Eagle's Cry: A Novel of the Louisiana Purchase (24 page)

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Authors: David Nevin

Tags: #Fiction, #Historical

BOOK: Eagle's Cry: A Novel of the Louisiana Purchase
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“Well,” Miss Dolley said, “she was just a girl.”
“Yes … she’s grown now. Married. Has a baby.” He wondered if he’d betrayed anything, for Miss Dolley gave him a sharp look at that. He hurried on. “So you see, when I got his letter, I figured—well, I mean, he wouldn’t put plans like that in a letter, you know, that anyone might see; but I figured why else would he ask me? I don’t know nothing about being a secretary.”
“Well, maybe he does plan an expedition. I know he’s interested in the West. Talks about it all the time.”
“But then, why don’t he say so?”
“Maybe for a national expedition the leader needs a—oh, how to say it? Like a national point of view, so to speak. National attitude, comfortable dealing at the national level.”
“Waiting for me to prove myself, you suppose?”
“I don’t know, but it’s reasonable, don’t you think?”
He felt a boundless surge of energy and had to be off, and in a moment he was walking fiercely along a rough path toward the river, boots ringing against stone. By God, it could be! The president wasn’t going to send a damned novice out to cross the whole continent, not the sort of fellow who didn’t know any better than to go up on the Hill and threaten Mr. Randolph’s clerk, for goodness sake. You’re going to send a man across the continent, you don’t know who he’ll meet and you better be able to count on him not to act the horse’s ass.
Faster and faster he walked, the river gleaming up ahead. He always felt better when he talked to Mrs. Madison.
DAVIDSON COUNTY, TENNESSEE, FALL 1801
“There’s going to be trouble,” Andrew said. Rachel Jackson didn’t answer. She saw he had that grave look that meant bad news; and for her, as he well knew, there was only one kind of bad news that really mattered: his departure.
“Spanish are acting like mad dogs,” he said. “Word’s coming up that they’re fixing on closing the river again—stopping our trade, bottling us up like flies in amber.” He smacked fist into palm. “Idiots! They still think they can split the West off from the East! Can you imagine us a separate nation, pulling our forelock to the Spanish crown so they’ll let us use a river that’s rightfully ours in the first place? It’ll never work. So I’ve been thinking …”
She started getting that frantic feeling. He was going away, she was sure of it, she could see the signs even in the restless way he paced. The next round of circuit court was a month away; she’d been counting on that month to get herself ready. But now she was sure he would tell her something had come up, some new crisis, this time with Spain apparently, and he must go in a week or, worse still, tomorrow. Her heart began to beat rapidly and she pressed her hand to her chest. He gave her a sharp look, and she shook her head and managed a shaky smile.
Obviously the pressure on her soul went back to the terrible scandal, but why baffled her. It wasn’t that anyone would say anything now, years later; and she knew she’d made a sterling reputation of her own for kindness, repaying Jesus for her rescue. But those days had torn her heart.
She was sitting in her wickerwork chair on the brick
courtyard Andrew had had laid for her between house and her garden, which now was carefully banked for winter, seven varieties of roses, and that just the start of the flowers. The teapot was empty, its flame snuffed, the platter of sugar bread bare. Early morning sun gave a golden cast to the white planks of the house, laid vertically, seams covered with narrow lathing. Hunter’s Hill was a marvel of elegance and luxury, as one of the few frame houses in a country where logs were still the standard. Andrew paced and talked, his body long and lean with that deceptive strength of the mountain man … .
Did she remember David Allison coming down from Philadelphia and whirling through like a dust devil, buying land and selling it to speculators at home, prices rising from the sheer energy of his purchases? He’d seemed so happy, always laughing, looking ready to dance. He was as golden in Tennessee as he had appeared to be in Philadelphia.
But she knew the story, for she kept the books, one ledger for the farm, another for their land deals with location and cost per acre and offers they’d had and rejected. Land was the heart and soul of business in the West. Everyone dealt, looking for prices to rise, profit in spinning parcels here and there, swapping this for that with something to boot, buy on credit at five cents an acre for land out in the forest and sell on credit at ten cents. Before too long that land would be going for three and four dollars, cleared and plowed and fenced with split rails.
