“Wif huge arms,” interjected Billy. He made fists and waved them in front of his face. The others smiled at this strange statement, then turned back to George, who said:
“I aim to bring Logan here someday. Have him stay in my family as I have in his. I’d like Tom Jefferson to see him, hear what he thinks. He’d learn something from Logan.”
“Maybe y’ought to go fetch him here for Annie’s wedding,” said Dickie. “A good halfbreed livens things up, if y’ give ’im some barleycorn, like they do old Mattapony Daniel at Mister Wright’s cockfights.”
“Don’t you dare!” cried Annie.
“Dick, that’s hardly very respectful, after all I’ve told you,” George said. “But …” He put a finger to his lip. “Maybe not a bad idea! Bring him and Cresap! Yee AH-ha!” He clapped his hands. “What a night we’d have!”
“Yah-ha! Yah-ha!” Billy yelped, clapping, eyes squinting shut in joyous release. All evening he had had an Indian cry pent up in his throat, and now it could come out. “Yah-ha! Yah-ha!”
GEORGE WAS GONE BEFORE THE CHILDREN WERE UP THE next morning, his saddlebags full of notebooks and maps, off to Williamsburg to plat his lands. He had ridden off to the capital in his best old frockcoat of forest-green wool, his best pair of shiny boots, tricorn hat, and a riding cape borrowed from his father, and thus, his mother told the children, he looked just about as civilized as anybody. “He’ll be back in three or four days,” she assured them, “the way he rides. Even allowing time to do his lands and soak up some government gossip, he’ll be back ’fore there’s time to miss ’im. And he hinted he might have time to buy a few presents for family, too. Well, say! Where did Billy get to? He was right here two winks ago.”
The boy had gone up to the bedroom where George had slept, and let himself in. And there on a clotheshorse hung what he had come up to see: George’s deerhide clothing. William looked at it for a long time in the morning-lit room, dust motes drifting around, voices faint in far parts of the house. He looked at the Indian sun design on the back of the tunic, a sun of white beadlike shells in the center, and rays of red and blue quills radiating out from it, up, down, left, right. Then he reached to touch some of the long leather thrums that hung along the yoke, and along the seams of the sleeves, and remembered those fringes swaying as George waved his arms and told his story of the Indian.
Billy ran a finger along the fringes and made them move. Then he put his nose against the deerhide and shut his eyes and inhaled deeply. And like a hunting dog sniffing its master’s shoes, he went where the scents had come from: The campfires in dark forests at night. The lodges where Indian tobacco had been smoked. The villages where meat was cured over fires. The rivers from which fish were caught and cleaned. Far roads where horses ran, sweating with their speed. Fields where one lay down and crushed flowers and wild herbs and autumn leaves. Springs and brooklets where one lay in moss and ferns to drink. Hunts where gunpowder flashed and made sulfurous smoke. The butcherings, where buffalo blood and bear grease stained the sleeves. The trading posts and frontier inns, where rum and whiskey were sloshed. But most clearly, the sunny meadows where a surveyor sweated for hours over his compass and chain with his gun leaning against a distant tree. Billy was far away in those places when he felt a presence. Eyes on his back. He felt a chill, and slooowwwly turned to look for a huge-armed Indian chief. But it was his mother, standing in the doorway, looking at him with her eyes full of tenderness. She came and stooped and kissed him on the forehead.
“Come,” she said. “Breakfast’s on the board.”
And then in four days George was home again, his saddlebags even fuller. There were presents from Williamsburg’s shops and manufactories. For Elizabeth, a comb inlaid with mother-of-pearl. For Lucy, a long tin peashooter. “Blow, don’t suck it,” he warned, “or y’ll have beans in your lungs.” For Frances Eleanor, a doll she could play with when she grew older. A dozen gunflints for Edmund, an inkwell of crystal for Johnny the poet, a penknife for Dick. And for Billy, his first compass, a small pewter one with a slit sight in its folding cover. He showed him how to line up North and see where the other directions lay. “And one day when I’m home again,” he said, “after y’ learn to read Euclid, why, I’ll teach ye how to survey, just like Grandpapa Rogers taught me.” They all sat stunned with delight, while George ran upstairs to his room to fetch Annie’s wedding gift. “Lord, he must be making money out there,” John Clark mused.
