From Sea to Shining Sea (55 page)

Thank God, George thought. I don’t think I could’ve performed another minute.

I’m just plumb out of everything.

L
OOKING IN A MIRROR THE NEXT MORNING IN
M
AJOR
B
USSERON’S
house, George stropped an ebony-handled razor and began shaving away his lather-soaked red whiskers. It was the first time he had looked in a mirror since Kaskaskia, and he was astonished at the hollowness of his cheeks and eyesockets.

Likely I’ve lost a stone’s-weight of flesh this month, he thought. Most all of us look like cadavers too busy to lie still.

But he felt better than he had felt for weeks; he had slept a sleep that had felt a thousand fathoms deep, on a cot in warm, dry blankets in the old church, waking only once in the night, to hear his officers and bodyguards snoring in their bedding around him. Then he had put himself back into his deep slumber with a prayer of thanks for their safety. This morning he had coughed up an awful amount of phlegm and corruption and it had been several minutes before he could walk without wincing and limping. Now he had had a breakfast of porridge and hot pork and had washed the gunpowder off his face and shaved off his itchy whiskers and would be going up to the fort within the hour to accept Hamilton’s surrender. In his duffel he had found his last clean linen shirt and stock and a pair of clean blue garters with silver buckles with which to fasten up his mud-stained, fringed leather gaiters. With these little touches of cleanliness and color he was trying to make himself look genteel enough to accept on behalf of Virginia and Congress the sword of His Britannic Majesty’s defeated general.

Bowman winked at him as he whacked mud-clots out of the fringe of his buckskins and draped his sword-belt over his shoulder.

“Some dandy, George, y’ air, y’ air. Did y’ notice Hamilton didn’t raise his flag this mornin’?”

“Mhm. To save himself the humiliation of having to haul it back down, I’d guess. I didn’t hear ’im shoot his morning gun today either, did you?”

“Nup. Prob’ly scared we’d start shootin’ back again. Heh, heh!”

George put on his old black hat, with its right brim pinned up with a turkey-bone toothpick and the writing-quill plume sticking out of the band. “Ready for this great day?”

“Wait.” Bowman reached toward him and tilted the hat at a jauntier angle. “Now. Y’ look like you’re goin’ to a victory ’stead of a church meetin’.”

They stepped out into the cold morning sunlight, where the troops stood in company ranks in the street grinning like elves. Their faces all had been washed, and … He smiled at them and announced:

“I was proud to say we won this battle without shedding a drop of American blood. Then I had to spoil it all by orderin’ you to shave.” They laughed and howled, and his heart swelled with love for them. He pulled his watch out of his pocket and flipped open its gold cover, then shut it and asked, “What time is it? My watch is full o’ water.” They laughed again, and somebody told him it was ten minutes till ten.

“Let’s march up a-lookin’ smart, boys, and get what’s ours. Master Lovell,” he said to the drummer boy, “give us something to step to.”

The drumbeats gave him gooseflesh.
Tut-tuttle-tut-tut pamp, tut-tuttle-tut-tut pamp, tut-tuttle-tut, tut-tuttle-tut, tut-tuttle-tut, pamp pamp
! The tracked mud of the road had frozen hard and there were feathers of frost in yesterday’s footprints. The shadows of walls and tree trunks were shallow blue, dusted with frost. The column passed the barricade and went up the road toward the gate of the fort. Beside the road on the ground were the ruddy bloodstains where the Indians had been executed. Joe Bowman’s company flanked right and halted to stand in ranks on that side of the road. McCarty’s flanked left and took up the stand on the other side. Then the companies of Williams and Worthington marched up to halt behind George, and when the officers commanded, “Parade Rest!” the drum stopped with a loud
pamp-pamp
! Behind George stood a red-nosed soldier with the Stars and Stripes folded over his right arm and Virginia’s red-and-green colors over his left. All across the meadow the people of Vincennes came, those of all ages, running, skipping, tottering, tradesmen in smocks and merchants in velvet coats, pregnant women heaving along, crones in wimples,
coureurs de bois
in buckskin and scarlet wool, slack-lipped children. They crowded into the sunny space along the front wall of the fort, flanking the gates, where the reflected sunlight was warm and
where they could examine the bullet-pocked palisades or stare at Long Knife and his shabby, barefooted soldiers.
“Où sont tous les autres?”
George heard several voices query. Mostly the citizens kept their eyes on him, watched him standing there with his monumental stillness, his deep blue eyes fixed on the carved initials G.R.—
George Rex
—above the gate, jaw muscles working. He glanced up once at the bare flagstaff. Sun-tinged little clouds crawled across the cold blue sky above the fort and drifted eastward. Beyond the fort the muddy flood of the Wabash gurgled, carrying trees and forest debris and ice chunks. Somewhere in the ranks someone sneezed and someone else hacked up a wet cough.

