Long Knife (10 page)

But Fernando was not aware of this, she understood as she looked furtively at his elegant profile; he was too preoccupied with their approach to St. Louis. Nor was his wife, the Lady Maria de la Concepcion y Zezar, who throughout this long river passage had languished pale and sunken-eyed among the cushion, dozing fitfully, turning her head in bad dreams and waking to cough into a scented kerchief. So, although it was always Fernando who asked her to play and her sister-in-law who implored her to continue, Teresa’s only attentive audience was made up of her little nieces, Rita and Maria Josefa, and the twenty sweating black oarsmen who glanced at her with eyes as timorous as her own, breathed hard and grunted with the strain of rowing, and now and then murmured and chuckled among themselves. Teresa could not imagine what they must be thinking about her and this frail little string-box of hers, but they did watch and listen disconcertingly when she played, with an animallike attention which somehow made the delicate Spanish airs seem even more incongruous and vain. Could they be laughing at her when they chuckled like that? She found that possibility too mortifying even to consider.

In the distance, off each quarter of the galley, a guard boat rowed by Spanish and half-breed soldiers moved at the same ponderous pace, always there. A breeze puffed down the river into her face, bringing smells of rotting shore vegetation and the pungent body smells of the blacks who shone with their sweat
in the afternoon sun. Teresa stopped playing and held her own perfumed handkerchief to her nose.

The long, slim shape of a pirogue detached itself from the low western shore of the river now, and came angling downstream toward them across the glittering sunglare of the river surface. As it drew near, Teresa made out the forms of five Indian men who were paddling it, and two bare-breasted Indian women who sat amidships on either side of a dead animal of some kind, dark and huge as a Spanish bull. When the pirogue came parallel with the Spanish galley, some twenty feet away, one of the Indians carefully stood up to take a curious look into the big vessel. He was stark naked, sinewy, gleaming with animal grease, totally hairless except for a bristling crest of black hair on the crown of his head with a white feather tied in it. A rush of shame and confusion shot through Teresa when she realized that her eyes had fallen on his exposed hairless groin with its strange fleshy knot of organs, the first she had ever seen; and as she turned away with a gasp, she heard some throaty and snorting laughter burst from the blacks on the oars. When she opened her eyes again the pirogue had drifted out of sight; Fernando was gazing after it, bemused. Lady Maria, her sickly face strained with disgust, pulled her husband’s sleeve to draw his attention away, and Teresa realized that it must be because of the nakedness of the squaws. Teresa fanned herself, feeling flushed and prickly at the thought of what they had just seen. To imagine men and women going naked, out of doors, and in each other’s company! It was appalling, barbarous, and carnal in the extreme. And she had heard, before leaving New Orleans, hideous tales of the blood-thirstiness of these savages, of their penchant for settling differences with knives and other sharp weapons. The image of blood flowing over naked flesh flashed through her mind, an intimidating and unbearable image which was immediately replaced by visions of the sanguinary and dolorous crucifixion paintings she had seen everywhere during her upbringing in Spain. A tipsy French courtier in New Orleans once had alluded in her presence to the veiled bloody cruelty of Spaniards. And though her
duenna
sister-in-law had hustled her out of earshot immediately, Teresa had remembered that remark ever since, sometimes becoming quite unsettled by it. Somehow now, during this voyage, those thoughts came to her ever more dreadfully, associated with her fears about the legendary Indian savagery. It seemed as if all the comforting layers of religion and civilization were being peeled off one at
a time, like clothing, with every mile that the galley moved up the Mississippi into this wilderness, and that the life ahead of her surely would prove to be more raw and elemental and obscene than anything her sequestered upbringing could have prepared her to imagine.

