From Sea to Shining Sea (50 page)

That was an awful, unsettling thought, a thought he’d never had before. When he had started devoting himself to the defense of Kentuck there had been no ambition in it, he knew that. When he had planned the capture of the Mississippi posts, he had not felt ambition then, either—just a great, swelling eagerness to do a bold and useful service for his state.

Maybe something had happened when the Indians at Cahokia had started seeing him as a great white father. Maybe it was the adulation of the Spaniards and the French. Of Teresa. Of his own men.

Maybe you started believing your own legend, he thought; maybe that’s why you thought you could make a madman’s enterprise like this work.

His fingertips stung with wet cold, and twigs slapped his aching-cold face in the dark, and his heart was pumping as if it were ready to quit. His nose was running into the stubble on his upper lip, and he felt like a snot-nose boy and wanted to cry with remorse for what he had started and now doubted he could finish.

But then he remembered his own words to Bowman and he whispered them eagerly to himself.

“Stop doubtin’, man! Get eager!” And he remembered and whispered: “I don’t intend to let anything stop us!”

And then he could feel under his feet a slight rising of the
ground. “Come on, boys,” he shouted back toward the sounds of splashing, gasping and moaning, “come on, now, it’s shallowin’ up! Campground just ahead here!” He didn’t know that was so. But it was as if he could make it so by sheer wishing.

And it came true. They were on a forested hillock of about two acres, surrounded by gurgling, whispering water, and there was a huge amount of dead wood drifted up on it. “Make fires,” he shouted. “Big fires!” He didn’t worry about fires being seen. It was nine o’clock at night and they were out in the middle of a flood where not even wolves would be on such a night. And it was a matter of life to get these hungry, exhausted men dried and warmed before they just went cold to the heart and died.

Soon the little camp was ablaze with a dozen strong bonfires, the hardwood smoke rankling in the rain, and the men crowded so close to the blazes that steam rose off their clothes. George went around the campfires as usual to dispense praise and good cheer. Then he lay down shivering in his damp blanket, his stomach growling and stuttering with emptiness, and thought troubled thoughts for a long time—thoughts about ambition, about overweening pride, about irresponsible rashness, about whether the pirogue had found the
Willing
, about whether it would be necessary to start killing and eating the horses. All this went around and around in his head and, with the shivering and hunger, and the endless watery sounds of this drowned world, made him more and more wakeful.

Then he heard somebody snoring nearby in the dark. He smiled. He picked up their
O diddle lully day o de little lie-o-day
and let it go around and around in his mind, and then older songs blended in, home songs from old Caroline, and then he remembered “The Quaker’s Wooing,” and
hum hum hi ho hum, fall liddle li dum diddle alla day
started going around and around, and then he heard the music of plucked strings, and a tune of Teresa’s
gitarra
began repeating itself.

Thank Lord God for this spot of dry ground you left us, he thought, and then he felt such a swell of gratitude for this latest deliverance of his troops that he stopped shivering and went to sleep.

T
HE MEN AWOKE THE NEXT MORNING DULL WITH THE
weakness of hunger and the aches of cold, and the sight of the brown, cold, dirty sea of water and flotsam surrounding their island camp demoralized them at once. George looked around at the flooded woods and then at the haggard company of scarecrows gazing sullenly about, and he could not imagine how he
was going to animate them this morning and make them willing to move off the one piece of solid ground in the world and go farther into that awful water, toward horizons of still more water. The French volunteers were huddling together in knots, casting ugly looks his way, and even his own boys did not seem to be appreciating their legendary leader very much this morning.

Suddenly a dull, muffled
boom
rolled across the waters; heads turned quizzically.
What the devil.

And at once he had it. He sprang to his feet.

“Hear that, boys?” he shouted. “It’s the morning gun at Hamilton’s fort! We’re that close, lads!” And now the men were on their feet, cheering, shaking their fists in its direction, whooping and frolicking, thumping each other on the back and shouting threats and profanities at the Hair-Buyer. And warmed by that spark of cheerful fury, they allowed themselves to be led into the water again and waded southward with their
de little lie-o-dum day
and their
glup, spit, patoooo.

