Read Eagle's Cry: A Novel of the Louisiana Purchase Online

Authors: David Nevin

Tags: #Fiction, #Historical

Eagle's Cry: A Novel of the Louisiana Purchase (38 page)

BOOK: Eagle's Cry: A Novel of the Louisiana Purchase
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Madison’s eyes widened at that information. Young Adams had been saying he was above politics as practiced today, that only a scoundrel could support either party. Now he intended to run as a Federalist. Evidently he had conceived a need to save the nation. Doubtless the story of Sally Hemings had energized him—and perhaps, Madison thought it not too cynical to wonder, it had struck him that Democrats were reeling and Federalists might storm back in the next election, now only two years off. Ripe pickings might be in the offing.
The titillating aura of sexual play seemed to reopen the attacks on Dolley. She stopped looking at papers. Her beauty, her sense of style, her vigor were all used against her. The whispers and hints in the papers said she was too much for her feeble little husband, her hungers drew her readily to other beds, the Democrats swapping her excesses for political favors. Such was the licentiousness in Washington, now proved by the revelations of a leader who would force a black concubine to submit to his illicit lust. And so forth.
Dolley took on a worn, sharp-featured look. Madison realized what he was seeing was the absence of her usual smile. One night when they were in bed with the candle snuffed, her voice a whisper, she said she thought it was a disaster, that this story would attach to Tom and all of them and drag on into the future, living still a hundred years after they were all dead and buried. For all their splendid dreams, she thought this is what people would remember. He rocked her gently, whispering that it would pass in time. There were tears on her cheeks.
Gradually the furor did seem to pass. No new information appeared to refuel the story and it slowly went stale. But Madison knew that things were changed forever. The episode made the administration seem light and weak and foolish, and he knew that their margin of error on the Louisiana question had shrunk. So much already depended on securing New Orleans—the tender plant of the people’s democracy, holding the nation together, fending off the dangers of the British connection. Now retribution for failure would be swifter and more certain, for their operating room had narrowed.
The president never commented. But one day at the end of a long talk on dealing with the French problem, he sighed and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. His voice came small and muffled. “I think everything is tighter now, James. Wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes, sir,” Madison said. “I think that is quite so.”
DAVIDSON COUNTY, TENNESSEE, LATE WINTER 1802
The wind was still and a winter sun warmed the front of the blockhouse where Rachel Jackson sat coring and slicing apples for a pie. She worked steadily, hands quick and sure, gaze roving over her well-tended acres. Maybe she missed Hunter’s Hill and the elegant frame house a little, but this simple log blockhouse—so like the one Pa had built when they first came out to the Great Bend of the Cumberland—really suited her nature and she was content.
And then Andrew was to home. She could see him through a front window that was hardly wavy at all. He had had new windows cut into the log walls and had ordered the big panes from a superior new glassworks in Knoxville and in a near miracle only one piece had broken as it came by wagon over a trail that could hardly be called a road. He was pacing before his desk, studying briefs; the next court season was near and he’d soon be gone. And she would be bereft again, desperate, breath short …
Two riders in the distance. She watched them, remembering how in the old days Ma would be reaching for the rifle standing ready inside the door. As they grew closer she saw one was Jack Coffee. Jack was good; he steadied Andrew somehow. More and more she feared that her husband’s fierceness in the face of scandal would lead him into terrible trouble someday. Sometimes she thought his need to defy was as strong as her own need to anchor to him. It was all so confusing!
Andrew came out and Jack presented the stranger as Nathan Fosby, from over in Sumner County, Sam’l Fosby’s son.
“I thought his son had run off,” Andrew said.
“Yes, sir,” the stranger said, “But I’m back now and got it fixed up with Pa, and he told me I’d better get on over here, you’d be the right man to hear about it. See, the French—”
Oh, the French, my goodness, rumors like crazy but no one really knew. She went to tell Hannah they’d have guests, shifted tea kettle from hob to grate, and stirred the fire. She was slicing a cake made that morning when she heard the young man say, “General, they really are coming—”
“Hold up, there,” Andrew said. “I’m not a general.”
“Pa says you’re going to run for the militia command, and he’s bet a hundred dollars you’ll win.”
Andrew laughed. “He’s a good man, your father. But I haven’t been elected yet. Judge will do for now.”
The militia … her mind wandered. He was thinking hard on the election but General Sevier, he’d already said he wanted the post for himself. The old military hero acted like it was his due, and he wouldn’t lose easily. There’d be trouble and here was Andrew already on a hair trigger.
Then she heard Mr. Fosby say, “French army’s coming and I believe we gotta get ready for them.”
Andrew had that steely look. “Rumors,” he said.
