Wash (23 page)

When he asks Mena if Wash can see out of it, she nods carefully and speaks in a faraway voice.

“He don’t like to be surprised from that side.”

“Goddammit!”

Richardson slaps the side of the wagon with such a sharp crack that even Wash stirs a little.

“I can fix him. Give me time.”

Mena is worn out but she draws up tall inside herself, knowing Richardson needs to catch at least a glimmer of what she had been on that very first day he saw her. It takes all her strength. When he sighs and nods at last, she nearly collapses from the strain but manages to hold herself still. Richardson turns to the driver who hands him a letter. He stands there reading it without realizing he has started muttering aloud.

“Those goddamn Thompson boys. Of course they won’t tell me why they had to lose their temper like children and tear up another man’s property. Their father would have to reach out from the far beyond and knock those boys of his across the back of the head before they would do right and probably not even then.”

Mena seems to be holding her breath so Richardson tells the driver to take them to that last little shed past the others. He turns to call Emmaline and almost bumps into her standing behind him.

“Dammit, a person could trip over everybody forever underfoot. Gather up some quilts and blankets, a lantern and a bucket with some water. Get them well settled out there till she heals him up, then I’ll put them in with the rest.”

Richardson

When I look back on it, I remember being furious about the brand but I didn’t have much time to see about Wash and Mena because I had bigger troubles. I’d partnered with Quinn before leaving so he could help Mary manage, but she couldn’t bring herself to hand him the reins, so my place lay in a shambles when I got home, with those two bickering.

I had plenty of work to do but I couldn’t seem to get to it. Somehow clearing my name from charges of misconduct seemed more urgent than my debts. I’d ridden off to my last war gunning for glory only to ride home with mud all over me. And I couldn’t get clean no matter how hard I tried.

There was a part of me that would have just as soon left it alone, no matter how wronged I felt, but people kept asking me about it. Or not asking me, which was worse. There was a hollow ring to those dinners they held in my honor that first summer home, with so many questions still floating around, even though my closest associates would not permit themselves to ask me anything directly.

I could hardly blame them. The reports were that I had been rash and precipitous, disobeyed orders, and that the entire blame for the massacre should be laid at my door. It was even said that I’d turned tail and run, only to be savaged by Wilton’s Indians. Dragged from my horse, scalped, and disemboweled, right there on the battlefield!

Mary looked at me with those wide blue eyes and told me I should be glad that I was home in one piece. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t in one piece at all. And it felt like the only thing that would put me back together was to set the record straight. McKee’s history of that war was shot full of holes, so I hired a writer named Kendrick to write it right. I’d publish my own book. Get the word out.

All that damn Kendrick did was drink my liquor and chase my daughters around my table, but that was just more of what I didn’t know at the time.

Everybody has a different version of what happened but I never could get the thing untangled, no matter how hard I tried. It was not me who lost those men, it was Montrose who sent me ahead then made sure our supplies never got there. It was Montrose who turned my men against me from the very beginning, but people will believe what they want to believe and there are no exceptions.

When our continuing troubles with England came to a head in the spring of 1812, I was determined to rescue our Revolution from the politicians despite the fact that I was already nearly sixty. To hell with Montrose’s suggestion that the veterans of ’76 should guard the home front. Perhaps I was too impatient and maybe I should have waited longer for word from Montrose before taking over our combined forces and marching them towards the fighting. But I’d already waited nearly two months at the recruitment center for him and I felt sure he’d be glad I took the initiative.

I moved slowly and cautiously upriver towards a fallen Detroit, struggling to gain and maintain firm control over two thousand men, with winter coming on and British-allied Indians everywhere. When I finally arrived at Fort Defiance with my men tired, hungry and verging on insubordination, the last thing I expected was to find myself rescued by Montrose himself, arriving triumphant with the news that he was back in command of our joint army.

He gave me only the left wing, which was mostly his Kentucky men, then delivered a rousing speech in which he fired them with mission and purpose. My frustration was so extreme that I was tempted to resign altogether but I remained faithful to my responsibilities. Things went downhill from there.

I waited all that fall at Fort Defiance for orders from Montrose that never came. All through October, November and December, struggling with mutinous men, poor supplies, constant raids from various Indian nations and always the increasingly crushing cold. Morale is difficult enough to maintain, but when you are spending the winter mostly outdoors and nearly naked with nothing to do, it’s next to impossible.

Then sickness struck. There were often three hundred sick at a time and I was losing three or four men per day, with the whole regiment wondering why they had come so far from Kentucky if not to fight. All I could do was drill them, which was beginning to seem absurd. After realizing my men could starve closer to the action just as well as farther from it, I issued my controversial order to advance to Frenchtown. I was determined to strike a decent blow against the British and our prospects looked good after we drove them from the town in our first skirmish.

It wasn’t until I received Dixon’s letter warning me that Montrose had been conspiring against me all along that my bad luck began to make an awful kind of sense. Dixon wrote that had Montrose not managed to wrest his command back from me, he was planning to withhold supplies until his men became boisterous enough to mutiny so that he could then rescue me himself. But even as I held the evidence in my hand, I refused to believe it. This willed blindness has been one of my continual weaknesses.

I remember it all. The heavy shudderings of the first cannon fire. It was still almost full dark. In the disorientation of waking, I wondered what the deep cracking booms were. I’d been expecting a British counterattack led by Wilton, but I thought I had more time. Time to get my weakened men fed back up to snuff, time to get good defenses built and time for Montrose’s long promised help to arrive so we could finally strike an adequate blow against the British.