Rachel Jackson knew her value in this equation, for the home place she ran was the base on which all else stood. It ran well because she saw to it. Sowing and reaping were timely, yields were high, cotton was coming as a new money crop since Mr. Whitney invented the gin over to Georgia. They had their own gin now, doing cotton for their neighbors too. Her vegetable gardens fed the plantation; now was canning and drying time. The hickory odor of the smokehouse lay on still morning air. They had milk cows and beef calves for slaughter and sheep for wool and were known for breeding stock. Fine hogs ran loose like dogs.
It was a good frontier farm; she reckoned Pa was proud of her, looking down from heaven. He’d been a great frontiersman. He’d led the first party into West Tennessee, sited Nashville on the Big Bend of the Cumberland when the Indians controlled the land and a settler had to struggle to hold his own little homestead with blockhouse and stockade, and she could see him nodding his big head when she told him that for all the luxuries Andrew showered on her, all they really needed from the outside was salt and tea and bar iron.
The mercantile business Andrew had started with Jack Coffee was more complex. They had a store at Clover Bottom hard against the Cumberland, where folks swapped their produce for strap leather, axes and knives, gunpowder and lead and the weapons to use them, factory-made calico and bonnets, pins and needles and medicines and salves and ointments, tea and coffee and sugar and salt, and all the things people got to hankering for when they built their places up to do more than just keep them alive.
There was frightful expense in bringing in such items—purchase in Philadelphia, wagon freight to Pittsburgh, flatboat down the Ohio to Louisville, overland to Nashville. Goods selling at three times Philadelphia prices still left little profit. Receipts were in barter, hard money being a precious commodity out here on the western edge of the nation. People brought in cotton, wheat, corn, tobacco, pickled pork, skins, furs, and all else for which a market might be found.
All this must be loaded on flatboats and sent down the Cumberland to the Ohio and then on to the great river for the long float to Louisiana. The boats would hold at Natchez, and if they could get through the Spanish officials they’d float to New Orleans, doorway to the world market. Some produce went to states back east and some went on to England and Europe, Tennessee wheat and corn feeding armies locked in slaughter in places with names she couldn’t pronounce. Which was all right. They were far from Tennessee; she didn’t have any trouble pronouncing names here.
The firm built its own flatboats, forty feet by twenty-four; downriver the boys broke them up and sold the lumber. She
imagined half the houses in New Orleans were built of Tennessee flatboat lumber. Then the boys walked home, six hundred miles on the Natchez Trace, each man with his own piece and always in large groups. It was as good as a man’s life to walk that Trace alone or with two or three; and you wouldn’t never know if it was Indians or highwaymen, white of face and black of heart, that got them. Every bit of this had to be paid for. A shipper never made much profit, but worse, could be badly hurt if the Spanish made trouble, which one way or another they usually did, slapping on new tariffs, palms out to be greased, some miserable little official with his britches frayed waylaying honest folk with honest goods. It just made your blood boil!
That was the Spanish problem. If the river really were closed, land prices would collapse, ruining them and countless others, and there would be no market for her careful husbandry. Of course, the very idea of such a threat came to Andrew as a challenge, a call to duty. He had burning dreams and the sense he was destined to lead, Tennessee and maybe more too. The idea horrified her and yet she could hardly doubt it. He’d done so much already—congressman, senator, judge—everyone out here on the far frontier looking to him. It distressed her but it reassured her all at the same time.
Anyway, this was the man who had defied all convention to take her to Natchez when Lewis Robards had threatened her, who’d come galloping down the Natchez Trace to wed her the moment word came of the divorce, who’d stood like an oak against the storm of consequences to save her life and her sanity. Did she really expect him to see naught beyond a 640-acre fenceline? He was a national man … .
Yes, she remembered David Allison. Andrew had gone to Philadelphia to offer seventy thousand acres, bottom price twelve-and-a-half cents an acre. David offered twenty cents but payable in notes. Andrew took the notes over to the John B. Evans Company and endorsed them in payment for supplies to stock the store. But scarcely was he home before word followed that David had failed, his empire had collapsed,
he was in debtor’s prison, the notes were due, and Andrew must pay. It had been an agony that had possessed them both and left them still in debt. Allison had died after a year in debtor’s prison, poor sad man who’d made such trouble for so many, might he rest in peace.
