Long Knife (2 page)

On the river below, a convoy of four flatboats was making for the channel of navigable rapids past the falls, seeking apparently to make a run for it in the remaining light. The calls of the sweepmen rose up faintly from the valley, the words unintelligible but their anxiety audible in the turned-up ends of their calls.

Westward they go, day after day, the old general thought. To all that land out there.

All that land out there. That we the Clarks have given them.

William and me.

He thought, as he did so often these days, of his famed youngest brother, William. Now there is a man for you! Got the glory he deserves, he did. And has been as good to me as all the fates has been bad. We ought to have been the two richest men west of the Alleghenies, him and me. But any dollar I make already belongs to the creditors, and those bloodsuckers do take it. And then William, he makes it up on my behalf. Selling off land to pay debts and suits … Riding about making endorsements and promises … Petitioning for me in Richmond and at Congress …

The thought of his brother’s devotion gave the general a bittersweet pain in his breast, and brought the melancholy a little closer. It was better to think of William in terms of his great triumph than in terms of that eternal dreary business of the debts.

The servant brought a tray with an uncorked jug of rum, two
drinking glasses, and a carafe of spring water on it. He placed it on a bench along the hewn-log wall, and poured the amber rum three fourths of the way to the top of one glass, as the general liked it. As had become their custom, he then poured a shot for his own evening indulgence into the second glass.

“Here’s to William,” said the general, raising the glass to the level of the setting sun. “I took the frontier to the Mississippi and then he carried it on to the blue Pacific. Here’s to William, I say.” With a breathy slurp he drained the contents.

“To William, sir,” said the Negro, to whom this toast was by now familiar. Swallowing the rum with a shudder, he turned and went wobbly-legged down off the porch toward the woodpile which lay neatly corded between two tree stumps in the clearing. The general watched him and chuckled. Old Cupid couldn’t handle more than one shot.

The four flatboats were slipping fast in a single file down through the channel now in a glory of sun-reddened water, and General Clark watched them go and smacked his lips and sighed and felt the beloved comfort of the liquor rise to his head and pursue the rheumatic ache outward through all his limbs. He pulled the old deerskin lap robe closer around his waist and began to feel quite cozy. Perhaps this might be a tolerable evening after all. Wincing from a painful shoulder, he tipped another measure of rum from the heavy jug into the glass and then held the glass on his lap and watched the boats. He remembered his own little convoy of boats setting out down the same main channel under the ominous eclipse of the sun, in ’78, full of heroes-to-be, going against the forts at Cahokia and Kaskaskia and Vincennes and, he had hoped, north to the British stronghold at Detroit. Detroit, he thought, The one conquest I wanted more than anything.

He remembered, too, the boat of the Lewis and Clark expedition setting out down that same waterway, just six years ago, in 1803. And he remembered William returning from the Pacific in 1806. He could see him as clear as yesterday: leathery, serene, the look of infinity in his eyes, full of such descriptions of spaces and mountains as would make your heart race.

This is indeed a place of brave beginnings, the general thought, sipping more slowly now.

But of endings, too.

The Negro staggered up the porch steps and went into the house with his arms crooked under a load of logs. Then he emerged and descended into the yard again to go for more.

The general watched his thin form in its faded homespun move like a ghost on a backdrop of dusky trees.

The topmost arc of that brick-colored sun now slid from view into the western forest and the woods nearby opened up with the quizzical peeps of countless tree frogs. Somewhere nearby a screech owl called once and then was still. Wingbeats and twitters rushed past the end of the cabin behind General Clark as a flock of martins sailed through the clearing and down toward the river.

The western sky now retained a tinge of rose. An errant draft of evening air whirled a whiff of wood smoke to the general from his own chimney. The servant, crooning low to himself, clumped heavy-laden across the porch and into the house once more, came out to see if his master needed anything, said his goodbye, and went singing down the hill to his shack. His voice faded into the far drumming of the Falls and now General Clark was alone on Clark’s Point, commanding the twilight.

