By James Alexander Thom
Published by Ballantine Books:
PANTHER IN THE SKY
LONG KNIFE
FOLLOW THE RIVER
FROM SEA TO SHINING SEA
STAYING OUT OF HELL
THE CHILDREN OF FIRST MAN
THE RED HEART
Table of Contents
Other Books by this Author
Dedication
Map
The Clark Family Tree
Book One - 1773–1784
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Book Two - 1784—1799
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Book Three - 1803-1806
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Epilogue
About the Author
Copyright
For my mother
DR. JULIA S. THOM
A pioneer in her own time
I am Ann Rogers Clark. My blood’s flowed across this land like rivers, from sea to sea.
If ye know my name, tho’ that’s not likely, it’s on account o’ the deeds of my offspring, which were considerable. I mean the deeds were considerable. Aye, but the offspring were considerable, too. I bore ten, my first in 1750 and my last in 1773. Their father was John Clark, as solid and goodly a man as ever did eat bread.
Of my children, six were boys, and they all came up heroes, each in his own ways. There’s kinds o’ heroes, y’ understand. There’s conquering heroes, and exploring heroes, and thinking heroes, and then there’s enduring heroes. My boys were all of those. Lord ha’ mercy, what they did! That ye well know; it’s in history books.
Most men would say the fame of her sons is fame enough for a woman. Most women would say likewise. Even I, oftimes, have said ’twas enough for me.
But what I’ve done, that’s considerable, too. I bore them, and I reared them through all the croups and agues and festerations, and the putrid fevers and the tick-sicks—not a one o’ mine died a child, as many did in those days—and I made them what they were, with a little help from menfolk and tutors. And then I watched them go out one by one to battlefields and frontiers they’d likely not come back from, all over the high and low and the hither and yon of this land, where they’d tend to risk their dear fool necks against every sort o’ hazard that God, Devil, King, or Man could conjure.
That’s no inconsiderable thing, what a mother o’ heroes does.
Wherever they went, my young’uns, they went first, and showed the way, all across this continent. They took big chances and made big changes. And talkers! They could change the look o’ the world by what they said about it, and harangue men into doin’ what they’d never ha’ thought they could do. A joke and a song and a dream o’ glory, they’d say, will carry a man through the Doors o’ Hell. Some of my sons had dreams o’ glory that the others made to come true, you’ll see as you hear their story. They were all of one heart, they were made o’ flint and steel, and they were bold. Aye, it was boldness that put the name of Clark in all the history books and clear across the map o’ this land, from sea to sea. No one family wrought more change on this country than did the Clarks o’ Virginia, and they were my offspring, I’m proud to say.
What follows is the story of what we did, and how, and who we were, and why. I’ll vow there’s not a made-up yarn y’ve ever heard to compare with it.
BOOK ONE
1773–1784
1
CAROLINE COUNTY, VIRGINIA COLONY
September, 1773
MASTER BILLY CLARK, THE YOUNGEST OF THE SIX SONS, SAT in a bright, warm rectangle of September sunshine on the waxed wood floor of the nursery and played with the gray wooden horse with red saddle and wheels that his Papa had carved and painted and given to him on his third birthday. He rolled it a few inches on the floor by pulling its string, and thought about the real horses in the stable, about how they smelled and blew their noses. But most of his mind was on something far away and outside, and most often he was gazing at the sky outside the west window, seeming to listen for those songs or sounds that only a child can hear.
He saw the sunlit blur of his blond eyelashes, and heard, in the shadowy part of the room beyond his island of sunshine, the pleasant voices of his oldest sister, Annie, and his Mama, who had baby sister Frances Eleanor at her breast. The baby made wet sounds and said, “Ng, ng,” in her throat, and the women’s rocking chairs creaked.
They were talking again about that thing called Annie’s wedding, which was to be soon. Annie talked about it all the time now, with joy and fear in her voice. The boy didn’t understand much about it and was not very interested in it. But he liked the music of their voices in the room.
He was always enveloped in the voices of his family. Their voices were always around him like a comforter of many colors. Even when his Papa and his older brothers were out in the barns and fields and woods, and his sisters were elsewhere in the house, he could hear their voices, and the sounds of what they were doing, and know where they were. Right now he could hear his Papa’s deep voice outside below the window, with the murmuring voice of Cupid the skinny slave man, and the thunk, thunk of a mallet striking wood. And …
He frowned, and listened hard again for that faraway something, trying to hear through the spinning shrill of the locusts. His Mama would always say he was like a dog listening for summer thunder. Something not quite a sound, something in the sunny distance beyond the meadow gate, had at last softly troubled his inner ear, and his heartbeat sped up a little and he looked at the blue sky over the yellow-green treetops.
But he could not tell yet. He turned back to his little wooden horse. He picked it up in his right hand and with his left he reached for a large ball, a ball made of a dried, inflated pig bladder painted blue and green. He put the wheels of the wooden horse on the surface of the ball and made it roll, as if the horse were walking around the world. Then he put them down and listened hard again, now with his eyes shut so he could hear even better. His Mama and sister were still talking, and the baby was still groaning and sucking, and his Papa and the Negro were still talking and hammering down in the driveway, and the locusts were still shrilling, but now Billy knew something was coming, something out beyond the meadow gate, though he could not yet really hear it, and he was growing excited, and behind the bright orange of his sunny eyelids he began to see a remembered face, a pair of dark blue eyes like his own.
