, nay, in all Virginia, you are.” That was an accepted truth, but one that always made Mrs. Clark snort. She snorted.

“If beauty’s what keeps a man jumpin’ on ye, I’d as soon have been homely as ham,” she grumbled. But then her face diffused with a golden smile that meant she’d been jesting. “Y’re a kind girl, Annie, and kindness is the best of all your beauty. Thankee for your loving words.”

Billy now was flexing his knees and glancing frantically toward his mother, then back out the window. He gave a curious little hop of excitement and cried: “Jo jee common, Mama! He
is
!”

And then they heard it, faint, far down the Fredericksburg Road, a voice raised in an Indian yodel, and a moment later it came louder, and they rose a little in their chairs, feeling shivery around their necks and shoulders, and after a while they could hear hooves beating up the dirt road from the meadow gate, and Mrs. Clark’s heartbeat quickened. Feet were thudding on the floors downstairs, all going outdoors, and girls’ voices were exclaiming, and when Billy darted away from the nursery window and down the stairs, Mrs. Clark rose with the baby on her shoulder and looked out the window down the road between the rows of oaks. She saw her son Johnny in shirtsleeves and brown breeches sprinting down the driveway yelling, “Well, hey! Well, HEY!” and saw a drift of dust coming among the trees. And then a horse and rider burst into view at the end of the rail fence, the horse a sweat-stained roan, the rider dressed in pale deerskins, now howling the name of Johnny, who stood in the horse’s way poised to spring, his left arm raised and crooked.

“By heavens, Annie, it
is
George!” He was dressed as usual like a red savage, and coming at full gallop now he leaned out and hooked his left arm in Johnny’s as he rode past him, yanking him off the ground and swinging him up behind the saddle, that old daredevil trick of theirs. And now the lathered horse with both of them on its back came skidding to a rump-down halt below the nursery window in a billow of dust, as the family swarmed laughing and whooping to welcome George home from the frontier, their surveyor, their backwoods adventurer, their Seldom-Seen, as John Clark often called him. Every time he came back it was a surprise and a commotion. Every time. Mrs. Clark carried the baby girl and hurried down the staircase, smiling, tears in her eyes. He was her secret special lad, George was, the first one born with red hair and the look of her Rogers family about him, and she thanked God he was home safe once more after a long, fearful unknowing.

He looked ever more like an Indian as he strode in the front door with a rapturous, wild-eyed, squealing little Billy on his shoulders and all the rest reaching to touch him and crying greetings to him. She noticed that these were no crude rawhide garments he’d made himself, such as he’d worn on previous homecomings, but fine, neat doeskin things, tunic and loincloth and leggings, tanned soft as velvet and decorated with fringes and thrums, colored beads and quills. “Aha,” his father was telling him, in a joshing tone but looking somewhat pained, “ye’ve got yourself a squaw out yonder.” George just laughed at that, neither affirming nor denying it.

“Hey, Mama,” he said in a deep and tender tone when he saw her in the hall, and he drew her close in his right arm to kiss her forehead and the red hair over her ear. He smelled of woodsmoke, horse sweat, and something like a wild animal musk. He looked down at the baby in her arms, at the swirl of thick, nearly black hair, at the dark brows and long lashes. “Now here’s a Clark I’ve not met yet,” George said. “She looks like you, Pa. A Clark and it rhymes with dark.” Mr. Clark chuckled at that old litany of the family phenomenon; they had alternated like that with but one exception, the ten children: Jonathan the firstborn had been dark like his father, then George red-haired like his mother; then Annie dark, Johnny redheaded, Richard dark, Edmund a redhead. Then Lucy had broken the pattern for the moment, and was the only red-haired girl of the clan. Then Elizabeth, dark-tressed, and redheaded Billy, and now this black-haired lastborn. But even the dark-haired ones were tinged by the Rogers coloring; in sunlight their hair was highlighted copper-red. And their complexions were fair and lightly freckled. For there had been Rogers blood not far back in the Clark family, too. Ann Rogers Clark’s husband John was in fact one of her cousins, which to her meant that the bold blood of the Rogerses had flowed two ways into her offspring.

