From Sea to Shining Sea (19 page)

And so now Annie had stood her ground, and she lay in the big bed upstairs at the Gwathmey house, in their plantation, a Clark girl all alone in the Gwathmey home, and she had convinced the future sheriff of King William County that she should have the say-so in this matter. And so the baby boy that lay cradled in her right arm against her swollen bare breast, this little scowling, livid, blotched creature that had caused her so much agony, would be
John
Gwathmey after all. Mama will be pleased, she thought. And sure Papa will be.

And the old midwife, humming to herself as she cleaned up the mess in the room, looked over at her once in a while and smiled.

That little old Clark girl there had sure had her way with that big bad night rider.

J
OHN
C
LARK THOUGHT THE NIGHT RIDERS WERE AN UGLY
necessity, and he did not like it when they came riding up at any hour of the night to unsettle his Negroes. But in one way they were good. Being out and around all over as they were, they were usually full of news, and these were times when the news seemed terribly urgent and important.

Tonight when John Clark first heard their hoofbeats out in the drive, he had been reading and rereading the
Virginia Gazette.
Copies of that journal’s war issues went from hand to hand among neighbors until they fell apart at the folds. From these old secondhand and third-hand newspapers John Clark had learned the saddening but stirring stories of what the patriots were doing up north. He had read about a band of volunteers shooting down a thousand British Redcoats on two hills called Bunker Hill and Breed’s Hill near Boston, almost stopping the British army before running out of ammunition and having to retreat. He had read about a merchant named Benedict Arnold and a Vermont militia commander named Ethan Allen, who had surprised the British garrison at old Fort Ticonderoga in New York, capturing half a hundred pieces of artillery to be used in the rebel cause. He had read about the planter George Washington, a Potomac aristocrat from up in Fairfax County, being selected to command the hungry, ill-clad rabble which was called the Grand Army of the United Colonies. This so-called Grand Army was a mob of fourteen thousand, without tents, living in everything from bark huts to sod houses, possessing not ten rounds of shot per man, and having extreme difficulty obtaining food because of a bad crop year throughout the colonies. Such was the dismal news one could read in the
Virginia Gazette
about this unpromising civil war with Mother England, and it was news already weeks old by the time written accounts of it had come down.

But the night riders always had fresh news about what was happening that very week in Virginia. These men would come trotting up the drive, mud-spattered or dusty, always thirsty, and while some of them were going through the slave quarters, their leader would stand in the hallway at the sideboard with John Clark and bolt down brandy while telling him the news of the Virginia Colony. It was in fact from a night rider that John Clark had learned that he had become the grandfather of a robust little Gwathmey named John in his honor; he learned it a whole day before a letter about it came from the Gwathmeys. The night
rider, Mike Brown Roberts, had laughed over his dram, saying, “So, then, Mister Clark, meseems young Owen must ha’ sobered up from that wedding party after all, eh?” Roberts had been a guest at the wedding.

“A boy, then,” Ann Rogers Clark had breathed, squeezing her hands before her waist. “And she did get by with namin’ him John. Well, now. Well-a-well, now! One’s breath isn’t always wasted on advice, is it?”

A
ND THEN IT WAS FROM THE NIGHT RIDERS TOO THAT THEY
learned of the siege of Lord Dunmore at Great Bridge, down near Norfolk. War on Virginia’s own soil!

His ex-Excellency the Royal Governor, as the people now liked to call him, had fortified a peninsula between Hampton Roads and Dismal Swamp, with his Redcoats and the Royal Marines from the sloop. There, with a few pieces of artillery, he apparently intended to hold out until reinforcements could arrive by sea. And during his wait, he was free to move up and down the coast in the warship, plundering the coast towns for food and trying to stir the blacks to insurrection.

John Clark sighed. The war news made him heavy at heart and clouded the bright calm view he had always had of his family’s future. Already his own sons, despite all his lectures to them about the immorality of war, were being drawn by the distant glory-song of armed conflict. Johnny, the oldest one still at home, was most passionate about marching in the cause of Liberty, and this mystified and troubled his father, because Johnny was of so sensitive and loving a nature that it was impossible to imagine him actually doing harm to another man. But Johnny drilled enthusiastically with his company of minute men, and practiced his swordsmanship every spare moment on fodder shocks, slashing and jabbing them to fragments. And sweet Johnny had exulted almost like a fiend when an order had come to eject all Tories and English-born militiamen from the ranks; it was as if his poetic soul had learned to hate.

