Remember the Morning (49 page)

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Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: Remember the Morning
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“Nothing-But-Flowers,” she said. “Wake up. You have a visitor. Your friend She-Is-Alert has journeyed all the way from New York. She has her two sons with her.”
Clara flung aside her deerskin robe and rushed into the street. There I stood, escorted by Guert Cuyler and Peter Van Ness. In my arms was Paul, who kicked and squirmed until I lowered him to the ground. His
brother Hugh seized him by the arm and stopped him from careening into a nearby cooking fire.
“Hello, Clara,” I said.
She kissed me and Hugh and little Paul. She seemed enormously pleased to see us. There was not a scintilla of a sign of regret or embarrassment. On our long journey up the Mohawk to Oswego and down Lake Ontario to the village, I had wrestled with my Moon Woman self. A hundred times I had vowed I did not care if Clara and Malcolm had become lovers again. I wanted to preserve that moment on the night of Clara's rescue when Malcolm and I had discovered love in our souls, thanks to our mutual love for Clara. I vowed I would not desecrate that moment with envy and recrimination.
“I've come with wonderful news,” I said. “The governor of New York has pardoned you and Malcolm. You can come home.”
Clara's heart soared. The Manitou had answered her prayers at last. Malcolm could not turn his back on his wife and sons. He would return home with them—and she and her mother would regain control of the Senecas and cool their war fever.
“We have other news that's not so wonderful,” Guert Cuyler said. “The war with the French has begun.”
“Where—how?” Clara asked, horrified.
“In Virginia. A colonel of their militia named George Washington and about four hundred men were on their way to the forks of the Ohio to stop the French from building a fort there. They were attacked in the woods by a party of French and Indians. There were a good many killed and wounded on both sides.”
Her Seneca mother's dream leaped like a panther in Clara's mind. Tears poured down her cheeks. “Is there no place on earth where I can find peace?” she cried.
“
I
T WAS A ROUT. AN UTTER total rout,” Malcolm said, his voice a croak, his eyes blank with exhaustion.
He was telling me about the latest fiasco in the war with France—the brainless frontal assault on the French fort at the carrying place between
Lake George and the Lake of the Sacrament.
58
Almost two thousand British soldiers had been killed or wounded. The British general, James Abercromby, had never come within five miles of the battlefield. Malcolm and his American rangers had been attacked in the woods by hundreds of Canadian Indians, inflamed by the French victory. Scarcely one man in five had survived.
He was back at Great Rock Farm from another campaign in this pitiless struggle with France. Year after year, the war had been a series of sickening defeats, beginning with the slaughter of two British regiments in western Pennsylvania and a thousand Americans who marched with them, confident of victory. In the north, along the border with Canada, it had been more of the same. Oswego fell with a crash that shook New York to its foundations. The French ruled the lakes and rivers to within a few miles of Albany.
In the valleys of the Mohawk and the Susquehanna and even in the northern hills of New Jersey, Indian war parties from Frontenac and Fort Niagara swept down to burn and loot and scalp. Another holocaust sprang from the fort at the forks of the Ohio, with Shawnees and other western tribes spreading torture and destruction across western Pennsylvania and Maryland and Virginia. People died within sixty miles of Philadelphia.
The ineptitude, the corruption, of the British government under the dithering heir of Walpole, the Duke of Newcastle, was unbelievable.
59
Their favoritism-ridden army, led by generals and colonels without talent or brains, was soon a continental-length joke. Malcolm Stapleton was one of many Americans who decided the colonies would have to rescue themselves. At a congress in Albany, he supported men such as Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania and Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island who argued urgently for an American confederation—in vain. The British opposed it because it smacked of independence and there was too much jealousy and suspicion between the thirteen very different, often quarreling provinces. They could not even agree on whom to deputize to negotiate a new alliance with the Iroquois.
As a result, the sachems of the Six Nations went home from Albany disgusted and Malcolm's dream of a Seneca spearhead, backed by the full weight of the Iroquois confederation, splintered into disillusion and demoralization. When Oswego fell, many Iroquois decided the French were sure winners and abandoned all pretense of neutrality. The French soon had emissaries in the Seneca villages along Lake Ontario, offering gifts of
guns and gunpowder and luring the young warriors south with promises of plunder against the inept, treacherous English.
