From Sea to Shining Sea (27 page)

He was still for a while, and she didn’t know whether he was sulking or remembering. But at length he said:

“Why d’ye ask me that just now?”

“Well,” she said, and the tears were starting to course hot and wet down her temples, “Because … because I loved you more that moment than ever before or since, I always thought, but … I know I do more now than I di … than I did then.”

And soon she felt him quaking in the darkness with his great,
suppressed sobs, and they held each other and wept silently until they were exhausted, and she went to sleep remembering the flowery green meadow under the Blue Ridge.

A
ND IN THE MORNING AT BREAKFAST, WHILE THEY WERE
still feeling haunted and bewildered, glancing cautiously at each other amid the lively talk of their children and the clatter of plates and silver, George announced that he heard a rider turning in, and that it must be a message about the powder, and he excused himself from the table and shot out into the hallway. On his heels at once were Johnny, who always imagined messages were for him, Mrs. Clark herself, who had a sudden wordless certainty that it was Jonathan home for his furlough, and Billy, who was just naturally always at George’s heels.

“Well, I’ll be a red-beaked ripsnort if it isn’t the Grand High Sheriff o’ King William County!” George cried from the front door. “Owen! Welcome!”

Owen Gwathmey lumbered in the door, hearty, red-faced from the October cold and, it transpired, from the flush of self-conscious pride. “I was in the neighborhood on a matter of office,” he said, “so thought I’d just come say in person instead o’ the post, that your Annie just two days since has given me another boy!”

Ann Rogers Clark clapped her hand to her chest and rolled her eyes. The infant wasn’t due for weeks yet, they’d thought. George poured a toast despite the morning hour. Owen said, “We named him Temple, after my mother’s family. We’ll want all o’ you who can to come to the christening.”

“May your tribe increase,” George toasted. “As it seems to be doing anyhow.”

“See, Annie,” John Clark said into his wife’s ear, “it’s all th’ same, we can keep havin’ children
this
way!”

And his words surged into her heart with such an impact that she felt a sensation like hot needle-pricks all over her skin, and a slamming of her heart, and a need to cry, out of tenderness, but she contained all that because of the happy people present, and as usual when she contained such a thing, her fair skin went red and blotchy and broke out in a rash. She left the uproar to catch a look at herself in a mirror down the hall.

Wouldn’t ye know it, she thought. It’s one o’ those that makes me look like I’ve eat raspberries out of a trough!

And at that moment they heard Jonathan’s voice hallooing from down the road, and when he saw her in the doorway, her blue eyes swimming in her livid face, if he had not known this
was her old usual stirred-up-feelings rash, he might have thought he and Bill Croghan had come home to another epidemic.

No one was ready for Jonathan’s arrival; they had been braced for it for days, but now Owen’s news had so disarmed them that no one of them could recompose whatever front he or she had intended to put up for Jonathan. Now they were caught with their emotions in disarray, and Jonathan and the slender young officer beside him were dismounting and moving among them. Jonathan came to his mother first.

He had always greeted her by giving her his cheek to kiss, and this time there was a momentary awkwardness when he didn’t, but she reached up and held him and kissed him there anyway, just as she always had, on that poor, sallow, scarred cheek, on the ruins of that skin she had bathed and soothed and pampered and nuzzled so many thousands of times in his childhood, and her eyes swam with tears and she was beginning to heave with sobbing. “Now, now, there, Ma,” he was saying in that deep-chested gentle voice, patting her arm, “what kind o’ soldier are you?”

“I’m all right,” she managed to say. “Just all weepy-happy ’cause you’re whole and home. And sorry your friend has t’see … see me lookin’ my worst.”

It was easier for everybody after that, and in a moment a typical Clark family reunion was in full ferment in the hallway, and gradually Jonathan got to seem as if he had never looked any different.

I
T WAS ONE OF THOSE RAREST OF TIMES, WHEN ALL THE
Clark boys were home at once, and the days flew.

It was a rare time in another way. There was romance in the house, and for once Johnny was not involved in it.

