From Sea to Shining Sea (5 page)

“And so that’s what we had to say on that,” George said. “Then after that, why, the chief smiled like as if to cheer us both up, and said he wanted me to come to live awhile in his camp, because he thought I was one of the good ones of my people. I told him I would, and he said, ‘While you live with me, you will explain how you reckon the unseen lines you draw on the land, and how they can have force even though they do not exist after you take your tools away.’ Good question, isn’t it, Pa? Makes a body ponder, eh? Then this Logan got a little mockery look, and said to me, he said, ‘Wolves and dogs raise a leg to squirt on the ground, and they say, “This land is mine.” But other creatures do not care for those squirts. If that is what you do with your tools there, the red man might be like the other creatures who do not mind the squirts of wolves and dogs.’ That’s what Logan said. That’s no dumb savage, Pa, is it? I’d say that’s a man who sees even farther than a County Clerk.”

John Clark nodded. He felt, strangely, almost jealous of his son’s admiration for the fatherly savage.

“Well,” George went on, “it made me laugh, it was so apt. And Logan laughed too, and told me he’d take me someday to the mouth of the Ka-na-wha River and show me something that would prove what he said. So one day last spring we went, in a canoe. It’s right far down the Ohio, took us days to reach it. All this way we went, just so he could teach me something. Well, there at the mouth of the Ka-na-wha, it’s a fine spot there, good site for a town someday. Logan led me to a big boulder, just about hid in tree roots and bushes. There was a lead tablet fixed on the rock, and there was writing on it. The language was French. I made out what I could of it, which was precious little, me being the kind of scholar I was. But Logan translated it for me. There was a date: 18 August, 1749, it was.”

John and Ann Rogers Clark looked quickly at one another and smiled. “The year we were wed,” she said. John Clark nodded.

“Aye,” said George. “Well, it said on that plate that on that day a Captain de Celeron claimed for the French Crown all the land drained by that river and its tributaries. When I looked up, Logan was a-grinnin’ at me. And all he said of’t was, ‘There are your squirts of wolves and dogs.’ Brought me all that way to show me that tablet and say that, think of it! Some teacher, hey now? Not twenty years that tablet had been there, and that grandiose claim meant no more than a dog-squirt. It’s England’s now, and whose next, I wonder?”

John Clark winked and pointed at George. “It bears out what I said about claims out there, the very thing I said. Here, I
know
my land is mine.”

“So sure, eh? With King George sayin’ you don’t have this and ye can’t have that? But forgive me. I’m off my story.”

“Some story it is, too,” Johnny said with one eyebrow cocked. “An Indian who reads French?”

“Ah, now, a skeptic!” George exclaimed. “Johnny, you do have a sharp ear. But what you don’t know, as I hadn’t yet told it, is, Logan’s mother was a Frenchwoman. So there y’are. The world’s full o’ wonders, but there’s explanations for most of ’em.”

“Did you just now make that up?” Johnny challenged.

“On my word it’s true. He’s a halfbreed. But as oftimes it happens, he’s the best o’ both peoples. And I’d reckon it might have something to do with his fondness for whites, now, mightn’t it? Far as I know, there’s but one living white man he hates. A certain Indian fighter, named Cresap. Cresap’s father killed Logan’s father. Logan and this Mike Cresap stay out
of each other’s paths like a hound and a bobcat.”

The older Clark children and their parents were finding all this quite interesting, but Lucy and Elizabeth were starting to fidget. Billy listened on with rapt attention—or at least watched his brother’s face as if entranced.

“You said he had weapons all over him. Why, if he’s so peaceable?” Dickie asked.

“Mind you, Logan was a great warrior. He’d taken many a scalp, in his younger days. The nations battle amongst themselves all the time, as y’ know. He’d fought aplenty.”

“Wif huge arms,” interjected Billy. He made fists and waved them in front of his face. The others smiled at this strange statement, then turned back to George, who said:

“I aim to bring Logan here someday. Have him stay in my family as I have in his. I’d like Tom Jefferson to see him, hear what he thinks. He’d learn something from Logan.”

“Maybe y’ought to go fetch him here for Annie’s wedding,” said Dickie. “A good halfbreed livens things up, if y’ give ’im some barleycorn, like they do old Mattapony Daniel at Mister Wright’s cockfights.”

“Don’t you dare!” cried Annie.

“Dick, that’s hardly very respectful, after all I’ve told you,” George said. “But …” He put a finger to his lip. “Maybe not a bad idea! Bring him
and
Cresap! Yee AH-ha!” He clapped his hands. “What a night we’d have!”

“Yah-ha! Yah-ha!” Billy yelped, clapping, eyes squinting shut in joyous release. All evening he had had an Indian cry pent up in his throat, and now it could come out. “Yah-ha! Yah-ha!”

