Long Knife Read online

  The room was warm. Its log walls were mellow with flickering light from the great fireplace. Furniture and glass and memorabilia glinted in lamplight. On a shelf of a glass-front cupboard, couched on a scrap of red velvet, gleamed a tiny silver medallion. No bigger than a dollar, the figure of a running athlete in it. He gazed at it for a long time, remembering.

  A stewpot hung over the coals on an iron arm in the fireplace, but its aroma did not tempt him. He was too agitated to eat. He stood by the cupboard for a few more seconds on aching legs, undecided between his hearthside chair and the door to his bedroom, wherein a candle burned unwinking in the close air. There was sweat on his brow. His bowels gripped and burned.

  At length he went out the back door into the darkness. The stars were intense overhead. Sweat on his face and flanks chilled him. He went to the outhouse, had a scalding evacuation while holding his face between his hands, then returned indoors.

  From the pantry he selected a quart of peach brandy distilled in Louisville, leaving the expensive Jamaican rum and the more stupefying corn whiskey on the shelf. He removed his wide-brimmed hat and hung it on a peg beneath the long rifle, straight sword, and tomahawk he had carried through the Revolution. He uncorked the brandy and set it on a table among letters and inkwell and quill, turned up the lamp wick, drew his chair closer to the table and eased into it, spreading the deerskin robe over his legs again.

  For a while he sat there erect, hands on his aching knees, drawing deep and difficult breaths and absorbing the warmth from the fireplace. His eyes, so dark a blue they appeared to be black, gazed into the shadows from under the sad, downward-sloping folds of flesh that hooded the eyelids. His hair, which had receded back to the crown of his head, was silvery, with a few still copper-red strands, and tufts of white were combed back over his ears. Dome and forehead were pale, and beneath was a face which, though weathered to cordovan, flecked with tiny broken capillaries, and mottled with age spots, was yet patrician, strong, and handsome. The nose was long and narrow, delicately winged. His lips were thin but sculptured sensitively, resolute yet not hard; they parted as he inhaled, closed as he exhaled. Despite his age no flesh sagged under his square-cut jaw. Thus he sat in repose for a long time, pate gleaming like an egg in the lamplight, face grave, aristocratic, and profoundly sad.

  He stirred after a while, looked at a point high on the wall, groaned a single word—“Teresa!”—hauled in a deep breath, and then expelled it with a plosive sigh. Then he clenched his jaw, reached for the brandy, and poured it into a glass which shimmered through tears. He snuffled once, drew up as if again bracing himself against sentimentality, fiercely threw the liquor to the back of his throat, and poured another measure.

  From a small brass scuttle on the hearth he scooped a handful of poplar stump punk and cast it into the coals, then watched the flames change to emerald and blue. A tall clock ticked in the gloom at the other end of the room; the fire fluttered and shifted in its coals; the frogs outside continued their piping queries. General Clark scanned the letters and documents, old and recent, that were spread in orderly stacks over the tabletop.

  He reached for a recent one from Jefferson which needed attending to. A few months earlier the president had written, asking Clark to find for him in the Ohio Valley the bones of certain extinct mammals which he wanted to present to the National Institute of France. Of the mammoth in particular the president wanted ribs, backbones, leg-bones, thigh, horn, hips, shoulder blades, and parts of upper- and under-jaw teeth.

  The general gave a wry smile and shook his head. Tom Jefferson knows precisely what he wants, he thought. And I always fill his order. Whether he wants a fossil or a frontier.

  Jefferson’s letter concluded:

  … I avail myself on this occasion of recalling myself to your memory, of assuring you that time has not lessened my friendship for you. We are both now grown old, you have been enjoying in retirement the recollection of the services you have rendered to your country and I am about to retire with an equal consciousness that I have occupied places in which others could not have done more good; but in all places and times I shall wish you every happiness and salute you with great friendship and esteem.

  He stared at the letter, hands trembling at the edges of the paper, his breathing accelerating.

