From Sea to Shining Sea (49 page)

George turned and saw what the gray-faced men were laughing at. The little drummer boy had hauled himself up onto his floating drum and he was lying on his stomach on it, hanging with one hand onto the fringe of a big sergeant’s coat and being towed along. Responding to their laughter, he began showing off, splashing with his feet, even letting loose of the sergeant to paddle with his hands. George roared with a happy release of laughter and turned to continue ahead, seeking the bottom with his benumbed feet.

And when after a while that hilarity had died down and he was hearing nothing, behind him but the dismal swash and phlegmatic breathing and now and then a piteous groan, he would have to start up again.

“Hey, I feel some warm water, Abe. Is it springtime already, or’d you just sneak a leak?” More laughter came from the trembling wretches all around, and someone took up the joke.

“Don’t add to it, Abe, I’m neck-deep already!”

*     *     *

“W
HERE
IN
THE
NAME
O’
G
OD’S
G
REAT
G
EOGRAPHY
IS
THE
Wabash?
” John Rogers muttered. John Duff was grimacing in the rain. The
Willing
had just labored around the edge of another wooded, inundated point to find herself in still another backwater cul-de-sac. Below on deck the men were pushing the boat along slowly with setting poles. Along each gunwale they walked toward the stern, each straining against a long pole he had stuck into the river bottom. When each reached the afterdeck he would pull up his pole, carry it to the bow, then get in line behind the last man, set his pole in the bottom, and walk, straining, toward the stern again. And the galley would slide a few more feet through the willows.

“Damn me if I know,” Duff murmured, peering in all directions through the maze of copses and reed-swamps and false channels.

“All hands, lay off and rest,” Rogers called out. “Pagan, would ye please scamper up that mast and look us up a path back to the river?” Pagan, an old, one-eyed ex-sailor, went like a monkey up the shrouds to the masthead twenty feet above the deck, hooked one leg over the spar, and perched there, taking in all the points of the compass with a slow sweep of his one eye. Then he spoke down. “Onliest water I can see big enough for us, and I can’t swear it’s the main road o’ the river, sir, is ’bout two hundred yard off starb’d.”

“Very well,” said Rogers, squinting up into the spitting rain at the little wind-flapping scarecrow silhouetted against the bruise-colored clouds. “Can ye see a way to get to it?” Johnny Rogers was getting an awful despairing choke in his voice. They had come early this morning to a point of bluff with large elms on it, which Duff had sworn marked the mouth of the Wabash. A couple of Kaskaskian rivermen had confirmed Duff’s landmark. And so the
Willing
had nosed toward that bluff through the misty expanses of turbid water and headed into a wide stretch that seemed to be the mouth of the Wabash. They had searched the bluff with spyglasses for signs of Indian sentinels. They had seen none, but that did not mean none were there.

And so they had gotten into the Wabash Valley and as far as they knew they had not been seen by any Indians since the fracas in the Tennessee River. As far as they knew.

But now in the course of this long, rainy day they had thus far gone up three blind channels, and this was the third time they had had to send Davy Pagan up the mast to have a look-see. The first time, they had been able to turn the boat around and row
out. The second time, the
Willing
had run aground on some hidden hummock, and only by putting men out in the cold water with ropes and shovels had they been able to back her off. A day gone by and they still were surely no more than two miles up the Wabash, with more than a hundred miles to go to their rendezvous with the Illinois Regiment.

Now Davy Pagan had studied the maze and he called down:

“Sir, I’d say back ’er down the way we come, ‘haps one quarter mile, and there’s a bay-oo big enough to bring ’er about. Then we p’ceeds ’bout three hundred yard and there’s a reed patch on th’ larb’d, openin’ through to open water. Might have to push ’er through, but through them reeds lies the way, I’d say, sir. I see no other.”

“Very well, Mister Pagan. And can y’ see what lies beyond that open water? Can y’ see the bluff, the elms, any hills?”

“Sir, I see nowt but water, then mist, thick as on th’ Firth o’ Forth on a November morn.”

“Eh, then, come down, Mist—”

“HOOP, HOOP! Avast, sir!” Pagan cried down suddenly, tightening his grip on the perch and leaning far out, peering till his eye popped. “Yonder comes a wee boat, sir, with but one soul in ’er, and comes a-flyin’!”

