From Sea to Shining Sea (54 page)

A tic had started under Hamilton’s left eye, and George made a point of staring at it, with a suggestion of a sneer. Hamilton now made a feeble attempt to explain something that seemed very important to him. “I always urged my Indians to bring me prisoners, not scalps; never encouraged barbarity. But you know how they …”

He stopped, because the Virginian seemed to be swelling up and tensing as if he were about to strike him dead on the spot, and Hamilton realized that no victims of Indian warfare would ever swallow such an excuse. So he said now: “Will you stay your hand, Colonel, till I return and consult with my officers?”

“Do that. Good day, Gov’nor.”

M
OST OF THE WAY BACK UP TO THE FORT
, H
AMILTON WAS
too busy composing himself to say anything to Helm. Hamilton was a dutiful son of a noble Scottish family, and this was the first time in his long and effective career that he had ever been faced down or humiliated—and this by a man who, according to Helm, was but about twenty-five years old, about half Hamilton’s own age. Helm had been prattling on exuberantly: “God dang, ol’ George ain’t changed nary a bit! He, hee! A regular, ring-tail, rum-suckin’ fire eater, ain’t he? Sure made you look ’bout big as a piss-ant, Gov’nor! Hee, hee.”

“Captain Helm, shut up or I shall hang you from the flagpole, I swear it.”

“Wal, y’ could, I reckon,” Helm twanged on cheerfully, “since there won’t be no Majesty’s flag up there t’ be in my way! Boy, ain’t them some—”

“Stop calling me ‘Boy,’ damn you!”

“Boy, ain’t them some fine-lookin’ soldier-boys he got? Every one of ’em’s dangerous as a den o’ bobcats! Hee! Most ’mazing thang ’bout ol’ George, t’ me, is how he can keep a
thousand
such blood-guzzlin’ runagates under control.”

Helm glanced out of the corner of his eye at Hamilton’s finecut profile as they walked up the slope toward the gate, and he could see that his seemingly harmless prattle was having its intended effect.

T
HE SIX CAPTIVE
I
NDIANS WERE STANDING IN A CLUSTER
with rope tethers around their necks, and their hands bound cruelly tight with thongs behind their backs. They were surrounded by the jeering, hissing frontiersmen, who were only awaiting
Colonel Clark’s permission to execute them for their crimes. George came around the church and stood looking at them. They stood there with that dignity that George had seldom seen in any men except Indian braves who expect to be killed and know that to be killed by an enemy is a high honor.

Captain Williams was determined that the savages should be killed. He had learned that the scalps they had been carrying had been taken from families down along the Kentucky River. “These here are murderers,” he said, “and they come in wavin’ all the bloody confession in their hands. They don’t need a trial.” George himself looked at them with rage and loathing. What they had been doing was exactly what he had exerted himself and his men so hard to stop. Still, he dreaded saying, “Kill them.” To him that was something no one less than God had a right to say.

Williams went on. “My boys got scalps. I say anyone here who’s ever lost a blood relative to such polecats as these is welcome to put ’em to the ax. If nobody else wants to, we’ll be glad to finish up.”

George looked at the captives and pondered. Their painted faces were Satanic and did not stir any pity. It was not a matter of pity.

Hamilton had gone back up to the fort an hour ago to talk with his officers and still had not returned a decision. George suspected that he had recovered some of his nerve after getting back inside his fort and among his Redcoats. Maybe his officers were urging him to hold out for honorable terms.

The
Willing
still had not been heard from. Bowman’s diggers had a long way to go in the collapsing mud before they could get their powder-keg bomb placed under the magazine. The men had been firing at the fort some eighteen hours or so before the truce flag and were running on grit alone, and if they were forced to start shooting again they might have neither the powder nor the stamina to keep it up another night.

Hamilton seemed to be hesitating and apparently needed one more sign of the Americans’ resolve. So George said it now.

“So be it, Cap’n. Take these murderers up to the gate road. I want His Lordship to get a good look at this.”

