And there astride his shoulders was Billy, who worshipped him and dreamed of him though he’d only seen him three or four days of his life, Billy who was a replica of the George of seventeen years ago.
“Well,” she said at last, and her eyes traveled over his elegant leather garb, “if y’ do have a squaw, bring her here to sew for your family, eh? For she plies a neater needle than any of us!”
“No squaw, you two! Ha, ha! Put that out o’ your heads. But listen, I’ve been with a Mingo family. No finer a people. Wait till I tell you of Chief Logan. Hey! I’ve a thousand tales to tell and but just a few days to tell ’em in! Now, say! Lookahere! What’s this varmint a-crawlin’ on my shoulders? Is it a coon, or a catamount, or what?” Billy went into gales of tickled laughter as George hoisted him off his shoulders toward the ceiling and then lowered him to the floor. The boy immediately grabbed his Indian belt and proceeded to climb back up.
“What sayee: just a few days?” exclaimed John Clark. “You’re going right back out?”
“I’m comin’ to the capital to plat out some lands I’ve surveyed, is all. Got to get back to harvest.”
“But Annie’s bein’ wed next month. Surely y’ll stay.”
“Is she now! Are ye now?” he cried, turning to find her in the mob and cupping her flushed cheeks in the palms of his hands. “And who’s the man? Is it Owen Gwathmey?”
“Aye,” Annie said, her brown eyes overflowing anew at the wonder of her betrothal. “Owen,” she gasped.
“Well, by my eyes! You’re smart, Annie! A hundred rakehells and dandies after you, but y’ chose one sound man! He’ll take care o’ you well, that one will! I admire Owen; he’s a brick!” Now he turned to a tall youth beside him. “Dick! Hey, youngster, you’re horny-handed now. Is Pa workin’ ye hard?”
“By heaven, he is! Like a field slave,” Dickie laughed. He was thirteen, erect, big-footed and rawboned. His dark hair was lank with sweat. He had run in from the fields.
“And where’s Eddie? Hullo! Here he comes!” Edmund ran stomping through the front door, red forelock flying, a long rifle in one hand, a turkey slung over his shoulder dribbling blood, its head shot off. Edmund was eleven. He flung down his bird and leaned his gun against the wainscot, then pressed in among his brothers and sisters to give George a shy hello and hug. “Hey, now, Eddie, that’s the hard way to shoot a turkey. I’ll have to have a match with you! Can’t let you outdo me, now, can I? Aha! Lucy up there! How’s my favorite redheaded sistereen, any-hoo?” She had bounded halfway up the stairs to get up where she could look at George over the heads of the others. She was eight, a blur of red curls and big freckles. She held a hand out over the bannister and grinned, showing him a homemade rock sling and a gap where her front teeth had been. George recoiled in mock astonishment. “By Jove! What’d ye do, shoot yourself in the mouth?” They all roared with laughter, and she squirmed and licked her mouth corners in delight and embarrassment.
They had been moving slowly along with him in the hallway toward the sideboard where the decanters sat. Billy was back up on him now, sitting on his left arm, while grave, milky-skinned little Elizabeth, five years old and demure, held his right sleeve and trailed along, waist-high in the press of tall people.
John Clark bustled happily ahead of his brood, his body thick and hard as an oak trunk, grinning yellow-toothed, his dark hair grizzled at the temples and queued in back, his face handsome, kindly, etched with smile lines and rugged as a rock cliff. He reached for a decanter and set out five crystal glasses. “Brandy from Burk’s peaches, remember?” he said, and poured for himself, George, Dickie, Johnny and Edmund. The five clinked their glasses together. It was their tradition that a son could join in toasts after his tenth birthday. Annie poured sherry for herself and her mother.
“To homecoming, our beloved son, with thanks to the Supreme Director of All Things for your safety.”
“Homecoming and thanksgiving,” George said, and they drained their drams. “Now,” George said, turning to them with a brilliant smile, like an actor to his audience, “God love us all, let’s eat and catch each other up on all the news o’ the year! What’s our new Royal Governor like, Pa? I hear he’s locked horns already a few times with the House o’ Burgesses.”
“A King’s man to the marrow, Dunmore is,” growled John Clark. “Packed the Court with Tories, and no one’s happy with ’im.”