Annie’s present was from the frontier, not from Williamsburg. It was a beautiful tippet, a shoulder shawl made of mink skins dark as her hair, delicately sewn together by some Indian woman. She was astonished. Her eyes swam in tears as she rubbed it on her cheek to feel its incredible softness. “You didn’t know I was getting married,” she said. “How did you know to bring me this? I thought y’d pick me up some glinty bauble in the capital!”
“Why,” he said, “it’s true I didn’t know it’d be a wedding present. But you’re my beauteous sister, and when I saw that, I knew it was made to be on your shoulders. I do love ye, Annie, and I’d stay if I could for that great day o’ yours. That great day for Owen Gwathmey, I should rather say!”
She was so overwhelmed she wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed her cheek against his chest, and sniffled, and finally said, “O, sometimes I just don’t know what to make o’ you. Y’ come threatenin’ to turn my wedding into a vulgar hijinks, but really you’re just as sweet and gentle as a, as a … I don’t know what!”
“I’ll be at your weddin’,” he said. “You won’t be able to see me, but you’ll know. Is that good enough?” He patted her gently on the back and then turned to face his parents, still holding Annie in the crook of his arm. “And you two, honored parents,” he announced, “listen here, it didn’t escape my notice that her wedding’s on the same day as your birthdays! October the twentieth, isn’t that so? I don’t know whose doin’ that is, but it sure doesn’t sound like mere happychance!” They were smiling broadly, utterly astonished that he had remembered that date. “So I’ve got things for you two as well, and I’ll just have to give ’em to you right now.”
For John Clark it was a matched set of flintlock pistols with ebony handles inlaid with silver filigree. They were costly pieces, which George really could scarcely have afforded to buy. He had won them, with their velvet-lined carrying case, from a gaming gent at the King’s Inn, his first night in Williamsburg. He did not explain this to his father, a devout Episcopalian who believed that craps and cards were evils. Betting on cockfights and horse races John Clark could condone, and sometimes did so himself, rationalizing that it is natural for cocks to fight and horses to run, but not for man to deal cards or throw dice. John Clark sat running his fingers over the elegant pistols, and George turned to his mother.
“And now for you, Ma. This.”
It was a beautiful little book bound in soft Morocco, with no printing on the backing or cover. The edges of the pages were gilded. “Now what in the world is it, a little Bible or something? It’s so …” She slapped her cheek. The pages were all blank as snow. “Well, how in the world am I supposed to read this? They forgot to print it!”
“No, Ma,” said George, laughing. “That book’s for you to write. You put down some o’ those proverbs and maxims y’re always givin’ us for our moral and practical guidance. You can title it what y’ like, y’ see? Ann Rogers Clark’s Book of Proverbs and Cautions, or something more flowery-like.” He grinned at her perplexity.
“What proverbs?” said she. “I don’t say proverbs!”
“Maybe y’ don’t know it, but ye do. Like, um: ‘A gentleman will keep his fingers away from his face except when he eats, shaves, or prays.’”
“Oh fiddle,” she retorted, “that’s no proverb, that’s advice.”
“Well, that’s what a proverb is, Ma: seemly advice, said in few words.”
“Well,” said she then, “when ye were littler, I said it in fewer words yet. I said, ‘Don’t pick your
nose.’”
They all laughed. Billy giggled, sitting on the edge of his chair, swinging his legs and pretending to excavate a nostril.
“Don’t write that one down, please,” George chuckled. “Here’s one I remember: ‘Red hair’s no excuse for tantrums.’ Ye don’t know how often I have to recite that one to myself. It works, too.”
“Well, I don’t know if I’ll be able to write a Book of Proverbs, thanks all the same,” she fussed, trying to hide her flattered feelings. “Huh! What am I supposed to do, follow myself around the house all day with a pen and this little book here, listening for proverbs to fall from my lips? George, I’ll vow, you’re a caution, you are. Well … Maybe I’ll write down dates in the lives o’ my children. Start with Annie’s wedding, maybe. And birthdays of her young-uns. If she’s like I been, that’ll fill up this little fancy book quick enough! Hmp! I’ll write down the days when you come and go, George, and stir us all up. Ye scoundrel. Come give me a kiss on my face. I wish to Heaven ye wouldn’t go away so soon to those places. Eh! When y’re gone, what I know about your welfare is like these empty pages! But, it’s not for me to try and stop ye, I who made you the sort that goes, for as the Lord knows, if there’s an empty place, Rogerses’ll rush into it. Just be careful, son. I didn’t raise you all those years for ye to go have a short life. Give your parents their care’s worth, that’s what I say!”