“No, sir! This ain’t no rumor. See, I just come from Santo Domingo and—”
“All right,” Andrew said. “Start at the start.”
So this Mr. Fosby told a strange and terrible story. She forgot all about coffee and cake and drew up to listen. He’d crossed his daddy and gone flatboating down the river, and at New Orleans he’d shipped on a schooner that went tramp trading through the Gulf. Till he shipwrecked on a reef off Santo Domingo and tried to swim for it, and both his legs was broke when waves threw him agin rocks. He was drowning when a black man and his son pulled him out and took him home and—well, here was the strange part, gave her an odd feeling but she knew a lot about love and Mr. Fosby’s face was full of honest love—
The black man’s daughter nursed him to health, and they fell in love and her father said they could marry. Her name
was Marie and she was beautiful, and again Rachel felt that jolt of surprise. She knew black girls could be beautiful, but she didn’t think of them that way. Mr. Fosby had learned some French by then and they stood up in the little village church with frangipani and bougainvillea in bloom, the comfortable sound of rectory hogs snuffling around outside the door, chickens pecking and cackling, and the parish priest had married them, all legitimate if you could call anything papist legitimate. Drumming and dancing went on all night, which sounded mighty pagan to her, though you could see how he loved this woman and how kindly her family was, and maybe it didn’t make any difference at all that they were black folks—
But then the French army came back, twenty-five thousand strong, column after column of soldiers filing off the ships with slung muskets and grenades, winches swinging cannon ashore.
“Under a big general, name of Leclerc.”
She saw Andrew’s eyes widen at that. “Leclerc, eh?” he said. But she was struggling just to keep up. She knew blacks had revolted in Haiti and it seemed Haiti and Santo Domingo were one island. There’d been some fighting, but things had settled down with a black leader, Toos-ant his name sounded like, and as far as the people could tell the French accepted him all right.
She was caught up in the story, found she was holding her breath, and consciously expelled it. Everything changed when the army came, the people restless, voices high, eyes shifting, nerves showing. Soldiers began arresting men, working from lists. Toos-ant wore his French uniform and tried to put himself between the soldiers and the people, but the old fear and hatred of whites was surfacing and strangers in Mr. Fosby’s village would finger their machetes at sight of him.
There wasn’t a sound but his low, steady voice. They were sitting in frame chairs with deerhide seats around the stone fireplace, and Mr. Fosby sat far forward like he was straining to make them see the beauty of the place, brilliant flowers
and birds flashing in the sun and storms sweeping in from the sea. He’d been happy there, she could see that. She had the sense that he hadn’t intended to talk this way at all, but it filled him and had to spill, like a milk pail you fill too full … .
It was as if he’d been too happy, in love with the island and a woman, didn’t care if she was black or blue, and in a moment it all exploded. Life will do that … .
Marie, perfectly good Christian name too, went to market with her sisters one day, carrying produce on her head and then laying it out on a coconut cloth in the square, and he’d followed with the men. Folks were buying and selling and swapping and there were dogs and children and burros and chickens pecking dung apart and mangoes, whatever they were, stacked on cloths in golden piles and a fiddle was playing and everyone was talking and laughing when the soldiers came.
French troops in their fancy uniforms, bayonets on muskets carried at the ready. They were chasing a tall, skinny man with frantic eyes who plunged into the market crowd. The soldiers followed, knocking people aside with rifle butts, and then someone yelled and he saw two of the soldiers fall and the others raised their muskets. He ran toward them, crying out, heard the roar of firing, saw them reload and fire again, and there were half a dozen people fallen, and he saw Marie on hands and knees with blood pouring from her mouth. He picked her up and watched the light fade from her eyes and then the soldiers were jostling him aside, and still holding his dead wife in his arms, he cried, “Why? Why?”
And they laughed at him. He cursed them. Their officer, a little major with pointed mustaches, slapped his face and said—he stopped, glancing at Rachel, and she, caught in the horror of the story, said very steadily, “Go on.”
—Slapped his face and said, “You like dark meat, do you? Look around. There’s plenty more where that came from.”
She was horrified. You’d think he would want revenge, sin though it would be, but something in his face decided her
not to ask, and into the silence he said, “They’re coming here, Judge; you understand that, don’t you?”
She looked at Jack, who was watching Fosby intently, his face noncommittal. Jack could be tenderhearted but now he was listening as a soldier listens, and so was Andrew.
No white man could live in the village after that, and Mr. Fosby’s family, loyal to the end, smuggled him down to the port city of Santo Domingo that night and he found a ship for New Orleans. But it didn’t sail for two weeks, and he decided to learn what he could. Every night he was in the taverns talking to French soldiers sodden with rum.
