Bon Marche (24 page)

By now all of the children were awake, and Charles tried to reassure them. “Your mother's ill,” he told them, “but she's going to be fine. You can help by going back to your beds and by being quiet.”

They obeyed him, but the older ones sensed that something was very wrong.

The black housemaid tried to help her mistress, but she couldn't stop the hemorrhaging. An hour went by. And two. Martha slipped into unconsciousness.

“Mistah Charles,” Angelica whispered to him, “it ain't good, ain't good a'tall. Ah jest donna wha' to do 'bout these kinda things. Some ladies, they slip babies real easy like. But, other ladies—” There was no need for her to finish the thought.

Dawn came.

Martha's breathing was labored. Her face was a ghostly white. Charles sat holding her hand. Angelica was applying cool, wet cloths to her mistress's brow, knowing it would do no good, but needing to do something. The children stood a few yards off with the slaves. All were frightened.

It was only a twitch. Under other circumstances it would have gone unnoticed. But Martha's hand twitched briefly in Dewey's and then went limp.

He felt for her pulse.

There wasn't any.

Stunned, he sat for a moment or two looking into her face. Then he laid her hand on her breast and went to his children.

“God has taken your mother,” he said to them, “to be with Him. She's in heaven now, and we must believe that she's happy.”

They stared at him dumbly. Only Corrine cried, and she kept stabbing at her eyes with her fists, as if to push back the tears.

“Are we going home now?” Franklin asked.

“Home?” The question startled Dewey. “Our home, son, is still ahead of us. Your mother would want us to go on.”

The boy drew himself up tall. “Then we shall.”

“Yes, son, we shall.” Charles dropped to his knees, gathering the children into his arms. They wept together.

Horace insisted on digging the grave. It tore at Charles's heart to watch the Negro struggling to do the job with only one hand. Several times one of the other men tried to help him, but Horace swung the shovel menacingly.

“Ah'm doin' it, nigger, Ah'm doin' it! So stay the hell 'way!”

They buried Martha beside the wilderness trail with only a mound of stones to mark the place, and some wildflowers that Angelica had helped the children gather.

On the largest of the stones Charles laboriously scratched a legend with a nail:

M
ARTHA
S
TATLER
D
EWEY

1768–1796

III

T
WO
more days on the Wilderness Road forced Charles Dewey to accept reality.

He guessed that his party had moved ahead no more than five or six miles in that time. The slaves were near exhaustion from their efforts to muscle the heavy wagons forward along the nearly impenetrable trail which was thickly lined on both sides by sycamores and oaks and chestnuts, some of them six to eight feet in diameter.

Charles stopped the wagons at a point where the buffalo trace narrowed even more and the giant trees crowded in to form a natural roof over them that blotted out the sun. The Conestogas were simply too wide to pass through. There was no way around the impasse. Virgin forest was everywhere.

The left front wheel of the lead Conestoga had struck against an oak, smashing it. They carried extra wheels, but it was useless to try to put on a new one.

What folly the wagons were, Charles thought. He wished he had listened to the long-hunter.

He sat down at the edge of the trail, listening to the cacophony of the hundreds of birds crowding the treetops, gazing at the profusion of wildflowers. He marveled at the beauty of the wilderness. He cursed it, too.

Dewey let the slaves rest while the children ran in little circles, gaily playing a game of tag with Angelica among the flowers. Charles thought of their mother. It had been only forty-eight hours since they had placed that mound of stones over Martha's grave.

Forty-eight hours—an eternity!

After half an hour, he pulled himself to his feet, clapping his hands together. “Well—now we know!” he shouted. “Come, we have much work to do!”

He directed the unloading of the wagons—the four Conestogas and the two open farm wagons—making two piles of the items removed from them.

On the larger pile were chairs and beds and wardrobes and dressers: the household furniture that Martha had taken so much care in loading at Fortunata less than a month earlier. Charles would leave that pile behind, leave it to the demanding wilderness.

