Eagle's Cry

by David Nevin

  Captain Mac used the time to square away his vessel, scrubbing decks and fo’c’sle of salt accumulated in a rough passage from the Chesapeake, savage water off Cape Hatteras and the tail of a hurricane in the Straits of Florida. Men deftly spliced new lines to repair frayed rigging. Spars were scraped and varnished, brightwork polished. One by one sails were laid on the deck and scrubbed, hosed down with river water from a two-man pump and hoisted to dry, snowy in the sun.

  Carl had always said that Capt. William McKeever was a sound man who ran a taut ship and could be counted on to carry a cargo to Le Havre, negotiate a price, find a return cargo, and come in on time. Faced with the reality of running a shipping company alone, mistress of a dozen ships crewed by men who ranged from rough to dangerous, she had turned first to McKeever.

  Shaking aside terrible memories—she thought she would never again go to the rotunda with its awful echoes—she had dressed in widow’s black and set out. Samuel had driven her to the quay in the Eastern Branch where the Cumberland Queen was moored in the shadow of the massive frigates at the Washington Navy Yard. She knew the vessel well, but now it seemed different and almost threatening. It was a merchantman riding high in the water with its cargo discharged, a brig square rigged with two towering masts and slender three-pound guns fore and aft to ward off bumboat attack. McKeever was a stout man of about fifty, sandy hair giving way to a bald spot, blond hair matted on his arms, with a tiny wife named Molly who sailed with him on every trip.

  He set out a small table on the quarterdeck near the highly varnished wheel, while Molly McKeever offered thick Turkish coffee in tiny cups that Danny understood was a welcoming ceremony. She sipped cautiously, admired the care he’d given the ship, and told him that Carl had left the company to her and she intended to run it. At that Mrs. Mac, as she said she liked to be called, sat up straight and gave Danny a dazzling smile of approval.

  Captain Mac nodded. “We figured so, and I don’t see why you can’t do good. Carl thought you was right smart—you could tell that.” That Carl had made his feelings so evident surprised her, but she said nothing as he continued, “So, yes, ma’am, I’ll be right honored to sail under your orders. Carl always treated me good; you do the same and we’ll get on fine.”

  The other captains were different. Obviously the very idea of working under a woman’s direct orders disturbed them. Three flatly refused, one with a string of obscenities. She sent McKeever with his first mate and a couple of ordinaries to make sure this one didn’t fire the ship as he left. She found she could rely on Captain Mac and decided to make him a 10 percent owner of the Queen, a share that could rise in time.

  “Oh, Miz Mobry,” he cried, “that’s mighty fine of you. Maybe we better see how we get on.”

  “We’ll draw the papers now to take effect in six months if all goes well.”

  The real difficulty was with the shippers on whom she must depend for cargoes. Many were friends and she knew others as customers, but one by one they refused to do business with her. They were full of condolences for Carl, and they urged her to sell and settle down to comfortable widowhood. She rejected four offers to buy the firm, two of them decent. As to placing cargoes with her, they really didn’t think a woman alone could run such a company. They said it would all fly apart, crews would dissolve, cargoes would be stolen, in a year there would be nothing left. The losses they could suffer if she collapsed and their cargoes disappeared could put them in debtor’s prison.

  She felt she’d climbed the stairs over every wharf in Washington and a good many in Baltimore; it got so it took all her courage and nerve to walk up, all her strength to come down after another refusal with her shoulders squared and her chin high. Some were hostile because they felt running ships wasn’t a woman’s place, but most were just plain worried. Many said that if she lasted a year, then maybe …

  A year was forever. She sat alone in the big house with its view of the Capitol and knew she was at the crisis point of her life. Selling the ships, the warehouses, all that Carl had built in thirty years seemed like killing his memory, which was all she had left. Darkness came; the building glowed in violet twilight. Tears started and she checked them. For a moment she had an overpowering desire to open the rum that Carl had liked and drink and cry, but she didn’t move and the yearning passed. The building loomed in the window, now bathed in moonlight.

