From Sea to Shining Sea (93 page)

And now his mother was asking: “A Hancock girl, then? Which girl, Billy?”

“Uh, Judy,” he said weakly, making a fool’s-face in the dark.

And she said:

“A mere babe she must be. There was no Judy when we knew ’em.”

“Well, but… It’s been fourteen years since we left Virginia, Ma.”

“Is she fourteen, then?”

William squirmed. “Well, would I ask her age of a miss? Well, she’s young, o’ course. But won’t always be.” Behind his eyes he was seeing peach-colored flesh and an aura of heavenly golden light that had begun to suffuse over the memory of those sisters, so that they were all starting to blur together. All except little Judy. William had not meant to tell his mother that he was going to marry Judy Hancock in particular. But it would have sounded silly to say, “One of the Hancock girls, at least.”

The air in the dark sickroom was redolent of the powerful ointments that had been used against his mother’s affliction, which was called St. Anthony’s Fire, but for a moment William remembered a warm lilac scent that had surrounded all those fetching nymphs, and he was stirred by a vague longing and a deep, miserable confusion.

“Son,” came the weak voice from the bed, “how far did ye press on this Miss Hancock?”

He wished the subject had never been mentioned. He was talking of daydream butterflies, but she was demanding that he pin one down.

“Uh,” he mumbled, “I talked with her father.” That was not exactly a fib. He had chatted generally and awkwardly with Colonel Hancock about wanting to come back and acquaint himself better with the girls. The colonel was a staunch admirer of the Clark name and had seemed to take this as a proper overture to some very acceptable formal proposal yet to come.

“And?”

“He, ah, he said he’d be pleased to talk of it with me in an earnest way after the century turns.”

He could hear his mother chuckling. “Billy, Billy! Now didn’t that strike ye as a strange reply?”

“Maybe a bit. But it’s just another way o’ saying wait a year or so. Eighteen hundred is that close. We’ll be a-feelin’ the century turn, Ma, in a year and a week.”

“That’s so, isn’t it,” she said after a while. “But it’s true she’s young, this Judy?”

“Young.” They were all young. Enchantingly, virginally young. William’s intimate knowledge of womanflesh had been gained primarily among camp-followers and squaws and innwenches, and so to him a virgin was a rather mythical being.

“Have ye been moved to write poetry?”

“Poetry? Oh, no.”

“Good. Poor Johnny, rest his beloved soul, was the only one ever got in such a state. Don’t y’ ever make a fool of yourself … Or be made one of… You go down now … Join family … Sing with … Gladdens me y’re home … Listen, Billy. I know you’re rare good … Marked, as George was … I love ye dearly now. Would ye send your Pa up when you go down … I must scold ’im for singin’ that bawdry, huh … Don’t kiss me on the face or touch me … it hurts. But I’m hugging you, Billy, in my heart … just like always. A happy Christmas, dear son.”

“Ma, don’t make me bawl, now.” He was gulping. The sound of her voice in the dark was so sweet and terrible and far, as he could not see her or touch her. He had in a way misled her. And it was plain that she wasn’t going to be here long.

“O’ course y’ll not bawl. Go on down now.”

O
H
, I’
M SO DISAPPOINTED IT’S GOT TO BE LIKE THIS
, A
NN
Rogers Clark was thinking as William’s boots tromped away down the stairs.

A body thinks on how ’twill be and I always pictured it would be in a bright room with me and John looking at each other, him a-sitting close by the bed holding my hand

And me looking pale and pretty as ary old saint

Young’uns all roundabout the bed

Wonder if George can still do a whippoorwill song

Poor George

I’ve a feeling I’ll not see this Christmas

Not quite

Oh, what time is it I wonder

Midnight yet? I didn’t count the chimes last hour

I wonder can a body feel it when a new century comes around

Like something silent turning out among the stars

Mercy I don’t know

I never felt new years or birthdays

It’s all got to do with clocks and calendars

Years themselves just roll on like a millwheel without beginnings or ends

Reckon centuries do too

Eh well but I do wish I could linger a spell and watch things … cotton gins and steam engines and whatnot