There were two romances. Colonel Isaac Hite, a substantial gentleman whom Jonathan had known during his clerking days, a relative of the Bowmans, came through with his family from Frederick County. Among them was his eighteen-year-old daughter Sarah, whom Jonathan had not seen since she was twelve. Sarah Hite had luminous, sleepy-looking blue eyes, high cheekbones, cornsilk hair, a rosebud of a mouth set in a resolute jaw, a lark’s song of a laugh, and a vibrancy of manner that drew Jonathan back to some old, vaguely remembered yearning. For hours he regarded her, Cupid’s arrow festering in his heart, and tried to remember what it was that he was remembering, and it was not until that evening at table, when someone mentioned the name of Captain Bill Lewis, that Jonathan remembered,
with a start and a flood of warmth, Lucy Meriwether. He turned and studied Sarah Hite in this new light and he understood now what had been haunting him. She had not seemed to look anything like Mrs. Lewis before, and still did not really
look
like her, but she
was
like her.

Johnny, with his connoisseur’s eye, had found nothing extraordinary about her, and so was merely polite to her as to any family friend. Bill Croghan found her very fetching, but could see enchantment written all over his friend’s face and decided not to compete for her attention. And that was just as well, because someone in the Clark family was already watching Bill Croghan with lovesick eyes.

It was Lucy.

Twelve she was then, a freckled tomboy with knee-scabs hidden under her dress, and no romantic notion had ever before entered her head. But somehow she had gotten the most sickening crush on this elegant Englishman in patriot’s uniform. She laughed uproariously at his mildest witticism, tilted her head and rested her freckled cheek on the back of her hand in an absurd pose of assumed femininity, and scarcely took her eyes off him. She was transparent as a window pane. Bill Croghan became aware of it at once. Being a wholesome and merry man, he liked her immensely as a child, but knew he would have a case on his hands if he didn’t handle her right. And so he became like a child when she had him in tow. He spent much time with her that October, walking and clowning with her in the yard, practicing the peashooter and sling with her, stooping and collecting pretty autumn leaves or studying woolly-bear worms with her, under a blue fall sky. She was flirting, a travesty of coyness, and had about as much girl-guile as a polliwog.

And Bill Croghan kept it all under control by calling her “Little Brother.”

And now for a while George did not have to be the sole bard at the table, because Jonathan and Bill Croghan had a most stupendous yarn to spin about Charles Town. Bill especially had a mastery of description that enabled the whole family to see it all as if they had been there themselves: General Lee and his food-stained vest and his dogs, the great ships plowing up the channel, the cannon blasts, the splintering ships, the waterspouts, the brave sergeant with the Carolina flag, the grounded warship burning and exploding in the channel at night, and then all the aftermath, celebrations and feasts, the dancing and music, the elegant Charles Town belles in all their finery. He told them how the South Carolina flag had been redesigned to include
a palmetto tree, and he taught them two or three of the more acceptable songs about Sir Peter Parker’s pants. George listened as if he were determined to absorb every detail, and even interrupted now and then to ask about particulars. He explained that the people of Kaintuck were always starved for news, and this was how they liked to hear it: in such a way that they could see it with their own eyes. George cheered for Colonel Moultrie when the tale was done, and proposed a toast to him. Then he asked Jonathan:

“And you, y’ saw all this from a grandstand, as it were, and didn’t have to shoot a bullet or dodge one?” He did not mean it to deflate Jonathan, but Jonathan, as men do who have just missed combat, took it that way. His eyes darkened and he stared at George for a moment, then glanced at Sarah Hite down across the table, as if to see whether she was smirking at him, then looked indignantly back at George.

“Yes,” he said coldly. And George caught the tone and understood.

“I’m glad,” he said. “Two reasons why. First, I’d shudder to think of you in such a danger. And second, if ye’d been down in the midst of it someplace, you two, why, you’d not ha’ seen it on such a scale, and so I wouldn’t have near so grand a story to tell ’em out yonder, would I!”

Johnny was intrigued by this notion. “What d’you mean about such a scale, George?”

“Well, probably you’ll see what I mean, soon enough. But what I mean is, it’s little and squalid when you’re down in it.” He was remembering his own first combat, on Pipe Creek. “But if you’re a general, lookin’ down on it from a hill, and making it go like you were God himself, why, I’d reckon you’d see so much glory in it, it’d turn your head.”

