Remember the Morning (52 page)

Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: Remember the Morning

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“I have no faith in such a thing,” he said. “If I go, I'll spend the rest of my life condemning myself as a coward.”

Clara saw how hopeless it was to reconcile his warrior soul and the voice of the woman who spoke within her. The Virgin spoke for a god of peace, for the Master of Life, who flowered once in the body of her son. Malcolm only understood a god of war. With a sigh she abandoned the struggle. The great falls thundered in her soul. She knew what she must do.

She said nothing to him about the assassins who would soon invade the longhouse of the Bear Clan. Instead, she kissed him and they made sad tender love one more time. When he finally slept beside her, with deep mournful breaths, she rose and knelt before the Virgin for a long time, worshipping silently, not seeking a voice, simply rejoicing in the words she had heard.

She lay down again beside Malcolm and waited. At last she heard small noises as the assassins crept past others who were pretending to sleep. A moment later they loomed in the darknessâat least three of them. With wild yells they sprang forward. Clara flung herself on top of Malcolm as the knives descended. Into her flesh the blades plunged, with amazingly little pain. But she screamed as if she were in agony, throwing them into confusion.

Malcolm flung Clara aside and seized a lacrosse stick off the longhouse wall. With a half dozen ferocious swings, he demolished the demoralized would-be killers. They fled with broken arms and jaws and noses, while uproar consumed the longhouse.

“A light. A candle,” Malcolm cried.

A woman offered one with a trembling hand. He looked down on Clara's blood-soaked body. She was bleeding from a half-dozen wounds. “No!” Malcolm cried, sinking to his knees beside her.

“Don't weep. And don't seek revenge,” Clara said. “Go home to Catalyntie. You belong to her now.”

“No!” Malcolm cried again.

“Promise meâ”

A tremendous roaring filled Clara's body and mind. The great falls opened its billowing arms to embrace her. She slipped away from Malcolm's grasp into the mist of eternity.

Two weeks later, when Malcolm appeared at Great Rock Farm, I saw calamity on his haggard face. I thought it was caused by the upheaval that was shaking America's frontiers. From Detroit to the forks of the Ohio, the Indians had risen to massacre British garrisons and white settlers in a blazing swath a thousand miles long. Among the dead was Robert Foster Nicolls. Ottawa and Seneca warriors had dragged him from his trading house outside the fort at Detroit and burned him at the stake.

“Thank God you're alive,” I said.

Malcolm stumbled past me into the parlor, where our son Hugh was reading a New York newspaper that denounced the British and the Indians with equal fervor. Malcolm patted him listlessly on the shoulder and treated little Paul no better when he ran to him. Hugh asked Malcolm if he was going to recruit a regiment and march against the Indians. Malcolm shook his head. “I can't fight my own people,” he said.

I sent the boys to their rooms and brought Malcolm a cup of strong tea. He waved it aside and told me what had happened in the longhouse of the Bear Clan. My heart dwindled to a speck of dust. I could never match Clara's love now. I was sure Malcolm loathed the sight of me. If I had not been at Great Rock Farm demanding my due as a wife, Clara might have been willing to leave Shining Creek.

Words sprang to my lips, words I had never dared to speak before. I realized as I spoke them that they also belonged to Clara. “Remember the morning we met, how beautiful it was? The sun on the green meadow and the trees in bud? I loved you then with my whole heart. But I didn't speak because I was afraid Clara would claim you first. Let's go back to that morning and begin again, the two of us, let's love each other without fear or doubt for the years we have leftâ”

Malcolm stared numbly at me. I might have been speaking Dutch or German or Chinese. Then something marvelousâperhaps even miraculousâbegan to happen. Within my voice, blended like the diapasons of a hymn, Malcolm heard Clara's voice. He saw Clara's love in my eyes. Tears streaked his hollow cheeks. He opened his arms to me.

A few months later, the great Indian uprising ended in an armed truce. Prophets like Grey Owl and Neolin, war chiefs like Pontiac, died in the fighting or lost face when it became apparent that the white men were too numerous to defeat and the Indians could not survive without white trade goods. The chastened British promised to restore the annual presents to the Iroquois and other tribesâand secretly vowed to get the money out of the Americans' pockets.

Since those days of tears and sorrow, Malcolm and I have struggled to love each other without blame or regret, anger or reproach. We have failed at times, as too such different hearts must. Those close to us, including our sons, saw little change in our everyday selves. But we knew love had conquered our hearts in Clara's name and would never leave us.

As I write the final words of this story of America's morning that memory has compelled me to tell, I feel Clara's hand on my pen, her lips against my cheek. The story is her testament and mine, proofâI hopeâthat love can transcend history's agony and endure within the recesses of the heart.