The few villages that followed Malcolm's leadership and tried to remain neutral while waiting for renewed negotiations for an alliance with England were threatened with destruction. Last year, to prove their grim intentions, the French and their Canadian Indian allies attacked Shining Creek with an overwhelming force. Malcolm and his comparative handful of warriors were compelled to flee into the woods with the women and children, leaving behind many old and infirm people. The attackers torched the village and laid waste the cornfields and fruit orchards, reducing the survivors to pathetic refugees, begging for food and shelter among the Mohawks, the Oneidas, and other tribes of the Six Nations. Only the Mohawks, whose country was closest to the Americans and who remained sympathetic to King George's subjects, showed them some mercy.
Each year, Malcolm spent all but the worst months of the winter in the northern woods, either fighting or planning the war. He helped build and garrison a series of forts along New Jersey's northern border. He conferred repeatedly with the governors of New Jersey and New York on how to raise men, how to coordinate some sort of defense with New England's contentious Yankees. Our sons were growing to manhood with a stranger for a father, a visitor who appeared and vanished like a creature in a myth, who was better known in the newspapers than he was in the flesh.
I was not much better as a parent. The flood of British troops into New York produced a fantastic prosperity among the farmers of New Jersey, who sold their wheat and rye and sheep and bullocks at vastly inflated prices. This meant the
vrouws
of Bergen County had unprecedented amounts of money to spend at the new Universal Store in Hackensack. I had long since paid off my loan from Arent Schuyler and my debt to Robert Foster Nicolls—and sent Jamey Stapleton his half share of the value of Great Rock Farm. I used the rest of my surplus cash to outfit a privateer. Guert Cuyler had taken command of it and was soon on his way to piling up prize money from a string of spectacular captures. I used my share of the profits to open a forge in New Jersey's northern hills, which was soon producing a ton of iron a month. The stuff sold for fantastic profits in London, where the war-driven demand for metal was voracious.
But these business triumphs seemed hollow, the cash overflowing my account books meant little, while the war raged on. More and more, I began to think it was Clara for whom Malcolm was fighting, not his wife and children, comfortable and safe in New Jersey. I began to suspect he secretly hoped for death in some forest ambuscade to prove to himself
and Clara that it was she and she alone that he loved. Again and again I reproached myself for this egotistical view of a war between two great empires. I said nothing to Malcolm. Each year, I struggled to welcome him as a wife, to be grateful for the few months he spent with me.
This year, Malcolm had barely recovered from his exhaustion and melancholy when he announced he was planning to leave for the frontier once more. I lost what little self-control I had left. “I can't stand the thought of you going back to Clara,” I sobbed. “I've tried to accept it but—”
“How many times do I have to tell you—she won't let me touch her,” Malcolm said.
“Whether that's true or not, you go back there for her sake. You want to die for her sake—instead of living for my sake—for your sons' sakes.”
“I'm going back to help Clara's people. Your people. They're refugees. Maybe with some help from the British we can get them back to Shining Creek.”
We were in our bedroom at Great Rock Farm—the room in which we performed the ritual of married love with a dogged persistence that was a tribute to nothing but my need for him and his guilty wish to love me in spite of Clara. I knew he had become Clara's lover again. But how could I reproach him when I had deceived him about Philip Hooft? I even recognized the tormented love for me that prompted Malcolm to lacerate his conscience and lie about Clara so stubbornly.
“I'm sorry. I'm a fool. It's easy to see why you don't love me,” I wailed.
Malcolm seized me by the shoulders. “Don't love you? If I didn't love you, I wouldn't lie with you in that bed. I love you as a wife, as loyal a wife as any man has on this continent. I know your crosspatches. I know I've put some of them there and God or destiny or the Evil Brother has put others. But they don't diminish the love I have for you.”
It was useless. He was talking to the mirror across the room, desperately trying to convince himself that he was telling the truth. While waiting for him beyond Albany was the woman who exalted his soul. I let him have the benefit of my perpetual doubts—and kissed him good-bye with tearful fervor.
At Albany, where the British army was camped for the winter, Malcolm discovered a modicum of hope. Chagrined by repeated defeats, the British Parliament had ousted the Duke of Newcastle and installed a new prime minister, William Pitt, who had in turn sent new generals to America. One of them was Malcolm's friend James Wolfe, finally promoted after years of neglect. Malcolm thought he detected a new spirit of patriotism replacing the quarrelsome self-interest that had prevailed in the royal army—along with an obnoxious anti-Americanism. Pitt had a new
slogan, which he had given his generals to pass on to the army: “In America, England and Europe are to be fought for.” He saw, with a prescience few other Britons possessed, that the control of this vast continent was the key to world power in the future.
