From Sea to Shining Sea (35 page)

“I’ll refuse to take ’im only if you’ll refuse to let him come, Uncle. Ye know how I am about that. I can only give you the same guarantee I … I gave you on Joe.”

“Once again, George, that’s good enough for me.”

If George’s love and admiration for his uncle could have increased from what it always had been, it did so with those words.

T
HAT YEAR THE
C
ONGRESS DECLARED A
T
HANKSGIVING
D
AY
—as some joked, to give thanks that there still was a Congress.

George was at home, and the family was thankful for his presence, though it was debatable just how present he was, he was so absorbed in his great scheme. Half his soul was a thousand miles off in the West, and the other half was at Williamsburg, where his influential friends were trying to sneak his plan through the Privy Council without exposing it to debate.

Richard, now eighteen, was trying to get his father’s permission to go with George out west. “His cousins go with ’im, why can’t his own brother?” he would implore. But John Clark needed Dick and Edmund to help him tend the place, because of all the extra farming he was doing for the army. Billy, now seven, could drive a team and butcher an animal and tend a tobacco field, or do just about any man’s work, but only on a wee scale, so John Clark could not let another grown son go off to war yet. “Next year, Dick,” he finally promised with a sigh.

Edmund was fifteen now, a big redhead, quiet, kindly, solitary, and he wasn’t talking war yet, because he really could see how his father needed help. “It’s a good thing for the British Eddie can’t go,” George told Johnny Rogers, “as that lad can fairly shoot the toenail off a sky-high buzzard, and call which toenail before he shoots. Not to exaggerate but just a little.” It was Edmund, in fact, who put the fowl on the table that
Thanksgiving Day; as usual he had ignored the turkey’s big body and shot it between the eyes.

“Why tear up th’ body meat,” he’d shrug with a smile, “when nobody eats turkey head anyways?”

Lucy was still preoccupied with Bill Croghan, though she had not seen him for almost a year and did not have a good word to say about him. She had never forgiven him for calling her “Little Brother” the last Christmas. But she still had it in a secret place in her head under her fire-red curls that she was going to marry him when her age caught up with his, and her way of going about it was just to work quietly and diligently to get over her natural tomboyish traits, so that whenever he might next see her, he would not call her “Little Brother.” As her mother confided to daughter Annie: “Lucy’s like a caterpillar that’s made up its mind to hurry up and be a butterfly. Ye want to tell th’ poor thing it’s not somethin’ you work at, it just happens.”

As for Annie, whom the brothers now liked to call “Madam Sheriff,” she had to tell her mother, with an abashed flush, that her most recent sanguinity hadn’t happened and she was probably going to have a third child come next year.

“Lord a God,” her mother breathed. “You’ve still got one toddlin’ and another not weaned! Don’t you remember at all that advice I gave you?”

“Aye,” Annie said, now with that old wistful smile of hers. “But Owen asked Dr. Campbell about that o’ the nursing, and he told ’im ’twas but an old wives’ tale.”

“Old wives! Hmph! Well, I like that!”

Jonathan and Bill Croghan were not at home for the holiday. Both were in winter quarters with Washington’s army in a place called Valley Forge in Pennsylvania. When they would write to the family, both would put their letters on the same sheet, paper being so scarce—as everything was.

Money was nearly useless in the Colonies by now, and even the tobacco certificates were terribly inflated, as Britain had shut the ports to trade. A pound of tea, if anyone could have found it, would have cost £10. On the Clark’s Thanksgiving table, the teapot steamed with sassafras and herbs, and there was a pot of dandelion coffee. The Clarks had, with their usual self-reliance, adjusted bit by bit to the shortages, and anything they could not produce on their own plantation, they just considered it didn’t exist. One of the severest shortages was salt. Cider vinegar from John Clark’s apple orchard served in its place.

It was cold and raw and spitting snow outdoors, but inside it was close and warm and happy. George said a frontier-style
Grace over the table that was so amusing that Ann Rogers Clark meant to write it down in her little blank book, but was too busy, and its wording had evaporated from her mind before she had a chance to sit down with pen in hand.