Now everyone was gaping aloft at him, as if trying to see through his eye what this might be. As they craned like this, they began to hear, faint in the dank air, yipping voices.

There was no mistaking it: Indians. Excited ones. “To arms, and stand ready,” Johnny Rogers called. The men laid down their poles and scrambled for rifles. “What see now, Mister Pagan, eh? Sing out, damn it!”

“It’s a canoe with a Christian in it, it is! But I make out a long canoe a half a mile ahind of ’im, up to her scuppers in heathens. They’re after his skelp, sir, way I see it!”

“Hell’s fire! All these guns but we’re blind down here! How many Indians in that canoe, Pagan?”

“I make out eight. Our white man’s ’bout tuckered, sir. If I had my gun up here, I’d sink me a heathen canoe!”

The Indian voices were distinct now. The riflemen on deck were tense with frustration.

“Can y’ get his eye, Pagan?”

The little man put his thumb and forefinger in his mouth and emitted a shrill whistle, then waved his hand in a summoning motion. “He’s seen me, sir, and’s a-comin’ thisaway!”

“Good! Now come down.”

Two long, tense minutes passed. The Indian voices, urgent as
the song of foxhounds Johnny Rogers remembered from Virginia, were loud and near now. Then the sounds of splashing, panting; a shape among the trees; then the prow of a canoe weaving among drowned shrubs. They could see the man in it now.

“Damn me if ’tain’t Myers!” someone hissed.

“Get ’im aboard! Raise those shields and stand ready!”

The men reached strong arms down and yanked the gasping, astonished white man out of his canoe and swung him aboard. A dozen flintlocks cocked and were aimed over the oaken breastworks toward the sounds of splashing paddles and excited Indian voices out in the flooded woods. The prow of the big war canoe came into view, then a painted face, two, three …

And when the Indians suddenly discerned the long, low shape of the gunboat lying in their path, they stopped paddling to grab for their muskets, gasping queries to each other.

“Shoot ’em,” said Johnny Rogers, and twelve guns cracked almost as one. The war canoe for a moment was full of jerking arms and twitching bodies, and then it turned over with a flurry of splashing. The sulphurous smell of gunpowder drifted through the dank air, and no one came up from the bloodstained water.

M
YERS
WAS
G
EORGE
R
OGERS
C
LARK’S
CHIEF
COURIER
. H
E
had gone from Kaskaskia to Williamsburg in September, loaded with messages, and had had to wait for the fall session of the Assembly before starting back, as he explained now, slumped on a bench, sipping rum, in the cabin of the
Willing
, and he had a lot of letters from Governor Patrick Henry and congratulations from Benjamin Harrison, speaker of the House of Delegates, and messages from friends and families of the Illinois Regiment—“a good twenty pounds of mail,” said he, lifting the precious bag with one hand and then letting it drop to the deck—and he was just skintight full of news of war and scandals and politics back East, but first, he wanted to know, what in the ding-dong, owlhootin’ blue-flame hell was Colonel Clark up to now and why was this scorched gunboat sitting here in a slough of muddy branchwater two miles off the Wabash River with that crazy one-eyed swab perched up on her at tree-top level, a-whistlin’ and flapping his arms like a jaybird on a limetwig, anyhow?

“Well, Mister Myers, I’ll try to explain it all to your satisfaction and wonderment by and by,” replied John Rogers, “but first will y’ kindly show me where in all this God damned water the Wabash River runs, because I got to get up it in a terrible hurry. Otherways, y’ll never get to deliver your mail.”

*     *     *

T
HE
I
LLINOIS
R
EGIMENT WAS WITHIN SEVEN OR EIGHT
miles of Vincennes now, but from the looks of the expanse of swift floodwater now in front of them, they might as well have been hoping to attack London.

George stood looking at it, and the men and officers were gathering behind him, dazed and numb and weak from hunger. They had not eaten for three days. They had been two weeks without shelter, and there had not been a day in those two weeks when it was not snowing, raining, or sleeting. They had waded countless swollen creeks and crossed three rivers. They had stopped at one place for two days to cut down a huge tree and build a dugout pirogue to ferry them across river chanels.