“
Amen!
” said John Clark.

And Bill Croghan tilted his head and gazed at George as if he had just discovered a new breed.

G
EORGE
R
OGERS STOOD UP FROM THE BIG TABLE HE USED
as a drawing desk and laid his calipers down on a large square of paper covered with sketches of king posts and trusses. He came forward, hand reaching and mouth twisted into a tight-lipped smile, his eyes intense. His hair was almost as much white as red now, but his face was still ruddy and youthful, his body firm and erect. “Well, George! You!”

“Uncle.”

They gripped hands, then spontaneously put their arms
around each other’s shoulders and hugged. Behind George inside the door of the study, Joe Rogers stood, anxious and half-smiling, watching this reunion. And behind Joe in the hallway, murmuring and staring, stood most of the rest of the Rogers clan.

Everything about this uncle’s family reminded George of his own. There had been ten children born to George and Frances Pollard Rogers, the youngest a daughter about Fanny’s age, and five of the Rogers children were named Johnny, Lucy, Edmund, William, and Frances. There was a joke that if any of the Clark and Rogers children somehow got exchanged at church, it would be next Saturday before anyone noticed.

“Well, Nephew, I know why you’re here. Close the door, Joe, and wait outside. George, let’s us sit by the fire.”

They drank to health and talked briefly about the war and then got to the heart of the matter.

“Joe’s determined to go with you, and he tells me you want him to. Is that so?”

“It was his idea, I hope he told you.”

“Yes.”

“In a way, Uncle, I prayed you’d be able to talk ’im out o’ the notion.”

“As I say, he’s determined. All but declared independence. I reckon if I’d denied him, he’d have just gone off and joined Washington. In the same way, I prayed
you’d
just tell ’im you didn’t want ’im along.”

“I could’ve told ’im that, but it wouldn’t ha’ been true. I need people I can count on to help me take that powder out, and I wish I could find ten o’ his caliber and spirit.” He saw both pride and sadness in his uncle’s eyes at these words. “But I had to hear you say, Uncle, that if anything happens to ’im, you’ll not grudge me.”

The expression in George Rogers’ face was fear, now. He replied, “Well, sure and I’ll
say
it. O’ course one can’t know how he’s going to feel at a time like that. But no, I don’t aim to grudge you. Y’ know I care for you as I do for my own. By my eyes, George, you
are
my own. I don’t want to lose either of you. But you know it’s not our way in this family to try to stop someone who believes what he’s doing. I know ye can’t guarantee anything, Nephew. All I ask is, keep ’im out of harm’s way as well as ye can.”

“I can swear this: Long as he’s in my sight, my own life stands ’twixt him and any harm. That’s as much guarantee as any man can give. As for Joe, I’ve already told him what he’ll have to
guarantee me: he’s to expect no coddlin’ on account o’ being my cousin.”

“By God! I should say not! I’d switch you if ye coddled ’im! Now … Well … Let’s bring him in. I’m set to say good-bye to my son. And to my best nephew.”

T
HE
O
HIO WAS GRAY AS LEAD, A MILE WIDE, RUNNING FAST
, thick with floating ice chunks. The longboat speeding down midstream with five rowers straining at its oars was so heavy with armed men, lead, and powder that its gunwales were barely above water. It bothered George to have all the powder in one boat, but one boat was all that Fort Pitt had been able to spare.

Young Joseph Rogers, the rower nearest the stern, sat in the very center of his seat, erect, looking straight astern. Facing him, at the tiller, was his cousin George, wrapped to his chin in a cloak, looking intense, almost angry. The clouds were low and somber, spitting snow into the river. Both riverbanks were white with snow, the cliffs and denuded trees etched dark against them.

George suddenly broke into a grin, looking at his cousin, and Joe Rogers asked, between laboring breaths, “What’s amusin’?” They had been rowing almost nonstop day and night since Fort Pitt and had come almost three hundred miles down this forbidding river, and every foot of the way, Joe had felt that he would perish of exhaustion—unless the overloaded boat capsized first and drowned him.

George replied, “Y’ never look left nor right, Cousin. Scared you’ll see Indians?”

“I’m scared if I roll my damn eyeballs one side or t’ other I’ll tip this damfool boat over.”