On the second pile were the things necessary for their survival: food, clothing, blankets, tools, guns, ammunition. It seemed a pitiably small pile.

Darkness was already overtaking them when they started dismantling the wagons, taking them apart carefully because Charles had other plans for the wood in them.

They built a large fire in the middle of the rock-hard trace so that they might continue working into the night. Only when Charles realized that all—himself included—had reached utter exhaustion did he call a halt, dropping where he stood, falling asleep within minutes. Angelica had already bedded down the children in blankets.

Only the sounds of the night birds accompanied their slumber.

IV

“J
ULY
26: Finally got under way again at noon today,” Charles wrote. “We have built a half-dozen sturdy sledges of the wood salvaged from the wagons. We loaded them with the necessary supplies and hitched them to the light draft horses—two horses to a sledge. In a very real sense, when we left the place where we abandoned the furniture we finally left Fortunata behind. But at least we move more quickly now. The party now includes myself, the five children, seven blacks, thirty horses (too many horses), one pony, and two milk cows. When—and if—we reach Bristol on the Tennessee border, I'll lighten this caravan even more. I'm determined to reach Nashville before winter.”

It was sixteen more days to Bristol, situated some five miles off the Wilderness Road.

The little frontier community—just a collection of log buildings, really—was the northern gateway to the Tennessee Valley and to the rugged mountains that could have only one name: the Great Smokies. But, to Dewey, it was just a stopping point where they could regroup. He wanted to get back on the Wilderness Road as soon as possible, heading toward the Cumberland Gap, which would take him into the northeast corner of Tennessee, on the border with Kentucky.

At Bristol, Charles made the difficult decision to trim the size of his company. Two of the drags would be eliminated by repacking the supplies. He had determined that it wasn't necessary to have two horses on each sledge; one would be enough.

The entire entourage would be mounted: four of the slaves would ride the backs of the light draft horses retained to pull the sledges. Riding horses would be used for him, the two older boys, Franklin and George, the two other male Negroes, and Angelica, who would ride “double” with the twins. Little Corrine, of course, would have her pony.

That meant Charles could sell twenty horses. After hearing of the rigors they would face in the Cumberland Gap, he also sold the milk cows at Bristol. He didn't get full value for any of the animals; indeed, what he did was trade them for extra provisions—food stuffs, mainly, but also including four additional muskets and more ammunition.

While he was there he wrote two letters, after being assured that they would be taken to a drop on the federal mail route by other travelers coming through.

One letter was to Katherine at Elkwood, telling her of Martha's death but giving only the barest of details. He told her that the children were well but gave her no information about the problems they had encountered on the road. The letter was coldly factual, with no hint of affection in the words.

The second letter was to Andrew. It was a long, rambling, one-way conversation. A catharsis.

“Andrew,” he wrote, “should I feel guilt for Martha's death? I tell myself I should; that, but for me, she would be comfortable now at Fortunata, happily awaiting the birth of her sixth child. Yet I feel no guilt. I think, as I look ahead at what still faces us, that she might be the most fortunate of us all.”

Charles paused in his writing, to run a hand across his tired eyes. “My friend, I wish you could be here at this moment to talk to me, to counsel me, to explain for me the little madness that afflicts me now when I think of Martha. I have discovered—and I worry about my discovery—that I miss her not so much as a companion in my life, but because of the satisfaction she gave me as a loving bed partner. I realize that of all of the dreaming I've done about a new life in the West, Martha was not in those dreams. A woman was. But a strong woman. One of ambition. Another woman—not Martha.

“She was so sweet, Andrew, so eager to please me. And that I miss. But it comes running through my troubled mind that the Martha of Fortunata would not have been the companion I'll need on the frontier. Martha was pliant, not strong. And then I think that I'm the worst kind of cad to allow myself to make that kind of an evaluation of a wonderful woman—the mother of my children. It troubles me greatly, my friend.”

He added a final thought: “I force myself to think of her. I want for me to cry for her. But I don't weep. Am I rational, Andrew? Or is this really madness?”