The six Indians were put in a circle and forced to their knees. The Kentuckians milled around them and poked at them with knives and swords and hatchets. Thirty yards away, Redcoats, Tawaway Indians, and Canadian militiamen lined the palisade like spectators at a Coliseum and looked down with a horrified fascination.

“Any man who’s had blood kin murdered by Hair-Buyer’s savages, step up,” George announced loudly enough for everyone in the fort to hear. But so many candidates came forward that it was necessary to draw lots. While that was being done, George kept scanning the palisade for a glimpse of Hamilton. So far, he was not there.

The defenders now were getting their first clear look at the legendary Long Knife, and their attention was divided between him and the ominous preparations. Whatever they had imagined of him, he was no disappointment. His queued red hair gleamed in the winter sunlight. His brow was broad and craggy, cheeks smeared with gunpowder. His eyes were so deep and terrible that their intensity could be seen from the fort, and his hard jaw was shadowed with red whiskers. He prowled like a lion around the site, the tattered, stained skirt of his long leather coat flapping around his thighs. When he turned his broad back to the fort, a circular Indian design of quills and beads could be faintly discerned on the stained and muddy leather.

Hamilton and Helm had just climbed a ramp to the parapet now and were looking down at the scene, and Hamilton seemed to prefer studying his adversary to watching the awful business of the savages. He said, maybe to Helm, maybe to himself, “Is he Scottish, do you suppose?”

“He’s American, Gov’nor.”

Now George turned, and his eyes fell on Hamilton and Helm. He stared at Hamilton for a half a minute, head tilted thoughtfully, then, still looking at him, said something Hamilton could not quite hear. At once, a frontiersman stepped aside from each Indian and held his rope tether while another man stepped up close with a tomahawk in his hand. The chieftain of the captive band straightened his spine, threw back his head, and began chanting his strange, quavering death song. The others joined with their voices. Hamilton’s face went pale and the tic started by his eye.

The Kentuckian standing over the chieftain raised his tomahawk, and the chieftain was looking straight at him when he struck. The song stopped. The Kentuckian stepped back. While the watchers murmured, the Kentuckian delivered two more whiplike blows at the mangled forehead and the chieftain slumped to his side and lay twitching. Then the Kentuckian bent and scalped him. While the other doomed ones continued their songs, two frontiersmen dragged the chieftain, by the rope at his neck, around the fort and down to the river, and threw his body into the yellow flood.

George looked up and he saw that Hamilton was still watching, and noticed that he had involuntarily put a hand to his throat. He had bought many scalps, but likely this was the first scalping he had ever witnessed.

And now the Indians on the palisade were all looking at Hamilton and crying at him in scolding voices, for he had always said he was their white father who would protect them against the Long Knives, and he was standing here doing nothing.

The next Indian’s song broke off and he tumbled forward with a cloven skull. Then the third. Each was scalped as soon as he fell; each was dragged down and thrown into the river, and the Long Knives were yipping with the bloodthirsty thrill of it. While the next tomahawk was being poised to strike, George looked up once more at the face of Governor Hamilton and then turned and strolled away from the executioners’ circle, as if bored, and stood with his back to the scene, gazing over the bright yellow winter grass and into the clean blue hazy woods beyond the river, because he was not bored but too stirred and sickened to watch anymore. His blood surged with the joyous wrath of justice each time a tomahawk made its ghastly
chewk
! But at the same time his bowels would grip with the shame of murder, and nausea was backing up behind his throat.

This is the vengeance we all wanted, he thought in revulsion. There seemed to be a red mist whirling around him, and through it came the sound of the executions, faint, like the voices of children playing outside a house.

And thus the world was reeling and he was trying to see, through that red mist, the cool blue distant woods where, it seemed, the only preservation of the soul could lie, and he thought of Teresa, two hundred miles beyond those woods, thought he heard a handful of
gitarra
notes.