  “’Enjoying,’ you say!” he growled. “By thunder, Mister President, I am thankful you cannot see just how I enjoy my retirement!” He started to crumple the letter, shaking as if with ague, but then smoothed and refolded it. “Well, I shall give you your old bones, my friend,” he muttered. “Tusks and backbones I’ve got already, piled in front of my house. I shall always give you whatever you want, as I have always, now, haven’t I? As I know you would do for me, and have, whenever you could. But try, Thomas! I daresay you know my needs are desperate. You’re the President. Surely you can do something for me now.”

  The time was long past when General Clark had been surprised to hear himself talking aloud in his solitude, addressing those of whom he was thinking. He had been alone almost all his life, alone, relying on himself; even when surrounded by his troops who were prepared to die for him he had been essentially alone, with all responsibility on his own shoulders, with every course of action depending upon his sole judgment. West of the Alleghenies, the Revolutionary War had been his war.

  And now, now in 1809, though every knowledgeable man who journeyed down or up the Ohio would stop and walk up the hill to pay homage to him, though his brothers devoted themselves to his problems, though his sister Lucy Croghan regularly came from Locust Grove across the river to inquire after his needs, and his little niece Diana Gwathmey came every other week to sit beside him for hours and listen to his tales and his grumblings, he was still alone. Some of his old Illinois campaigners, those still fit to travel, would come up when they could, talk fowl-shooting or bone-hunting with him, sit with him on the porch, drink a little, give him news of their lives, then depart, leaving him again alone. It was strange about them: Virtually every one of them had become a physical ruin, many had died young, and all who still lived looked twice their age. They had been the toughest men imaginable during the campaigns back in ’78 and ’79; indeed, they would not have survived the campaigns had they not been. But almost immediately after their victory over General Hamilton, the Scalp-Buyer, they had begun to deteriorate. The hardships of that winter march against Vincennes seemed to have taxed their whole life’s store of vigor, leaving them unsteady, frail, bone-sore, and prey to any malady that came by. They, like he, had ruined themselves for their country.

  There were certain other old warriors who could come to Clark’s Point and momentarily alleviate his solitude. These were the Indian chiefs, former allies of the British, whom he had fought or won over by eloquence and tact in the great councils at Cahokia. Every year some of the old chiefs would come from their distant villages, some of them five hundred miles across the wilderness, ride up the road to Clark’s Point, sit and talk with him, and smoke the pipe of peace. They called him “the Long Knife, our father who speaks with one heart and one tongue.” Of all his visitors, it was these whose company touched him most, these former adversaries with their somber visages and their information from another kind of world, and it was when their bright blankets and feathers had vanished into the forest shadows that his loneliness would return at its most poignant.

  Despite the brandy and the deerhide robe, the old soldier felt chilled again, chilled as much by the sense of his own feebleness and solitude as by the actual coolness of the night. Rising unsteadily from his chair, he took a poker in hand, jabbed at the logs in the fireplace until sparks and flames shot up the chimney, then laid two more split walnut chunks against the backlog. He lowered himself back into his chair, spent by the effort; his heart was thudding painfully and light specks were swimming behind his eyes. As the fire began to strengthen, he recovered his breath somewhat. But this new reminder of his infirmity depressed him further. The loss of his legendary physi
cal power was one of the worst of the relentless and undeserved misfortunes which had dogged him through the latter half of his lifetime.

  Now he put his hand on a piece of paper that pulled like a magnet at the corner of his eye. It was a draft of a petition he had made to Congress three years before, asking for title to the two and a half square leagues of Ohio Valley lands that had been offered him in 1778 by a great Indian chief. The general deemed this petition the most abject correspondence of his life. He had never felt so pathetic and frustrated as when he had penned this appeal. He could not even bear to read it when he was sober, and would have destroyed it by now, were he not so meticulous about his accounts and papers. But he had read it and reread it countless times while deep in his cups, as now, savoring a rich and righteous feeling of self-pity. He had written it as a last resort, after every other hope for reimbursement had been given up.

  The paper rustled in his hands as he read.