“So then what’s being done about Dunmore?” John Clark asked the night rider. Sitting halfway up the stairs watching and listening was little Billy. On the step below him and almost pressed against him sat York. The little fat black fellow was desperately afraid of the men who came at night and shone their lanterns around in his mother’s cabin, and he was able to stay this close to one of them now only because his friend Billy was next to him.

“Well, sir,” said Roberts, “Colonel Woodford’s regiment’s
been sent down to Great Bridge, with an order to drive ’is Ludship out if he can.”

“Woodford’s and not Henry’s, eh?” said John Clark. “That’s good, anyway.” Patrick Henry, because of his popularity among the patriots, had been given command of one of the two colonial regiments, but the Safety Committee had had the wisdom so far to put only Woodford’s regiment in the field. William Woodford was a veteran of the French and Indian War. Henry had never soldiered in his life, except to lead an excited mob last spring down the road toward Williamsburg.

“And so,” the rider continued, smacking his lips after a sip of Indies rum, “there sits Bill Woodford in Great Dismal Swamp, with all them minute men and no cannon, watching Dunmore’s fort, and probably prayin’ he’ll not get a chance to attack ’im. By what I hear, all those boys want t’ do is hunt boar in there. And as I see it, all ’is Ludship needs do is wait till those fools’ve shot up all their powder, and then walk out with ’is Redcoats and catch ’em chawin’ their bacon. Oh, by th’ bye, did you hear yet we caught John Corbin for a spy?”

“Oooh,” Billy whispered to York. “A spy!”

“Oooo,” York whispered back. “Wha’sat, a spy?”

John Clark was shaking his head. “Ah, that’s sad. Mind ye, I’ve no love for Corbin. But one’s own neighbors! They’ll not hang ’im, I hope.” The Corbins were one of Caroline’s most prominent Tory families.

“Hang a spy,” Billy whispered to York, clutching his own throat and sticking his tongue out of the corner of his mouth. York cringed, white eyes bulging in the shadows, wondering whether a spy was what he was.

“They’ve flung ’im in the guardhouse at Williamsburg. They say he was carrying messages to Dunmore,” said Roberts.

Boots clumped in the mud room at the rear of the hall as the rest of the riders came in. They stood looking so longingly at the decanters that John Clark told them to help themselves. Then he added:

“If I was to run out of ardent spirits, I wonder me, Mike Roberts, whether your patrol would have such a keen interest in my poor, tame nigras.”

The riders laughed, their big voices filling the hallway. “Well,” said one of them, “ye do have one missin’ out o’ quarters, Mister Clark.”

“What?”

“But I found ’im. He’s right up there a-spyin’ on us.”

And when York saw all these dreadful night men looking and
pointing up at him, he flung his fat little arms around Billy’s waist and began wailing. Billy was moved to action. He stood up, gripping the banister, and faced them defiantly.

“No,” he proclaimed. “Yorkie’s not a spy! He’s my personal own man!”

J
ONATHAN
C
LARK PACED ABOUT HIS OFFICE IN THE
C
OURT
H
OUSE
, heels resounding on the plank floor. He could not sit still. He could not get the news of Great Bridge out of his mind. Colonel Woodford had defeated Dunmore’s Redcoats there with his regiment of half-trained Virginians! They had shot down thirty or forty British Grenadiers on the wooden bridge, repelling two waves of real Redcoat Regulars, and had driven Dunmore off the peninsula and re-opened the road to Norfolk, without the loss of one Virginian! The war was really on Virginia’s soil now, and Jonathan was so stirred that he could not work.

He could hear shouts outdoors. He put on his hat and coat and went out. It was a mild winter day, almost like spring, and most of the townspeople of Woodstock were out in the streets. Abraham Bowman, a strapping young farmer of Jonathan’s age, hailed him and fell in step beside him, grinning and sucking the fresh air through his teeth. “Wright and Marshall are pitting their best cocks up at Wright’s shed. What sayee to a bet or two?”

“Lead the way. Ah, Lord! I couldn’t stay in. Maybe a man’s not meant to sit on a chair all day.”

“Sure not.”