He sat there drinking until stars appeared in the southeast over Kentucky, sat imbibing slowly and steadily in solitary decorum, reviewing his campaigns, calculating his debts, mulling over the slanders and abuse he had suffered by his opposition to the land syndicates and their bogus claims; he sat framing phrases for the petitions and letters that he must continue writing to Thomas Jefferson, to the national Congress, to the legislature of Virginia; he sat daydreaming of the snowy mountains, high plains and evergreen forests his brother had seen in the Far West, envisioning them as clearly as if he had beheld them with his own eyes. He looked at the distant lamplights of Louisville across the river, the Louisville he had founded in 1784 when the Revolution was finally concluded. He pondered on his endless weary efforts to administer for his veterans the tracts of land that had been given them by Virginia as rewards for their gallantry in the campaign. But always his thoughts returned to the indifference and ingratitude shown him by the government he had served so well. I won their war in the West for them, he thought, and ever since I’ve been paying the bills for it as well.

Fifteen thousand dollars in receipts and vouchers I sent them in ’79, he thought. And they lost ’em and say they can’t reimburse me without ’em.

What a damnable muddle it all is, he thought. It is simply impossible to do anything straightforward and swift, once civilization sets in. You can count on men as men. But from their government you can count on nothing but hollow praise and
empty promises. Set your head to do a thing direct and right, and then by God you may expect to flounder with it while your government makes debate and intrigue over it, cavils over its costs, and subverts it motives.

By Heaven, he thought, my misfortune is to have lived too long.

His mind quit its other meanderings then and began to play upon that single notion, while crickets shrilled in the valley and a wolf howled in the darkness somewhere north of the river. The general sighed into his glass and sipped and considered when he should have died.

Of all the musketballs and shot, all the tomahawks and arrows that whistled through the air I breathed before I was thirty, not a one touched me. My life had a charm on it, those days. Not a single missile of war touched me then, when it should have, when I was winning.
That
must be the time to die: When you think you’ve got everything to live for. A hell on earth it is, he thought, to triumph too early and be thwarted ever after. Spoils a life, it does.

There must have been some ideal time to have taken a lethal blade or bullet. Lord Dunmore’s War? No, that was too early. So too was the defense of Harrodsburg. The assault on Fort Sackville? No, it would not have succeeded had he fallen. Against the Shawnees at Piqua? Perhaps that would have been the time, or when he had fought Benedict Arnold in Virginia in ’81.

But no. None of those. The ideal occasion would have been in taking Fort Detroit. That had been his main ambition in the war, but the fates never cooperated. And as long as I had been still desiring it, I reckon I should have been most unhappy to get shot down.

“Hah!” He clambered to his feet with a suddenness that hurt his joints and set his head swimming. “By God, sir,” he muttered, laughing, swaying on his feet. “Shame on you! Toying with that morbid idea!” He groped down for the slipping deerskin lap robe, and in doing so knocked the tray off the bench. He heard the glass break, and the stoneware jug rolled with a small hollow thunder, its contents glugging out onto the porch floor. Alarmed to hear precious liquor spilling, the General lurched hastily about in the dark trying to locate the jug. Then a bolt of shame went through him and he drew himself up to his full height. He stood there composing himself, trying to erase from his mind the spectacle he knew he must have presented.
Scrambling so desperately after a fallen jug! He turned and hobbled on his cane into the house, stooping to go under the lintel.

The room was warm. Its log walls were mellow with flickering light from the great fireplace. Furniture and glass and memorabilia glinted in lamplight. On a shelf of a glass-front cupboard, couched on a scrap of red velvet, gleamed a tiny silver medallion. No bigger than a dollar, the figure of a running athlete in it. He gazed at it for a long time, remembering.

A stewpot hung over the coals on an iron arm in the fireplace, but its aroma did not tempt him. He was too agitated to eat. He stood by the cupboard for a few more seconds on aching legs, undecided between his hearthside chair and the door to his bedroom, wherein a candle burned unwinking in the close air. There was sweat on his brow. His bowels gripped and burned.