“Lucy,” said Mrs. Clark, “run tell Rose to fetch Master George a roast, to hold him till supper.” The girl leaped down the stairs with a flash of petticoats and ran out to the kitchen house bawling for the cook in a tomboyish voice.
“I hear talk of a patriot committee in the House,” George was saying. “D’ye know much about it?”
“Aye. We’ll talk of ’t after a bit, though,” John Clark said. “Kings’ politics and tyranny are no fit subjects for children’s ears.”
“Indeed not,” said Mrs. Clark, drawing back the corner of her mouth in a rueful half-smile. “They’d rather hear you tell of scalpin’ and flayin’ Indians, and an explanation why y’ve still got your own hair on your head.”
“Aye, George,” Edmund exclaimed. “Ha’ ye kilt any savages yet?”
“Oh, the contrary! I hate to disappoint ye, Brother, but of late, Indians been my best friends. Listen, I’ll tell of a kinship a hundred times more interesting than fighting!” At these words, his mother’s blue eyes looked deep into his. She did not smile, but there was a softening, an easing, of the fine careworn lines in her face.
The Clark house was large and the central hall was wide and long, but it was growing very crowded now. Black faces peered in through the family circle as servants edged closer to see this wild man back from the far fearsome places, this big-voiced wild man whom one or two of the older women could remember rocking to sleep or wetnursing, twenty years ago.
“Jo jee,” young Billy had been imploring softly, over and over, as he sat on his brother’s arm. “Jo jee?”
“Aye, Billy?” George answered when, for a moment, no one else was talking.
“Jo jee, I dream bout you wif Indians.”
“Did y’ now, Billy? When? Last night?”
Billy shook his head slowly, red mouth open, wide blue eyes full of wonder and love. “Ev’y time I go to sweep.”
There was a murmur all around.
“It’s true,” Mrs. Clark said, gently rocking the baby girl in her arms and looking at Billy. “Every night he dreams, sometimes he calls out, and every morning he tells me what he dreamed of you. Y’ mought be far away, George, but all th’ same you’re always here. That lad is, well, he’s like a piece o’ your soul that y’ didn’t take along when you left home. He’s uncanny about you.”
George looked into the eyes of the little brother on his arm, this little stranger about whom he’d just heard such a thing, looked at him thoughtfully, gravely. Then he jounced him up and down and grinned to make him grin. “Is that so?” he exclaimed. “Why, I’d ha’ thought ’e was just a plain old catamount, but one that climbs people ’stead o’ trees!”
And the happy uproar resumed.
TWENTY CANDLES BURNED IN THE DINING ROOM THAT EXTRAVAGANT evening. Their warm light gleamed on waxed-oak window casings and chair rails, and glinted off pewter serving dishes. A portrait of Queen Caroline, after whom the county was named, some mediocre colonial painter’s copy of an elegant original, stared woodenly from above the sideboard toward the long dining table where all the Clarks, except Jonathan, the eldest son, sat together joking and laughing over the feast. John Clark was at the head of the table and George at the foot. Edmund’s turkey was the main course; beside it sat a huge game pot pie with flaky crust, all its meats—squirrel, rabbit, venison, and boar—also furnished lately by Edmund’s unerring rifle. Platters of honeyed squash and glazed carrots, turnips and snap beans, steamed alongside, and heaps of popovers stood folded in napkins on the buffet. Rose the cook and her daughters kept coming in from the kitchen house with replenishments. E
veryone had things to tell, except infant Frances Eleanor, who could not talk yet but laughed when others did. She had been brought down and propped in a mammy bench near the table so that even she, at eight months, would be here to enjoy the presence of her Seldom-Seen brother.
“Jonathan’s risen in the world since last you were home,” said John Clark. “He’s moved to Woodstock, in Dunmore County, where he’s Deputy Clerk o’ County.”
