From Sea to Shining Sea (4 page)

“Jo jee! Jo jee!” Billy called through the laughter. “Tell me bout wiver wats an’ bear-biters! Pwease!”

“Hey, yes! I promised you a yarn, didn’t I, young man? I promised to tell you about the finest Indian chief of all. River rats and bear-biters some other time. This is a better story!”

Billy scooted low in his chair and put his hands between his thighs and scrunched his neck protectively down between his shoulders and shivered once, his mouth hanging open. He glanced once at his mother and father to reassure himself of their nearness and then waited to hear the wonders. The rest fell still and watched George’s mouth as he paused to form the opening words to his tale. Edmund, Dick, and Johnny, though hunters and farmers on a man’s scale, were now open-faced boys; Lucy was squirming, and Elizabeth silently slid down from her chair to go and stand by her mother’s skirt. Even the parents were expressionless now. All faces were cleared of whatever had been in them, ready to receive. Beyond the doors of the bright room, dark shapes moved and yellow eyes gleamed; even the Negroes were listening. George raised a big, long-fingered hand and made his eyes look wild. Then he began, in a voice deep and dark as a cave.

“Oftimes, out there in that country, ye’ll
think
you’re alone, all, all, alone, but y’re
not
! You’re always bein’ watched!”

Billy shivered and scooted so far down in his chair that only his eyes showed above the edge of the table.

“It was like that, the first day I met Tah-gah-JU-tay, the great MING—o.” He put a deep resonance on the syllables of the strange Indian words, making them sound most savage and ominous. Mrs. Clark bit her lips to keep from smiling. She was hearing her own storytelling style, pauses and intonations. George had learned yarn-spinning from her bedtime stories of long ago.

“It was a perfect fall day,” he went on, lightening his tone and making a panoramic sweep with both hands, his sleeve fringes swaying hypnotically. “Yellow meadows and fallen leaves all warm with a hazy sun. Ripe berries and wild grapes everywhere. Y’ know the kind of a day.

“I was on a great, sunny meadow, overlooking a curve of the mighty O-HI-o, with my compass and chain and notebook, a-layin’ out terrain. I didn’t suspect there was a human soul inside
a hundred miles! It was so
still
! All I’d hear was that
rustle, rustle
, when a breeze goes through dry leaves. Or now and then,
tht
!
tht
! a walnut or acorn fell. Sometimes I’d hear squirrels’ feet rustlin’ in the leaves—leastways, I
thought
they were—and once in a while:

“FFFTHTHTHTHRRRRR!” He startled them almost out of their chairs, and in the pantry someone gasped and dropped something. “… I’d flush a quail.”

“Oooey,” breathed Edmund. “That sounded so real my trigger finger twitched.” George barely managed not to laugh at Edmund’s remark, biting inside his cheek to keep a serious face.

“Shhh!” said Annie, who seemed now to have forgotten even her wedding.

“So there I was,” George continued, “in all that space and quiet, just workin’, concentrating, as ye have to do when you’re surveying. I’d poke that old maple Jacob’s staff in the ground, and I’d put my brass compass atop it, tighten down th’ thumbscrew. Y’ know how brass’ll shine in the sun. I love that. Then I’d sight along to a spot, then I’d pace out, payin’ out those thirty-three feet o’ chain, and stake down the end.” They could see him doing it, all that complicated calculating and measuring. “And an interesting notion occurred to me just then,” he went on, “that these brass and wood instruments o’ mine were tools,
tools
, mind ye, for imposin’ a humanly order onto th’ wilderness! That was what I was doin’ out there, all alone, all, all alone—or so I thought—there where no white man ever stood before, why, I was doin’ the very, very first bit o’
civilizing
on that wild land.” His mother looked at his father, and they nodded. They doubted that much of this notion was registering with the smaller children, but they knew their son George had a far deeper mind than Parson Robertson had ever suspected. “But all that while,” George continued, raising a cautionary forefinger, “I was gettin’ farther and farther away from my
rifle.
That rifle o’ mine … Well, ye
live
by your rifle out yonder, y’ understand. It leaned up against a tree trunk, where I’d put it, as you never lay your rifle on th’ ground, eh, Eddie? And I was getting farther and farther from it, as y’ can’t help doin’ when you pay out chain. Now and then I’d cast an eye back at that rifle, and I remember thinkin’ once, it’s shiny metal and maplewood, too, like my surveying instruments, and the thought hit me, why, it’s
another
tool for putting order on the wilds.”