G
EORGE WAS GONE BEFORE THE CHILDREN WERE UP THE
next morning, his saddlebags full of notebooks and maps, off to Williamsburg to plat his lands. He had ridden off to the capital in his best old frockcoat of forest-green wool, his best pair of shiny boots, tricorn hat, and a riding cape borrowed from his father, and thus, his mother told the children, he looked just about as civilized as anybody. “He’ll be back in three or four days,” she assured them, “the way he rides. Even allowing time to do his lands and soak up some government gossip, he’ll be back ’fore there’s time to miss ’im. And he hinted he might have time to buy a few presents for family, too. Well, say! Where did Billy get to? He was right here two winks ago.”

The boy had gone up to the bedroom where George had slept, and let himself in. And there on a clotheshorse hung what he had come up to see: George’s deerhide clothing. William looked at it for
a long time in the morning-lit room, dust motes drifting around, voices faint in far parts of the house. He looked at the Indian sun design on the back of the tunic, a sun of white beadlike shells in the center, and rays of red and blue quills radiating out from it, up, down, left, right. Then he reached to touch some of the long leather thrums that hung along the yoke, and along the seams of the sleeves, and remembered those fringes swaying as George waved his arms and told his story of the Indian.

Billy ran a finger along the fringes and made them move. Then he put his nose against the deerhide and shut his eyes and inhaled deeply. And like a hunting dog sniffing its master’s shoes, he went where the scents had come from: The campfires in dark forests at night. The lodges where Indian tobacco had been smoked. The villages where meat was cured over fires. The rivers from which fish were caught and cleaned. Far roads where horses ran, sweating with their speed. Fields where one lay down and crushed flowers and wild herbs and autumn leaves. Springs and brooklets where one lay in moss and ferns to drink. Hunts where gunpowder flashed and made sulfurous smoke. The butcherings, where buffalo blood and bear grease stained the sleeves. The trading posts and frontier inns, where rum and whiskey were sloshed. But most clearly, the sunny meadows where a surveyor sweated for hours over his compass and chain with his gun leaning against a distant tree. Billy was far away in those places when he felt a
presence.
Eyes on his back. He felt a chill, and slooowwwly turned to look for a huge-armed Indian chief. But it was his mother, standing in the doorway, looking at him with her eyes full of tenderness. She came and stooped and kissed him on the forehead.

“Come,” she said. “Breakfast’s on the board.”

And then in four days George was home again, his saddlebags even fuller. There were presents from Williamsburg’s shops and manufactories. For Elizabeth, a comb inlaid with mother-of-pearl. For Lucy, a long tin peashooter. “Blow, don’t suck it,” he warned, “or y’ll have beans in your lungs.” For Frances Eleanor, a doll she could play with when she grew older. A dozen gunflints for Edmund, an inkwell of crystal for Johnny the poet, a penknife for Dick. And for Billy, his first compass, a small pewter one with a slit sight in its folding cover. He showed him how to line up North and see where the other directions lay. “And one day when I’m home again,” he said, “after y’ learn to read Euclid, why, I’ll teach ye how to survey, just like Grandpapa Rogers taught me.” They all sat stunned with delight, while George ran upstairs to his room to fetch Annie’s wedding gift. “Lord, he
must
be making money out there,” John Clark mused.

Annie’s present was from the frontier, not from Williamsburg. It was a beautiful tippet, a shoulder shawl made of mink skins dark as her hair, delicately sewn together by some Indian woman. She was astonished. Her eyes swam in tears as she rubbed it on her cheek to feel its incredible softness. “You didn’t know I was getting married,” she said. “How did you know to bring me this? I thought y’d pick me up some glinty bauble in the capital!”

“Why,” he said, “it’s true I didn’t know it’d be a
wedding
present. But you’re my beauteous sister, and when I saw that, I knew it was made to be on your shoulders. I do love ye, Annie, and I’d stay if I could for that great day o’ yours. That great day for Owen Gwathmey, I should rather say!”

She was so overwhelmed she wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed her cheek against his chest, and sniffled, and finally said, “O, sometimes I just don’t know what to make o’ you. Y’ come threatenin’ to turn my wedding into a vulgar hijinks, but really you’re just as sweet and gentle as a, as a … I don’t know what!”

“I’ll be at your weddin’,” he said. “You won’t be able to see me, but you’ll know. Is that good enough?” He patted her gently on the back and then turned to face his parents, still holding Annie in the crook of his arm. “And you two, honored parents,” he announced, “listen here, it didn’t escape my notice that her wedding’s on the same day as
your
birthdays! October the twentieth, isn’t that so? I don’t know whose doin’ that is, but it sure doesn’t sound like mere happychance!” They were smiling broadly, utterly astonished that he had remembered that date. “So I’ve got things for you two as well, and I’ll just have to give ’em to you right now.”