And in the afternoon, their heads and bodies again benumbed by emptiness and suffering, they slopped ashore on a low bluff that was the western bank of the Wabash. They had at last got below the mouth of the Troublesome River. They were now about three leagues downstream from Vincennes. Now they had only to cross the Wabash to its eastern shore and march those last nine miles up that eastern bank, and they would be upon their prey. In those words, it sounded simple. But George gazed across the great river and he understood that what they had done in the last two weeks had been mere practice for what lay ahead.

There was no other side of the Wabash to be seen.

The mighty river swept by, dirty yellow, dimpled and swirling, carrying whole trees and floats of debris and misshapen pans of floating ice. Beyond its wide channel as far eastward as he could see over the table-flat floodplain, there was nothing but yellowbrown water, water, water, its expanse broken only by leafless dark trees, white-limbed sycamores, snarls of drift, and the tops of bushes. Beyond the broad channel of the Wabash, he could not see a foot of ground anywhere. Nor a sign of the
Willing
, nor even the pirogue he had sent to look for the
Willing.

The dismal panorama hit him in the stomach like a cannonball. His vision blurred, the light dimmed, brightened, dimmed. The woeful voices of the men seemed to be coming from inside his own head. His whole brain and soul seemed to be muddling into a chaos of hopeless confusion, frustration, regret. I should have gone to de Leyba’s house and never left Teresa’s side, he
thought: a private man with no vainglory. It was vainglory brought me here, and we’re doomed by it.

He had to keep his face toward the river because he could not let the officers or men see his face now. He felt like dropping to his knees and crying in despair.

But there was a presence beside him. Bowman was there on his left. Someone else was on his right now; it was Captain Worthington. They were waiting for him to say something. So he said it.

“At last, gents. The Wabash. The last barrier between us and Hamilton. We’ve done it, boys. We’ve crossed the Illinois in winter. A thing supposed to be impossible. Congratulations to us all.”

They were looking at him through the sides of their eyes, unsure what to say to this. Finally Bowman cleared his throat. “Hamilton’s a gone gosling, sure enough,” he said, evidently still feigning eagerness, then he added, “What ought we t’ do first, George?”

George took a deep, shuddering breath. It was obvious they weren’t going to let him give up. It was still his show and they still believed he could do something and so, now without the inner fire of vainglory, he still had to do something and it still had to make sense. So he started talking.

“Put a detail to making a raft,” he said. “Big enough for, say, four men. We’ll send it across yet today to reconnoitre the far side for a good landing place. If they find ground to walk on, we’ll have ’em sneak up to th’ town and liberate some boats, just in case something’s befell th’
Willing.
Ed, you divide your company up and have ’em cut ash and hickory and find bark to make canoes. Everyone else can go hunt, dig roots, find slippery elm bark, anything edible except our horses. I doubt there’s much game on this shore, but there might be at least one deer stranded here—th’ Good Lord usually arranges things like that for times like now. Keep everybody busy, gents. As my Ma says, ‘Idle hands make evil thoughts.’ If I’ve forgot anything, think of it yourselves. Hop to it, then, my friends.”

They went away, and now they were not pretending eagerness; their voices were lively and full of authority. Soon every man was busy.

It was odd how that had worked out.
Their
needs had saved
him.
He remembered another one of his mother’s sayings. It was back when she’d birthed Fanny, her tenth. Someone had said it was about time she gave up mothering and rested. “Nay,” she had said. “I’ve started something, and now I wouldn’t stop if I could, and I couldn’t stop if I would.”

It was funny how one always came to understand her sayings by and by.

B
Y THE NEXT MORNING, TWO SERIOUS TRUTHS WERE EVIDENT
: There was virtually no game in the area, and the
Willing
had not reached her appointed station on the Wabash below. Hunters combing the flooded woods for miles around had determined the first fact; the scouts in the pirogue had come up the river to tell him the other.