G
EORGE SAT ALONE IN THE CHURCH LATER, HIS HEAD ROARING
like a windstorm, a wooden letter-box on his knees, looking at a ray of afternoon sunlight slanting in through a chink in the log walls. He knew that he and his opponent of the chessboard both had been changed inside by the executions. Hamilton seemed to have little of his spine left, and his last message had been simply a plea, not a demand, for honorable terms of surrender.

Brave man, George thought. He’s wrong and he’s a murderer, but he’s brave. He just wants a scrap of honor, as a brave man would.

But now I’m a murderer too, he thought. I can say I was an executioner, but the difference is only in the words.

So now I’m a murderer too. That must change how I judge murderers.

Or does it?

The light and shadow in the chapel were swimming, whirling. He sat with his pen and paper and thought hard to steady the world.

He had the blood of prisoners on his own hands now, and so he was able to see Hamilton for what he was: a brave, proud, dutiful,
wrong
man being crushed by circumstances out of his control, an evil man perhaps but now simply doing the good thing of trying to save his soldiers’ lives and hold out for a scrap of dignity.

I’d try to save
my
boys. Lord God but I would! His throat tightened and he blinked, remembering coming out of the ice water yesterday. Was that only yesterday?

I can’t have them dying just to deny Hamilton that scrap of dignity, he thought. Even though they’d be glad to.

In front of him was the crude wooden altar where Frère Gibault, the one priest of the region, did services, trying to save souls, far from the seat of his religion. Frère Gibault’s face swam in the gloom, then Vigo’s, de Leyba’s, then Teresa’s; all those benign and beloved faces moved and blended and faded. And then he was seeing his mother’s and father’s faces, those proud and steel-souled people who, though neither had ever taken a life, were as resolute as soldiers in their own ways.

All these faces and the voices that belonged to them milled and murmured around him, until he opened his eyes and shook himself and found himself sitting in a tiny, cold church with something needing to be written.

He had come all this way and had done the impossible but though he should have been exulting in triumph he was sunk instead in a profound bittersweet sentiment and had scarcely enough strength and concentration left to lift the quill to the inkpot and think of a word to start with.

Finally, with a sigh, he leaned over the paper and began.

It was, more or less, the same set of terms Hamilton had wanted, except that he was not going to let Hamilton and his men march away.

He gave the paper to a messenger and watched him go up toward the silent fort, the white flag flapping over his shoulder. Then George went back into the church and stood alone, his back braced against the wall, eyes shut, feeling the greatest pain and weariness he had ever felt. Pinpoints of light sparkled and swam among billowing gray and yellow clouds behind his eyelids. He saw a tomahawk embedded between an Indian’s eyes. He saw Hamilton’s sharp eyes and pouty mouth. He saw oceans of muddy water and then he saw Hamilton’s face again.

What will he do when it comes right down to signing it? George wondered. Will he change his mind and decide to fight to the end?

Now George desperately wanted Hamilton to sign it. If it proved necessary to resume the fight, he wondered if he could really win. Half the Americans were slumped in their coverts out there so sound asleep now that even gunfire probably wouldn’t wake them. What if Hamilton sees how they are? What if he begins to suspect there’s only a hundred of us instead of a thousand?

As it is, George thought, if he does give up, we’ll have more prisoners to guard than men to guard them with.

That was why he had set the surrender ceremony off till the next morning: so he wouldn’t have to try to guard them tonight.

What have we done here? he thought. He was alone in a room thinking, as he had been two years ago at the beginning of this outlandish venture, and now that he had done it, it seemed more impossible than it had when he had planned it.

What we’ve done is we’ve taken the whole Northwest Territory, if Hamilton signs that, and if we have, we’ll have to hold it.

God help us, he thought.

He heard a voice calling outside.

It was Helm. Helm, with a carefully contained smile, handing him back the same piece of paper he had sent up to Hamilton.

George unfolded it. Under the terms in his own hand was a paragraph in Hamilton’s hand: