The Rebels: The Kent Family Chronicles (11 page)

Amused, Judson said, “For years I’ve been trying to find out where those are located. Every man places ’em differently, it seems.” He pondered a bit longer. “You know, I wouldn’t want to wish you ill—but I will admit the possibility’s intriguing.”

“Good.”

“In fact I’d be more than happy to get away from this damned place for such a purpose. Still, can you just—just wave your hand and appoint me to attend in your stead?”

“Naturally not. You’d have to be duly elected to the delegation. But there’s precedent. Richard Henry Lee saw to the election of his brother, Francis Lightfoot, when old Bland had to come home because of his infirmities. With words in the proper ears, I could swing it. I’m on good terms with Tom Jefferson of Albemarle County, for instance. He’s highly respected despite his youth—yes, I could definitely swing it. Mind you, I’m not saying it
will
become necessary. But I’d rest easier up there knowing that if this blasted gout does lay me low again, my place would be occupied by a man who’s as determined as I am to stand fast against the king and his ministers.”

For a moment Judson was tempted; exceedingly tempted. To his private shame, he nearly wished that his older brother would be incapacitated. Then reality took over. He shook his head again:

“Oh, I don’t think it would work, Donald. I have no experience in politics.”

“I realize that. Some of the other delegates are pretty short on it themselves. I want to say something else, Jud. I say it as a brother who feels affection for you. Eventually, you’re going to have to decide what you are—and where you belong. The kind of life you’re leading now—surely it brings you no real pleasure—”

“I hate it, for Christ’s sake,” Judson said savagely. “But as to what I am—that’s been settled up at the big house.”

“Then at least don’t shut out a possibility that might relieve the situation. All I want today is your pledge that I can depend on you if I need you.”

Westward, fast-flying clouds showed flickering white light. Judson watched the bleached wood of the pier dot with the first raindrops.

“All right,” he said with a wry shrug that concealed a feeling of futility. Donald had probed the painful riddle that Judson struggled with for hours on end. He knew he didn’t belong here at Sermon Hill, where his father’s disapproval and the nearness of Peggy Ashford McLean were constant torments. But just as certainly, he didn’t belong in the learned councils of the patriots in Philadelphia.

Where, then?

Where?

He stared morosely at the lightning-ridden clouds on the western horizon, confronting again the damning truth:

He was a misfit. His father hadn’t been entirely wrong when he claimed that devil’s blood ran in his son’s veins. And to make matters worse, not only did Judson not know where he belonged in the world, he didn’t know how to find out.

The closing of Donald’s fingers on his shoulder took him by surprise. The compassionate look in Donald’s tired, reddened eyes startled him, then filled him with a warmth he hadn’t experienced in—Lord, it must be years.

“Thank you,” Donald said.

“You’ve made a wretched mistake, you know,” Judson laughed with a false heartiness, helping Donald hobble back to the horses.

“Who can be sure? You might discover you have a flair for oratory and backstairs finagling. Besides, while the winters in Philadelphia are miserable, I understand the ladies are quite flirtatious.”

“You understand? Haven’t you persuaded even one to tumble into bed with you?”

Donald responded to the teasing with a grimace. “I fear these damned bandages would prove—hampering, shall we say? You, though—that’s another story. See what you have to look forward to?”

“You haven’t mentioned this to the old man, have you, Donald?”

“What would be the purpose? It’s merely a contingency.”

“Contingency or no, please do me a favor and keep it private. Otherwise I’ll be rousted to camp in the fields.”

Donald laughed. “I suspect you’re right. I’ll keep quiet.”

The first of the empty wagons was pulling away as they mounted in the pattering rain. The huge casks were somber reminders of the canoes that might never come.

One buck in the second wagon glared at them when they rode by. Wincing with pain, Donald didn’t see. Judson pretended he didn’t either.

In the second week of September, Donald Fletcher left in a coach, heartened by a letter from his friend Tom Jefferson. The letter said that, for the first time, the Congress might soon represent all thirteen separate political entities up and down the eastern seaboard. Reluctant Georgia was apparently planning to dispatch a delegation at last.

After Donald departed, Judson was also the recipient of an unexpected communication: four closely written foolscap pages dated almost eight months earlier, and wrapped inside a pouch one of the Clark boys brought to Sermon Hill. The letter was one of a packet that had been sent east by Judson’s friend George. The packet had been posted at Pittsburgh.

The Clark boy said George had informed his family that he was well and in good spirits. As a member of the Virginia frontier militia, he had scouted for the royal governor, the Earl of Dunmore, in sharp action against the “savages” late the preceding year.

Dunmore had personally gone across the mountains at the head of an expeditionary force numbering a thousand men. His purpose was to put down raiding by the Indian tribes. The raiding had been provoked by Dunmore’s own seizure of land in western Pennsylvania, and by the arrival of settlers in the country below the river with the Indian name—Ohio.

In the letter directed to Judson, George Clark wrote of a successful military engagement at a place called Point Pleasant. There, a Shawnee war chief named Cornstalk and his followers had been decisively defeated. Most of the rest of the letter concerned itself with the breathtaking beauty of the wilderness south of the Ohio.

On earlier expeditions, George Clark had looked at its dark, lush shores from a poplar canoe. But now, at last, he had set foot in Kentucky, and explored it.

The letter described strange, eerie marsh hollows where animals stole down to lick at frosty-white deposits of salt, and woodsmen marveled at bones thrusting up from the ooze. George wrote that he had personally seen time-bleached ribs as long as the roof pole of a cabin, and thigh bones thick as tree trunks:

I believe we gazed upon the remains of phenomenal Beasts which may have roamed our earth before the coming of the human kind. At least I have never heard of skeletons so immense, save in fanciful tales.

Judson’s mind couldn’t quite comprehend such a bizarre curiosity. But he knew George Clark would never invent a story merely to impress him. He actually felt a thrill of awe down his spine as he read the passage.

Kentucky, already divided into three large counties which nominally belonged to Virginia, now boasted several white settlements. In 1769, a man from the back country of North Carolina had crossed the barrier mountains to explore the territory. Subsequently, he’d led members of his family to the rich new land. The Boone clan had journeyed through the notch in the mountains called Cumberland Gap, and established a few isolated stockades.

Inhabitants of the frontier outposts lived with constant danger. The reason was simple: Kentucky had long been a hunting ground for the Creek and Cherokee tribes who ranged up from the south—and also for the more ferocious Miamis, Shawnee and Wyandots who claimed the forests north of the Ohio. In spite of the threat of Indian attacks from two directions, Clark saw the Kentucky wilderness as a promised land for men of free spirit:

Such spacious domains, my friend, have doubtless never before been viewed by Human eyes. Here is land where a man can breathe sweet, untainted air. Stroll all day through forests with branches that arch overhead like the vaults of Cathedrals. The limestone soil is fertile, and game astonishing in its abundance. Fat Turkeys of gold and purple—Buffalo grazing the canebrake which rises taller than a rider on horseback—Elk and Deer beyond counting—Paradise, notwithstanding its perils. In Kentucky a man relies solely upon Himself and a few trusted Comrades of like mind. It is here, I may say with conviction, that I have found both Beauty to entrance the Soul, and vast spaces whose exploration and defense give purpose to my Life at last.

The letter closed with a brief but sincere wish that Judson was in good health, and that George Rogers Clark might again share his experiences in person, if ever the mounting conflict with England gave him reason to return to the Virginia colony which had taken so much of the western forest in its own name.

The letter fired Judson’s imagination just as George’s two visits had done. It also filled him with a heightened loneliness, and a sense of deepening confusion. At a river-front inn, he withdrew to a corner and read the foolscap pages again and again. Rum helped paint vivid pictures of his lanky, red-haired friend striding along under those immense green arches, smoothbore over his shoulder, listening to the wild bird calls and sharing the friendship of a night campfire. The names rolled sonorously in Judson’s inner ear—

Pittsburgh.

Kentucky.

Ohio.

Shawnee.

By their very sketchiness in his own mind, the lands beyond the Blue Wall became richer and more colorful moment by moment; then day by day.

More painful to think about, too.