AFTERWORD

T
HIS IS THE SIXTH IN A series of narratives from the archives of the Stapleton family. The earlier volumes are
Liberty Tavern
and
Dreams of Glory
, which tell the story of the Stapletons in the era of the American Revolution,
The Spoils of War
, which describes their odyssey in the era of the Civil War, and
Rulers of the City
and
Promises to Keep
, which concern the modern Stapletons. Although all these books have dealt frankly with the past,
Remember the Morning
is by far the most controversial. Some members of the Stapleton family objected to its publication. But they were persuaded by other members that it was too important to omit from the series.

Apparently, Catalyntie Van Vorst Stapleton gave the finished manuscript to Harman Bogardus, pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church in Hackensack, with orders that it be held in the church's archives until she and her husband and their two sons died. Thereafter it was to be handed over to their descendants, who were at liberty to do whatever they chose with it. These grandchildren placed it in the vault of a local bank and forgot about it. There is little evidence that anyone ever read it. Future-minded like most Americans, each generation of Stapletons has tended to regard their predecessors as quaint relics of an irrelevant past.

The research and editing required to prepare this and the other manuscripts for publication have been funded by the Principia Foundation, set up by the late Paul Stapleton to deepen the historical consciousness of his descendantsâand other Americans who share with them the voyage of the American nation into the uncertain future.

James Kilpatrick
President
The Principia Foundation

Notes

Medicine man or priest who presided at religious ceremonies, healed the sick, helped mourn the dead.

Another tribe in the Iroquois confederation.

Small cylindrical beads made from polished shells. It was used as money by the Iroquois, and as gifts. White wampum signified peace.

From the Latin word for James, Jacobus.

The equivalent of about $5,000 in late-twentieth-century money.

Housewives
.

Cat-o'-nine-tailsâa whip.

At this time New York had no daytime police force. Law was enforced by part-time constables.

Prisoners in eighteenth-century jails had to pay for decent food.

New York's part-time police force
.

There were no law schools. Lawyers studied in the offices of other lawyers
.

A midday meal; there was no such thing as lunch.

This was a polite name for whores. They were supposed worshippers of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, whose cult was celebrated on the island of Cyprus with wild orgies in ancient times
.

New Jersey did not become a separate colony until 1738.

On the frontier, Indian summer days often brought war parties for a final raid before the onset of winter
.

A large cloak
.

Wine from the Canary Islands
.

A drink of hot water, wine, and lemon juice, sweetened and spiced. Named for Col. Francis Negus, its creator.

It was almost an eighteenth-century article of faith that night air was unhealthy.

Circles of fire.

Contraceptives at this time were usually made of sheep gut or sometimes of fish skin. Manufactured by wholesalers in England, they were available in apothecary shops
.

Syphilis.

Gonorrhea.

A drink that mixed rum, brandy, milk, and beaten eggs, stirred by a hot poker.

December 21.

About $200,000 in late-twentieth-century dollars.

About $3,000,000 in modern dollars.

A coarse wool, named after the English city in which it was manufactured.

Now Lake Champlain.

British army nickname for a musket.

Dismissed.

Dutch for good housewife.

At this time, the customs officers in New York did not own a single boat. They charged duties only on goods that came directly to the docks.

He is referring to the English Civil War of 1642-49.

After William of Orange, the Dutch Protestant ruler who became King of England in 1689, in the revolution that expelled the pro-Catholic James II.

A summons to war
.

A merchant ship
,
armed and commissioned to attack and seize enemy ships in time of war.

Now the site of the Houses of Parliament
.

The terms Whig and Tory went back to the previous century. The Whigs backed the revolution of 1689
;
the Tories remained loyal to the deposed James II and his family
.

James Edward Stuart was the son of the deposed James II, who died in 1701. Whigs called James Edward “The Pretender.” Tories called him James III.

The
London Weekly Journal
reported this incident more or less as Catalyntie Stapleton tells it
.
The Round House on St. Martin's Lane was district police headquarters where prisoners were held overnight
.

This was a popular way of referring to James Edward Stuart
.

Ensign was the equivalent of a second lieutenant.

Commissions were bought and sold
,
usually for substantial sums, in the British army of this era.

A gold coin worth one pound and one shilling.

Biographies of James Wolfe, later the conqueror of French Canada, sometimes called the grandfather of the American Revolution, confirm that he served with Brigadier Henry “Hangman” Hawley in the ugly business of pacifying the Scottish countryside.

Seats in Parliament could be purchased in so-called “rotten boroughs,” usually controlled by a great landowner.

At this time, one in five New Yorkers was black. The proportion of black males was even higherâone in four.

Wolfe later wrote several “prophetic” letters to friends in the army in which he predicted American greatness.

Cute meant clever in the eighteenth century.

Historians confirm the appearance of this sudden rain shower which saved most of New York from the flames. No one, of course, has previously suggested what appears here as an explanation for it.

Roughly the site of present-day City Hall Park.

Syphilis.

Lake Champlain.

The site of Pittsburgh.

The Indian name for the French governor of Canada.

Roughly eight pounds.

Now known as Fort Ticonderoga.

Newcastle's brother, Henry Pelham, Walpole's immediate successor, died after an overeating
binge in 1754. Walpole died in 1745.