  Gradually her sense of the Capitol changed. The image of echoing voices in the rotunda as her husband died in her arms faded toward a new perception. For this building also was a tower of bravery, crowning a hill that just the other day had been a cornfield, anchoring a city that hadn’t existed, focusing a nation cradled in revolution and nurtured on dreams, all of it testament to courage and faith and conviction. In the shadow of such a totem, could she be less?

  Sometime before the moon’s gleam passed from the looming dome, a plan came to her. If she could find just the right customer, someone entirely new …

  Doing so took two months of calculating, arranging, planning and proposing, including a trip by stage to Boston and back that ate up agonizing days. On her return she sold three ships for capital and loaded the Cumberland Queen with finished goods likely to find a market in New Orleans; hardware, notions, luxuries, French wines, satins and silks. Then, making sure Mrs. Mac was aboard and taking Millie and Samuel with her, she set out for the one place in the world where she had blood connections.

  She remembered her uncle with awe. She’d been a girl when Carl snatched her away and Daniel Clark, for whom she’d been named, was a businessman of great weight. He was a master at dealing with the Spanish overlords who of ten made trouble for shipments from the north but for whom his trade nevertheless was a chief source of income in a province that never paid its own way to the Spanish crown.

  But he hadn’t achieved such eminence by being soft, and she sensed that blood ran as thin as did friendship in matters of business. He had succeeded the original Daniel Clark, founder of the business, and she remembered mainly his austerity and the firmness with which he had eliminated Ireland from his accent. Now, older herself, she could see that a certain harshness of manner probably was essential to a successor taking control, but it had become his persona. So would he be moved to help her? As factor for upriver clients, he had plenty of cargoes to place, but would he risk losses for which owners would blame him? Unlikely, she thought. But she had something to offer.

  Overnight the wind shifted. Chanting sailors on the windlass hoisted the anchor as sails bellied. They made English Turn in three tacks and late that afternoon moored to the levee at New Orleans. The turrets of the cathedral were visible over the top of the levee, bearing a startling force of memory. She sent a message to her uncle: She was here with urgent business; could he see her tonight?

  She sat in a folding chair on the quarterdeck watching the evening sun give a golden cast to the levee and the figures along its crest and the fishermen unloading their catches on narrow wharves lying lengthwise. Someone was cleaning fish, hurling offal into the river, where it was snatched by gulls and seabirds that fought for dangling prizes in midair. The distinctive odor of alligator musk swept over the water from the swamps beyond. It had been years since she’d been here, but the familiarity of it all brought tears to her eyes. But even wiping her eyes, she knew that this wasn’t home; her mother and father were dead and she’d never been close to her older brother, who had taken their small plantation and would not welcome her. Home was the new capital of the United States.

  Presently she saw a tall, slender man wearing a planter’s hat and a coat of rakish cut come down the levee steps, moving rapidly with an easy grace. He mounted their gangway and tossed a salute to Captain Mac.

  “Splendid-looking vessel, Captain! You bring honor to our port.” His voice was clear and bright; it flashed through her mind that he probably could sing. “Madame Mobry is here?”

  Captain Mac led him up to the quarterdeck.

  “Daniella!” he cried. “How
wonderful to see you!”

  She was startled. “Do I know you?”

  “Ah!” He laughed, a quick bark. “What a blow to masculine pride! You don’t remember me, and I was sick with love for you. But that’s the way of all tragedy, you know, the fate of the ardent lover to be cast aside on life’s cruel dust heaps. I’m Henri Broussard.”

  “Henri?” Dimly she remembered, a tall, skinny boy with dreadful pimples who’d been a pest, often near, rarely speaking. “But—but you were just a child.”

  “A child! Madame, forgive me, I am two years your senior.”

  “You couldn’t be! I was sixteen when—”

  “I know too well. When Mr. Mobry swept you away to the United States, which I have detested on principle ever since. I was eighteen.” He struck a gallant pose. “And passion never beats more fiercely in a man’s heart than at eighteen.”

  When she didn’t answer, he said quickly, “Forgive my chatter. I am commissioned to present you at Uncle Daniel’s house at nine. It’s only seven; I suggest we stroll in the twilight and reacquaint you with what once was your home.”

