From Sea to Shining Sea (86 page)

It was a bad-luck day. It looked as if half of the men were walking wounded now. Some, stained with their own blood, were carrying or dragging blood-soaked comrades whose heads wobbled on their necks. William, aiming at a sprinting Indian, heard a gasp beside him and felt a body slump against his leg. He fired; the Indian tumbled; he reloaded, and only then looked down. Lying there by him, propped on an elbow, face chalky, a sinewy runt of a fellow with salt-and-pepper hair was blinking in disbelief at a bloody arrowhead that protruded from under his left collarbone. It was one of George’s old campaigners. William knelt beside him amid the shuffling of feet and the roar of gunfire and howling of Indians, and said, “Care to walk with me, old-timer?” and stretched out a hand.

“Just as soon not,” the man wheezed. He was not bleeding from the mouth; likely the arrow had missed his vitals.

“Want to lay here then till they come scalp you alive?”

The man reached for William’s arm. “No, don’t b’leev I do.” William got him up and he was able to hitch along with his right arm over William’s shoulder, his left hanging, bloodsoaked. His eyes bugged now and then, and William knew he was doing his damnedest not to faint.

The shooting and wailing and cursing went on and it was like being herded along a gauntlet of Hell’s own demons. Now the retreating troops were within a hundred yards of Hall’s soldiers; the Indians, in a last effort to keep the two groups divided, suddenly came rushing down the slope and up from the rear, and were splashing into the river from the other bank.

It was bewildering how they could swarm and maneuver so effectively, like bees by some common instinct, yet fight singly with such initiative. Even as they came down in this terrible onrush, William had to admire them, and sense the greatness of Little Turtle and Blue Jacket and Black Hoof and such chiefs.

He had to let the wounded man down. He fired one shot and then there was no time to reload because the warriors, all swift, hard muscle and joyous frenzy, had crashed into the mass of Kentuckians from three sides, and now it was just simply a deadly brawl, tomahawks, clubbed rifles, bayonets, swords, knives, fists, teeth, and feet, the awfulest melee one could have dreamed of in a nightmare. William stood and plunged, ducked and swung and skipped, kicked and stabbed, reeled from blows, saw sparks, drew blood, twisted one braceleted arm until it
broke, knocked out teeth, squeezed someone breathless and bit off his nose, yanked out a handful of black hair, fell to his knees from a blow on his back but somehow got up again, his vision coming and going until he could see again, and what he saw was a savage straddling the poor old fellow with an arrow through him, ripping open his abdomen with a knife, reaching in, yanking out the still-beating heart and sinking his teeth into it. “Oh, no, God damn you,” William roared and, with an infuriated lunge, thrust his hunting knife through the Indian’s temple up to the hilt into his brain. The Indian died, blood from the torn heart bathing him; William could not pull his knife out of the skull and so left it there, and resumed the battle with a tomahawk he found lying on the ground. He fought on with a cold, sick efficiency, mostly reflex, unable to forget the sight of the gushing, bitten heart. He knew the Indians believed they could obtain the strength of an enemy by eating his living heart. But what strength had that fainting old man had?

Yell and be happy
, George had told him;
there’ll be time later for crying and puking.

So William yelled, his voice curdling with fierce joy and unbearable sadness, and flung himself on the broad bare back of a Shawnee who was trying to scalp a bluecoat soldier.

“Y
E
KNOW
SUCH
K
ENTUCKY
BOYS
BE
FAIR
HAND-FIGHTERS
,” William was to tell George and the family back at Mulberry Hill the next month, “so we fit our way to Colonel Hall, and there we formed a square, and drove ’em back to where we could shoot again. Well, we retreated up the river for about a hundred years, bloodyin’ every foot of it. Colonel Hardin wouldn’t let us break and run all morning, thinkin’ Harmar would send reinforcements. But none ever come. Damn, damn! Finally we drove ’em off, or else they got bored killin’ us and just up and quit. We hauled our wounded back twenty-five mile till we got to Harmar’s army, where he’d just been a-
settin
’! George, listen: our messenger had got to him, all right. But ’stead o’ sendin’ even a troop o’ horse to come help us, he’d ordered that whole damn army—nigh a thousand men, mind you!—to form a square and just
set
!” William’s eyes were brimming and his mouth was contorted. George nodded, and William went on.

