Long Knife (75 page)

“Well, sir, what’ve you been thinking of today, sitting here on this fine afternoon?” That was, she knew, the way to get him started. She was always amazed at what she found when she would dip into his stream of reveries that way.

“Oh, I was puzzling on a strange thing,” he began, going far into the distance. “You know, when William and Mr. Lewis were way out there in the West, where there had never been a white man before ’em, they found a squaw there, and d’you know, there was a tattoo on that woman’s arm. It said ’J. Bowman.’” He clucked his tongue. “’J. Bowman,’” he repeated. “Now, I’ve thought on that many and many a time, Missy, and if there’s an explanation for it, why, it must be wonderful indeed …” He fell back into his musings and was still for several minutes. Then he looked up at her as if she had just appeared there. “Ha, Diana! Well, sit down there, and tell me anything you know.” His voice was growing louder and more animated now, and she knew she was once again successfully pulling him out of that great, turbid river of long memories.

“Well, I know that some fine gentlemen of Virginia will be here today and they have a magnificent new sword to present to you, and you shall be a gracious, fine Virginian yourself as you accept it …”

“Ah, ha, Missy. I know what you’re trying to say, that I should be a good boy, rather than a spiteful one, and not break their toy, eh?”

“Well, I should hope! They’ve come a long way.”

“That they have. Well, we shall see, Missy. But you know,” he added with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, “I don’t always have the control of my temper; no, I never have had.”

“But you will today, or I shall be very, very put out. I came today to have a nice day with you, and no tantrums. And they’re going to give you a nice pension, too, Auntie Lucy tells me.”

“About time, by God,” he rumbled. “D’you know, I never got a penny of my officer’s pay for all those battles, all those years? And d’you know, they ended up givin’ all my boys one hundred and eight acres of land for their valor, not the three hundred they were promised. And wouldn’t’ve give ’em
any
of it, if I hadn’t badgered ’em the way I did so many years …”

“Drink this nice hot tea, now, and don’t fret so.”

“Ah, thankee. Tea, eh? Hm.” He reached to his hat, put it on, and tipped the little jug over the teacup.

“Now what on earth!” Diana exclaimed, feigning surprise.

“Just a special sweetening, that’s all, that I prefer over honey …”

“Aha. Well, just don’t get yourself
too
sweetened up before those gentlemen come …”

“La, la, la; one’d think you was a wife, Missy!”

“And pray what d’you know about wives, Uncle!”

“All my friends’ve got ’em, that’s what … ah …” A frown gathered on his brow suddenly, and his vision seemed to recede inward again.

“What is it, Uncle?” Diana asked, leaning close. She always strove to keep him jolly during her visits, and felt personally responsible whenever he would have a slump in spirits or lapse into his reveries.

He picked up the cup and took a long drink from it, and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. Then he gave a deep sigh, and gazed off over her shoulder, his eyes watery. “Ah Missy! If the fates had treated me fair, you’d’ve had an elegant aunt you’d’ve loved very much, so fine and gentle was she, like you be fine and gentle.” He blinked rapidly, then raised a handkerchief up, dabbed his mouth with it, and returned it to the sleeve of his half-dead right arm. Diana patted the back of his hand. He took her hand and began stroking it, still seeming to look at a point miles beyond, and said, “Aye, fine and gentle.”

After a while, Diana said, “The Spanish lady, Uncle?”

“The very one. The Spanish lady.”

Diana did not ask any of the many questions she would have liked to ask. She had asked before, asked questions about the lady’s name and age and all sorts of inquiries, fishing for details of a story which she imagined must be unbearably romantic. Diana lately had become a reader of novels, and in her mind’s eye she had often seen her uncle as a dashing young cavalier, intermingling gusty sighs with a dark-eyed beauty in a voluminous satin gown of exotic design. But the old soldier could never be prevailed upon to confirm such details. He would only mention the Spanish lady on occasions when he was somewhat in his cups, and would give only mere fragments of allusion, as if his mind were fluttering around the margins of a memory too painful to look at directly. Once when Diana had pressed him for more details to make her heart race, he had admonished: “You ought to read history, girl. Novels will make you silly.”