“Everyone—soldiers, sergeants, officers, everyone—understood that the goal was New Orleans. Bring the blacks to heel in a month or two, then on to Louisiana with fixed bayonets.”
“Bayonets?” Andrew said. He glanced at her. “An army? Talk here is they’ll just replace the Spanish.”
She’d heard Andrew say often that such talk was wishful thinking in the extreme; he was simply drawing Mr. Fosby out.
“That’s not what the army thinks. They believe they go to conquer. I figure that’s right too, ’cause one night I met an American mercenary, a colonel, he was pretty far along in his cups, and he laughed out loud when I asked the question. Don’t be silly, he says, these Frenchies intend to take over the continent. Everything west of the Appalachians, Tennessee, Kentucky, the Ohio River, all French. Said this Napoleon was a pistol, got whatever he wanted, no one could stop him.”
He cleared his throat. “So what I figure, Judge, the point of that big army, it’s to conquer us.”
Jack Coffee had to own up—Fosby’s story had impressed the hell out of him. First time he’d seen what all the rumor about the French could really mean. Imagine those bastards in the square at Nashville shooting down women and children!
The judge had been affected too, though you never could
be sure what that canny man was really thinking. Anyway, Fosby’s story had strengthened his decision to go after the major generalcy, when everyone knew challenging Sevier was no small matter. But Jackson was a natural commander; you could see that in his response to crisis. It would never occur to Coffee that it was up to him to rally the state, place himself at the pass, defend the nation. Oh, he’d volunteer, do his duty, die if necessary—but see himself as the key to it all? Great men had that image of themselves, and it was ever more evident to Coffee that Jackson was a great man.
So he was thinking when he walked into the Nashville Inn where the field officers of West Tennessee militia had invited Jackson to what amounted to a final judgment dinner: Should they elect him their commander? Eastern regiments would vote for Sevier, so Jackson must carry these western regiments. Coffee stood in the doorway of the small dining room and spotted his own commanding officer, Col. Robert Hays of the Davidson County Cavalry, under whom as a captain he commanded a company. Hays was talking with Col. Sam Farrow, who ran the regular militia of Davidson County, of which Nashville was county seat. He saw Bob Weakley from over at Lockland and Jake Hemphill of Sumner County, Dick Childress of Murfreesboro, and Dave Phillips from Lebanon, and the others, twenty or twenty-five all told. Just about everyone from the Mero District, westernmost in Tennessee, and some from the middle district too. Jim Scorsby, their brigadier, had been called to Louisville, but he was a Jackson man. Coffee waited till he caught Bob Hays’s eye before entering; the militia was democratic and all that, but the CO was still the CO. Coffee was only here as a courtesy to Jackson. He would keep his lip sealed; no one wanted to hear his views.
Hays was an old Jackson friend; indeed, Jackson’s whole military career had started with him, when he’d been appointed judge advocate of Hays’s regiment. That was ten years back, before statehood, before Nashville had turned into a real town, when the Nashville Inn was still one big room with logs unpeeled on the inside. Of course, that did
point to Jackson’s main weakness: he had never really commanded troops and now he wanted to command them all as major general.
There were three districts; each constituted a brigade, a regiment for each county plus one cavalry outfit like that of Bob Hays’s. Regimental officers were elected by their men; field-grade officers elected their brigadier, who joined with them across the three brigades to elect the major general. The governor would decide ties. It was a funny kind of election, when you got down to it—so few voting, so much at stake. That was what the judge had to make them see, that this mattered … .
The odds were agin him, no doubt about that, for Sevier was the military man; but then the door opened and Jackson came striding in, the very picture of a commander. Tall, thin, whipcord strength as obvious as if it were written on his forehead, wearing a fine suit of black broadcloth with newstyle pantaloons loose over well-brushed boots, a glowing cigar jaunty in his left hand, circling the room, shaking hands, a quip, a question, a word of recognition for each man and his regiment, the whole room glowing with his presence. Coffee knew him well, and yet this seemed a new Jackson, lifted by some inner fire, rising to the need—an—other mark of a natural commander. Immediately Coffee’s optimism returned.
All these men knew him, supreme court justice riding circuit in their counties, already a power by virtue of his office, widely recognized as the civil leader of West Tennessee—but civil was one thing and military another. Someone put a glass of whiskey punch in his hand and they stood close, chatting not with each other but with him, talking hunting, horse racing, a new bull someone had imported, a stallion likely to tear up the track at Clover Bottom, a new plowing technique someone was trying down toward Murfreesboro, a bear that mauled three men before they put him down. They had dinner, venison with pork sausage to spice it, and ale from Bob Hays’s brewery:
and cigars were lighted before the judge turned serious and said it was time to talk.
BOOK: Eagle's Cry: A Novel of the Louisiana Purchase
11.15Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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