But I reckon you can watch from over yonder too

Over across the River

Find things out over yonder too, surely so

Like whatever became o’ poor son Dickie

And I’ll see Johnny there too all healthy and handsome and rosy-cheeked like he was before the prison boat …

I’ll see Elizabeth

Ma

Pa

Rachel

I guess I’ll be going to see as many as I’m leaving

And the Almighty at last

Oh my what will old John do without me though

Fifty years he’s had o’ me and I can scarce remember a time before him

Sometimes I feel I was born married to that man

He’ll perish without me to look after him

What was the best time of all I wonder

Oh I’d have to say it was that morn in Albemarle John and I rode the ox cart up on the meadow o’ spring flowers and he bade me keep my eyes shut till he was ready for me to look and he showed me where our first house would be If there was one best time I’d say that was it

I wonder if the next place I see will be like that meadow that morning

It will be I’ll bet Oh I hope so

Come on John ol’ Darlin’

I know it takes you a long time to climb a stair

“J
OHN
? S
IT IN THE WHITE CHAIR
.

“John. I think the time to go has come. It’s really just sort o’ like fainting, is all.

“You aren’t cryin’ are you? Now listen what I ask: John dear, keep my coffin shut. Whoever speaks over me have ’im say I was a patriot too. It’s no inconsiderable a thing what a mother does.

“Did I ever tell ye, John, that the first time I laid eyes on you I knew. I knew it would be you and me right up to the end.”

But

This isn’t the end at all

It’s the beginning

Across the River I’ll see ye there

I see the far glory shine like sun on water

Come on when you’re ready

A
NN
R
OGERS
C
LARK DIED
C
HRISTMAS
E
VE
, 1798,
OF
erysipelas. She was buried at Mulberry Hill in a grave at the edge of the woods. They had to burn the frozen ground to dig a place for her. Much of Louisville’s population stood there in the cold when she was put down.

Her husband John Clark did not stay long after she was gone. He became bemused, would not bother to eat, and stood for hours at a time gazing out the window at her headstone out by the woods.

In July of 1799, with three witnesses, he dictated his will.

He divided some 8000 acres of land among his sons Jonathan and Edmund, his three sons-in-law, and his grandsons John and Benjamin O’Fallon. To William, his youngest son, he gave Mulberry Hill and all its livestock and furnishings and servants, including William’s bodyservant, York.

To George he could give nothing but the old slaves Cupid and Venus, because anything else given to George would be subject to seizure by his creditors.

One night, a week after the will was completed, John Clark
went quietly to his bed in the bedroom where he and Ann had slept since 1785. He lay looking at the far wall, and out the window at the stars over her grave, and he remembered one morning half a century ago when he had stood with her in a meadow in Albemarle County and shown her where their first house was going to be.

And then John Clark decided there was nothing else to get up for again.

A few days later, with most of Louisville’s people up on Mulberry Hill again so soon, this time in the heat of August, he was buried beside Ann, at the edge of the woods, a long way west of Virginia.

G
EORGE
R
OGERS
C
LARK LOOKED INTO THE AMBER RUM IN
the bottom of his glass and smelled its fumes, and for a moment he was without any thought whatsoever. It was unusual: his mind was blank—without a plan, without a word, without a recollection. From inside his log house came the musical voices of Fanny and her children, but they were faint and remote, as if from another world.

It seemed there were two great emptinesses in his soul: one where there had always been a purpose, one where his mother and father had always been. Now those two places were vacuums.

It was surprising how much he missed his parents. He thought much about the embarrassments he had brought upon them in their last years.

I always intended they’d be happy in Kentucky, he would think. It’s my fault they weren’t. Oh, I guess they were, but not as happy as they might have been. But then, who is?

At least now I can drink without shaming them, he would think.

I mean unless they can see me from where they are.

