From Sea to Shining Sea (37 page)

“I can work with the good doctor,” Jonathan said. “I can touch infected men and have no fear. D’ye wonder why it is a man has the small pocks but once?” He had them curious now. Their fear was in suspension. He knew that fear grows in unknowing, and he was giving them knowledge. “Blood,” he went on, “has a property. I’m no doctor, so I can’t put it in a doctor’s language, but blood has a property that fights disease. I reckon it’s like what happens when the Redcoats come to Lexington or such a place: all the patriots run to Lexington to drive ’em back. Well, that property in your blood is like a patriotism in your body: it’s to stop the invasion of a foreign evil, if y’ follow me.” Some were nodding, others listening with mouths hanging open.

“What we’re doing is like that. Well, we invade your arm with a speck o’ pus from a poxed man. That pus is the foreign evil like the Redcoats I spoke of. Just a light scratch on your skin and a spot o’ pus put on it. What happens then is that patriotic property of your blood rushes to that place, and it stops the invasion
right there.
And in so doing, your blood learns how to fight that particular evil. So. Instead of bein’ generally invaded, like I was, you’ll have but th’ one spot of disease, one scar, there on your arm. And ever after, you’ll be able to walk through an epidemic of the pocks without any fear of it. The rest of your natural life! Think what a gift o’ God that is!”

They were seeming to believe him; their faces were beginning to show some hope where they had only shown fear. He concluded:

“General Washington, ye know it, is a man cares about his people. He doesn’t want an epidemic here at Valley Forge. And I’ll tell it true, he’s the first general ever knew enough to do this for his army.

“Now, I’ve seen you walk into the face of bayonets and grape-shot when he needed y’ to do it. So I reckon ye won’t be afraid to walk in there and face a doctor who’s like to save your life. Now s’pose I tell one more truth: that no man or woman ever died—nay, nor even
sickened
—from this little pinprick you’re about to take. It’s true! My word on it. And General Washington’s. And if
that
isn’t enough, maybe y’ll take the word o’ God on it. If you want that assurance, you have it from our chaplain, the Reverent Mister David Jones. Mister Jones,” he said, turning to the slender, almost frail-looking, man who stood beside and behind him, “gentlemen may want to pray with ye, before they proceed in and be treated.”

Jonathan left their souls in the care of the chaplain and stooped in through the low door of the hospital cabin. A young man in a white apron stood over a table, arranging small cups and pen-size iron lances. He looked up as Jonathan took off his cape and coat and hat and hung them on a wall peg. “Ready, Major Clark?”

“Ready, Dr. O’Fallon. Another set o’ men getting their souls fortified right now.” They could hear Reverend Davy Jones’s voice droning in prayer outside.

“I think it’s your talk fortifies ’em most,” the physician said. “I’m not so certain mere prayers alone would prepare ’em.”

“‘Mere’ prayers!” Jonathan mocked him. “In faith, Bones, one might guess you’re an Unbeliever!” He rolled back his sleeves, picked up a lance and a cup, and pulled back a linen curtain that hung from poles in a corner of the hut. “Now, Corporal,” he said to a young man lying inside on a cot, “are y’ ready to give for this worthy cause?” He drew down a sheet to expose the man’s chest and shoulders, which were covered with white-topped pustules of the readiest kind. The donor looked askance through his swollen eyelids
at the lance in Jonathan’s hand, coughed violently, then sighed and turned his face toward the wall.

“Aye,” he said in a weak voice, “help yourself, Doctor.”

Well, well, Jonathan thought, stooping close over the young soldier to cut the head off a pustule and press its matter out with the edge of the cup, wouldn’t Ma be tickled to know she’s now got a “doctor” amongst her sons?

“D
ONE
,” D
R
. O’F
ALLON SIGHED A FEW DAYS LATER
. “A
ND
may I never have to look into another pair of terror-struck eyes again, nor puncture another palsying arm, so long as I live. Now every man jack in this army who’d never had the pocks before has just a wee touch of it now, thanks be to us. It gives me shudders to think what we’ve been doing. Even though,” he added quickly, “I do believe in it.”

“You’d
better
believe in it!” Jonathan exclaimed. “I’ve been vouching for it for a week now, in the belief you believe in it.”

Dr. O’Fallon and Jonathan were now cleaning instruments and vessels with hot water from a kettle. They had become very close while working together in this unprecedented project.