This George, though! To her he was the quintessential Rogers, like her beloved father and brothers: an adventurer, a soul-swaying talker, a man born to stir up the world. She stood back now amid the clamor of her children and looked him in the face to see if the past year in the wilderness had changed him. There was still that imp’s smile, the dimpled cheeks, the piercing dark blue eyes, the hawk-sharpness of his long nose, and that square chin. His face was brown as cordovan now, and his red hair and eyebrows, usually the color of an Irish setter’s coat, were sunbleached light as straw. But there was something deeper in his merry eyes now, some new sad knowing, as if he had learned something important in this past year, his twentieth year. She’d know what it was ere long; he’d let it out as he talked.

And there astride his shoulders was Billy, who worshipped him and dreamed of him though he’d only seen him three or four days of his life, Billy who was a replica of the George of seventeen years ago.

“Well,” she said at last, and her eyes traveled over his elegant leather garb, “if y’ do have a squaw, bring her here to sew for your family, eh? For she plies a neater needle than any of us!”

“No squaw, you two! Ha, ha! Put that out o’ your heads. But
listen, I’ve been with a Mingo family. No finer a people. Wait till I tell you of Chief Logan. Hey! I’ve a thousand tales to tell and but just a few days to tell ’em in! Now, say! Lookahere! What’s this varmint a-crawlin’ on my shoulders? Is it a coon, or a catamount, or what?” Billy went into gales of tickled laughter as George hoisted him off his shoulders toward the ceiling and then lowered him to the floor. The boy immediately grabbed his Indian belt and proceeded to climb back up.

“What sayee: just a few days?” exclaimed John Clark. “You’re going right back out?”

“I’m comin’ to the capital to plat out some lands I’ve surveyed, is all. Got to get back to harvest.”

“But Annie’s bein’ wed next month. Surely y’ll stay.”

“Is she now! Are ye now?” he cried, turning to find her in the mob and cupping her flushed cheeks in the palms of his hands. “And who’s the man? Is it Owen Gwathmey?”

“Aye,” Annie said, her brown eyes overflowing anew at the wonder of her betrothal. “Owen,” she gasped.

“Well, by my eyes! You’re smart, Annie! A hundred rakehells and dandies after you, but y’ chose one sound man! He’ll take care o’ you well, that one will! I admire Owen; he’s a brick!” Now he turned to a tall youth beside him. “Dick! Hey, youngster, you’re horny-handed now. Is Pa workin’ ye hard?”

“By heaven, he is! Like a field slave,” Dickie laughed. He was thirteen, erect, big-footed and rawboned. His dark hair was lank with sweat. He had run in from the fields.

“And where’s Eddie? Hullo! Here he comes!” Edmund ran stomping through the front door, red forelock flying, a long rifle in one hand, a turkey slung over his shoulder dribbling blood, its head shot off. Edmund was eleven. He flung down his bird and leaned his gun against the wainscot, then pressed in among his brothers and sisters to give George a shy hello and hug. “Hey, now, Eddie, that’s the
hard
way to shoot a turkey. I’ll have to have a match with you! Can’t let you outdo me, now, can I? Aha! Lucy up there! How’s my favorite redheaded sistereen, any-hoo?” She had bounded halfway up the stairs to get up where she could look at George over the heads of the others. She was eight, a blur of red curls and big freckles. She held a hand out over the bannister and grinned, showing him a homemade rock sling and a gap where her front teeth had been. George recoiled in mock astonishment. “By Jove! What’d ye do, shoot yourself in the mouth?” They all roared with laughter, and she squirmed and licked her mouth corners in delight and embarrassment.

They had been moving slowly along with him in the hallway
toward the sideboard where the decanters sat. Billy was back up on him now, sitting on his left arm, while grave, milky-skinned little Elizabeth, five years old and demure, held his right sleeve and trailed along, waist-high in the press of tall people.

John Clark bustled happily ahead of his brood, his body thick and hard as an oak trunk, grinning yellow-toothed, his dark hair grizzled at the temples and queued in back, his face handsome, kindly, etched with smile lines and rugged as a rock cliff. He reached for a decanter and set out five crystal glasses. “Brandy from Burk’s peaches, remember?” he said, and poured for himself, George, Dickie, Johnny and Edmund. The five clinked their glasses together. It was their tradition that a son could join in toasts after his tenth birthday. Annie poured sherry for herself and her mother.