They had embarked at Kaskaskia the morning before for the remaining sixty miles up to St. Louis. Kaskaskia, though on the east side of the Mississippi, had given Teresa a foresight of what she might expect in this part of the world, and it had been a bewildering impression. A ball had been held in their honor at the home of the merchant Gabriel Cerré by the leading French and Creole citizens of Kaskaskia. Teresa had been surprised by the amounts of imported wealth and finery these people owned—the silver snuffboxes, the silk and velvet and taffeta dresses, the slippers, the chocolates, the crystal and silverware, the clocks, the satin-lined trinket boxes, the mirrors … Teresa had heard Kaskaskia referred to as the Versailles of the West; and while it definitely was no such thing, it did boast of more Old World trappings than she would have expected here. Yet, under the glitter, within and around the well-built stone houses, there was a crudeness, a slovenliness, showing through the veneer so plainly that it had wounded her sensibilities. During the evening she had looked into a pantry to find a drunken French gentleman pressing himself upon a half-breed girl servant. She had been set back on her heels by the liquorish breath and overpowering body smells and grotesque awkwardness of the swains, both French and Spanish, at the dance, and by their unbelievable propensity for drunkenness. She had found in a hallway a youth in silks, the son of a great wheat-trader, passed out on a smelly pile of uncured animal skins. And at one point in the evening, the ball had been disturbed by the uproar of a drunken band of Indians who, surprised stealing vegetables from a nearby town garden, had escaped by firing their guns into the air and filling the night with war whoops which were sufficiently ferocious to frighten the equally besotted whites back into the protection of locked doors for a few minutes. It had taken the de Leybas some time to comprehend the farcical nature of this incident, and Teresa had lain awake most of the night thereafter, hearing every sound in the village street outside, fearing that she would not survive till the dawn without being scalped and ravaged, despite the assurances of their hosts, Monsieur and Madame Cerré, that it had been only a sham.

Those had been her impressions so far of the Illinois country,
and now they were nearing St. Louis, the capital of Upper Louisiana, a mere village on the western bank of the great Mississippi, on the edge of a vast, unexplored land tenuously claimed by Spain, a mere river’s breadth from the troubled country where unfriendly England held sway over a few hundred half-civilized French settlers and thousands of fickle savages. To the east, she had heard, American colonists even more barbarous than the Indians were waging a sporadic war to obtain independence from the British, and there were rumors that this conflict could sweep someday even into this remote Mississippi Valley, which was coveted by every faction as a water road for munitions and supplies. It was a frightening prospect all about, and Teresa de Leyba, timid, introspective, delicate, and vulnerable, could no longer even pretend to share her brother’s enthusiasm for his new adventure.

“There lies St. Louis, Excellency,” said the vessel’s captain, coming astern to point northwestward at a cluster of stone houses standing on the western bluff of the river a few miles ahead, tiny, gleaming white in the late afternoon sunlight.

“St. Louis, at long last,” breathed Don Fernando, rising stiffly to his feet, stooping to stand under the awning, stroking his neat goatee. His velvet pantaloons and the white stockings on his slim legs were rumpled and soiled from the long repose in the dirty river-galley. “And that on the far bank, up that stream. That, I presume, would be Cahokia?”

“Cahokia, Excellency. Creole French and Indians under the English flag.” He shook his head and then made a scornful gesture toward the town with two fingers. “That the mongrels should stay on their side of the river.”

“Enough of that, Captain,” said Don Fernando, taking the hand of his wife, who had risen to stand beside him. “Load the six-pounder and signal the fort that we are here. St. Louis, Maria,” he said gently to her as the captain went forward, scolding the Negroes to a faster cadence. “You’ll be able to rest soon and be strong again.” She lowered her kerchief from her face to give him a feeble smile. Teresa rose and stood beside Maria, placing her hand at the small of her back. She jumped and flinched when the little swivel-cannon in the bow of the galley spat orange flame and a cracking roar rolled away over the river and returned in echo. The acrid smell of burnt gunpowder was still in her nostrils when a puff of smoke appeared from the village at the top of the bluff, followed a moment later by its report, then another and another and another: St. Louis saluting her
new governor. Tears of appreciation stung Teresa’s eyes and momentarily swept away her lassitude as she looked at her brother, the proud young grandee silhouetted against the setting sun. Suddenly this valley looked rich and mellow and spacious, and perhaps full of a new and different kind of promise after all.

Can there perhaps, she wondered, be other men in this land as noble and fine as he? Mother of God, that there should be. She flushed as she made this frivolous prayer, but prayed it nonetheless. Maybe, she was thinking as boats came out from the foot of the bluff to meet them, this is not the end of my world at all.

“Teresa,” Don Fernando said, now turning to her, obviously feeling expansive, “little sister, I feel that you are going to find much happiness here, more than anywhere before.” He so wanted her to; she knew that. Perhaps, she thought, it is possible.

G
ENERAL
E
DWARD
H
AND OF THE
C
ONTINENTAL
A
RMY, WHO WAS
thirty-four years old but moved with no more spirit than an old man, walked with George Rogers Clark as far as the great open log gate of Fort Pitt and stood there with him looking down over the woodshingled roofs of the town of Pittsburgh to the wharf on the riverbank where the young colonel’s ten boats hung to their moorings, filled already with men, bristling with long rifles. The Ohio River here blended the waters of the Allegheny and Monongahela and then, broad and green, curved away to the northwest and vanished into the fresh springtime emerald of the forest. The sky was azure from horizon to horizon; the shrilling of locusts stretched like an invisible skin over the shimmering fields of the valley. Far downstream a hunter’s single gunshot struck like a pulsebeat on the air.