But Diana was remembering something now. “Uncle George,
you said something a few months back when you dictated that letter to Mister Vigo. D’you remember …”

“Vigo!” Again the old man’s face contorted with emotion.

“You said that about ’life’s tenderest string.’ D’you remember that? I suspect it was about your lady ….”

“Vigo,” the old man repeated. “Missy, pray would you read me his letter again? It’s there in the letterbox ….”

She found it near the top of his cherished correspondence. She unfolded it. She had had to read it to him every visit since it had come.

Vincennes, July 15, 1811

“Vigo,” the old man said again, shutting his eyes and shaking his head. Then he stared hard, seeming to be in another search through memory. “D’you know, that man cashed drafts upon
Virginia for me for—what was it—twelve thousand dollars or thereabouts, that Virginia has never paid ’im?”

But Diana was more interested in romance than finance. She said, “And then you wrote to him that you’d not have that ‘serene and happy evening’ because Providence had ‘cut asunder life’s tenderest string.’ Uncle, I know you meant by that the Spanish Lady!” Diana exclaimed with a knot in her throat and a mist in her eyes, as it was the favorite one of all her reveries, and she yearned to have it confirmed from his own lips. “He knew the Spanish Lady, didn’t he?” If I ever meet Mister Vigo, she thought, I must ask him all about her.

“Vigo,” the General murmured. “De Leyba. And Cerré, and Gratiot, and Pollock. All of ’em ruined like me, due to some great meanness in the Capital.” He seemed to be gnawing mentally at the familiar old lament, which she had heard him speak of a dozen times. “Virginia wouldn’t honor my expenses of the Western campaign. They said I didn’t send ’em an accounting. Well, God knows what a task it was to keep records in the heat of that war … but I was meticulous in public matters, and by Heaven …” he banged his fist on the arm of his wheelchair, “I sent every account book and every voucher—
twenty thousand bloody vouchers
, so help me, writ on any shred o’ paper as we could scrounge! I sent Bill Shannon to the state auditor at Williamsburg in November of ’79 with all those packets, and he took receipt for ’em.” Diana marveled at his recall of such details thirty years later, though he might forget what he had done yesterday or last week. “Every blasted transaction! No matter how little. A bottle o’ rum or a washerwoman’s hire, I made a voucher. How many a candle did I burn up, sitting up at night over them pestilential accounts, when my mind ought to’ve been on strategy! Bill Shannon couldn’t even carry all that paper by himself. Seventy packets, it was. I remember exactly. Paper, and paper, and paper! How could anybody lose that much paper? I mean, unless they
wanted
to?”

He was thumping on the chair arm with his fist as he labored once again through his lament. “And then the auditor said those records didn’t exist! We showed the receipt for ’em, and then ’e says, ’Well, they must was destroyed when Benedict Arnold burned the Capital at Richmond.’ Well, maybe they was, an’ then again maybe they wasn’t. But they was never found and many a good patriot went broke to ’is grave since!” He kept thumping on the chair for a while, his eyes blazing into the distance, then he stopped and vented a huge sigh and seemed to
shrink with weariness. Diana never knew what to say when he was on this pet tirade. It seemed too absurd a story to her, and much as she liked to believe her uncle, she wondered sometimes if he had fabricated this explanation out of his disappointments and come to believe it was true.

It seemed more likely to her that he would not have been able to keep such precise records during those campaigns, or that Shannon had not delivered them to the Capital, or some other explanation stemming from the vicissitudes of those troubled times. At any rate, it was all too complex and remote and businesslike for her turn of mind, and she had to make herself patient as he repeated the woeful old litany, which she had heard so many times before. But today it was upsetting her. Here he sat, drinking more than a little and worrying the scabs of those old wounds of state injustice while at this moment, probably—she looked up at the shadows on the walls of the great four-chimneyed brick Croghan house—emissaries of that state were on their way here to present him with another token sword. Young and romantic-headed though she was, Diana Gwathmey could sense another mortifying storm of temper a-brewing.