And now they were facing the biggest stretch of open water they had seen yet, and they no longer had the pirogue. It had been sent down to find the
Willing
, with orders for Lieutenant Rogers to bring her on day and night. Without the
Willing
, without her meat and flour and rum, without her broad hull to float them across the flooded Wabash, it seemed, the regiment must surely perish of exposure and starvation here in these wintry floodlands, within three leagues of its unreachable destination. To go back two hundred miles over the way they had come would be impossible. To the officers and men gathering behind Colonel Clark now, that was the way their situation looked as they stood in floodwater on the edge of the last major river before the Wabash, the Troublesome River, which the French called the Embarras. They looked at it, hearts sinking.

But now to their amazement George’s voice rang out as cheerful as ever.

“All righty, then, boys, let’s don’t trouble ourselves with the Troublesome!” He pointed downstream. “We’ll just follow the bank down to the mouth, two-three miles yonder, isn’t she, Mister McCarty? And then we’ll need only cross the Wabash herself. Damned if I’ve got time to play in every little creek, I’m after that Hair-Buyer!” He strode off southward now, waving his right arm in a sure, impatient summoning motion that utterly belied the wild desperation he really felt.

And the men, as usual, trusted his determination, and hoisted their guns and fought off their shivers and went limping along after him. “Master Lovell,” he said, leaning down to the drummer boy, “tap out somethin’ to strut by.”

And so Dickie Lovell did, and soon the whole staggering, blue-lipped, hollow-eyed line was singing “Katy Cruel,” their favorite marching song:

And down, down they went, on lower and lower ground, with their
O diddle lully day O de little lie-o-day
, the tune going round and round in their heads with its senseless but heartening monotony, and George led them on down, his eyes stinging with tears sometimes at the sound of their fine, manly voices, at the thought of this seemingly fatal trap he’d led them into, knowing they were as hungry and spent as he was but kept coming along because he didn’t seem to mind it and because he seemed to know what to do next, and soon they were wading again, searching in the twilight for the Wabash. Somewhere along the way the drummer changed his cadence and the men picked it up and started singing a song old Leonard Helm had made up and taught them, about a homemade liquor so bad that only every other mouthful could be swallowed, so that you had to sip twice as much to do you the same amount of good, and each refrain ended with a “
glup, spit, patoooo!
” in imitation of spitting out the awful stuff. And the soldiers sang it and sang it and tried to outdo each other with the awful sounds of spewing and gagging and retching, with each new depth of revolting noise earning a laugh. It was the lowest and most hilarious form of humor, and a noisy march for one so deep in enemy country, but George did not try to hush them because it was keeping their minds happy. Anyway, he thought, this abominable weather surely was keeping everyone, Englishman and Indian alike, burrowed in at the fort. There had not been one sign of anyone across the entire Illinois in the two weeks since they had marched out of Kaskaskia. So they must have their singing now, he thought; it’s all the nourishment they’ve got.

And now night was falling and there was not a spot of ground anywhere for a camp, and for the first time George was afraid that his determination had outreached his judgment, that for the first time since he had been leading men he had led them not just to the limits of their abilities but beyond them. The men could not lie down or even sit down to rest in this cold water; soon it would be too dark for them to walk in it, and if they tried to spend the night standing still in it waiting for morning light, they were bound to die of exposure.
Glup, spit, patoooo!

Bowman came splashing up with the word that some of the weaker men were having to be hauled along by their stronger
comrades, arms draped over their necks for support, while others were holding themselves up only by hanging onto the horses. “Hard fortune, George,” Bowman whispered.

“Come on, man, y’re doubting,” George hissed at him. “What did I tell you about that?” It gave George a little straighter spine himself, having to straighten up Bowman’s. But ahead, the trees and bushes were losing their outlines in the deepening gloom, and no matter how promising a blurred patch or smear of darkness might look, when he reached it it would prove to be not solid ground but merely a willow thicket two feet deep in water, with nothing beyond it but more water, more reeds, more tree trunks. The evening was drizzly and the hush of water on his hat and the hiss of it in the trees and the
plurp plop plip
of it dripping into the water seemed eternal. He felt as if he had been born with this rain on his head and this icy ooze around his feet; he felt that it would always be like this and that it was his punishment for bringing his good and faithful people out on this mad errand of patriotism. Or is it patriotism? he wondered, wondering deep below the levels of words, is it patriotism or is it but a terrible ambition for glory?