One of the privates had a theory about this, and his fellows egged him on until he came and told George about it. “The rain falls forty days and forty nights, as y’see, sir, and th’ animals go two by two lookin’ for an Ark, and thar sets th’
Willing
, so they just take ’er an’ head for Ararat!” And the soldier turned away, prancing like a leprechaun, slapping his knee while George and the onlookers roared with laughter at his wit.

The starving troops now worked feebly but steadily making two canoe frames from peeled, split ash. There was no birch in the vicinity, so they peeled great limber slabs of bark off various kinds of trees and tried them. Inner bark of elm seemed to be about the best, and men with tomahawks, knives, awls, and leather thongs were sitting around in the rain working with numbed fingers, tailoring bark to cover the frames, while others experimented with candle tallow and pounded bark fiber to make a substitute for pitch to seal the seams. The canoes were shaping up rough-looking and flimsy, but apparently they would have to serve, along with the pirogue, to do the ferrying the
Willing
had been meant to do. George kept returning to the river to watch for the four scouts who had gone out the day before on their raft. At last the shout of a sentry upstream heralded their return. They were in a sorry condition. They came paddling ashore weakly on logs, their feet and arms in the cold river water, looking like half-drowned rats. They were brought staggering up to a bonfire, and as they warmed themselves and drank hot sassafras tea, they made their dreary report. Unable to find any land on the other side except a low hill surrounded by water, they had paddled farther up toward the town until, at dusk, the current had broken up their raft. They had spent the entire night awake, lying on old logs in the backwaters, half in and half out of the water, staying together only by holding each other’s hands, keeping their souls together only by joking and praying and singing Len Helm’s drinking song. George clamped his jaws and listened to this piteous account.

“By my eyes!” breathed a listener, taking his blanket off his
shoulders and draping it over one of the scouts, “I thought
I
had a hard night!”

The smaller of the two bark canoes was finished, and put in the water, and with a few minutes’ more caulking and plugging, floated without leaks. Immediately George sent Captain McCarty and three of his men up the river in it to make another attempt to steal boats. But they returned within an hour, reporting that they had been stopped by the sight of four large campfires on the shore a league upstream, and figures clad in red—whether Indian blankets or British uniforms they had not been able to tell at a safe distance.

“Well, then,” George said with a sigh, “use what daylight’s left to go on down and try to find the
Willing.
Tell Cousin Johnny that I’m mighty impatient for ’im.” He sensed some troops standing nearby and knew he’d better lighten up his tone of voice. “Tell ’im,” he said, “that the pair of elephants might be enough to feed the regiment.”

The troops could still laugh a little. He was glad to hear that.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, F
EBRUARY
20,
WAS MISTY
,
AND THE
air was close down to freezing. Even the dull report of the morning gun up at Fork Sackville caused little cheer. The men sat huddled in their blankets, their eyes hollow and haunted. There was much coughing, little talking.

But in the French company they were talking. Captain Charleville came with a worried expression and told George that the people in his company were having a democratic discussion about trying to return to Kaskaskia. George hopped to his feet. He strode into the French camp. Within two minutes of fast talking, he had reminded them that they had volunteered to come with him, laughed off their notion of retreating, and told them to go out and hunt food for their comrades if they were so eager to go walking. They were ashamed to meet his eyes, and were bewildered by his cheerful but forceful manner, and soon they had faded into the woods in every direction with their muskets. “Now,” George said to Charleville. “My thinking is, democracy is a fine thing, in its place, but this isn’t the place. So long as they’re scattered out there in the woods, they won’t be holding assemblies, if ye see what I mean. Good day, Cap’n.”

Now there was nothing George could do yet but try once more to work up the spirits of his own men. He went around the camp talking up the certainty of success, boasting about the canoes, talking about the imminent arrival of the
Willing
, rubbing his stomach and assuring them that with so many hunters out there
would soon be meat. He decided that if no turn of fortune had come by tomorrow, he would have the first of the horses butchered. But he kept this decision to himself.