From Sea to Shining Sea (21 page)

They went to it. It had no windows, just gun ports, and one thick, oaken door secured by an iron lock. Jones stood with his teeth bared in pain, leaning against the door in a despairing posture. “What now?” he groaned. “Chop the door in?”

“Not if it’s to be our fort.” George took off the short sword that hung at his side. “Kindly take my hanger here and go stick us a pig, while I let us in.”

At the expense of the worst pain yet, George climbed fingers-and-toes to the top of the stick-and-daub chimney. He tore off chimney down to roof-ridge level until the opening was wide enough to admit him. He let his legs down into the sooty aperture, and paused to watch Jones. Jones was mincing along like a firewalker, cooing seductively to a sow he had cornered in the angle of a rail fence. George grinned. “Get ’er, Mister Assemblyman,”
he called softly. It would have been easier to shoot her, but they dared not make the noise.

At that instant Jones flung himself on the sow and stabbed her through the heart before she could squeal. They fell in a heap and she died under him after a few twitches.

Now, wincing with agony, George braced feet and elbows against the inside of the flue and eased himself down. He lost his hold and fell most of the way, yelping as his feet hit the hearth. A kettle rolled clunking on the floor and ash-dust swirled in the narrow beams of light through the gun-ports.

The cabin was empty except for a large hewn table and a bench in the center of the one big room. The occupants at least had had time to remove everything portable, even their bedsteads.

The iron lock yielded at the lift of an inside latch, and he opened the door to let in daylight, Assemblyman Jones, George’s horse, and the dead pig.

They forted up, pausing now and then to look and listen. They heard two faraway gunshots while butchering. They built a fire and rendered some pig fat. George went to the edge of the clearing for some oak bark. They limped about, fetching water and more wood, some green corn, grass for the horse, and a long pole. They swept away their tracks with a bough, then locked themselves in about midafternoon with the glorious aroma of roasting pork. George was sure by now that Indians controlled the whole countryside here in the Licking Valley. It seemed most likely to him that Kentuck’s first two elected representatives might die defending this log-walled room, their political careers less than a week old. But he did not say so. Instead he anointed Jones’s feet with an ooze of pig fat and oak bark. Then Jones anointed George’s feet. The pain began to ease at once. Their moccasins were drying near the fire.

They loaded their rifles and pistols, and laid them out on the table with powder horns and rifle balls, ramrods, patches, and extra flints. The long pole would be used to knock the roof off if Indians set it afire. The plan was that George would do the shooting while Jones loaded. Jones, with his weak eyes, was an uncommonly poor shot among frontiersmen.

“Now, Mister Assemblyman Jones. Set for a siege?”

“Aye,” replied Jones with a nervous laugh, sitting on the bench with his feet wrapped in oozy rags, arranging rifle balls in a neat row in a groove of the tabletop. “Aye, thou defender and lawmaker of Kain-tuck. Bring on the tribes.”

“I’ll eliminate the Shawnee nation first,” George said. “After them, the rest’ll go down easy.”

While they were waiting and eating, doctoring their feet and watching at the portholes, they talked about what they should do if only one of them got to Williamsburg. Jones was astonished at all the connections George had among leading Virginians. “But if nothing else comes to pass,” George said, “I swear by my life I’m going to get some ammunition transported back out here. I think our jurisdiction’s damn nigh overrun, by the looks o’ this, and hardly a man in Kaintuck’s got enough gunpowder to blow his nose.”

“L
ISTEN
,” G
EORGE HISSED
. I
T WAS TWILIGHT NOW
. T
HEY
had let the hearth fire die because it smoked too much with the chimney torn down. For light they had made a smoky little lamp, using a broken cup, some pig fat, and a cloth wick. George picked up both rifles and limped to one of the firing ports.

He could see nothing but the darkening clearing and the gloomy forest beyond it, and a stretch of pale river, but he could hear something: a faint, metallic sound, repeating and repeating, and a fragment of voice. He listened for a long time, hardly breathing, puzzled. He looked back once and saw John Gabriel Jones praying at the table with his eyes shut; he looked as if he were saying grace over a banquet of guns and ammunition.