“Well, now, there y’ are,” he said, blinking. “That right there ought t’ be the first proverb y’ write down!”
AND THEN GEORGE HAD GONE, BACK TOWARD THE WILDERNESS, as suddenly as he had come out of it, and Master Billy Clark, his youngest brother, was nearly inconsolable. He would go out into the yard alone and put his compass on the grass and find West on it and then sit gazing in that direction and pining. He told his mother he wanted to learn to read at once, so George would come back and teach him to survey. He would go to sleep at night with his compass in his hand. He resumed dreaming about George, dreams ever more vivid now. One night when Annie and her mother were sitting up late in their nightdress planning their details about the wedding, they heard him yip in his sleep. Mrs. Clark went in with a candlestick and sat on the edge of his trundle bed. Eddie, Johnny, and Dickie slept in the same room. They were snoring or mumbling in their covers. They slept like logs because of their hard work on the plantation and their long hours of study. Johnny moaned often in his sleep, saying the names of girls. Johnny was perpetually in love, with someone or other, stunned with heartaches and writing awful poems. One could never know who was this mooncalf’s object of love at any time. It would as likely be some bondsman’s daughter he had tumbled in a haymow as some spoiled planter’s girl he had pranced with twice around a ballroom; to him any miss was a princess; they were aristocrats by the color of their hair or the shine in their eyes, or the shape of their lips or the curve of their hips, to use one of his own frequently repeated rhymes. All his dreams were of love.
Billy’s compass gleamed in the candlelight, and he rubbed it and looked at it.
“Mama,” he said, “tell me a story about Jo jee.”
“Oh, my. There are so many stories about Georgie,” she said in a voice she hoped was soft enough not to awaken the other boys. “Say, darlin’, I’ll make you a trade deal. A favor o’ mine for one o’ yours. I could tell you a story of ’im every night, if you can promise me I’ll see smiles on your old glummy face next day.”
“I can pwomise.” He showed her how he could smile. It was a wistful, forced little grimace.
“Fair enough, then. Well, let’s us see, now. What story should I tell ye first about that brother Georgie o’ yours? Like I said, he’s been just one yarn after another. Well, there’s the story about Georgie and your Grandpapa Rogers out surveyin’ on the Mattapony. Then there’s a story about George and Grandmama Rogers and the whippoorwill call. Or, about when Mister Lawrence’s Indian boy made Georgie a bow and arrows. Or, there’s the story about when Georgie won all the medals at Dr. Mason’s school, one medal for foot runnin’, and one for wrestling, and one for horse racing. Only boy who ever won all three. Or, the story about when Georgie was, oh, just about your age, and went a-walkin’ all by himself through the woods down to Mister Jefferson’s mill with a bag o’ corn to grind. Or, about the first time he ever went up to the top o’ the Blue Ridge and looked at the western mountains.” Billy was squirming, these all sounded so good. “But,” she said, “instead, why don’t I just start at the beginning, and tell about the day Georgie was born, for that was a day I still shiver to remember, as there were Indians that day.”
“Indians when ’e was bo’n?”
“Yes. Like omens, they came.”
“Ooo!”
“And lightning. Lightning struck that day.”
“Oooooh!” Already he was seeing pictures and she hadn’t even begun.
“Then here’s the tale, darlin’. It’s seventeen years before you were born, in a place y’ve not yet seen, that this story began. But first:
“Can ye remember how big my belly was just before Frances was born? Well, that was the way I was that day, too, because I had Georgie in me then. So you have to remember I was like that the day these things happened, all right now? All righty. Now, y’know we lived out west in Albemarle County then, that was where the frontier was in those days. We were right by Blue Ridge. And on past the Blue Ridge didn’t anybody live, ’cept wolves and bears and Indians, and a few hunters. Y’ve heard us talk of Albemarle County.”
“Uh-huh.”
“November nineteenth was the date of it, in 1752. Your Papa wasn’t home that day, he was out a-huntin’ deer on the mountain. That day, Billy, was raw and cold and gray as bullet lead. Been spittin’ sleet all through the morning, it had. Your brother Jonathan, he was two then, was snug down in our big bed to nap so he’d stay warm, just like you are now, ’cause that day the cold wind just blew in through one wall o’ that cabin and out th’ other without pause for a how-d’ye-do or a fare-thee-well. Even with a big cookfire in the hearth, it was cold inside, and the wind was moanin’ and whistlin’ round the house like demons.” She glanced at him and saw him pull up the coverlet against cold, and knew that her storytelling was effective.