For John Clark it was a matched set of flintlock pistols with ebony handles inlaid with silver filigree. They were costly pieces, which George really could scarcely have afforded to buy. He had won them, with their velvet-lined carrying case, from a gaming gent at the King’s Inn, his first night in Williamsburg. He did not explain this to his father, a devout Episcopalian who believed that craps and cards were evils. Betting on cockfights and horse races John Clark could condone, and sometimes did so himself, rationalizing that it is natural for cocks to fight and horses to run, but not for man to deal cards or throw dice. John Clark sat running his fingers over the elegant pistols, and George turned to his mother.

“And now for you, Ma. This.”

It was a beautiful little book bound in soft Morocco, with no printing on the backing or cover. The edges of the pages were
gilded. “Now what in the world is it, a little Bible or something? It’s so …” She slapped her cheek. The pages were all blank as snow. “Well, how in the world am I supposed to read this? They forgot to print it!”

“No, Ma,” said George, laughing. “That book’s for
you
to write. You put down some o’ those proverbs and maxims y’re always givin’ us for our moral and practical guidance. You can title it what y’ like, y’ see?
Ann Rogers Clark’s Book of Proverbs and Cautions
, or something more flowery-like.” He grinned at her perplexity.

“What proverbs?” said she. “I don’t say proverbs!”

“Maybe y’ don’t know it, but ye do. Like, um: ‘A gentleman will keep his fingers away from his face except when he eats, shaves, or prays.’”

“Oh fiddle,” she retorted, “that’s no proverb, that’s advice.”

“Well, that’s what a proverb is, Ma: seemly advice, said in few words.”

“Well,” said she then, “when ye were littler, I said it in fewer words yet. I said, ‘Don’t pick your nose.’”

They all laughed. Billy giggled, sitting on the edge of his chair, swinging his legs and pretending to excavate a nostril.

“Don’t write
that
one down, please,” George chuckled. “Here’s one I remember: ‘Red hair’s no excuse for tantrums.’ Ye don’t know how often I have to recite that one to myself. It works, too.”

“Well, I don’t know if I’ll be able to write a Book of Proverbs, thanks all the same,” she fussed, trying to hide her flattered feelings. “Huh! What am I supposed to do, follow myself around the house all day with a pen and this little book here, listening for proverbs to fall from my lips? George, I’ll vow, you’re a caution, you are. Well … Maybe I’ll write down dates in the lives o’ my children. Start with Annie’s wedding, maybe. And birthdays of her young-uns. If she’s like I been, that’ll fill up this little fancy book quick enough! Hmp! I’ll write down the days when you come and go, George, and stir us all up. Ye scoundrel. Come give me a kiss on my face. I wish to Heaven ye wouldn’t go away so soon to those places. Eh! When y’re gone, what I know about your welfare is like these empty pages! But, it’s not for me to try and stop ye, I who made you the sort that goes, for as the Lord knows, if there’s an empty place, Rogerses’ll rush into it. Just be careful, son. I didn’t raise you all those years for ye to go have a short life. Give your parents their care’s worth, that’s what I say!”

“Well, now, there y’ are,” he said, blinking. “That right there ought t’ be the first proverb y’ write down!”

A
ND THEN
G
EORGE HAD GONE, BACK TOWARD THE WILDERNESS
, as suddenly as he had come out of it, and Master Billy Clark, his youngest brother, was nearly inconsolable. He would go out into the yard alone and put his compass on the grass and find West on it and then sit gazing in that direction and pining. He told his mother he wanted to learn to read at once, so George would come back and teach him to survey. He would go to sleep at night with his compass in his hand. He resumed dreaming about George, dreams ever more vivid now. One night when Annie and her mother were sitting up late in their nightdress planning their details about the wedding, they heard him yip in his sleep. Mrs. Clark went in with a candlestick and sat on the edge of his trundle bed. Eddie, Johnny, and Dickie slept in the same room. They were snoring or mumbling in their covers. They slept like logs because of their hard work on the plantation and their long hours of study. Johnny moaned often in his sleep, saying the names of girls. Johnny was perpetually in love, with someone or other, stunned with heartaches and writing awful poems. One could never know who was this mooncalf’s object of love at any time. It would as likely be some bondsman’s daughter he had tumbled in a haymow as some spoiled planter’s girl he had pranced with twice around a ballroom; to him any miss was a princess; they were aristocrats by the color of their hair or the shine in their eyes, or the shape of their lips or the curve of their hips, to use one of his own frequently repeated rhymes. All his dreams were of love.