At length he went out the back door into the darkness. The stars were intense overhead. Sweat on his face and flanks chilled him. He went to the outhouse, had a scalding evacuation while holding his face between his hands, then returned indoors.

From the pantry he selected a quart of peach brandy distilled in Louisville, leaving the expensive Jamaican rum and the more stupefying corn whiskey on the shelf. He removed his wide-brimmed hat and hung it on a peg beneath the long rifle, straight sword, and tomahawk he had carried through the Revolution. He uncorked the brandy and set it on a table among letters and inkwell and quill, turned up the lamp wick, drew his chair closer to the table and eased into it, spreading the deerskin robe over his legs again.

For a while he sat there erect, hands on his aching knees, drawing deep and difficult breaths and absorbing the warmth from the fireplace. His eyes, so dark a blue they appeared to be black, gazed into the shadows from under the sad, downward-sloping folds of flesh that hooded the eyelids. His hair, which had receded back to the crown of his head, was silvery, with a few still copper-red strands, and tufts of white were combed back over his ears. Dome and forehead were pale, and beneath was a face which, though weathered to cordovan, flecked with tiny broken capillaries, and mottled with age spots, was yet patrician, strong, and handsome. The nose was long and narrow, delicately winged. His lips were thin but sculptured sensitively, resolute yet not hard; they parted as he inhaled, closed as he exhaled. Despite his age no flesh sagged under his square-cut jaw.
Thus he sat in repose for a long time, pate gleaming like an egg in the lamplight, face grave, aristocratic, and profoundly sad.

He stirred after a while, looked at a point high on the wall, groaned a single word—“Teresa!”—hauled in a deep breath, and then expelled it with a plosive sigh. Then he clenched his jaw, reached for the brandy, and poured it into a glass which shimmered through tears. He snuffled once, drew up as if again bracing himself against sentimentality, fiercely threw the liquor to the back of his throat, and poured another measure.

From a small brass scuttle on the hearth he scooped a handful of poplar stump punk and cast it into the coals, then watched the flames change to emerald and blue. A tall clock ticked in the gloom at the other end of the room; the fire fluttered and shifted in its coals; the frogs outside continued their piping queries. General Clark scanned the letters and documents, old and recent, that were spread in orderly stacks over the tabletop.

He reached for a recent one from Jefferson which needed attending to. A few months earlier the president had written, asking Clark to find for him in the Ohio Valley the bones of certain extinct mammals which he wanted to present to the National Institute of France. Of the mammoth in particular the president wanted ribs, backbones, leg-bones, thigh, horn, hips, shoulder blades, and parts of upper- and under-jaw teeth.

The general gave a wry smile and shook his head. Tom Jefferson knows precisely what he wants, he thought. And I always fill his order. Whether he wants a fossil or a frontier.

Jefferson’s letter concluded:

He stared at the letter, hands trembling at the edges of the paper, his breathing accelerating.

“’Enjoying,’ you say!” he growled. “By thunder, Mister President, I am thankful you cannot see just how I enjoy my retirement!” He started to crumple the letter, shaking as if with
ague, but then smoothed and refolded it. “Well, I shall give you your old bones, my friend,” he muttered. “Tusks and backbones I’ve got already, piled in front of my house. I shall always give you whatever you want, as I have always, now, haven’t I? As I know you would do for me, and have, whenever you could. But
try
, Thomas! I daresay you know my needs are desperate. You’re the President. Surely you can do something for
me
now.”

The time was long past when General Clark had been surprised to hear himself talking aloud in his solitude, addressing those of whom he was thinking. He had been alone almost all his life, alone, relying on himself; even when surrounded by his troops who were prepared to die for him he had been essentially alone, with all responsibility on his own shoulders, with every course of action depending upon his sole judgment. West of the Alleghenies, the Revolutionary War had been
his
war.