George eased a rifle muzzle through the porthole, aiming toward the noises outside. He could hear them talking in the edge of the woods now; they were about to come forth into the clearing.

George snorted suddenly, pulled the rifle back in, and hobbled to the door. To Jones’s astonishment, he unlatched it and swung it wide open and stepped out, and Jones heard him say:

“About your chimney and pig, Mister Martin, I’ll make good on ’em, and thankee. You folks are a welcome sight.”

Jones’s sigh of relief blew out his little lamp.

S
UNLIGHT FLASHED OFF THE BRASS SPEARHEAD ATOP THE
regimental flag. The banner, salmon-colored silk with a long fringe, flapped lazily above the cloud of road dust stirred up by the dragging feet of overheated, exhausted marchers.

Captain Jonathan Clark nudged his horse’s flanks with his heels and looked at the flag. In the center of the silken rectangle was depicted a white scroll, upon which was inscribed:

Jonathan looked often at the flag, trying to inspire his limp and sagging morale. He felt dust between his teeth, and his nostrils were clogged with dust-reddened snot. Sometimes he thought the troops in this regiment raised twice as much dust as any other body of men because they dragged their feet so much.

They just shuffle along, he thought angrily, squinting against the dust and sunglare. The sun was just a few degrees above the Carolina treetops, and already was drilling hot, and every morning for days it had been in their eyes as they trudged eastward toward Charles Town.

This German Regiment, as it was called, was not all he wished it could be. The privates were surly and stubborn, muttered to each other in their incomprehensible tongue, and glowered insolently at their officers, Abe Bowman and Bill Nelson, John Markham, Morgan Alexander, who were, like Jonathan himself, mostly of English stock. The regimental commander, General Peter Muhlenberg, was of their own kind, and they liked him, and thus he had to tend to many details of discipline and dispute that should have been handled by the company officers. Most of the troops did actually know English fairly well, but often acted as if they had not understood orders given in English. And they would retreat into their own tongue when they wished to mock their officers. General Muhlenberg was a fine and fair man, an old friend of Jonathan’s, but he had been a clergyman and was too soft-hearted to be much of a disciplinarian. He usually would choose not to believe that his foot soldiers were capable of being crafty and disobedient; he did not believe those were Germanic traits.

But the 8th Virginia was a troublesome unit, and already twenty men had deserted during this long, stifling forced march from Georgia.

Jonathan could understand their discontent. They had left the clean, green mountains of the Virginia-Pennsylvania frontier far behind, to march now in suffocating heat through eternal and monotonous plains and swamps and fields of poor red earth, patchy scrub and sparse, dusty pines, stung by no-see-ums and sweat bees, and tormented by mosquitoes that came upon them out of the marshes like whining clouds. They had been put in an army under the command of General Charles Lee, who was forever trying to anticipate where the British fleet might show up along the Southern coast. Thus the army had marched back and forth from place to place—in General Lee’s own words, “as confused
as a dog in a dancing school”—and now after a sweltering, disease-plagued encampment in Georgia they were hurrying up to Charles Town, where a British fleet had hove to and lay threateningly offshore. It seemed to Jonathan that the British had a great advantage. They could just show up anywhere, white sails off a coastal town, and the Continental Army would have to go there and try to arrive in time to keep them from doing what they had done to Norfolk.

Here in the South the sick list was long and the sick stayed sick. Dysentery was universal, everybody had rashes, and some of the men were beginning to suffer the fevers and chills of malaria.

Jonathan pulled a damp, filthy handkerchief, stained the color of brick dust, out of his sleeve and mopped his face, and looked ahead at the long column of dusty coats, black tricorns, knapsacks, and shouldered muskets stretching out of sight on the infinite straight road, the forward companies obscured by their own dust, and wondered what sort of soldiers these Germans would prove to be in the face of fire and steel.

It was not their manliness or courage he doubted. They were frontier people, after all, and most of them had been on the edge of their lives more than once. They were accustomed to fighting individually.