Johnny, the family’s poet, nodded at this apt phrase.

“Well, I had
just
been thinking that peculiar thought,” George went on, “out there in that place where I thought me a
hundred miles from any livin’ soul, when
all of a sudden
—” He lowered his voice to a chilling whisper: “I felt a …
presence
!”

Billy emitted a shivery moan and Elizabeth curled her fist in her mother’s skirt.

“Aye! Know, how your back’ll draw up and the hair’ll raise on th’ back o’ your neck? When you feel …
eyes
on ye? Eh! I’ll tell y’ this, old family: Out yonder, y’ have to be keen to that feelin’, heed it and trust it quick, ere it’s too late, elsewise it might be the very last thing y’ll
ever
feel!

“And I, well, I was so far from my rifle by then, methought I’d felt the feelin’ too late.
Too late!
” he hissed.

Annie now had her palm on her throat and was swallowing with terror. Dickie’s mouth was hanging open. George went on:

“I turned, sloooowwwly, my eyeballs goin’ like this. And I started edging as sly as I could toward that tree where my rifle stood. But
alas
! Before I was one pace toward it, I saw him in the corner of my eye! Lord, a jolt o’ cold poured down me like I’d stepped under a waterfall in January! There, no more than six steps from me—somehow he’d got that close to me, stealthy as a sunbeam—stood this
huge, armed Indian
!”

Billy, seeing in his mind’s eye an Indian with huge arms, was starting to pull the tablecloth toward his mouth. His mother reached and pried his clenched hand off the linen and held it in her own.

“Well, old family, was I ever in a pickle! That savage had a musket on his arm and could ha’ shot me ’fore I’d got halfway to my gun! All’s I could do was look at him over my left shoulder, and that’s what I did, I looked at him over my left shoulder for a long spell, seemed like unto an hour, though I know it was four seconds or so. But
never
had I seen such an Indian! And he was starin’ straight at me! Y’ want to know what he looked like? Why, he was tall as me, at least, a hand over six feet, I’d say. His face looked as if ’twas cast bronze, and he was still as a statue. Eyes black and steady-blazin’. It was those eyes I’d felt on my back, and no wonder, either! Well, he had big chest muscles, and these braids of long, shiny black hair that hung down over his chest. And he had a band round his head with so many eagle feathers sticking up that his head looked like a shuttlecock. He had a red blanket over one shoulder, like those Roman senators y’ see with their togas, in the history book. And he had a big necklace on, made o’ bear claws, and panther teeth, and porkypine quills, and another made o’ bangles o’ pure beaten silver! But most of his decoration was knives and pistols and tomahawks, that stuck out all over ’im!

“And that, old family, that was the first I ever saw of Tah-gah-JU-tay, great chief of the MING-oes!” George now sank back in his chair and stopped, hands on thighs and elbows akimbo, and looked around at his stricken audience. The servants had crept out of the shadows now and stood in the lighted doorways, some hugging each other, all looking at George’s mouth.

“But, but,” Lucy began stammering, “what happened?”

“What happened? You ask what happened! Why, what
does
a warlike savage chief do, when he’s got a careless white man caught like that, cornered thirty yards from his gun? What
does
he do? You’ve heard all the tales; tell
me
!”

“Kills you an’ cuts your hair off! And bites your eyes out,” she said, adding one shocking embellishment from the horrors of her own imagination.

“Right you are, sister! And so that’s what he did to me, then and there!”

“Aw, no,” Dickie howled, clapping his hand on top of his head. “How dare y’ make a joke out of a good story!”

“What! I’d never do that!” cried George. “He didn’t kill me at all! What sayee, Betty?” The child had her hand up.

Elizabeth worked her rosebud of a mouth, then said in a tiny voice, “’Cause you came home.”

“So I did! And here I am, little lassie, hardly dead at all. And what say you, Johnny?’

“Besides, you told us already that the Mingo chief was your best friend,” this handsome lad reminded him smugly.

“That’s so right, aye, Johnny! That’s what comes o’ good listening’! You all hear that? Don’t just listen to the yarn a man’s tellin’, listen to everything he says.”

“That’s mean, George,” Annie said with saucy indignation. “It’s bad to end a story with a catch trick.”