  They climbed the steps to the top of the levee, which was a promenade, wide and paved with crushed shell, orange trees in orderly rows. Couples strolled and vendors offered small glasses of lemonade and little cakes arranged fetchingly on sheets, some with languid fan overhead to drive off flies. Broussard led her along the pathway, bowing occasionally to acquaintances but not introducing her. He continued to expound on the passion he had felt for her long ago until she grew exasperated.

  “Really, Henri, don’t you see I’m in mourning?”

  “Forgive me, Daniella,” he said. “It is a joy to see you, but I do understand grief.”

  He said this with such feeling that she glanced up quickly, wondering if he was playing with her, but he looked quite guileless. He also looked quite startlingly handsome, his face lean, his profile dramatic. She glanced down quickly, feeling disoriented and somehow inappropriate, and immediately noticed the strength of his wrist, held before him to accommodate her arm through his. It was thick and powerful; she thought he could break things with his hands, and she noticed curls of dark hair lying against his knuckles. She was shaken in some way that she couldn’t have imagined and didn’t like. She looked away from him, drinking in the familiar look of what had been home and was—definitely—home no longer.

  The cathedral bells were tolling for evening worship, the windows of the Cabildo were dark, government foolscap put away and workers fled. Presently they came to the market on the levee, tables under awnings loaded with fresh fish, vegetables, cuts of beef and pork; hawkers sold cups of gumbo, braised meats on sticks, bottled beer cooling in tubs of water, rum in what looked like pewter thimbles …

  Just short of the market Henri turned down the levee and they were in the great square, with more people hurrying toward the cathedral doors that now were closing. Others strolled, laughing, men holding women close, women looking up with promise in their eyes, boys skipping and yelling and sword fighting with sticks. There seemed music everywhere, drifting on night air, fifes and fiddles and banjoes and here and there a mouth organ, plaintive and sad. Couples danced impromptu little turns to this music, rolling right into the dance and back out on walks made of crushed oyster shell, tossing coins to the players. The rhythm of it, the laughter, the careless abandon of the flow into the dance to emerge rejuvenated, invaded Danny’s mood for a moment, and she too wanted to dance and then remembered and then feared Henri would forget and turn to her. But he walked on and she walked beside him, as calmly as if her heart weren’t churning. How many times in her girlhood she had strolled here, noticing every hot-eyed glance from almost every man and boy she passed and acknowledging none, until Carl had swept her away to a new life.

  New Orleans throbbed like a great city; she thought it more lively than Philadelphia though with eight to ten thousand people it was scarcely a sixth of that city’s size. Maybe it played a city’s role to the hilt because there was no other for a thousand miles in any direction. It was civilization’s outpost deep in a swampy wilderness.

  It was dark now, but Henri said there was ample time and steered her into a limonadier’s shop for a glass of the sweettart drink that nauseated her as if in reaction to the gaiety. And then she realized it was because this was an interlude of play before the business on which everything depended.

  Henri said that his mother was Daniel Clark’s second cousin and so his use of uncle for Mr. Clark was a title of courtesy. Hence he and Danny were scarcely related, which seemed to please him and, oddly, pleased her too. He went on recalling the sunny days of youth, and to break from too personal a turn she asked him, what, then, had he never married?

  “Oh, yes,” he said, and to her surprise and mortification, she felt disappointed. He gave her an appraising glance—Was she so evident?—and continued, “Do you remember Madeleine Bercy? Very beautiful, hair like spun gold?”

  Danny was suddenly conscious of her own dark curls. She nodded, growing angry with herself.

  “Two lovely little boys, now five and six,” he said. “I am raising them.”

  “You make that sound—”

  “Madeleine died. Yellow fever, four years ago.”

  “Oh, Henri, I’m so sorry.”

  “As I am for your loss. We understand each other.”

  It passed through her mind that she wasn’t entirely sorry for his loss, nor was he for hers. And that was most disconcerting of all, and she stood abruptly and said they should go. They walked on, past taverns and dance halls and a sign announcing a Quadroon Ball and the opera house where Sylvain by André Grétry was playing and neither spoke again.

