“Billy,” she said, in that same precise language and musically modulated voice that had been her mark since she was three years old, “it certainly was an occasion to be mourned and regretted. But we who love you are thankful for the miracle that you were not among those hundred and nine. We’ve something to praise the Almighty Lord for, haven’t we?”
William looked at her for a moment, at this marvelous creature who had been a part of his life for as long as he could remember, who had never in all those years vexed him in the slightest, even though she had long ago taken from him the privileges of being the baby of the family, and suddenly the gloom passed from his face and he began to smile upon her, his blue eyes full of adoration.
“Fanny,” he said, “d’ye know there are times when I’m really glad I pulled you out o’ that cold river?”
And amid the family’s laughter, she leaped up from her chair, actually leaving Dr. O’Fallon’s side for once, and ran across the room to hug her brother Billy around the neck.
27
LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY
February 4, 1791
To William Johnston, Esqr
Clerk of Jefferson County
Sir
This is to certifie that I am willing licence should Issue out of your office for the Marriage of my Daughter Fanny Clark to Doctr James O’Fallon
Given under my hand this
4th day of Febry 1791
JOHN CLARK
“This is your last daughter, is’t not, Mister Clark?”
“That she is,” John Clark replied. “Why, Mister Johnston? Are ye getting weary of issuing us licenses?”
“Ha, ha, ha! Why, no sir! No indeed! These are glad occasions for me, and I’d be delighted to keep on if you had a dozen more! May you and yours increase, sir, as there’s no better a people in Kentucky! In truth, were’t not for you Clarks, there’d probably be no people in Kentucky!” He nodded and winked at George, who had just witnessed the document and was laying down the quill. George nodded at this tribute with a small smile. The clerk was a jolly, inquisitive sort, almost in the nature of a gossip, but he was still a staunch champion of the Clark family. Once, it was said, Johnston had ejected from his office a man he had heard chattering to bystanders about General Clark’s weakness for the bottle.
It was true that John Clark’s tribe was increasing. By his daughter Annie Clark Gwathmey back in Virginia he was now the grandfather of nine, including a set of twins; by son Jonathan, four more, the latest being a daughter Mary; by daughter Elizabeth, two more, both of whom had nearly killed their mother in coming into the world; and by daughter Lucy a grandson named in his honor, John Croghan. That child’s father, Bill Croghan, now stood beside George, looking at him through the corner of his eye, and knowing a secret about him that so far George did not know himself: just last night, in a profoundly tender, intimate moment with Lucy, there had been an enthusiastic consent that if their second child should be a boy, he would be named after George. If a girl, it would be Lucy Ann, they had agreed, but Lucy had expressed an intuitive certainty that it would be a boy, and a red-haired one at that. Lucy had a firm faith in the potency of her mother’s Rogers blood.
Lucy’s concern over her brother George had been very deep during the years of his crisis with the bottle. She and Bill Croghan both worried about the distress it caused her parents. And Lucy had often been annoyed at having to admit any weakness in a Clark. But lately they were hopeful for him, as George had not gone on a binge for more than a year. According to the reports from their parents at Mulberry Hill, the same sealed whisky jug had sat untouched on the mantel in George’s room from one New Year to the next, gathering dust. Doubtless there had been many a night when he had yearned for it, as his financial troubles grew ever more hopeless, but not once had he even touched it to make fingerprints in the dust on its rounded shoulders. “I’m letting it age, so’s it’ll be good and mellow,” he would joke about it. But to William in confidence he had added: “May it mellow forever, for it’ll never be good enough for me again. If I touch that, I’m a lost soul for sure.” And so that dusty jug had stood for month after month now as a sign of his determined will to save himself. Even when his cherished plan for building a canal and locks around the Falls had fallen through for lack of financial backing, George had resisted the temptation to turn back to the jug for solace. That, his family believed, had been the turning point in his struggle. The iron will and self-discipline that had made him the conqueror of the Northwest Territory had borne him over the slump of that failure, and now he was keeping himself intoxicated not with liquor but with reading and writing, and with great new schemes and hopeful projects. As in the old days, he was thinking big and thinking all night.