George took a last look back inside the fort, where regular soldiers in buff trousers and blue coats and a ragged assemblage of civilians had gathered in curiosity. They stood about on the beaten, dusty yellow parade ground and lounged against the palisades and blockhouses, somehow looking soiled and stupid in contrast with the vast clean wilderness outside the fort.

My God, but I am happy to be quitting this place, he thought. Nothing here but disappointment and subterfuge.

General Hand stood nibbling his thin lips and gazing with ennui down at the boats. The flesh hung gray on the shapely bones of his face, and a day’s stubble on his chin glinted in the morning sun. He had hardly met George’s gaze, even while hosting him and filling his requisition for boats and munitions. General Hand’s aspect was distinctly that of a failure. His effort four months earlier to lead a force of more than five hundred soldiers against the British trading post at Sandusky had become bogged down in snow and floods and illness and the weight of its own baggage; he had overrun a few Indian villages deserted except for old women, and thus had returned to Pittsburgh to be ridiculed behind his back as the leader of “the squaw campaign,” had asked to be relieved of his command, and was awaiting his successor now. It was discouraging even to look at him, and George was as anxious to be gone as the general obviously was to see him leave.

“My thanks, sir,” said George, careful as always to keep the pity out of his voice, extending his hand.

“Good fortune to you,” said the general, at last looking directly at him. “Let’s pray there’ll be a bigger contingent awaiting you when you get down to the Kentucky.”

“I’m sure there will be. Goodbye, sir.”

There had better be, George thought, as he made his way past the massive earthwork redoubts of the fort and down the dirt road among houses and garden plots toward the wharf. He had expected to have more than three hundred men underway to Kentucky by March; now it was late in May and he and his captains had managed to enlist a mere one hundred and fifty. Everywhere they had gone to recruit, they had met the resistance of leading citizens who demanded to know by what authority their own meager manpower was to be taken away for the defense of remote Kentucky. News that Daniel Boone and a party of twenty-seven salt-makers had been captured by an Indian force in February had demoralized many of the settlements, and the borderland disputes between Virginia and Pennsylvania
had dimmed George’s hopes of signing up any Pennsylvania volunteers. The whole frontier had sent up an uproar of disapproval against his recruiters, and men already recruited were being encouraged to desert. Many had.

There’ll be danger of even more slipping away until we put distance between us and these settlements, he thought. That was why he had decided not to prolong the futile enlistment effort any longer; this little band would more likely shrink than expand if it waited longer here.

Despite the disappointments of the recent months, his confidence quickened as he turned his back on civilization and strode down the hill toward his flotilla. Out there, he thought, one can control the course of things, and not be undermined by schemers.

He turned heads as he made his way to the river. Women in doorways and gardens watched him; men with barrows and mules nodded to him; Indians and bushlopers in smoke-blackened deerskins stopped and turned as he passed. He was aware of the impression he created; he carried himself at full height and deliberately expressed all his energy and power in his movements. Without the epaulets and insignia of the regulars’ uniform to proclaim his rank, he knew he had to inspire obedience by sheer force of bearing. He wore now a fine high-collared coat of soft doeskin which reached his knees, edged in fringe and emblazoned Indian-fashion on the back with elaborate designs in red and white beads and quills. At its throat showed a clean white linen stock. Into the brass-buckled swordbelt at his waist were thrust a long, slender tomahawk and a flintlock pistol. His chest was crisscrossed by two leather straps, one supporting a large sheath knife and a powder horn, the other a pouch for rifle balls and personal effects. His long legs were sheathed in fringed deerskin leggings and on his feet he wore deerskin moccasins decorated with narrow bands of blue and white beadwork. His red hair was pulled back over his ears and bound into a queue, and his glinting eyes were shaded by the wide brim of a round-crowned soft black felt hat pinned up on the right side. Cradled in the crook of his left arm was his long Kentucky rifle, slim as a walking-stick, with its gleaming blond stock of flame maple. Even so heavily accoutred, he moved with a swift, easy gait which brought him quickly down to the water’s edge and onto the sun-warped, fishy-smelling planks of the wharf, where his captains stood waiting for him.