“Mama!” he said. His eyes were open wide.
Ann Rogers Clark turned to him. “Aye, son?”
“Jo jee common!”
“Say what?
Georgie’s comin’? Nay, Billy, I think not. Georgie’s far, far yonder,”—she nodded toward the west—“out behind the mountains, where th’ Indians are. Y’know that.”
He shook his head and frowned. “Jo jee common,” he insisted.
“Mought be he’s right?” black-haired Annie suggested. “He always knows where we all are. Uncanny-like.”
“I know. But … No. George wouldn’t come over the mountains now. Not with harvest so close. Not if ’e grows twenty bushel o’ corn to the acre out yonder, as he claims. Though that sounds a tall tale to me.”
“But,” said Annie, “he’d come home for my wedding!”
“Sure and he might, if he knew of’t. But he doesn’t.”
The boy had abandoned his ball and horse and was standing now at the window with his little hands gripping the sill, looking and listening out over the plantation.
The only people he could see outside were his Papa and Cupid. They were inserting poles lengthwise through two hogsheads of tobacco. These poles would be axles when the barrels were pulled to market by oxen along the rolling-road.
Mrs. Clark and Annie were talking of weddings again, but the woman, bemused, was watching the boy. It was strange how he always just knew where everyone was. Now and then it proved embarrassing, as when he’d turn up brother Johnny romancing some wench or other under a haymow or in the barn loft. It was strange, that special sense of Billy’s, and it was strange about his dream
Mrs. Clark began rocking her chair again while the baby sucked. She saw how the pressure of the baby’s mouth mottled and wrinkled the tired skin of her teat. Twenty-three years she’d been bearing and nursing her children, and now one of them, her own namesake, was about to marry and begin the same great, absorbing, demanding, body-and-soul-consuming occupation. For Mrs. Clark, this was a bittersweet time. Now she returned her gaze to Annie’s flawless oval face, her wide-set brown eyes, her always-smiling mouth with its full underlip. Her beauty was ripe now. She would begin bearing within this year surely, and with the years those firm teats of hers would darken and wrinkle like these.
“Ye listen now, Annie, as I’m just about to give the very advice my own mother, rest her soul, gave me ere I married your Papa. She said to me, ‘Ann girl, your man will have you with child all the time, if y’ let him. I’ve had nine o’ you,’ she told me, ‘and I love y’all as I love my life, but if I had it to do over, I’d rest a couple o’ years between. Now, only way to keep your man off you,’ she told me, ‘is nurse your babies longer, like the Indian women do.’
“That’s what she told me, Annie, and she spoke true. A man thinks that if ye have a babe at your teat, y’re still too much in motherin’ to lay with ’im yet. A man doesn’t know much about such things, and so if he respects you at all, and I know Owen does, why, he’ll not press ye. He mought go jump on a slave woman, but he’ll leave y’ be, remember that, Annie.”
“But Mama, y’ve bore ten of us,” Annie laughed. “Didn’t ye remember her advice, or what?”
Mrs. Clark’s blue eyes looked at a corner of the ceiling and she nodded and pursed her lips. “I remembered it. After I’d had Jonathan, and then Georgie right away after him, why, me-thought I’d nurse Georgie a long spell and get some respite from that man stuff. I mean, bearing children’s a fine thing, most important thing a body can do, I suppose, and what our Dear Lord fit us out to do, but after two, why, the marvel of it’d wore off, and I remembered your Grandmama’s advice, and I thought t’ try it. But … Well, it would ha’ worked, I reckon, ’cept I couldn’t go through with it. I’d see your Papa was a-wantin’, lusty man that he is, and I’d feel guilty like some sham dodger, not worthy o’ good John Clark.
“And, too—Damnation, girl, I’ll just out an’ say it: When John wanted me, I wanted John. And so I weaned little Georgie.”
Annie clapped her hands and laughed, red-faced. “Oh, Mama!”
“And so ’twas, by the very next year, ’54 that was, you came along, my darlin’, our first girl, and John honored me by naming you after me. And a blessing y’ve been every day o’ those eighteen years since. So, I guess—”
A gunshot echoed out of the woods.
“KSH!” Billy imitated it, pointing a finger. “Eddie shoot tokey!” Then he turned his gaze back toward the road, down beyond the meadow.
“See?” said the girl. “He always knows.”
“Aye. And indeed Edmund will have a turkey, by Heaven. He never misses.”
“You were but fourteen when y’ married Papa, weren’t you?” said Annie, turning back to marriage talk, her heart’s main concern.
Mrs. Clark put the baby girl on her shoulder and patted her back. “Fourteen. Aye, I’ve been raisin’ children far longer than I ever was one myself. Yes, m’ darlin’, I’m tired and half broken down by children now. But what better could I ha’ been doing, I always say, than bringin’ you ten wonders into this world? If pride’s a sin, then I’m a sinner. And, then, our Good Lord loads us only with such burdens as he created us fit to carry. I …”
She looked at Billy, who still gripped the windowsill, gripped it hard, his sturdy little body poised like a question mark, his copper-red hair ablaze with sunlight. What on earth has got ahold of him? she wondered.