THE GRANDFATHER CLOCK BONGED THE HOUR OF TWO IN A far room, but it awakened Ann Rogers Clark, and she could not go back to sleep because detailed thoughts about Fanny’s wedding kept rising up. And after a while she began to sense that somebody else was awake in the house. She slipped out of bed and pulled on a robe and slippers, pausing now and then to be sure her rustlings weren’t awakening John. Then she eased out through her bedroom door and went down the hall. A rectangle of light reached out into the hallway from the open door of George’s room. She stepped softly up to the door and looked in. A blaze was roaring in his fireplace.
Lamplight was on his left hand, with which he was rubbing his forehead. He was in his linen shirt, sleeves rolled up, and was agleam with sweat. Handwritten papers were adrift all over his desk, and there were rolled sheets leaning against the wall, and papers on the floor covered with sketches of machinery—windlasses, levers, wheels. The unopened jug stood on the mantel. And the hum of night seemed like the hum of his brain’s own machinery. Sometimes when he was like this, his mother thought she could hear his brain rumbling and humming like a mill.
She thought now that he was sunk too deep in his cogitations to have noticed her presence. But he still had the senses of a scout, and without looking up he said, “Hey, Ma,” and reached his hand out. She went and stood by his chair, and he put his arm around her waist. She patted his shoulder and looked down at the papers that lay immediately before him, covered with the complex hieroglyphics of his night-ponderings.
She put her hand on his left wrist and pulled his hand down, softly admonishing, “What’ve I told you about a gent keeping his hands away from his face? You’re gettin’ bald up in front, and it’s from all that head-rubbin’.”
“Hm, hm.” Still without looking up, he asked, “Whatever became o’ that book o’ your proverbs?”
“I’ve still got it,” she said. She didn’t tell him that it still had not one proverb in it. She hoped he wouldn’t ask.
And now he said, whether to her or to himself, she didn’t know:
“There’s nothing a man can’t think his way out of, if he can bear the strain o’ thinking.”
“I’m sure o’ that.”
“But few can.”
“So it seems,” she said. “What’s this now?” She pointed at a drawing of intermeshing gear wheels.
“An upstream boat.”
“An upstream boat? Of all things!”
“I’ll tell ye more of it when I’ve worked it out better. It’s so plain to me I suspect there must be something wrong in my reckonings, or else why hasn’t some tinker-by-trade invented it already?”
“Well, I’ll declare this: Donald Robertson, rest him in peace, if he could see you now, he’d know there’d been something wrong with his reckonings!”
GEORGE’S MECHANICAL DEVICE TO DRIVE BIG BOATS UPstream was soon all laid out in drawings. But he still felt there might have been a flaw somewhere in his reasoning, so he took his plans down to the boatwright, one of his old veterans he could trust, and they began building a dinghy-sized model of it. George knew from his years on the rivers that oars were an inefficient way to propel a boat against a steady current, as they were not working while out of the water between strokes, and they tired rowers so fa
st. So he had designed a windlass which could be turned by men or a horse, and whose power would be transmitted by a set of gear wheels to a large number of oars, half of which would be in the water pulling while the other half were out on the return stroke. The boatwright worked for days making the gear wheels out of maple and fitting them into a small boat. And then one day they hauled it on a covered wagon to a secluded part of the river and launched it. Using a two-handled crank to operate the windlass, they pattered steadily upstream for two hours without even breathing hard.
He came home in a rapture. He sent a request away by Dr. John Brown, a friend of influence, asking that Congress give him exclusive patent rights for fourteen years. He had read up on patent law and naval law, and knew that if he obtained the sole right to make his mechanical boat on the Continent, he would also have a monopoly right for mechanical boats on all the rivers.
After he sent the request, he would grab his mother or Fanny whenever he passed them in the hallway and waltz them around until they gasped for breath. “Look at me!” he would exclaim. “I’m going to be the Admiral of the Upstream Fleets! My troubles are over.” And he settled down, murmuring and chuckling, to await Dr. Brown’s reply, and to keep himself from fidgeting to death in the meanwhile, he worked on half a dozen other projects. He was drafting for publication a thesis explaining the mysterious disappearance of the ancient mound-building Indian civilization. He was collecting and classifying fossils and giant animal bones from the limestone beds of the Falls and from salt licks upriver.