Because it was a day of thanks, they gave no asking prayers. But in the small hours after everyone was bedded down, John and Ann Rogers Clark knelt on the floor side by side at the foot of their bed and asked for the deliverance of their son Johnny and nephew Joe Rogers. Johnny’s whole company had vanished in the Battle of Germantown, and Jonathan had written that more than likely they had all been captured in that awful confusion. John Clark prayed aloud for him, and then they remained on their knees to have their own private words with God.

May his captors be humane, she prayed, as they must be, as Thou are the God of all us English peoples.

She thought momentarily of the High Church that had burned her ancestor at the stake, but put that out of her head quickly.

He’s all sweet and dreamy down inside, she prayed. Let him not have to make himself cold and hard against ill use. Amen.

She lay on the pillow later with John Clark snoring beside her and turned her soul up toward Pennsylvania; she listened to her heart to get a sense of whether Johnny was alive. She listened to her heart and to her womb, and finally got the sense that he was alive somewhere up there. But she had too a heavy feeling of dread.

If he’s alive, though, she thought, whatever his distress, being alive’s the thing to be thankful for.

She heard Annie get up in the bedroom across the hall and tend to her crying baby boy Temple, and heard Annie and Owen talking low for a while, then there was silence again and Ann Rogers Clark went to sleep listening to the cold wind around the caves.

I
T WAS THE GRIMMEST, DARKEST, MOST OMINOUS SIGHT
Johnny Clark had ever seen, that prison ship, and his soul sank a little deeper with every stroke of the oars that pulled him toward it.

The hulk lay there in the choppy cold water ahead, without
the masts or spars or even the flag that give a ship the look of life; it lay like an enormous floating coffin, between a harbor and a sky as somber as death. From somewhere forward on its deck, black smoke rose and was whipped away into the snow by the raw channel wind.

The oars of the cutter rose and fell, rose and fell, and the side of the prison ship slowly loomed closer and higher. Johnny was one of twenty prisoners being rowed out to the ship. The rest were enlisted men, sitting in their thin and tattered clothes, hugging their knees, their leg-irons hanging between their ankles. The eight rowers, dirty Brooklyn waterfront wretches, looked as if they could be Charon’s own oarsmen. Two middle-aged British soldiers with pistols and muskets stood over the prisoners, cloaks wrapped about their faces. The chubby British ensign in charge of the rowboat stood beside Johnny, an arm over the tiller, constantly running his tongue over his chapped lips.

As they drew near the hulk, two dark figures appeared at the rail above, their heads and shoulders visible; they seemed to be carrying something heavy between them. Then two more appeared, also carrying a burden. They moved to the head of a gangway ladder, which slanted down the ship’s side to a floating platform alongside. There was a rowboat tied to that platform, with four men in it.

Now the figures started down the gangway, and Johnny saw what they were carrying: man-size bundles wrapped in canvas. One carrier at the head and one at the feet of each bundle, they labored down the gangway and put the corpses down on the edge of the platform. The men in the boat then lifted the bodies down into their vessel while the carriers went back up the gangway. The rowboat cast off then and its oars started moving.

“Well, there’s shore leave for two more Yankee Doodles,” the British ensign said with a sharp, barking laugh. He shook his head. “Take off two and put on twenty. Keep that up and she’ll get pretty crowded, what?”

Johnny looked at the ensign with distaste. “You’re a sorry joker,” he said.

“Hey! I’m not joking. That’s the only way I’ve ever seen any Yankee Doodles get off the
Jersey.
” He waved to the rowers of the dead-boat as it passed close by, going shoreward. Then the cutter tied up at the platform. The ship stank of decay and filth. Even the north wind knifing down off New York Harbor failed to blow the stench of the grave off the
Jersey
’s sides.

Johnny followed the ensign up the gangway first. The enlisted men came dragging their rattling chains up after him, the armed
guards following. Through the boarded-up gun ports Johnny seemed to hear a mournful murmur of voices. Or was it just the wind in his ears? Or his imagination?

He passed between sentries at the head of the gangway and stepped onto the deck. He glanced forward and aft while the ensign handed a packet of papers to a thick-bodied, broad-faced naval officer. The main deck, all worn, weather-grayed teakwood, was an expanse of perhaps two hundred feet in length, wisps of snow-dust blowing along it. The vast wooden surface was interrupted only by sealed hatches, a capstan, and three huge stumps where the masts had been. The dark smoke he had seen was pouring from one small hatch forward. The only rigging was a tall derrick on the starboard side, supported by guy ropes that vibrated in the howling wind.