“It would be, aye. But I’m not endin’ the story yet. The best part’s now. Listen:

“I knew, by the fact that I was still alive, that this mighty savage wasn’t hostile. So I turned to face him straight on, and he looked me over good. And all at once he smiled, as bright a smile as your own, Annie, and he raised up his right palm like this, and he said in better King’s English than Parson Robertson’s even,”—George’s parents chuckled; Donald Robertson’s native Scotch brogue was so thick even after twenty years in the colony that he was sometimes nearly incomprehensible—“that chief said to me, ‘You are a Virginian. You make a house on the creek by the graves.’ And I showed him my hand, and I said, ‘That’s so.’ Well, then he came over and took my hand just like
a gentleman would, and said, just as plain, ‘I am Tah-gah-ju-tay. Your people call me Logan, and they know me as their friend.’ Well, I’d heard aplenty about this Logan, back at Fort Pitt, and I was tickled it was Logan instead o’ some unprincipled Shawnee that I’d have to watch out o’ the back o’ my head. So I told him my name, and we walked over to a tree and sat down in the sun to smoke together. I had some tobacco, and he mixed it with some dried leaves and bark and seeds he shook out of a decorated bag. They call that mixture
kinnickinnick
, boys, and when you smoke it the hands on your watch stop moving and your fingers feel fuzzy, and your head becomes one big eye so’s you can see the whole world. Try some, if y’ ever get the chance.

“Well, we talked that whole afternoon away, that Logan and I did, and I came to understand more in those hours than I ever did in a week at a school, or even more than Dr. Mason taught me at Gunston Hall. That Indian’s mind is like, well, like ye said Peter Jefferson’s was. Or like Grandpapa Rogers … aye, I was minded o’ him. And I’ve learned a lot more since, going and staying at his camp. But here’s what I remember best, and I swear I can remember it just about word for word, maybe because o’ that kinnickinnick. Maybe if Parson Robertson had smoked that stuff with us, I’d ha’ been able to memorize the way Jonathan could. Ha, ha! But here’s what Logan said, anyways, and here’s how he said it:

“He pointed at my survey tools there in the meadow, and he said, ‘George Rogers Clark, you are drawing your unseen lines on the land. Such is the way of Virginians, and Logan is sad.’ And he said, ‘I, Logan, am the brother of all white men. Once I thought to go live among whites, and have my people in their schools. I tell my red brothers to keep peace with white men and learn their useful things. But my red brothers tell me now that they cannot do this if the Virginians keep coming to draw lines on the land and put families here. Your boats now go far down this river and take families to the Cain-tuck-ee. There they drive the game from the sacred hunting ground, where it is decreed that no tribe may live but all may hunt.’

“Then I told Logan that we need those places, because there are too many people east of the mountains, and they need to find new room to live in. And he said to me:

“‘The red man too needs room to live in. But he does not come in with his tools to draw lines on it and take pieces of it from the Great Spirit who owns it. Logan is sad because the way of the white man and the way of the red man cannot be, in the same world.’ So I pointed west and told him there was land
without measure, room for both peoples. But he said, no, there is room for all the red people
or
all the white people, but the truth is there is not room for both. He told me he was saying that not in anger but in sadness.

“Well, I thought then of something we’ve heard Tom Jefferson say: that someday the Indians could take up our ways and live amongst us, and enjoy English thought and comfort. And I looked aside at that fine Mingo, and I saw him in my mind’s eye all done up in a jackcoat and white breeches, pumps and a powdered wig, counting coins and dancing minuets. And by God, it was a notion so outrageous pitiful I was ashamed to ha’ thought it! I knew then why it was true what he said, and why it was so sad. I could see, bright as brass in sunshine, that it’s a problem without a peaceable end. And that made me as sad as he was.

“So then I said to him, ‘Tah-gah-ju-tay, all I can do then is pray that when there is finally no more room, you and I at least will be too old to fight each other.’ And he said he wished likewise, but had little hope, for he thought it would be soon.”

“Oh, my,” Mrs. Clark murmured. Her eyelids were glinting with tears. Now she knew what she had seen in George’s eyes in the hallway that afternoon. All the children looked at her, then back at George. He knew he was no child’s storyteller for this moment, and he wondered whether this could mean anything at all to the younger ones. Surely not to Billy, who was still wide-eyed and tense, as if he expected the Indian in George’s story to throw down his pipe suddenly and leap up with a tomahawk in his hand.