But I guess if they can see me from there, they can understand me from there too.

He was sitting on the porch of his new log house on the bluff above the Falls, shaded from a hot, late-afternoon sun, caressed by a breeze up from the river. This was his third glass this afternoon, and he was beginning to embrace the likelihood that he would not stop.

There was no reason to stop, really. Up here on Point o’ Rock, there was no one it could embarrass. He was away from the society of Louisville, away from Kentucky altogether. It was the Indiana Territory on this side of the river, and no one lived here but his own old veterans and his old French allies, and Indians.
He was living in the first real house he had ever owned, except that little cabin on Grave Creek thirty years ago, and here he sat like an old eagle in its aerie, high above the Falls, looking far. It was no mansion, but it was his, and it was where he had long since dreamed he would have a house. It was a two-story structure of hewn poplar logs, sturdy as a fort, with a large stone fireplace at each end, a kitchen and pantry house attached at the back, and this front porch overlooking the most spectacular stretch of the Ohio. It had been built by brother-in-law Owen Gwathmey, lately arrived in Kentucky with Annie and their great brood of children. Owen had come over with his crew of skilled Negroes and built the place according to George’s plan and under his supervision. It was as well built a log house as any he had ever seen, and Uncle George Rogers would have been proud of it, if he had lived to come and see it. But he had died last year, he who had taught George everything he knew about engineering and building, and that too had left a great empty place in George.

Although it was not the pillared white house of his old dream, and although there was no beautiful wife to sit with him and watch the sun go down as in that old dream, it was where he had wanted it, and here he could sit and think, and drink when he damn pleased, and his old comrades and even his old enemies could come here and drink with him, and Louisville’s society and America’s government could think what they wanted to think of him, or forget him if they chose to forget him, which seemed to be the case. George had quit working on his memoir long ago; indeed, he didn’t even know where the manuscript was now.

Anyway, the ones who really counted back in the East had not forgotten him. President Jefferson, Madison, Monroe … They still wrote to him now and then. And he was not entirely alone, even out here in this wild place. He had the two old servants, Cupid and Venus, whom his father had willed to him, and who were so old and decrepit that the creditors wouldn’t bother to take them from him. And Fanny and her sons were here, to fill these vast hushing silences with their sweet voices.

Fanny was the proper sister to be here with him, because her fortunes had been hard and devastating like his, and she could commiserate and understand. Fanny was a widow again, widowed by a swift, violent tragedy, and this high, lonely place was a retreat for her, too. She was glad to be in hermitage, for a twice-widowed woman of thirty, with small sons by both marriages, was an anomaly at Louisville’s balls and fetes where the
mating of well-born swains and maids was the paramount purpose, just as it always had been in old Virginia.

And so now, Fanny was the beautiful lady who sometimes sat with George and watched the sunsets in the valley. Not his wife, but his sister. It was always blood family, it seemed, that stayed alongside and helped one fend off the despair. Fanny and William now were his closest soulmates and helpmeets. And neither of them deplored his drinking. They did not encourage it; in fact, they tried to keep his spirits high enough that he would not fall into it. But they weren’t embarrassed by it and they understood when he took a slide, as he felt he was about to do now. Jonathan and Edmund, who had finally come West last year and were deeply involved in becoming pillars of Louisville society, were somewhat offended by his drinking—or, rather, his reputation for it—while Lucy and Annie, as matrons of the town, pretended that his problem did not exist. But the youngest ones, William and Fanny, lived with it and understood it and gently tried to loft him over it. William and Fanny.

And now William was coming stronger and stronger into George’s mind: good, sturdy, patient, cheerful, selfless William, as fine a Clark man as had ever trod the ground. With the thought of him, the emptinesses in George’s soul began to fill up again. He put down his glass on the bench beside his chair, and folded his hands on his lap instead of refilling the glass. He looked down toward the river road, and he had a notion, a notion that came upon him from some unexplainable somewhere, that William would be along any time now.