“And when we’d drug ourselves in, did he set off for the Maumee to strike back? No siree, he didn’t. He ordered us all back to Fort Washington, cannon and all. We were
dumbstruck
, George. The men wanted to go back and fight, but the general said give up!

“A hundred and nine men, George. Left for the scalping knife and the buzzards. Meat left to rot, as you used to say, Pa. Not a one with a grave to sleep in.” He shook his head and put his palms over his face. The family looked at him in the light from the chandelier, and no one knew what to say. Finally George spoke.

“Well, Brother, ye’ve had your taste o’ war now. And didn’t I say, there’s a time after for cryin’ and pukin’.”

“Aye, you were so right, too.” William touched his tongue to the little scar just below his lower lip. He had discovered after the battle that he had bitten his lip through. Except for the bullet graze on his flank, it was the only scar he carried from that battle where death had flown so thick and fast.

All the bruises and sprains that had been in every part of his body had left no scars.

George looked at William with a heart-quaking affection and deep respect. In all the combats he had been through himself, he had never been exposed to such an intense or sustained hail of lead and steel as that must have been, and he wondered if he could have borne it the way William had. Survivors of the battle had told George that his brother Ensign William Clark was “brave as Caesar” and “blessed with eyes all the way around his head.”

John Clark, sitting here now hearing his youngest son talk, was aware that he had killed so many Indians that he had lost count of them, and this brought the old confused sadness over him, for he still suspected that the Gate of Heaven is closed against those who have taken human lives, even though some passages of the Bible seemed to justify slaying in a right cause. John Clark heard and watched his youngest son now with anxiety for his soul. At least it was good that William did not seem to exult.

And now William said: “I’m sick for the whole miserable United States Army. Its first campaign was a disaster, damn that fool Harmar. I wish you’d been leading ’em, George. It wouldn’t ha’ turned out so.”

“Hear, hear!” exclaimed Dr. James O’Fallon. He was sitting across the room, in a straight chair, Fanny Clark in another chair at his side. He had come down the Ohio at last, after long travels in the South and East, to see the girl he had doctored and then become infatuated with back at Fort Pitt. And he had found her here, now grown into a stunning, sweet-voiced, shapely young woman of seventeen, and here his travels had stopped. He had been here for weeks now as a house guest, occupying William’s
empty room. And her parents were expecting him at any moment to announce his intentions, which were already quite plain. Fanny was so a-brim with happiness that she could not bear to see William brought to such low spirits.

“Billy,” she said, in that same precise language and musically modulated voice that had been her mark since she was three years old, “it certainly was an occasion to be mourned and regretted. But we who love you are thankful for the miracle that you were not among those hundred and nine. We’ve something to praise the Almighty Lord for, haven’t we?”

William looked at her for a moment, at this marvelous creature who had been a part of his life for as long as he could remember, who had never in all those years vexed him in the slightest, even though she had long ago taken from him the privileges of being the baby of the family, and suddenly the gloom passed from his face and he began to smile upon her, his blue eyes full of adoration.

“Fanny,” he said, “d’ye know there are times when I’m really glad I pulled you out o’ that cold river?”

And amid the family’s laughter, she leaped up from her chair, actually leaving Dr. O’Fallon’s side for once, and ran across the room to hug her brother Billy around the neck.

“This is your last daughter, is’t not, Mister Clark?”

“That she is,” John Clark replied. “Why, Mister Johnston? Are ye getting weary of issuing us licenses?”