And yes, I should have sent sentries up each of the two roads leading into town that night, but my William had said I was being unduly harsh with the men, unreasonable with all my drilling and protocol, especially after our successful taking of the town just a few days before. That night I had allowed myself the thought that maybe William was right, maybe I was being too strict, so I sent only two scouts up the one road.

I was still asleep when the attack came. I did not even have time to dress properly, just stepped into my breeches and pulled my jacket on over my nightshirt before rushing out into the graying dawn.

The British were shooting hard from the front with Indians flanking either side. My men were under withering attack in an exposed field where they too had been woken by gunfire. I tried to form them into a line but it was no use.

In moments like that, time slows down without giving you any more of itself. I do believe I will continue to see for the rest of my life my men pouring past me with the Indians right behind them. I even put my pistol on one of my own, trying to get him turned around, but he just shouldered by.

When I saw that there was no reversing the situation, I retreated with them in order to try to set up a second stand in the woods on the south side of the river, but the Indians soon swarmed us there as well because Wilton was paying top dollar for scalps.

William and I were captured together by one chief who wanted my jacket for himself. When he escorted us to the rear of British lines, we saw we were vastly outnumbered and agreed it would be suicide for our small group to hold out, no matter how staunch. By this time, I had become convinced that Montrose was not only not coming with reinforcements, but that he was probably well on his way back to Fort Wayne, having cast our fortunes to the winds.

When Wilton insisted on our immediate surrender, I tried to secure the proper guarantees for protection of my wounded men. But even as we stood there discussing it, Wilton’s Indians approached the bodies of our dead to plunder them, then moved towards some who were only wounded. Those wounded were guarded over by friends, brothers or cousins, but the Indians kept coming until one of my men shot an Indian right where he crouched.

I never will forget the expression on my William’s face, looking first to me, then to Wilton, then to that last fallen Indian, then back to me. I could tell all these various pieces had not yet fallen into place in his mind and I wondered if they ever would since I was having difficulty with them myself.

The terms of our surrender were hammered out before midmorning. I should have paid more careful attention but I was still stunned. In shock, I guess, and I remained that way throughout our forced march to prison at Beauport where William and I were herded into an open pen to stand huddled together with my men in the driving rain. Along the way, we passed the bodies of my two scouts, their scalped skulls gleaming against the dirtied snow.

I spent most of the next morning writing our secretary of war, trying to counterbalance what I knew would be the gist of Montrose’s letter saying the defeat had been my fault. Even as I wrote that letter of account to my government, the Indians were on a rampage of their own. I should have known what would happen but when Doctor Simms told me the details later that week, I was so sickened by the story that I heard it only in part.

It is only occasionally, shielded by years of retrospect, that I am able to take my mind back to the truth of what Simms told me. That the Indians had retreated the afternoon of the battle for feasting and an all night celebration. That it was not yet midmorning on the next day when they rode back into town two hundred strong, with faces painted red and black, to make short work of my wounded men who had been left there, supposedly under British protection.

They tomahawked the more wounded so as not to have to manage them, then they took the less wounded captive, binding them onto their horses and parading them through town in an attempt to gain ransom. My sergeant Lipscomb asked that they lead him to one house where he was known, but when the couple proved too frightened to come to the door, the Indian leading the horse shot Lipscomb in the head and left him on their doorstep.

When Simms told me that the bodies of the men under my command lay there for several days until they were half eaten by hogs, I shut my mind to it. Of course, it is always the things we try to forget that we remember and it was no different for me.

I lost all perspective. I kept thinking if I could only retrieve the small trunk of papers captured from me during the battle, I could mount an adequate defense. That trunk held signed papers from Montrose proving that I had done exactly what he’d ordered of me. Without those papers, it was his word against mine. And once he killed Tecumseh, butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Still, I fought to clear my name until debt threatened to swallow me right up. Debt and drought together.

∞

It is a hot sunny Sunday afternoon, late in Richardson’s first summer at home. The whole place has sunk into a quiet haze by the time he finally steps out of his study. No more letters to newspaper editors today. He’s given up on the impossible task of rescuing his reputation, at least for the rest of this afternoon.

He’s heading for his garden, drawn by the heavy sweet smell of his tuberoses, when he sees one of his negroes limp to the fence of Gamma’s paddock off the back of the barn, hook his elbows over the top rail and stand there watching Gamma’s new smoke gray foal.

Richardson notices this silhouette standing by the fence then realizes he has seen him there before. Standing in that same position at other quiet times, watching the horses while everyone else is busy with supper. Richardson had assumed it was Ben but today he pauses to look a minute longer.

It is Wash. Up and about. And tall.

Richardson goes the long way around so Wash won’t see him. He walks through the cooling dim of the barn aisle and into Gamma’s stall, which opens out to her paddock where the old mare stands dozing in the sun as her foal wanders nearby, still tentative and wobbly, not yet venturing far.

Richardson stays well back in the stall’s deep shadow so he can get a good look at Wash without being seen. Gamma catches Richardson’s scent but chews her hay unconcerned. She knows him. He has been there for most of her foals and she has carried him over nearly every trail, both in daylight and dark. When she tangled with a bear who clawed her rump before she broke its arm with one good kick, Richardson had tended to her himself, talking softly through the medicine’s sting. With him standing in her stall, she does not worry about Wash as long as he stays on the far side of the fence.