What he feared for was their obedience. The square, straight, unthinking responses of drill were unnatural to them. He could see that already, in their resistance to training. They had learned to obey only so far as to avoid punishment. Under fire, he expected, they would fall to anarchy and, like Indians, preserve their individual selves to fight another day. That was the best way in wilderness fighting, of course. But now they were soldiers of the Continental Line, trained according to Bland’s and Harvey’s military texts, to fight other squared-up regiments in the European manner, advancing in open fields with bayonets against bayonets, instead of sniping from the cover of rocks and trees.

When we get to Charles Town, Jonathan thought, spitting a gob of dust-red saliva onto the roadside and listening to the dismal shuffling of reluctant feet all around him, pray we shan’t break and rout, and disgrace that pretty pink flag!

G
EORGE PACED OUTSIDE THE DOOR OF
G
OVERNOR
P
ATRICK
Henry’s bedchamber. He could hear Henry inside, dictating correspondence to a secretary from his sickbed.

George’s scald feet were cured, but they still felt prickly sometimes
when he had to stand still, so now he paced back and forth in the gloomy hall

Henry had been elected, a month before, the first governor under Virginia’s new constitution. He had been installed in the Governor’s Palace at Williamsburg, which Lord Dunmore had so hastily vacated, but had retreated here to his private home in Hanover County during a bout of ill health. The house was quiet except for the governor’s voice and, from some distant corner of the dwelling, the voices of children with their tutor. Mrs. Henry had died the year before, after a long illness, leaving him with six children. The house seemed oppressive and sad. George wondered how a man could run affairs of state in such a depressing atmosphere, especially while ill himself. You’d think he’d want to be carried out and set under a shade tree, George thought. How can people stand so much indoors?

The bedchamber door opened and the secretary poked out his head, a youthful, pallid face under a white-powdered wig. He looked George up and down once, making evident his disapproval of the petitioner’s wild appearance. George was still in his smoke-tainted, fringed hunting shirt and buckskin leggings stained with the blood of pig and Indian. Around his waist was an Indian-bead belt, fastened in back by thongs and supporting his hanger sword and a pistol. He had set his knapsack and hat on a chair by the door and leaned his rifle on the wall.

“His Excellency will see you now,” the secretary said, then recoiled timidly as George shouldered through the door past him.

The room was dim and hot. Heavy curtains had been drawn against the daylight, and two bedside candles burned in air dense with the smells of medicinal powders and stale bedclothes. One might have thought a man was dying in here, but the voice that greeted George from the pile of candlelit pillows was deep and strong, though curdled with phlegm. “George Clark! What a pleasure! Take this chair here and let me see you, lad!” George took a hot, damp hand.

“Your Excellency. Thank you for receiving me. It is, as y’ll see, quite urgent.”

“In good time. How is your father? Your mother?”

“Both well, to my knowledge. I’ve not been home yet.”

“Must be urgent indeed, then.” Henry had pushed his spectacles to the top of his high forehead, which seemed two inches higher than it had been the last time George had seen him. Henry looked considerably older than his forty years. His face was fever-blotched, and his eyes, bushy eyebrows above and concentric
pouches beneath, blazed with candle flame. “How come you to Hanover?”

“Well, sir, finding myself and my friend John Gabriel Jones elected Kentuck’s delegates to the Virginia Assembly—” Henry’s eyebrows lifted. George continued. “We went to Williamsburg and found the Assembly already adjourned. So I’ve brought straight to you what I was taking to them.”

Henry shook his head and stretched out his hand. “Welcome to the governing business. Though I can’t say you’re a bona fide delegate, as Kentuck’s no county of Virginia.”

“Her people desire that she be. They’ve petitioned. I’d intended we should come just as deputies, to negotiate for admission to the state. But the people did things their own way while I was detained elsewhere. Withal, I have petitions praying Virginia’s protection, and one disputing Colonel Henderson’s claims on that country.”

Henry regarded the ceiling for ten seconds, as if adding sums, then looked back to George and said, “There’s many a faction, besides Henderson, who’d deny Virginia has any proper pretension to that country.”

“That I well know. I’ve heard every side of it.”

“The Assembly won’t sit again till October.”

“Aye,” George sighed. “Meantime, Indians are swarming on the settlements, egged on by the British, and I doubt there’s fifty pounds o’ gunpowder in all o’ Kentuck. That can’t wait much longer. We need powder, and that’s why I’ve come straight to you.”