“Ha, ha, ha! Why, no sir! No indeed! These are glad occasions for me, and I’d be delighted to keep on if you had a dozen more! May you and yours increase, sir, as there’s no better a people in Kentucky! In truth, were’t not for you Clarks, there’d probably be
no
people in Kentucky!” He nodded and winked at George, who had just witnessed the document and was laying down the quill. George nodded at this tribute with a small smile. The clerk was a jolly, inquisitive sort, almost in the nature of a gossip, but he was still a staunch champion of the Clark family. Once, it was said, Johnston had ejected from his office a man he had heard chattering to bystanders about General Clark’s weakness for the bottle.

It was true that John Clark’s tribe was increasing. By his daughter Annie Clark Gwathmey back in Virginia he was now the grandfather of nine, including a set of twins; by son Jonathan, four more, the latest being a daughter Mary; by daughter Elizabeth, two more, both of whom had nearly killed their mother in coming into the world; and by daughter Lucy a grandson named in his honor, John Croghan. That child’s father, Bill Croghan, now stood beside George, looking at him through the corner of his eye, and knowing a secret about him that so far George did not know himself: just last night, in a profoundly tender, intimate moment with Lucy, there had been an enthusiastic consent that if their second child should be a boy, he would be named after George. If a girl, it would be Lucy Ann, they had agreed, but Lucy had expressed an intuitive certainty that it would be a boy, and a red-haired one at that. Lucy had a firm faith in the potency of her mother’s Rogers blood.

Lucy’s concern over her brother George had been very deep during the years of his crisis with the bottle. She and Bill Croghan both worried about the distress it caused her parents. And Lucy had often been annoyed at having to admit any weakness in a Clark. But lately they were hopeful for him, as George had not gone on a binge for more than a year. According to the reports from their parents at Mulberry Hill, the same sealed whisky jug had sat untouched on the mantel in George’s room from one New Year to the next, gathering dust. Doubtless there had been many a night when he had yearned for it, as his financial troubles grew ever more hopeless, but not once had he even touched it to make fingerprints in the dust on its rounded shoulders. “I’m letting it age, so’s it’ll be good and mellow,” he would
joke about it. But to William in confidence he had added: “May it mellow forever, for it’ll never be good enough for me again. If I touch that, I’m a lost soul for sure.” And so that dusty jug had stood for month after month now as a sign of his determined will to save himself. Even when his cherished plan for building a canal and locks around the Falls had fallen through for lack of financial backing, George had resisted the temptation to turn back to the jug for solace. That, his family believed, had been the turning point in his struggle. The iron will and self-discipline that had made him the conqueror of the Northwest Territory had borne him over the slump of that failure, and now he was keeping himself intoxicated not with liquor but with reading and writing, and with great new schemes and hopeful projects. As in the old days, he was thinking big and thinking all night.

T
HE
GRANDFATHER
CLOCK
BONGED
THE
HOUR
OF
TWO
IN
A
far room, but it awakened Ann Rogers Clark, and she could not go back to sleep because detailed thoughts about Fanny’s wedding kept rising up. And after a while she began to sense that somebody else was awake in the house. She slipped out of bed and pulled on a robe and slippers, pausing now and then to be sure her rustlings weren’t awakening John. Then she eased out through her bedroom door and went down the hall. A rectangle of light reached out into the hallway from the open door of George’s room. She stepped softly up to the door and looked in. A blaze was roaring in his fireplace.

Lamplight was on his left hand, with which he was rubbing his forehead. He was in his linen shirt, sleeves rolled up, and was agleam with sweat. Handwritten papers were adrift all over his desk, and there were rolled sheets leaning against the wall, and papers on the floor covered with sketches of machinery—windlasses, levers, wheels. The unopened jug stood on the mantel. And the hum of night seemed like the hum of his brain’s own machinery. Sometimes when he was like this, his mother thought she could hear his brain rumbling and humming like a mill.

She thought now that he was sunk too deep in his cogitations to have noticed her presence. But he still had the senses of a scout, and without looking up he said, “Hey, Ma,” and reached his hand out. She went and stood by his chair, and he put his arm around her waist. She patted his shoulder and looked down at the papers that lay immediately before him, covered with the complex hieroglyphics of his night-ponderings.