The ensign had turned his mocking face and was contemplating Johnny. Johnny said to him, “So this is what the Royal Navy smells like.” And as the two officers’ faces began to lengthen and darken with indignation, he added, “I’d say the whole ship is a poop deck.”

The stout officer glowered at him. “You’re not going to last long.” Then, after staring malevolently at him for five seconds, he returned to his papers. “Clark, is it?”

Astern, rising ten feet above the main deck, was the quarterdeck, like a small fort or castle, separated from the main deck by barricades with firing loopholes. Atop this stood a small guard tent, shaking in the cold wind.

“Stand here, Leftenant,” said the naval officer, who then ordered guards to take the chained prisoners forward. They went, scraping and rattling, abjectly. They did not turn to look at Johnny. He was not one of their officers. He had been separated long since from the rest of the men of his company, during weeks of being shuffled from one bleak prison compound to another.

“Now, Clark,” the stout officer growled. “Follow me.” He led toward a door through the barricade into the quarterdeck. Johnny took one look back, and the ensign tipped his hat to him, still smiling mockery, and called: “A Happy Thanksgiving to you, Yankee Doodle. Ha, ha! A happy one!”

Johnny paused there and looked past him. There was only the windswept deck, below which he knew not how many American soldiers were confined, and, all around, the iron-gray, white-capped waves racing by, lapping their cold tongues against the rotting hull, waters too cold and swift and wide for anyone to think of swimming, and in the distance, the low, dark shores of British-held New York and Long Island.

Johnny had a notion, almost a certainty, as he stepped into the fetid gloom of the quarterdeck and started down a steep companionway, that he would never leave this foul hulk until he was carried down the gangplank in a canvas shroud.

“O
H, BUT
I’
M THANKFUL FOR IT
!”
A PRIVATE EXCLAIMED, LICKING
his lips, rolling his eyes and rubbing his flat belly as he held his cup over the kettle. The mess-man flobbed a spoonful of overcooked gray-brown rice into the cup and the soldier moved a step along the plank table. He stopped and licked his lips comically again as another mess-man dribbled a teaspoon of vinegar over the rice. “A drop more?” he coaxed. The mess-man shook his head.

The Thanksgiving Day feast was a half a gill of rice and a spoonful of vinegar for each man and officer. Jonathan Clark watched the soldier move away. The soldier’s bare feet tracked mud through the snow as he walked to a log and sat down with others to eat. Jonathan smiled at his soldiers’ jests about the holiday feast, and looked piteously on those who were too torpid, tired, or sick even to joke. On this ration they were expected not just to keep their half-naked bodies and discouraged souls together, but also to labor like beavers building log huts for their winter quarters. It was only the hard labor that kept them from chilling from exposure. But how long, he wondered, can men do hard labor on a blob of rice or a fistful of fire-cake a day? The British had foraged the countryside clean in the autumn, taking virtually every last pig, cow, or goose and every bit of harvest, and all the wagons in the vicinity, before settling down for a fat and gala winter in Philadelphia. Thus, getting even a little of anything every day for his nine thousand soldiers, let alone
enough
of anything, was General Washington’s most desperate problem. Shelter was being provided, but slowly. Nine hundred little ten-man huts were being built in the valley. Axes chunked and saws rasped all day every day. There were plenty of trees for the logs. And there certainly was plenty of mud to chink between the logs; after every chilly rainfall or meltoff of snow, there seemed to be enough mud in Valley Forge to chink the widest gap in the world—“except the ones between my ribs,” Bill Croghan would joke. The snow was littered everywhere with bark and wood chips, and great, smoky bonfires of limbs and
brush burned night and day, fed by half-clothed soldiers trying to keep warm as they worked on their huts. Everyone was soot-smudged and reeked of stale woodsmoke. General Washington, in one of those gestures of his that bewildered but touched his troops, was living in an unheated linen tent nearby, where he had vowed he would stay until every soldier was housed, even though a snug and roomy stone farmhouse stood awaiting his occupancy a short distance up the road.