Then drums rattled within the fort. Voices came through the palisade, a wooden bolt rumbled, and the twelve-foot gates swung open slowly to reveal the ranked Redcoats at attention inside, their Brown Bess muskets at shoulder arms. While the drums beat slowly, Governor-General Hamilton appeared in the gateway, followed by two other officers, and marched down the grade toward the American colonel. Hamilton’s coat was brushed, his boots were black and shiny, and his powdered wig was silvery. He carried his hat in his left hand and squinted in the bright sunlight. The voices of sergeants bellowed behind him and the ranks of Redcoats paced forward a few steps, then halted with a stamp, at attention just within the gate.

Hamilton stopped and clicked his heels a yard in front of Colonel Clark. He grasped the hilt of his sword and unsheathed it and everyone could hear the rasping ring of the fine steel as it came out. Then with a flick of his wrist he tucked the blade under his right arm so that the hilt was within reach of the victor.

Without taking his eyes from Hamilton’s, George reached out and closed his hand around the hilt, feeling the cold polished silver and the smooth leather of the grip. This was the moment. This was the end toward which he had been pressing since that solitary night of brooding and planning in Harrod’s fort two years ago. He stared at Hamilton’s fatigue-swollen eyes, eyes that looked as if they had been weeping; and seeing the defeat there he knew that beyond his boldest dreams he had turned the Hair-Buyer’s world upside down. He had wrested from King George a wilderness territory nearly the size of the thirteen colonies combined, and had not spent the life of one American to do it.

He pulled the sword away from Hamilton. “Governor, you and your garrison are my prisoners.”

“I grant you, sir.”

Now Hamilton let his eyes wander toward the ragged ranks of American woodsmen. They stood, leaning on their rifles, indescribably gaunt and filthy, clothes drab as compost, their sunken cheeks and their chins nicked by razors. Some had put red bandannas around their necks to give themselves a bit of color for the ceremony:
panache
and bare feet. General Hamilton mentally added them up: the little band, scarcely more than two squads, on the left, an equal number on the right, and the reeky, weatherbeaten scarecrows lined up behind the colonel. Hamilton flicked his gaze over the meadow and toward the town, and finally he said:

“May I ask, Colonel Clark, where is your army?”

The Virginian’s sudden smile was dazzling. He reached out and nudged Hamilton’s elbow with a knuckle as if to share a delicious joke.

“This, sir,” he replied, “is them.”

Hamilton dropped his head forward and gave a strangled little whimper.

Man, George thought. I’d hate to be him. Then he turned his back on him and waved the English sword high. “BOYS! POST VINCENNES …
IS OURS
!”

With a deafening outburst of war whoops and cheers and yokelish yodels, they broke ranks and stampeded for the gate, snatching their Colonel Clark off the ground and bearing him laughing on their shoulders, jostling past the astonished Redcoats into the fort.

Hamilton stood by himself on the yellow dirt road among the tittering townspeople with his empty scabbard at his side, and tears ran down his long nose.

T
HE MESSENGER WHO CAME HOWLING UP THE ROAD TO THE
Clark house this time was seventeen-year-old Cousin Edmund Rogers. The handsome redhead was so frantic that the family at first thought he surely was bringing news of death or catastrophe.
His horse was lathered and wild-eyed, and Edmund was simply babbling till he got his tongue straightened out. “Johnny … George … Cousin … I mean … Cou … Joh … No. They’re at my house! Johnny is—”

“What Johnny? Our Johnny?” cried Mrs. Clark, clapping her hand to her throat.

“No!
Our
Johnny! My brother Johnny’s at our house! Y’ must come! He’s brought back … Oh, y’ll never believe this! He’s brought back another … He’s brought a real British
general
this time! The Hair-Buyer one! George captured ’im, he did, and’s sending ’im to Williamsburg, all chained up! And other officers. And the Grand Judge of Detroit, he caught him too! George did! He caught the whole murderin’ pack of ’em! Oh my God, come hear Johnny tell it all! Come on! Come on!”