It was as if he had rediscovered his mental powers, and this was intoxication enough for him. With his brain he was going to make himself independent; he was sure of it. His room was now stacked with manuscripts and books, charts, maps, and mechanical drawings. On his desk were always pencils, straight-edges, compasses, and his well-thumbed Euclid.
Further rekindling his old passion for independence was the news from overseas of the French Revolution. He read every newspaper he could lay hands on, and was the local expert on that distant struggle. “We infected ’em with Liberty,” he would expound to any listener, “while they were here as our allies. Our hearts should chime with theirs. They’ve learnt from us that it’s right to throw off a king!”
Another project was now serving to restore his old pride in himself. It was the writing of a memoir of his war years, a memoir begun at the request of his friends James Madison and Tom Jefferson. At first this request had struck him as an unwanted obligation. In his bitterness, he had tried to forget all his deeds that had in the end paid off in ruin and ingratitude. He had even used some of his diary and note pages as scrap paper, so contemptuous had he become about his dashed fame. But the memoir, begun so reluctantly, had grown to be a challenging and surprisingly pleasurable task. Reviewed through the telescope of time, the story had the aura of a bittersweet legend about it—the daring, the outrageously long odds against his mission’s success, the great-heartedness of his ragged followers, the laughter and songs and dreams of glory that had enabled them to transcend their sufferings, the pure, childlike trust of his French allies, and those brief and poignant interludes with Teresa and her family. Of course he could not write it as a legend, nor would he have done it if he could have. He fancied himself no man of letters, and had, after all, been asked to write a historical report from a military view. The glorious moments, the moments of hope and heartbreak, the great glowing or moody landscapes, all these were elements he could not even try to capture. But they were there; they pervaded the whole memory, and the challenge was in trying to record the military facts without discoloring them with emotions. Some of the facts and dates and figures were difficult to recollect over the intervening dozen years. And so George had written to George Mason, asking to borrow from him the long, detailed report he had written for him right after the 1779 Vincennes campaign. But Mason was old and very ill and had misplaced it somewhere, so George had to proceed without it. In pursuit of details half-forgotten, George would go visiting many of his old campaigners, some of whom he had not seen in years. Their reunions often produced laughter, tears, a few authentic details, and a vestige of the old indomitable spirit of those heady days before the disillusionment. And many a man told him, “Gen’l, if y’ ever go to war again, be it Indians or them besmirched Spaniards, just whistle me up and we’ll go do it the way we used t’ done it.” Then they would look moistly into each other’s eyes and see not the wrinkles in each other’s faces and the rheumatic hesitancy in each other’s movements, but that old magic camaraderie they had felt in those terrible but happily remembered days. George would come away heartened to know that he still had an army.
Thus time had gone by, with a light burning always in the window of George’s room at Mulberry Hill, and the same dusty liquor jug sitting on the mantelpiece. John Clark had calculated that George in the last year had burned more lamp oil and candles than the rest of the household combined. And Mrs. Clark had said, “So be it, and let us thank God for every drop he burns, as oil’s a far better fuel than alcohol.”
“I, FANNY, TAKE THEE, JAMES, TO MY WEDDED HUSBAND …”
“… to have and to hold from this day forward …”
“… to have and to hold from this day forward …”
“… for better for worse, for richer for poorer …”
“… for better for worse, for richer for poorer …”
“… in sickness and in health …”
“… in sickness and in health …”
“… to love and to cherish, till death us do part.”
“… to love and to cherish, till death us do part.”
Till death us do part, Fanny thought, and she remembered the secret prayers she and Elizabeth had exchanged three years ago, that their husbands should live long and safely. Now James O’Fallon, the object of her prayer, was slipping the gold band onto her finger, and he held it there with his cool, healing hand as the church full of people droned with the words while a trickle of perspiration went down her spine and between her nates under the gown and all the petticoats.
“With this ring I thee wed: in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”
And Dr. James O’Fallon, holding her hand, felt her shiver.