Andrew was coming to his point, and now she saw that leaving wasn’t the issue. He wanted to sell their holdings, some forty thousand acres out to the west they’d collected so painfully, and clear their debts. She nodded, liking talk of clearing debts. And then … did she remember that tract they had over by Stone’s River? How choice it was: 450 very favorable acres with two log blockhouses, holdover from the old days but still in good shape; with a minimum of fixing they’d be—
She stared at him, the place emerging from memory, blockhouses like what her father had built so long ago. Ma, God rest her soul, had done well there after Pa was killed. Blockhouses were warm and comfortable, the top floor bigger than the bottom so that in an attack you could fire down as well as out, and she’d smelt the powder smoke in their blockhouse more times than she wanted to remember. The screams and shrieks and war cries of painted men come to kill them, terror gripping her throat like a strangling hand, men slithering close like snakes with murder in their faces. She shuddered. If she lived to ninety, she’d never forget that terror, her throat tightening at the very sight of an Indian. Back in those not so long ago days where she and Andrew had started, in the log-walled compound where he’d looked at her that day and she’d felt it all through her body, and the next time she’d seen him she’d smiled … .
So he came to his point. He wanted to sell Hunter’s Hill, clear the last of their debt, and live on the smaller property. Yet something was missing and she waited and then the answer to her last question came with the name he proposed for the new property:
The Hermitage.
It would be a refuge; it would protect them, it would draw him back from all his wild wanderings, back to her where he belonged.
“And,” he said, “we’ll clear the decks for action.” He
meant against the Spanish, and she felt a shiver of apprehension. But whatever happened then would be later, not now.
She stood and put her hands on his shoulders. “All right,” she said.
“They say the militia election’s set for February,” Jack Coffee said. “Conway’s stepping down—seems he ain’t well. Some of the officers are talking you up for major general.”
“Well, we want to be a mite cautious there,” Jackson said. He was saddling the bay mare; he and Jack were going to the store to meet their factor who’d come up from New Orleans. Rachel had kissed Jack’s cheek and gone inside.
Jackson was proud of the calm in his voice, for in fact the very idea set off a flash of desire. The notion that destiny had singled him out for great things made him sound like his head was too big for his hat, but it was true just the same. It burned in him like those rockets he’d read about in the French wars, white heat, tail of flame, riding mind and heart. Felt destined, and not just in Tennessee, either …
The military was his answer. He liked action, knew his own mind and didn’t hesitate; something needed to be done, he’d issue the orders and lead the charge. Men had always been willing to follow him. Major general, Tennessee militia, would be just right; but that didn’t make it easy.
Jackson’s mind was ablaze when they rode out, which didn’t prevent an appraising look at his acres, fields in dry stubble after the harvest, corn stalks to be gathered for fodder, cows grazing comfortably in the far pasture, fruit trees strawed for winter. A promising colt galloped along the rail fence as if it wanted to race; a good sign, horse that wanted to run.
It was a fine place and he hated to let it go, but it was time. That clearing the decks business, he hadn’t meant to say that, though the truth does have a way of popping out. But he was always careful of Rachel. They had paid a heavy price for what would have destroyed people of less strength. His natural instinct to fight had sharpened to what in calm
moments he could see was a sort of mania. And her wild discomfort in his absences was sort of a mania too.
But trouble was coming, and if it didn’t come on its own he might make it himself. It was no time to be overextended, debt leaving a man vulnerable, for with this Spanish pressure, sooner or later things would pop like a stopper from a bottle left in the sun. Settlers were pouring westward, over the Cumberland Gap, down the Ohio from Pittsburgh, new state of Ohio demanding admission. Vast new areas were being broken to cultivation as Indian titles were extinguished by treaties that, right or wrong, probably would soon be violated.
Well, wrong, he’d agree to that, but the treaties made promises that there wasn’t no way of keeping. Can’t keep settlers from coming on for good land lying fallow. Yes, it was hunting land for Indians, but could you really keep land open for naught but hunting with settlers coming over the Cumberland Gap in ever greater streams?
The Indians whose wild attacks at dawn had driven them into blockhouse walls in the old days were mostly gone now, gone south, down to Alabama country where there was still plenty of hunting range. They brought in pelts from time to time, and he traded with them and liked them well enough. They liked to laugh, and sometimes they made him laugh too. But friendly as they could be when well separated, there’d been too much killing on both sides, too much hatred deep ingrained. Man with any experience in the West saw an Indian, he remembered his own brother killed when just a boy, his auntie wearing a bonnet day and night after the Indians took her hair, and she thanking God every day she survived at all. No, settlers coming was the way of the West, and Jackson’s own experience with roving war parties told him settlers and Indians would never live together without trouble.

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