T
HE
R
OGERS HOUSE LOOKED LIKE AN ARMED CAMP.
A guard troop commanded by Captain Williams was posted around a row of old brick slave quarters where the prisoners were being kept for the night. There was a crowd of neighbors, curious to see the notorious scalp-buyer and to hear the incredible news from the West.

Johnny Rogers looked strained and thin from the journey, but he was happy and bubbling with marvelous tales of the victory. When John and Ann Rogers Clark arrived, Johnny stood straight as a Prussian to greet them, his eyes shimmering with tears. And then they all, the Rogerses and the Clarks, sat in George Rogers’ library and listened to Johnny try to tell the story, and it was apparent from his breathlessness and the tears that kept coming to his eyes that he was so moved by what had happened that it was hard for him to talk. He told them of George’s plan for the attack on Vincennes, about the nearly impossible march he had undertaken, and about the role the
Willing
was to have played in it. He told of the grueling voyage of the gunboat, the Indian attack in the mouth of the Tennessee, the rescue of Myers the courier from Indians, the frustrating effort to keep the
Willing
on the right way. And then:

“When we got that bedamned boat in sight o’ the fort at last, can you imagine what we felt seein’ the American and Virginia flags a-flying over it ’stead of the Union Jack! I was so bumfuzzled for a time there I couldn’t understand why those flags were up. I wondered if it was a trick, that the Hair-Buyer’d put ’em up to trap us! I didn’t believe it could be Cousin George. I mean, after all, I’d just come a-rowin’ up through that drowned land, and it was ice water as far as ye could see, I mean that, and
I still don’t see how a mortal man could ha’ got there, I swear to the Eternal God I don’t, but there they were, they’d taken that blamed fort the day before, and there they sat guarding more prisoners o’ war than they had men to guard ’em with! Redcoats, a whole company of ’em, and companies of French Canadian militia from Detroit, and all the principal agents in the scalpbuying business. O’ course I was mortified I’d missed the whole fight, but so overjoyed they’d not lost a man.

“Ha, ha! Oh, listen, they had those British in a corral, and they were hanging nooses in the trees around ’em, and lookin’ at ’em with wolf eyes, and twirling tomahawks careless around ’em. O’ course, George had given orders no prisoner was t’ be hurt, but
they
didn’t know that, and they were so scared they looked like they were poopin’ peach pits—Excuse me, ladies present, that’s a saying Leonard Helm used about ’em, and it just slipped out there, careless-like.

“Speaking o’ Helm, that old rascal, he was so pent up from being a prisoner all winter, he got George to let him take a force up the Wabash to hunt some British reinforcements that were due down from Detroit. And damn my eyes if Helm didn’t surprise ’em and surround ’em, and without firing one shot! He captured forty more soldiers, and more Indian agents, and ten boats bearin’ forty thousand pounds’ worth o’ military provisions and Indian trade goods, all stuff they were planning to use to hire Indians for their spring offensive. But, ha HAAA! There won’t be a spring offensive now! And in one o’ those boats was Philip Dejean, the Grand Judge of Detroit, who’s about as important a scoundrel as Gov’nor Hamilton ’imself. Lord have mercy, people! I can’t wait to see Patrick Henry’s face when we ride in with this catch! Oh, what that Cousin George has done! Why, there’s not been the like of it ever! I … I … What have I forgot? Have I told ye—Oh! That Myers we picked up. He had messages from the Assembly, congratulations to George for takin’ Kaskaskia last summer. Late, it was, but George read it to th’ troops in the fort there. And he asked ’em to think back to the start of it all, back at the Falls, and then he told ’em they’d probably done more good out there, just those few of ’em, than all the armies marching up and down the coast. And, listen, I wish ye could have seen their faces. They were just comin’ to realize it, I guess. Then he told ’em they were a company of heroes, every man a hero, and his voice, you know, caught, like, and I looked and he was cryin’. And they threw their hats in the air for ’im. God, I still get shivers.” Johnny’s own voice broke now, and his eyes were brimming, and for a moment he
couldn’t speak, but just sat shaking his head at the wonder of it. All the Clarks were blinking rapidly and breathing deep breaths and shaking their heads slowly, envisioning their son and brother across the thousand miles. Billy looked as if he were in a trance, his eyes glazed, looking at Johnny Rogers’ mouth as if he could will more of those wonderful words to come out of it.