“Now, Dr. Clark,” said the physician. “Something to celebrate the completion of that ordeal?” He had been calling Jonathan “Doctor” since the day the donor had done so. O’Fallon went to his medicine chest and drew out a half-full demijohn, measured out a double dram for each of them, and set them on the table.

“You’re sure this isn’t calomel, or some other of your Devil’s potions?” Jonathan queried, looking into the cup.

“Calomel’s colorless and tasteless,” O’Fallon said, raising his cup to Jonathan and then sipping from it. “I assure you, this is neither. Ahhhhh! My word on’t!”

“Ahhhh! Your word’s as good as your brandy.” He felt very good, very happy. He felt certain that he had helped spare many a man from the awful, deadly misery that he had suffered less than two years ago.

Boots crunched on the snow outside. The snow had half-melted during the day, then had frozen over as temperatures plunged. The door opened inward on its leather hinges and Bill Croghan came in, huffing and shivering. At once Dr. O’Fallon poured him a brandy. “Health,” Croghan said, winking and drinking.

“Health indeed!”

“I don’t see the usual queue of doom-faced soldiery outside,” Croghan said.

“We’re done. Every man’s infected good and proper. But only in his arm, I pray,” Jonathan said.

“And so I pray. Listen. Much news from home!” Croghan now referred to the Clark house in Caroline County as his home. He had had to put his English home out of his mind entirely. “Your derring-do brother Colonel George Clark has gone over the mountains once again. Apparently his mysterious mission is under way at last.”

“Mm. You mean Major,” Jonathan said, his cup halfway to his lips.

“No. Colonel. That’s what I came to tell you. I’ve a letter from your Little Brother Lucy today. The scallawag finally condescended to write to me, bless her heart. Anyway, she says he’s a colonel now.” He handed a paper to Jonathan. Jonathan perused it while, outside in the cold, the footsteps of marching soldiers crushed in the snow, and the incredibly strident voice of Baron Von Steuben, Washington’s new Prussian drillmaster, screeched drill commands.

“‘Little Brother Lucy’?” exclaimed Dr. O’Fallon, thumping the heel of his hand against his temple. “By all that’s odd, I’ve got to meet the rest of this Clark clan!”

“Aye, you should!” Bill Croghan exclaimed. “Get Doctor Jonathan here to extend you an invitation, and you’ll never regret it.” He extended his cup for another dram, and tilted his head toward the frantic voice and the half-coherent ravings of the Prussian, whom General Washington had put in charge of retraining the Continental troops for the coming campaigns of spring. Von Steuben, with the ferocious energy of a mother bear and the muzzle-blast language of a master sergeant, was giving the ragged army no leisure to think about its itchy little spots of small pocks, or any of its other myriad miseries. “Listen to that voice!” Croghan laughed. “How’d you like to be married to a
woman
with a voice like that? Ha, ha! Have you heard what the troops have nicknamed him? ‘Herr Schpittenschlobber.’ Ha, ha!”

“By Jove!” Jonathan slapped Lucy’s letter with his knuckles. “Brother George
is
a colonel! Well, though. It’s only militia,” he snorted, “so he’d better not try to bear rank over me, ever!” Then he shook his head and compressed his lips. “Lord help ’im, if he’s set himself a hard task and has to depend on
militia
for it! Especially such lawless yayhoos as he’ll be a-findin’ out on the backside o’ those mountains! Poor George! A colonel of bear-biters! Lord help ’im!”

*     *     *

G
EORGE
R
OGERS
C
LARK SAT BEHIND THE LONG TABLE IN
the main room of the public house in Red Stone Fort and eyed his latest recruit, who was about to be entered onto the muster roll by Cousin Johnny. The volunteer looked as if he had never once stood up to full height in his life. He had leaned against the door jamb before coming in; now he was supporting himself on the table, both palms lying flat on it, his rangy body hanging between his shoulders, one long leg crossed loosely in front of the other, as if his arms and the table were all that could keep him from collapsing on the floor and going to sleep.

He did not appear to be weak; there was sinew and long, ropy muscle evident there. But he was either the laziest or tiredest man George had ever seen. He was dressed more like an Indian than a white man. His face was weathered and bony and hollow-cheeked. He looked as if he had not been under a roof or in bathwater for two years. He looked, in other words, like half of the volunteers George had managed to sign up: rough, raw, flea-bitten, half-civilized if that much.