They walked up the dirt street between the hewn-log houses. Down a side street, a gang of young horsemen were whooping and charging in a gander-head-pulling contest. The white gander hung by its legs from an oak limb, squawking and flapping as each rider galloped by and tried to yank its head off. Jonathan and Abe stopped to watch. Several unsuccessful passes were made. “Wisht I was horseback,” Abe said. “Bet you I could do ’im the first try.” Bowman was known as one who would bet on anything, especially his own abilities. A horse was spurred, hooves beat, and then a triumphant shout went up. A young man reined in, holding the gander’s head high in his bloody fist while the white body in the tree flopped and sprayed blood and rained feathers. “
That’s
th’ way it’s done,” Abe Bowman said, and they walked away. “Say, friend Clark, what d’you hear from your brother George? Joe was askin’ me t’ other day.” Abe’s cousin Joseph had been George’s lieutenant in the Indian uprising. “Joe esteems him right high.”

“Oh, last letter I got, he said he’d laid out a town, Leesburg
he called it, seventy miles up the Kaintuckee River. Said he looked for fifty families to be livin’ in it by Christmas. O’ course it was last July he wrote that, and I guess they’d not even heard o’ Lexington and Concord by then. Medoubts they even know out there that a war’s on.”

“Oh, they know more out there than y’d reckon they would. Joe bet me that Dunmore’s connivin’ out there in ’74’ll mean a lot o’ British-like Indians to bother with.”

Jonathan remembered what Washington had said about the need to defend the West. But he shrugged. Worthless wilderness, he thought. They turned into the hubbub at Wright’s tobacco shed, and stooped to look at the cages of the fighting cocks. “I like the looks o’ Marshall’s birds. I’ll lay a pound on his the first go-round.”

Abe doubled over and slapped his thigh in exaggerated hilarity. “Y’ll never learn, Jonathan Clark! Now listen, no matter how someone else’s birds look, never bet against Wright’s!”

“I take that to mean you’ll accept the wager?”

“I do! Oh, ye fool! It’s a tradition! Wright’s always wins!”

They leaned their elbows on the rail of the cockpit. Abe Bowman was still laughing and shaking his head. The air in the shed was close, and stank of tobacco and whiskey-breath. There were about thirty men around the pit, and most of them appeared to have been at the jug since morning. Many of them were speaking German. A large part of the populace of Shenandoah County was made up of German frontiersmen. The name had been changed recently to Shenandoah to obliterate Dunmore’s name. Jonathan had had a lot to do with that. As the county’s clerk and representative to the Revolutionary Assembly, he was becoming an ever more avid patriot, and that was one reason why Abe Bowman was so drawn to him.

“Here come the first cocks,” said Bowman, nudging him in the ribs. “Poor Clark! Tradition, remember? He, he!”

The trainers threw in their roosters. Wright and Marshall were both squat, fat-faced, mean-eyed men, and it was said that the only way to tell them apart was by seeing which roosters they held. The bettors started shouting. Abe Bowman immediately began taunting Marshall’s rooster, which was standing in one place, scraping the ground nervously with the claws of its right foot, bobbing its head like an ouzel, swelling and deflating, backing slightly as Wright’s bird advanced. “Hey-o, Marshall bird,” Bowman yelped at it, “don’t just stand and wait! What are ye, a buzzard?” That brought on a wave of laughter and similar jibes, Bowman jabbed Jonathan again with his elbow, sure his
point was being taken. Wright’s bird kept advancing until the tailfeathers of Marshall’s reluctant bird touched the pit wall.

Then the laughing taunts were suddenly drowned by an explosion of squawks, whiffing and flapping wings, and thudding bodies. The air in the cockpit was so full of dust, drifting feathers, and bloodspray that the whiskey-dazed spectators could not follow what was happening. The jeering stopped and now a dozen voices were shouting questions, in English and German. Both trainers stood with their mouths open, squinting into the turmoil.

It was over in seconds. Wright’s bird lay in a tattered, twitching heap in the center of the pit, bleeding from both pecked-out eyes and from other wounds beneath its feathers. Its neck appeared to be broken. The ground under it darkened with blood as its movements grew feeble, then ceased. Marshall’s cock stood arched, blinking and crowing over it, flapping its iridescent feathers back into place. Its beak and spurs were crimson.

“Well, Abraham,” Jonathan said, extending his hand, palm up, to accept his winnings, “my bird took your advice. So much for traditions, eh?”

The men stood around later and drank from a demijohn of rum that Wright had paid up in losses. Marshall’s cocks had overthrown a tradition of many years, defeating seven of Wright’s ten best birds. “’Twas a true rebellion,” Jonathan gloated, raising his cup to Marshall. “Worthy of Lexington, Breed’s Hill, and Great Bridge.”