  … My reason for not soliciting Congress before this was the great number of Petitions before them, and the prospect I yet had of a future support, but those prospects are vanished. I engaged in the Revolution with all the Ardour that Youth could possess. My Zeal and Ambition rose with my success, determined to Save those Countries which had been the Seat of my toil, at the hazard of my life and fortune.

  At the most gloomy period of the War, when a Ration could not be purchased on Public Credit I risked my own, gave my Bonds, Mortgaged my Lands for supplies, Paid strict attention to every department, flattered the friendly and confused the hostile tribes of Indians by my emissaries, baffled my internal enemies (the most dangerous of the whole to Public Interest) and carried my Point. Thus at the end of the War I had the pleasure of seeing my Country Secure, but with the loss of my Manual activity and a prospect of future indigence, demands of very great amount were not paid, others with depreciated Paper, Suits commenced against me for those sums in specie, My military and other lands earned by my Service as far as they would extend were appropriated for the payment of those debts, and demands yet remaining to a considerable amount more than remains of a shattered fortune will pay—this is truly my situation—I see no other resource remaining, but to make application to my Country for redress …

  To have been reduced from the glory of victory to so low a condition as to beg like that! And even then, the Congressional Committee on Public Lands had defeated that petition, and the grant of land—land he already considered his—had been refused him.

  The irony, the enormity of it enraged him more every time he thought of it. That tract of land had been offered to him in simple friendship by the Piankeshaw chief, Tobacco’s Son, known among the Indian nations as the Grand Kite of the Wabash, who had chosen to make his people friends of the Americans rather than mercenary scalp-takers for the British. Tobacco’s Son had given him the deed in a ceremony of dignity and eloquence, with a warning to all other tribes to esteem the gift and never cause that tract of land to taste blood. And he had decreed that the Indians would retain title to a road through that land to the door of the Long Knife’s house, so that any Indian could come in safety to get his counsel. He had accepted the deed from Tobacco’s Son, taking it in trust for Virginia, whose government he served, and soon afterward, the Assembly of Virginia had agreed by unanimous vote that he had the right to it. But later when the claims of Virginia had been transferred to the new federal government, the national Congress had refused to give him the grant, or even so much relief as a pension.

  The thought of it never failed to make him seethe. He sat here now before his blazing hearth thinking of it, heart pounding with indignation, eyes smoldering. Tossing down still another glass of the brandy, he hauled himself to his feet and flung the heavy robe into a corner of the room. He leaned upon the table’s edge with his fists clenched and glowered at the petition on the table.

  “By God, it is a disgrace,” he began in a low and hissing tone. “I gave to a brown savage nothing more than honest words and an invitation to friendship, and he offered me an estate. But …”

  The general now raised his fists to the ceiling, and brought them down with a crash on the table, shouting: “I gave to the United States half of the territory they possess, and they suffer me to remain in poverty!” His fists struck the table again, then a third time, and suddenly he was blinded by a sunlike flash and felt a pain as if a tomahawk had been driven into his brain. The right side of his body seemed to depart in one instant; there was an intense silent scream inside his head and he felt himself falling.

  Alone in his log house on a wild point of land above the Falls of the Ohio, felled by a stroke, General George Rogers Clark lay, his mouth open, drooling on the rough board floor. In a fragmented dream, he saw his soldiers standing with raised tomahawks over kneeling Indian braves. The dream began over and over. In some fragments, the soldiers struck the captives; in others, they spared them and let them go.

  The General had fallen close to the hearth. His left foot was inside the fireplace. The room began to fill with the smell of seared leather. The embers ate through his boot and soon the flesh of his foot and leg began to burn.

  AT DAWN A PUAN INDIAN CHIEFTAIN CALLED TWO LIVES, WHO WAS in his fiftieth summer, rode eastward along the dirt road on the north bank of the Ohio. His pony’s unshod hooves made no sound as he rode toward the Falls. On the far bank of the river lay the big village the American white men called Louisville, its buildings square and blue in the pearly morning light. Many boats were tied to poles in the river next to the town’s bank, looking very small at this distance. Smoke drifted from the houses, out over the river. In past years Two Lives had been in Louisville to trade, but he did not like to go there. Louisville had many smells and Two Lives did not like them. There were sour smells from the places where whiskey and brandy were made. There were smells of rotting animal guts and tannin from the buildings where the white men butchered animals for meat and made their hides into boot leather. There were rankling odors of lye and of limestone dust, and other aromas which made Two Lives breathe through his mouth and close his nose. Even now across the wide river, he imagined he could smell the town.