“You’re not a bit broke down!” Annie was protesting. “You’re the most beauteous Mama in Caroline County, nay, in all Virginia, you are.” That was an accepted truth, but one that always made Mrs. Clark snort. She snorted.
“If beauty’s what keeps a man jumpin’ on ye, I’d as soon have been homely as ham,” she grumbled. But then her face diffused with a golden smile that meant she’d been jesting. “Y’re a kind girl, Annie, and kindness is the best of all your beauty. Thankee for your loving words.”
Billy now was flexing his knees and glancing frantically toward his mother, then back out the window. He gave a curious little hop of excitement and cried: “Jo jee common, Mama! He is!”
And then they heard it, faint, far down the Fredericksburg Road, a voice raised in an Indian yodel, and a moment later it came louder, and they rose a little in their chairs, feeling shivery around their necks and shoulders, and after a while they could hear hooves beating up the dirt road from the meadow gate, and Mrs. Clark’s heartbeat quickened. Feet were thudding on the floors downstairs, all going outdoors, and girls’ voices were exclaiming, and when Billy darted away from the nursery window and down the stairs, Mrs. Clark rose with the baby on her shoulder and looked out the window down the road between the rows of oaks. She saw her son Johnny in shirtsleeves and brown breeches sprinting down the driveway yelling, “Well, hey! Well, HEY!” and saw a drift of dust coming among the trees. And then a horse and rider burst into view at the end of the rail fence, the horse a sweat-stained roan, the rider dressed in pale deerskins, now howling the name of Johnny, who stood in the horse’s way poised to spring, his left arm raised and crooked.
“By heavens, Annie, it is George!” He was dressed as usual like a red savage, and coming at full gallop now he leaned out and hooked his left arm in Johnny’s as he rode past him, yanking him off the ground and swinging him up behind the saddle, that old daredevil trick of theirs. And now the lathered horse with both of them on its back came skidding to a rump-down halt below the nursery window in a billow of dust, as the family swarmed laughing and whooping to welcome George home from the frontier, their surveyor, their backwoods adventurer, their Seldom-Seen, as John Clark often called him. Every time he came back it was a surprise and a commotion. Every time. Mrs. Clark carried the baby girl and hurried down the staircase, smiling, tears in her eyes. He was her secret special lad, George was, the first one born with red hair and the look of her Rogers family about him, and she thanked God he was home safe once more after a long, fearful unknowing.
He looked ever more like an Indian as he strode in the front door with a rapturous, wild-eyed, squealing little Billy on his shoulders and all the rest reaching to touch him and crying greetings to him. She noticed that thes
e were no crude rawhide garments he’d made himself, such as he’d worn on previous homecomings, but fine, neat doeskin things, tunic and loincloth and leggings, tanned soft as velvet and decorated with fringes and thrums, colored beads and quills. “Aha,” his father was telling him, in a joshing tone but looking somewhat pained, “ye’ve got yourself a squaw out yonder.” George just laughed at that, neither affirming nor denying it.
“Hey, Mama,” he said in a deep and tender tone when he saw her in the hall, and he drew her close in his right arm to kiss her forehead and the red hair over her ear. He smelled of woodsmoke, horse sweat, and something like a wild animal musk. He looked down at the baby in her arms, at the swirl of thick, nearly black hair, at the dark brows and long lashes. “Now here’s a Clark I’ve not met yet,” George said. “She looks like you, Pa. A Clark and it rhymes with dark.” Mr. Clark chuckled at that old litany of the family phenomenon; they had alternated like that with but one exception, the ten children: Jonathan the firstborn had been dark like his father, then George red-haired like his mother; then Annie dark, Johnny redheaded, Richard dark, Edmund a redhead. Then Lucy had broken the pattern for the moment, and was the only red-haired girl of the clan. Then Elizabeth, dark-tressed, and redheaded Billy, and now this black-haired lastborn. But even the dark-haired ones were tinged by the Rogers coloring; in sunlight their hair was highlighted copper-red. And their complexions were fair and lightly freckled. For there had been Rogers blood not far back in the Clark family, too. Ann Rogers Clark’s husband John was in fact one of her cousins, which to her meant that the bold blood of the Rogerses had flowed two ways into her offspring.
This George, though! To her he was the quintessential Rogers, like her beloved father and brothers: an adventurer, a soul-swaying talker, a man born to stir up the world. She stood back now amid the clamor of her children and looked him in the face to see if the past year in the wilderness had changed him. There was still that imp’s smile, the dimpled cheeks, the piercing dark blue eyes, the hawk-sharpness of his long nose, and that square chin. His face was brown as cordovan now, and his red hair and eyebrows, usually the color of an Irish setter’s coat, were sunbleached light as straw. But there was something deeper in his merry eyes now, some new sad knowing, as if he had learned something important in this past year, his twentieth year. She’d know what it was ere long; he’d let it out as he talked.