18

“A
UGUST
16: Forded the upper reaches of the Tennessee River today,” Charles wrote in his journal. “My map shows that we might reach Nashville by following the Tennessee, but there is a much more direct route by going through the Cumberland Gap and eventually linking up with the Cumberland River. That's my preference.”

Five days later they reached the Cumberland Gap, through which the storied Boone had guided so many travelers.

Like the Wilderness Road, the Cumberland Gap was misnamed. It was a natural path cutting through the mountains, but no more than that. Less than that, in truth. Charles stopped his party to study the huge rocks they'd have to climb over, just as Boone's people must have done.

Dewey groaned. “We're never going to get the sledges over those rocks,” he said to the slaves. “We'll have to make some slings from the linen covers we salvaged from the Conestogas, and load up the horses with supplies that way.”

Three hours were spent in making the transition from the sledges to the slings, but there was still enough daylight to make it through the gap. He directed Angelica and Horace to lead the children through the rocks on foot.

“Take the easiest way,” he said. “And carefully—make sure no one falls.”

“I'm going to lead my pony,” Corrine told him confidently.

“That's fine, dear.” He gave his daughter a hug. “But keep a long lead on him. Don't pull at him. Let him find his own footing.”

Angelica, Horace, and the children started through the gigantic rocks first. Charles and the five other slaves, each leading a pack horse, followed some hundred yards behind.

They were nearly halfway through the rocks when a scream echoed off the sides of the mountains.
Corrine!
Dewey tossed his lead rope to one of the blacks. Half scrambling, half falling, he made his way to his children. He was able to breathe again when he saw all five of them standing with Angelica and Horace.

Corrine, though, was shrieking. “Daddy! Daddy! My pony!”

The animal had slipped on the rocks, tumbling some thirty feet into a crevasse. When Charles got there he found the pony on his back, wedged tightly between two boulders, its legs thrashing in panic, its pained cries assaulting the ears. It took no knowledge of horses to make out that both forelegs had been broken in the fall.

Dewey went to his knees, cradling his tiny, distraught daughter in his arms.

“Baby, baby,” he cooed to her, rocking her gently back and forth. “Corrine, darling, we don't always know why bad things happen. But they do sometimes, and we must be brave.”

His words sounded so empty to him.

“The pony, baby, is badly hurt. He's in terrible pain.” He paused, sighing deeply. “I'm going to have to end that pain for him.”

He gestured to Angelica, who took the girl from him and led her away. Horace herded the other children after them.

Charles called for one of the Negroes to bring him a musket. The sound of the shot reverberated through the virgin mountains, bouncing back and forth, seeming never to stop.

“August 21: Poor Corrine,” Dewey wrote. “How can I expect her to understand the sacrifices she has been asked to endure? First her mother. And now her beloved pony. I can only hope that a Benevolent Being gives her courage to go on. My God, she's only six years old! Did I do wrong in bringing the children on this sad adventure?”

That night Dewey took a blanket and bedded down away from the rest of the party. He had a need to be alone. The embers of the campfire were mere red dots in the wilderness as he lay on his back, his hands behind his head, gazing up through the openings in the branches to catch glimpses of the nearly full moon.

He must have dozed for a time, because he came awake with someone whispering to him.

“Mistah Charles—”

It was Angelica's voice.

He sat up quickly. “The children? Is something wrong?”

“No, suh. They's sleepin'. Ah'm sorry if Ah scared ya.” Uninvited, she sat down beside him. “Ah jest thought mebbe ya was lonely.”

“Lonely? Yes, I suppose I am.”

The black woman reached out and took his hand. “Miss Martha, she love ya very much.”

He didn't say anything. He didn't pull his hand away, either. Her touch was comforting.

“Sometimes a man he gits so lonesome it pains 'im.”

“Yes.”

Angelica gathered him into her arms, cradling him against her ample breasts as she would a child, as she had done with his children.