Malcolm soon located William Johnson, the Irishman who had first rented and then bought our Mohawk River lands. Johnson had a letter from Clara, whom he had met at Onaquaqu, the Indian town on the Susquehannah, where the Irishman kept a store. The letter told Malcolm she had gone north to the Seneca country. Her mother had died and she had become matron of the Bear Clan. Johnson had told her about the all-out military effort the British were about to make. With the French on the defensive, she hoped to reconstitute their village on Shining Creek. She begged Malcolm to bring seeds for a corn crop and for apple and pear and peach trees. The men needed gunpowder and bullets, the women blankets and warm wool cloth against next winter's snows.
Malcolm asked Johnson, who had become superintendent of Indian affairs, to issue these supplies as gifts from the British government. At first Johnson demurred at giving presents to the Senecas. Too many of them had joined the French in previous campaigns. But Malcolm described the price Clara's people had paid for their loyalty and persuaded him to relent.
As the supplies were being packed and loaded on horses, Johnson asked Malcolm if he was interested in leading an expedition into the heart of Canada to cripple France's Indian allies. The target was a large Indian town on the St. Francis River, not far from Montreal. From there had come many devastating war parties. General Jeffrey Amherst, the new British commander, wanted to strike a blow that would warn Canada's Indians that they could not slaughter Americans with impunity.
“I told Amherst you were the perfect man to lead a raid like that,” Johnson said. “He wants an answer from you the day before yesterday. Time is at a premium. Any day your friend General Wolfe will arrive by sea with an army to attack Quebec and Amherst wants to draw as many French and Indians as possible out of his way.”
How could Malcolm say no? Especially when he learned that his brother Jamey's regiment was in Wolfe's army. It was the sort of mission that stirred the recklessness in his soldier's soul. Best of all, he would take the warriors from Shining Creek with him for the assault. They would be ideal scouts for his force of rangers—and their good conduct would resolve Johnson's doubts about the Senecas, making them candidates for more generous present-giving.
Within an hour, Johnson was introducing him to General Amherst. At the general's side was a familiar, if unexpected, face—Robert Foster Nicolls.
Thanks to his father's political pull and his own familiarity with America, Robert had become Amherst's commissary, in charge of feeding his huge army. William Johnson enviously muttered to Malcolm that Nicolls was making a fortune at the job. He got eight percent of all the money he spent.
Nicolls heartily seconded Johnson's recommendation of Malcolm. “I've seen him attack Indians unarmed and chase them into the woods,” he said, recalling the fateful morning Clara and I had met him and Malcolm.
General Amherst was impressed by Malcolm's promise to recruit fifty Senecas. No one in the English or the American wing of the British army had been able to persuade more than a handful of Indians to serve with them. A handshake sealed the bargain. Malcolm would deliver the Senecas and General Amherst would find the volunteers in a month's time.
Malcolm journeyed to Shining Creek with the gifts of seeds and goods and found her presiding over a new longhouse with the symbol of the Bear Clan over the door. The other clans had also built new longhouses; most of the warriors, their wives, and children had returned. Clara greeted Malcolm gratefully. The bags of seeds, the bundles of blankets, and barrels of salt meat and gunpowder on the packhorses he had hired from William Johnson were proof that he still cared about her and her people.
But Clara's gratitude dwindled when Malcolm assembled the warriors and told them about the expedition to Canada. Once more his oratory mesmerized them. Here was a chance for revenge against their ancient enemies, who had burned their village and caused the deaths of many of their grandparents and parents. Clara was even more dismayed when she studied Malcolm's route into Canada on his map. They would have to pass no less than four French forts. They might manage this with reasonable stealth on their way to the attack—but once the assault became known, the exit route would be patrolled by French troops and Indian allies hungry for vengeance.
“You're leading these men to almost certain death!”she told Malcolm.
He stiffly disagreed. It was no more dangerous than any other war party. They would have the advantage of surprise. It was an opportunity for Americans—he was sure most of his volunteers would be Americans—to distinguish themselves in a war where the British regulars were now doing most of the fighting. “This is our kind of warfare, Clara, one the British can't fight,” he said. “They can't go anywhere without artillery, supply wagons, all the abracadabra of a regular army.”
He was still trying to create an American presence, an American consciousness. But he stubbornly refused to see that it was irrelevant as far as the Indians were concerned. The war was a quarrel between white men. “What does it have to do with us?” Clara said. “We only want to
live in peace, to grow our corn and hunt our game on our ancestral lands.”

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