“Ah, is he now,” said George. “I wrote to him at Spotsylvania Courthouse; hope they passed it along to him. Dunmore, eh? The Governor’s already named a county after himself? Woodstock. Isn’t that by Shenandoah? That’s splendid country, by Heaven. Eh, well! Deputy Clerk! Old Jonathan’s got a practical head on ’im, as we all know.” He chewed a mouthful of rabbit and pointed his knife at the turkey. “Give me the little bubs o’ meat off the back, Pa, if you can dig ’em out for me. That’s the best part of a turkey, to my mind. Aye, Jonathan the Scholar! How clear I recollect those dreary days at Parson Robertson’s school—how is old Uncle Donald, by th’ bye? Well? Good—and how, once or twice every day, at the least once or twice, he’d remind me what a bad pupil I was, compared with Brother Jonathan. Ha, ha! Jonathan was a proper scholar, he was! He could memorize other men’s dull words by th’ mile, that’s what Brother Jonathan could do so well, and that’s what made a scholar, in Parson Robertson’s view. I couldn’t do it, but Jonathan could. No wonder he’s a Deputy Clerk already. As for me, God be praised! I’m a legend at the Parson’s school, isn’t that what they say? Worst pupil ever? Ha, ha!”
“He refunded me your tuition, George. Said he couldn’t take my money for such a lost cause as you.”
“Ha, ha, ha! He’s a legend too, isn’t he? A Scotchman who refunded some money! Well, he sure made Jonathan bookish enough, anyhow. Ye got your tuition’s worth on him, Pa.”
“Indeed. Always in a book, he was. One day when he was a-readin’, I told him to go hitch up the carriage, and I swear he did it without once taking his nose out o’ that book! How can a body hitch up a horse and carriage without seeing either one, I ask?”
They all laughed. That was their favorite story about Jonathan.
“I know just what book that was, too,” George said. “It was Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws. I recall a day when I sat in that classroom with that bedamned tome open on my desk. I read that blamed first page twenty times, and I couldn’t tell Parson one hint o’ what it said! O’ course that earned me another lecture on what a good scholar Jonathan’d been. Ha, ha! But now look at us. Old Jonathan’s sitting in his clerk’s office, with pigeonholes full o’ deeds an’ all, and getting his wages for pokin’ ’round in dusty paper, but me, no scholar at all, I’m a-layin’ out land, and makin’ farms out o’ wilderness to sell to newcomers, and by Heaven, Pa, I’m worth twenty thousand pounds sterling in land if he’s worth five in cash, that smart scholar! Did I tell ye, Pa, that Higgins sold me his share of our place out on Grave Creek, the one you came and saw? And already I’ve had three generous offers on it, from gents comin’ down the Ohio. And hear this! I’ve engrossed land with a salt lick for ye. It’ll make y’ rich. Pa, I’ll say it again, that you’ve got to come out, move out and stay. Our fortune’s in Kaintuck. Virginia soil’s exhausted from growin’ tobacco, y’ know that. I pray y’ll bring the family out. We’ll be that country’s first and foremost family, I swear it. We’ll be in Kaintuck what Jeffersons are in Albemarle!”
“Egod, George, how you can talk!” exclaimed John Clark, shaking his head. “I’m ready to mount up and ride!”
“Ye saw the land! You know how fine it is!”
John Clark groaned. “Must you tempt me by speakin’ on’t?”
Sisters and brothers were turning their heads back and forth from one end of the table to the other. It was hard for anyone else to get a word said when George and his father were talking about Kaintuck. John Clark went on: “Aye, it’s fine. Never have I seen such soil. But son, things are all in question in this colony now, with King George and his acts, and a man dares not move till he knows what’s to come next. By what Parliament says, anyone west o’ the mountains is an outlaw, and what good’s the land claim of an outlaw? Ye say you’re worth twenty thousand quid in land out there? But the King forbids ye even being out there. How smart is that, I ask? My grant here’s secure, I know it. What sort o’ father would I be, taking my family out to dubious land? And where the red Indian still prevails, I might add? Aye, son, I saw the land in that valley, and I can’t get the picture of it out o’ my head, nor forget the feel of it ’twixt my fingers, any more than you can. Someday we’ll come. Not yet awhile. Here in the Old Dominion at least, I know where I stand. And a man with this size a family has to know where he stands.”
“Let’s talk about my wedding,” Annie exclaimed. “If we’re to talk o’ something important to this family, let’s talk o’ what happens next month, on the twentieth of October! Who cares about some forest, out on the Ohio River, I mean, except the Indians who live there?”
“Right!” cried George. “Your wedding! I want to know about it! Who comes? Who’s the music, I’d like to know? By Heaven, I’d like to know about this shivaree!”