If only he’d go to sleep for a while, she thought, so I could steal away that awful little jug. Though doubtless another would appear from somewhere if I did …

But the old general was not nodding. He was still brooding. “It all got worse when Virginia turned over its war debts to Congress,” he grumbled. “Congress was worse than the Virginia Assembly. One would think they’d never heard of the war in the West. We spent most of our time applying for reimbursement, did Jonathan and me. Years and years … Jonathan …”

His voice broke on the name. Jonathan, closest in age of the Clark brothers and George’s boyhood playmate, had died suddenly the previous year and it had been a crushing blow. “Old Jonathan,” he mused now. “It was hard, Missy, that he who wanted to live should die, while I, wanting to die, should live.”

“Now, Uncle, I won’t hear again such nonsense! ’Wanting to die,’ indeed!”

“And Dickie,” he murmured. “And John.” This morbid brooding about his long-dead brothers was no better. Dickie had vanished in the wilderness between the Falls of the Ohio and Vincennes in 1784, never to be heard of again, and John had died that same year of consumption and other ailments contracted during six years as a British prisoner of war. Their parents,
John and Ann Rogers Clark, had died within three months of each other in 1799. The old general’s thoughts were often on death, which, he claimed sometimes, “is ever calling in the neighborhood, but afraid to come to see me.”

“Let me fresh up your tea, Uncle,” she said, getting up and carrying off the tainted cup before he could give it a thought. She emptied it in a mint bed outside the kitchen door as she went in, hoping it wouldn’t kill the mint.

“Mercy!” she exclaimed to Lucy Croghan as the tea was poured. “Those gentlemen are going to believe all they’ve heard about his intemperance. But I’m afraid to just take his jug right away from ’im.”

“Oh, never you mind,” said Lucy. “I’ll just tell William to give ’em a deep whiskey when they arrive, an’ they’ll never even notice how ’e is.”

T
HE
H
ONORABLE
C
HARLES
F
ENTON
M
ERCER, BRINGER OF THE
sword, was a lean, straight-backed man with thin, sandy hair, grand flaming ears, light blue eyes with brows so light and sun-bleached they were imperceptible, a profusion of freckles, long, delicate upper lip and hard chin which his military bearing caused him to keep pulled in close to his Adam’s apple. He was also quite obviously awed to be in the presence of George Rogers Clark, and extremely pleased with having been the Virginia legislator whose bill had created the memorial sword and pension for the conqueror of the Northwest Territory.

“General Clark, sir,” asked Colonel Mercer, to make conversation as the visitors and family were gathering on the terrace for the ceremony, “what are your thoughts on this new war with England?”

“I know little of it but what confused reports I get here to read. But I suspect we should have had little to suffer from it in these parts, had I been enabled to throw Detroit and the Lakes into our hands when I so desired it.”

“Ah, yes,” mused Mercer, his hands clasped behind his back. “I understand what you mean.”

“I did everything in my power for the state of Virginia,” the old man said, looking up at Mercer through his now red-rimmed eyes, “being stopped only by lack of support from the state.”

“Yes, I know,” said Mercer, a bit abashed.

“The state of Virginia turned my laurels into thorns,” the old soldier said.

Oh dear, thought Diana Gwathmey. I’m afraid he’s going to take them to task again.

The officials and family members were placing themselves about now, before and behind the wheelchair, self-consciously sidestepping to make room for other sidesteppers, most with timorous smiles and murmured politenesses, their hands mostly clasped before them. Diana came close to the side of the General’s chair and stood there with one hand protectively on its back, and once reached over to smooth down a strand of his hair in back. The general himself sat nodding and rocking to and fro just perceptibly, as if halfway between dozing and preparing to fight.