“Well, son, just then there came a ruckus from the henyard, out back o’ the cabin. There was an old scoundrel fox had already kilt two o’ my hens that month, and I was sure he was in there. So you know what I did? I took your Papa’s spare gun, that old musket that’s over the mantel in the kitchen house is the very one, and I loaded it. I looked to be sure little Jonathan was asleep, and then I eased open the door and stepped out into the wind. I figured I had a good chance to surprise that old thievin’ fox, as the henyard was out round back from the door, and I was downwind to boot. Can’t y’ just see me, with a big belly and a long gun, a-tippy-toein’ round the corner of the cabin? He, he!”
“Yeah! He, he!”
“Thunder was a-crackin’ over the Blue Ridge as I went creepin’ round that house, gun muzzle first, aimin’ to bring that bad fox to justice for his crimes.
“Well, Billy lad, listen now: If that had been the fox there, I couldn’t have surprised him a half as much as the surprise I got just then! What I saw there in place of a fox made such a flash o’ fear go through me, I couldn’t ha’ been hit harder by lightning! My heart like to stopped, and my guts clamped down so hard, I swear it started me having my baby. For you know what I saw in that henyard instead of a fox?”
“A nindin?” he whispered.
“Not just one Indian but two. The one inside was just handing a hen across the fence pickets to the one outside. And, Billy, just then the one inside looked and saw me!”
“Oh, nooo!” he breathed.
“And then th’ other one saw me too!”
Billy groaned.
“Fancy it, Son, the stew I was in! Me with one ball in my gun, and two full-grown braves in my henyard. And just then, I heard a voice off my side, and there was another Indian man there, and
two squaws, and they were all lookin’ at me too! And I was a startin’ to hurt so bad in my belly I could scarce stand still, ’cause Georgie was ready to come out!
“Well, I don’t know how long we stood there like so many posts. Chickens were squawkin’ and runnin’ all over each other as only those stupid creatures can do so well. I don’t know how I looked to the Indians, but I could see they had the chicken-stealin’ emotion writ all over their faces! They looked guilty as foxes!”
“You bettuh shoot ’em, Mama!”
“Well, before I could or couldn’t, a lightning bolt cracked down, blinding white, and fired up a tree-top down by the spring, so close by I swear it budged me an inch in my shoes, and Lordy, I felt a real squeeze in my belly, and what I wanted most was to get indoors and get laid down, because y’ll never know, Billy, praise be, how much it hurts when a baby starts a-comin’!
“But those Indians were standin’ there thinkin’ what to do, and I didn’t have a plan myself, so there I stood with that cocked gun, pointin’ it first at the two Indians, then the other bunch, dependin’ on which way I was a-wobblin’ at the moment. Son, I didn’t have any idea whether I could shoot one and then run lock myself in the house with Jonathan ’fore the others could shoot an arrow in me. And if I did get in, why, I feared they could burn down the house with me and Jonathan in it! Y’ still awake, son?”
The top of his head, all that was visible of him now, nodded rapidly.
“Thought y’ were. Well, Billy my son, I’ll never surely know why those Indians did what they did then, but I reckon they just got ashamed, like any ordinary people do. One older man said something, and the one put down the chicken, inside the fence, where it splayed out all feathers and cackles and finally ran under another hen. The Indian sprang over the fence then, and I nigh pulled th’ trigger to shoot ’im in midair, as I feared he was comin’ for me. But instead, they all herded together, still lookin’ wary at me, and dignified as they could act, bein’ chicken thieves, I mean, they all strolled away down past the spring into the woods, toward the river, there where that blasted tree-top still stood a-smokin’ from the lightning. And it took all the guts I had, but I stood there lookin’ after ’em with that cocked gun till they were out o’ sight. There was more lightning, and I could hear Jonathan screamin’ inside the house. I went in finally, all but carryin’ my belly in my arms and draggin’ that gun after me. I barred the door and laid out ball and powder on the table, shooshin’ Jonathan till he piped down. Rest o’ that afternoon I hulked and groaned round in that little room like a sick cow, peerin’ out through chinks for a sight o’ Indians, sittin’ down on a stool now and then when the pain passed over. I wanted to yell for your Papa or scream prayers, but I knew if I scared Jonathan thataway, then he’d howl and scare me worse than I already was.”