  Samuel and Millie Clark stood on the forepeak of the Queen, watching Miss Danny cross the levee with the handsome man and disappear. They were anxiously awaiting their own family. Samuel’s brother, Joshua, and Milly’s sister, Junie, who had married and now had two children. Miss Danny had sent a message to the family plantation asking her brother to give the couple a pass to town. It was too dangerous for Samuel and Millie to leave the ship; manumission papers in English wouldn’t count for much in New Orleans.

  Then Samuel spied his brother atop the levee, face achingly familiar but heavier, stronger, older. The difference startled him, and then watching the now thickset figure coming down the levee he saw that his little brother had grown up and looked to be a man it would be dangerous to cross. Junie, no bigger than Millie, was behind him, apron not hiding her swollen belly, her bonnet cast back on her neck.

  They weren’t entirely severed. Millie had taught Junie to read and write and she had taught Joshua, and every year or two a smuggled letter got through. But they needed a wealth of catching up and in the babel of words it struck Samuel as pure joy to hear the guttural French patois from the plantation. It made him see how long he’d been away and how far he’d gone and it made Maine a distant chimera, the patois and the smells of the river and the sounds of music and laughter from across the levee the reality.

  Even as these impressions registered, his brother drew him aside with startling urgency. He caught a glimpse of Junie looking near tears and then Joshua whispered in a tense voice, “You heard about Santo Domingo?”

  He was surprised. Of course it was wonderful news—black men rising, forcing whites to yield, slaves no more—but then he heard his brother’s hoarse whisper. “I’m going there, Samuel. Going to fight for my people.”

  “I thought they won the fight,” Samuel said. He felt stupid and disoriented.

  Joshua looked around, being sure they weren’t overheard. “French’ll be back. You don’t think white men will roll over for black men, do you? But we’ll whip them again when they come. Toussaint, he’ll never give up. He’s the greatest man in the world. And he needs my help.”

  Samuel had his wits back. “You got two little babies, and Junie looks like she got another one coming.” Joshua nodded. “They the ones need your help, brother.”


  But no, Joshua intended to live free and get them free too in time, and any sacrifice, for him and for them, even up to death itself, was worth it to live free. He would steal a pirogue and run through the swamps where no white man could keep up with him, and he’d fetch up in Barataria Bay and get on one of Jean Lafitte’s ships. In Barataria they don’t worry about a man’s color.

  “Pirates,” Samuel said.

  “What’s the difference? They prey on white folks, and white folks prey on us.” He said the freebooters call regularly at Santo Domingo to fill their water butts.

  “You’re crazy, Joshua. You’ll get caught, you’ll hang.”

  “Nah! You should come with me. Where else a black man really free?”

  “I’m free now,” Samuel said, but he knew his brother had heard the hesitation in his voice.

  “Is that so? You walk around free as a bird; don’t doff your hat to nobody? That ain’t what I hear.”

  “Well,” he said, thinking of the streets of Washington, “a black man has to mind his manners, that’s so …”

  When they left, Millie was sputtering with indignation. “He’s crazy—leaving his family, sure to get killed. Junie about to lose her mind; figures he’s already lost his.”

  Samuel agreed, but still he understood his brother’s yearning. Santo Domingo … imagine black men rising and driving the oppressors into the sea. Made him hunger to be part of it too. He didn’t say as much to Millie, but he understood his brother all right … .

  It was all so familiar, Daniel Clark’s home, the iron-studded oak door swinging open, the bowing black face, the interior garden with its pool and its fat goldfish, the ballroom-sized gallery straight ahead. For a moment Danny was swept back across the years, but then Henri turned her to the right and she found herself in a small study she’d never seen before. Her uncle came through a door and embraced her. He was slender with aquiline face and hard eyes. A small gold ring in his right ear made him seem a corsair. But she dismissed the thought. He kissed both her cheeks, murmured condolences, led her to a chair and pressed a glass of champagne into her hand, but she sensed his wariness. This was just what she had expected, and its effect was to firm her mood and collect her thoughts.