He took a trip to Richmond. The trip had no purpose other than to allow him to spend the better part of two days in bed with a cheerful whore who didn’t constantly whine for demonstrations of affection, the way Lottie Shaw did. On the trip he heard that George Clark had indeed acquitted himself well in the battle at Point Pleasant. His name was mentioned in the taverns along with those of other well-known frontiersmen—Kenton, Girty, Boone. Thanks to men like George, Lord Dunmore’s western war had been a success. God alone knew when Judson Fletcher would be able to say the same about his own existence.

In early November, Donald sent Judson a letter saying that grim news had arrived on a transalantic schooner recently docked at Philadelphia. In August, George III had refused to receive the petition for reconciliation, and formally proclaimed the American colonies in open rebellion. Said Donald:

Such as John Adams of Mass. Bay are jubilant. It is plain that we shall soon be past the point of possible compromise, if we are not already. I was advised of the unhappy turn of events while at rest in my quarters. The d—d gout has once again confined me, together with what one of the local croakers diagnoses as a congestion in the breathing passages, brought on by exposure to a prolonged spell of wet, foul weather.

“The vile, perfidious spawn of Satan!” Angus Fletcher cried, much too exercised to touch the hog cutlet and greens on his plate. “The wretched, deceiving miscreant!” The old man bunched his fingers and hit the polished dining table so hard the candle-glasses rattled. A spoon fell to the pegged floor.

Into his fourth or fifth glass of claret, Judson Fletcher lounged in his chair at the opposite end of the long dinner table. A nervous house black stepped forward to retrieve the spoon. He retreated when Angus glared.

Muttering private curses, the old man covered his eyes with both hands. The tall windows of the dimly lit room were open on the November dark. The evening was unusually warm; Judson’s neck cloth was undone.

“And all along I thought you and His Excellency were kindred souls,” he said.

Angus Fletcher whipped his hands down. “I need no clack from you, you damned young traitor.”

Judson smiled. “Strikes me it’s Lord Dunmore who’s the traitor to those who thought him a friend. That he’d try to recruit a loyalist army is to be expected. But promising freedom to any nigra who deserts his master to join—that’s a delightful fillip, to say the least. After Seth heard the news, he was talking like the hottest rebel.”

Livid, Angus opened his mouth to reply. He was so upset, he couldn’t say a word. Judson glanced away, momentarily ashamed of himself.

Yet he hadn’t held back, had he?

The opportunity was just too rich. In one stroke, the Tory governor had undercut the very planters who were his strongest adherents. Men like Seth McLean could switch sides quickly when their economic position was threatened. But Angus, believing both in the slave system and the authority of the king, was not so flexible. He’d been suffering ever since the surprising announcement had been circulated in the neighborhood the preceding day.

“I’d expect you to relish my discomfort,” Angus snarled at his son. “To gloat—because you’ve no brains in your head! No notion of the turmoil Dunmore may have unleashed. We put the lid on the kettle that was stewing all summer. Now the damn fool’s pulled it off again. Only Jehovah in His wisdom knows what will—”

Boots rapped on the pegged floor. Judson swung around.

Looking apologetic, Reuven Shaw stood just inside one of the tall windows. His long blacksnake whip was draped over his left shoulder and under his right armpit.

“Blast you, Shaw,” Angus said, “you’re never to interrupt my dinner and you know it.”

Shaw seemed unnaturally pale. “Yessir, I realize, but—” The overseer swallowed. “Number two curing barn’s afire.”

The room was absolutely still. Angus turned as white as Shaw:

“Afire?”

“Yessir. I been smellin’ something comin’ all day. The niggers been jumpy as hell. I got a gang working to control the fire, but—”

Angus leaped up. “The niggers set it?”

“Who else, Mr. Fletcher? Half the bucks ain’t in their cabins. Sneaked out after sunset, I reckon—”

Judson felt no further impulse to laugh. Outside, behind the overseer, a dull red glare was rising. He heard strident voices through the November darkness.

“Sneaked out!”
Angus thundered. “Don’t you have anyone watching to prevent that? Who’s your driver tonight? Why didn’t he sound the alarm?”