LATE IN APRIL A STORY CAME DOWN THE RIVER, A HORROR story. When it came to George’s ears, it drew his mind back over almost twenty years.
Jacob Greathouse, the man who had killed Chief Logan’s family and disemboweled his pregnant sister in 1774, thus sparking Dunmore’s War, had just this month been caught by a band of Shawnees on the Ohio near the mouth of the Scioto, in a party of several dozen white settlers. The Shawnees had massacred and mutilated all the party. But they had recognized Greathouse, and remembered, after all these years, and had saved him and his wife for a very elaborate death.
They had stripped them and whipped them to a pulp, from neck to knees. Then they had cut into their abdomens, detached the lower ends of their small intestines and tied them to saplings. Then they had forced them to walk around and around the saplings until all their guts were wound around the trees. Finally they had scalped them and filled their empty torsos with coals.
George remembered Chief Logan as he had last seen him, besotted and bitter. He gritted his teeth and shook his head. Maybe Chief Logan could look down from wherever his afterworld was and know this vengeance had been wrought. “I always wondered,” George said, “whether the story o’ Greathouse and Logan would ever be finished. I’d say now it’s finished.”
ALL JOHN CLARK’S MARRIED DAUGHTERS SO FAR HAD BEEN sheltered well by their husbands. Annie Gwathmey and her large brood still lived in Owen’s family estate, The Meadows, back in Virginia. Elizabeth Clark Anderson lived in her husband’s great stone house, Soldier’s Retreat, ten miles from Louisville. And Bill Croghan had just completed a magnificent brick plantation house he called Locust Grove, four miles northeast of Louisville, as the place where he and Lucy would dwell and build their branch of the
clan. But it was apparent to everyone that Dr. James O’Fallon was not ready yet, not nearly ready, to provide any such solid seat for his lovely bride Fanny to live in. They made their honeymoon at Mulberry Hill, and it gradually became clear that he was in no hurry to move out. Bit by bit, his belongings came down the river from places he had left them during his travels, and bit by bit they were brought into the Clark house at Mulberry Hill. Bit by bit the new O’Fallon couple began expanding to fill the upstairs rooms that had been left vacant by marriages of the other daughters.
“It’s nice to have a doctor in the house should we need one,” John Clark would say sometimes to his wife. “But so far, even with no need for one, we seem to have one. Do we not?”
“We’ll have a need of ’im along about Thanksgiving time,” she told him one day that May, three months after the wedding. “I mean, that is, if a doctor can be of any use delivering his own child.”
“Eh! What, now? Are you saying—”
“That our littlest darling’s about on the way to giving us a grandchild.”
“By Eternal Heaven! Then we’d best not, er, urge them to leave, had we? Say, now! Wouldn’t it be an event to have one born here in our own Mulberry Hill!” He clapped his hands once and rubbed the palms together, his eyes full of tender anticipation.
“Seeing as how that news delights ye so, Mister Grandfather Clark,” she said, looking at him with one eyebrow raised, “you might turn handsprings to know what else I’ve learnt this day.”
“Eh? What else?”
“That Lucy’s in the same condition again.”
He gasped. “Noooo!”
“Yesssss. And knowing this family, they’ll probably have ’em both the same night, so’s that I’ll have to be two places at once!”
LUCY CLARK CROGHAN’S SECOND SON AND FANNY CLARK O’Fallon’s first were not born on the same night, but were so close together that Mrs. Clark scarcely had time to come back from Locust Grove to Mulberry Hill between them. Lucy’s redheaded boy, named George, was born on November 15, and Fanny’s dark-haired boy John, named after his grandfather, came into the world on the night of the 17th. But the doctor who had been in the house for so long when not needed was not in the house when these events took place. He had departed some weeks before on a trip of business to the Carolinas and Georgia, where he was involved with many other gentlemen in some sort of a large and puzzling land speculation. All he had ever explained to the Clarks about it was that he and his fellow entrepreneurs would one day become rich as kings from it, though in the meantime most of his personal wealth was tied up in it and that was why he was not in a position just now to build a home for Fanny.