“Your name?” asked John Rogers, holding the quill point in the ink pot and looking up at him.

The man muttered something that sounded like “Hom’n Cawnsuluh.” Johnny squinted. “What was that first name?”

The man licked his lips. “Hom’n.”

“Uh, is that Harmon? Herman?”

“Mhm,” the man said, nodding. Johnny wrote something down and then looked up again and said:

“And that last name again, it was what?”

“Cawnsuluh,” the man replied, then wiped his teeth with his tongue.

“How d’you spell that?”

The man’s eyes narrowed, then glanced about. He looked like a trapped animal. But then he fell back on his natural indolence, and with a lazy leer of a smile, said:

“Hell, yew th’ man with th’ pen.
Yew
spell it.”

Johnny sighed and shook his head and wrote something down. George stood up. “Keep,” he called, “fetch me and this man some grog.”

Even this laconic newcomer seemed struck by the redheaded, deep-voiced officer who was extending his hand to him; he pulled himself into an almost upright posture and reached for the handshake. “Come and have a cup with me by the fire,” George said cheerfully, “and we’ll get acquainted, and I’ll tell ye what my expectations are. I’m George Clark, and this is my show.”

“How d’ye?” The woodsman picked up his rifle from where it
leaned on the table and, mouth hanging open, followed George toward the hearth. There the whopper-jawed, greasy-haired innkeeper was setting down mugs for them.

“Well, now, Mister Consola,” George began, “tell me what country y’ve seen lately.”

They took time, these personal talks with new men. But George never failed to learn something useful from them, and he usually was able to imprint the new recruits with some of his own confidence. By shrewd but easy-sounding conversation, he was able to divine pretty well what a man’s sentiments and loyalties were. He had turned away two or three, during the last few weeks, whom he had suspected of being Tories sent to spy on him.

But the recruiting so far had been a crushing disappointment. Instead of the three hundred men he had expected to have by now, he had only one hundred. The county lieutenants were blocking the efforts of George and his officers, discouraging enlistments and even enticing recruits to desert.

The dilemma lay in the secrecy of the expedition. It could succeed only if it remained a secret. But because he could not reveal his true purpose, he could not convince anyone of its importance. The county lieutenants and other leading citizens accused him of getting the countryside in an uproar, trying to recruit their own scarce manpower away for the defense of a distant region whose people were fools to be there anyway. The worst trouble was with Colonel Arthur Campbell, leader of Fincastle County, who had so recently failed to block George’s move to get Kentuck made a separate county. Now Campbell seemed determined to thwart anything George was doing, executive orders or no, and it had come to a point where George had gone up and banged a fist on Campbell’s desk and accused him of sedition. It had done no good.

Spring was coming on and George had but a fraction of the men he needed. Therefore he used all his power of persuasion on every man who came in. And so now he quizzed and listened to this rancid bushloper, gradually became convinced that he was a much better man than he looked to be, and noted that he might be especially useful as a hunter or courier, as his drawling history indicated he had been just about everywhere George had ever heard of. Apparently he sagged and slouched so much only in order to conserve energy for the times when he was on the move.

They finished their cups. George stood up. Console—or whatever his name was—unfolded himself and rose, grinning a
grin that looked like an old churchyard full of crooked tombstones. George swore him in and pumped his hand. “I’m glad to have a man like you,” he said, meaning it. “Now if you’ll go back to the pup over there who wrote your name, he’ll see you get victuals and a berth.”

“I’m sure glad I come, Mister Cunnel! Ah’d reckon this goan be a rail ramsquaddle hijink, ayup-ha!” And he shambled back to Johnny Rogers.

At that moment, Bill Harrod came in, looking like a whipped dog. “Five more o’ mine have gone over th’ mountain,” he muttered. “Crump says he saw ’em talking this mornin’ to those two poop merchants from Fincastle, Long Jaw Campbell’s boys. An’ now they’re gone.”

“Damnation!” George ground his molars. “Get one and lose five!”

“I’ll send a squad out after ’em.”

“No. I’m not going to do that anymore. They don’t come back either!” He was clenching and opening his fists. “’Scuse me, Bill. I left something in my room.”

The innkeeper watched George stalk through the door. He had seen Colonel Clark in that state a lot of times now, and he shook his head and sucked an eyetooth. He knew that something would probably be broken in there before the colonel came back out.