“No, huh uh,” Billy exclaimed. “Talk bout Jo jee wif Indians! Pwease!”
“After a bit, Billy,” his mother said. “Hush now. The wedding’s important, and Georgie wants to hear about it, don’t ye, son?”
“You heard me say so. Billy, after a while I’ll tell ye of the greatest Indian I ever saw, but first we hear of the wedding. Is that fair?”
Billy nodded. Anything George wanted was what should be.
“Fiddlers and pipers,” John Clark said. “Mr. Henry’s bringing ’em up from his father-in-law’s public house. That’s the music.”
“Ah! Mister Henry’ll be here? I wish I could stay. I’d like to talk to that gadfly!” Patrick Henry was the Clark family’s lawyer. In the House of Burgesses he was a constant scold against King George’s policies, and his name was known out on the frontier, where disrespect for authority was esteemed.
“No, now,” Annie interjected. “We’re talking about my wedding, not about politics, remember?”
John Clark laughed heartily. He was relieved to be back on the topic of the upcoming event. He always got unsettled when George urged him to move the family west. Ever since George had taken him on a tour of that country two years ago, he had wanted to go to Kaintuck so badly he could taste it, but the day-by-day business of running a plantation had kept him tied down in Old Virginia, and he was comfortable here when he wasn’t being prodded to uproot. Now the prospect of his daughter’s marriage to a scion of an old family was comforting, like an anchor.
“Will Jonathan be down for the event?” George asked.
“Sure he will,” said Mr. Clark. “I’ve writ to ’im, and I’ll write again and tell him you’re here.”
“Ah, but y’ heard, Pa, I told you I can’t stay. I would fondly love to, but I can’t. Sorry, Annie.”
“Well, y’re never here for anything else. So how should I hope y’d be here for the main time o’ my life?” she accused.
“Annie,” Mrs. Clark said sharply.
Sometimes the family felt that George had forsaken them. With his energy, imposing looks, and golden tongue, he reasonably could have become a lion amidst the Tidewater gentry. He could have married into the Pendletons or Lees or Hancocks, gone into the legislature, grown fat and prosperous, and occupied himself, as most of the gentry did, in being English-like. Many a daughter of the plantation aristocracy had had a coy eye on him. But George had not deemed himself precious, and instead had chosen that dangerous and comfortless world out beyond the mountains of his boyhood dreams, leaving his peers to their balls and minuets, their cards and fox hunts and social rivalries, and their fine-horse breeding and their mating games, both of which they conducted in much the same way. He had gone to be a land finder, a phantom of the woods, and a consort of savages, and thus had deprived his neigh
bors and his family of himself, it sometimes seemed to them.
But in a way, distance had made him closer and more dear to them. Because of the hazards of the wilderness, real and imagined, he was always in their prayers. And whenever he came home, he found himself ever more of a prized curiosity, a storyteller, a voice of boundless optimism. For John and Ann Rogers Clark themselves knew and loved the frontier. They had in fact started their marriage as pioneer homesteaders, out in remote Albemarle County, in the shadow of the Blue Ridge. They had carved an estate out of the forest there, in seven happy, hard years, and their first four children had been born out there, in a log house that John Clark had built with his own hands and tools. Only the terrorism of the French and Indian War had finally driven them back to the Tidewater, in 1757, for the sake of their children’s safety. John and Ann Rogers Clark still felt the pull of western horizons, tied though they were now to this lowland plantation. In a way, George was dwelling where their hearts dwelt, and they were still free and young through him.
“Reverend Archibald Dick will say the vows,” Mrs. Clark said. “And we’ve sent word for the old Albemarle neighbors to come, those who’ll think it worth the journey.” She smiled a sly smile. “Meseems a few o’ those earthy folk ought to leaven the spirit o’ the occasion, mixed in with the gentility hereabouts.”
George grinned and winked at her. “That, I wish I could see. Say, maybe I should send some of those ring-tailed river rats and bear-biters from Red Stone Fort back here as I go through. Give them a dram o’ corn and they’ll whump you up a wedding celebration fit for th’ history books!”
“George,” said Annie, drawing out his name, hardening her eyelids and pointing a threatening finger at him, “ye do any such a thing and I’ll disown you. My wedding’s going to be good and proper, marked by good manners and politeness all ’round.”