  Two Lives rode up a street now between the silent log buildings of Clarksville, where the mills stood still and few men lived anymore. Two Lives knew that his great friend Clark, the Long Knife, was not happy about the stillness of his town, because he had founded it to be a great trade center with a boat canal past the Falls. But although Two Lives was sad for the Long Knife’s disappointment, still he preferred the quiet and the emptiness of Clarksville to the noises and smells of Louisville across the river.

  The pony began climbing the road up the bluff toward the house of the Long Knife, and as he climbed, the rushing of the river and Falls subsided below, absorbed in the foliage of the giant oaks and sycamores. Up here it was wild and clean and still, and Two Lives was happy that the Long Knife lived up here now instead of in the town. Bluebirds, finches, jays, juncoes, martins, and towhees flew crisscrossing the path, in search of their morning food, and at one place halfway up the bluff the rider startled a grazing doe, which fled in surefooted leaps up a steep bluff covered with ferns. The white flag under its tail vanished into a green thicket far above, and Two Lives smiled with pleasure in the knowledge that if he had been hunting, that foolish deer would have become easy venison. But Two Lives had not come to hunt, nor would he have hunted on this land, which was known among the tribes to be the Long Knife’s land, and therefore like a sacred place. Two Lives had been trading a few miles down the river, and had come up the road this morning only for one purpose, to see the Long Knife and bring him greetings from his tribe. Two Lives was anticipating this meeting with great pleasure, as he always did, because the Long Knife once, thirty-one summers ago, had spared him from the tomahawk. It was thus that Two Lives had gotten his name: this peaceful second life he lived was the life Clark had granted him to live.

  Two Lives was almost to the meadow when a shot rang out. Reflexively, he dro
pped low along the pony’s back and turned it in its tracks, listening. He had heard no ball cut through the foliage near him, and so presumed that the shot had not been fired at him. It had come from the top of the bluff, somewhere near the house of the Long Knife. Perhaps he is hunting, thought Two Lives. As he urged his pony out of the woods and onto the meadow, he heard a feeble, croaking cry. Alarmed now for his friend, he kicked the pony into a trot.

  Two Lives almost wept when he found the general on the porch. The old soldier was lying on his side, trying to reload the flintlock pistol which lay beside him on the porch floor. Wadding, ramrod, and powder horn lay scattered next to it. His face was dirty and gray and streaked by sweat. Its expression was grotesque; the right eye drooped almost shut and the right side of his mouth hung slack, with a string of saliva drooling from it. His open, wild left eye was inflamed. His right arm was limp and useless alongside his body. A whiskey jug lay on its side on the ground among the bones of the ancient animals. Two Lives jumped from his pony onto the porch and stooped to raise his friend’s head from the floor and look into his face. It was then that he saw the burned trouser leg and the remains of the boot, and the bloody, seeping left leg covered with flies and ashes and flakes of blackened skin.

  The general only now seemed to become aware that someone had arrived to help him. His bloodshot left eye searched the Indian’s face and then seemed to show a glimmer of recognition. The left corner of his mouth drew up in a lopsided smile, then he sighed and sagged, uttered some incoherent words, and went into a spasm of shuddering.

  Two Lives leaped up. He cupped his hands around his mouth and broke the stillness of the morning with an ululation that could be heard far down the valley. He fired his own musket into the air, then finished reloading the general’s pistol and discharged it. Finally hearing halloos coming from the woods below, and seeing the general’s old black man bustling up the hill, Two Lives stripped off his blanket, spread it to cover the shuddering old soldier, and found a pillow to put under his head. Then, pausing to pick up the liquor jug and throw it out of sight into a thicket, he plunged down into the woods to get roots and herbs for a burn dressing.