Eagle's Cry

by David Nevin

  Two riders in the distance. She watched them, remembering how in the old days Ma would be reaching for the rifle standing ready inside the door. As they grew closer she saw one was Jack Coffee. Jack was good; he steadied Andrew somehow. More and more she feared that her husband’s fierceness in the face of scandal would lead him into terrible trouble someday. Sometimes she thought his need to defy was as strong as her own need to anchor to him. It was all so confusing!

  Andrew came out and Jack presented the stranger as Nathan Fosby, from over in Sumner County, Sam’l Fosby’s son.

  “I thought his son had run off,” Andrew said.

  “Yes, sir,” the stranger said, “But I’m back now and got it fixed up with Pa, and he told me I’d better get on over here, you’d be the right man to hear about it. See, the French—”

  Oh, the French, my goodness, rumors like crazy but no one really knew. She went to tell Hannah they’d have guests, shifted tea kettle from hob to grate, and stirred the fire. She was slicing a cake made that morning when she heard the young man say, “General, they really are coming—”

  “Hold up, there,” Andrew said. “I’m not a general.”

  “Pa says you’re going to run for the militia command, and he’s bet a hundred dollars you’ll win.”

  Andrew laughed. “He’s a good man, your father. But I haven’t been elected yet. Judge will do for now.”

  The militia … her mind wandered. He was thinking hard on the election but General Sevier, he’d already said he wanted the post for himself. The old military hero acted like it was his due, and he wouldn’t lose easily. There’d be trouble and here was Andrew already on a hair trigger.

  Then she heard Mr. Fosby say, “French army’s coming and I believe we gotta get ready for them.”

  Andrew had that steely look. “Rumors,” he said.

  “No, sir! This ain’t no rumor. See, I just come from Santo Domingo and—”

  “All right,” Andrew said. “Start at the start.”

  So this Mr. Fosby told a strange and terrible story. She forgot all about coffee and cake and drew up to listen. He’d crossed his daddy and gone flatboating down the river, and at New Orleans he’d shipped on a schooner that went tramp trading through the Gulf. Till he shipwrecked on a reef off Santo Domingo and tried to swim for it, and both his legs was broke when waves threw him agin rocks. He was drowning when a black man and his son pulled him out and took him home and—well, here was the strange part, gave her an odd feeling but she knew a lot about love and Mr. Fosby’s face was full of honest love—

  The black man’s daughter nursed him to health, and they fell in love and her father said they could marry. Her name was Marie and she was beautiful, and again Rachel felt that jolt of surprise. She knew black girls could be beautiful, but she didn’t think of them that way. Mr. Fosby had learned some French by then and they stood up in the little village church with frangipani and bougainvillea in bloom, the comfortable sound of rectory hogs snuffling around outside the door, chickens pecking and cackling, and the parish priest had married them, all legitimate if you could call anything papist legitimate. Drumming and dancing went on all night, which sounded mighty pagan to her, though you could see how he loved this woman and how kindly her family was, and maybe it didn’t make any difference at all that they were black folks—

  But then the French army came back, twenty-five thousand strong, column after column of soldiers filing off the ships with slung muskets and grenades, winches swinging cannon ashore.

  “Under a big general, name of Leclerc.”

  She saw Andrew’s eyes widen at that. “Leclerc, eh?” he said. But she was struggling just to keep up. She knew blacks had revolted in Haiti and it seemed Haiti and Santo Domingo were one island. There’d been some fighting, but things had settled down with a black leader, Toos-ant his name sounded like, and as far as the people could tell the French accepted him all right.

  She was caught up in the story, found she was holding her breath, and consciously expelled it. Everything changed when the army came, the people restless, voices high, eyes shifting, nerves showing. Soldiers began arresting men, working from lists. Toos-ant wore his French uniform and tried to put himself between the soldiers and the people, but the old fear and hatred of whites was surfacing and strangers in Mr. Fosby’s village would finger their machetes at sight of him.

  There wasn’t a sound but his low, steady voice. They were sitting in frame chairs with deerhide seats around the stone fireplace, and Mr. Fosby sat far forward like he was straining to make them see the beauty of the place, brilliant flowers and birds flashing in the sun and storms sweeping in from the sea. He’d been happy there, she could see that. She had the sense that he hadn’t intended to talk this way at all, but it filled him and had to spill, like a milk pail you fill too full … .

  It was as if he’d been too happy, in love with the island and a woman, didn’t care if she was black or blue, and in a moment it all exploded. Life will do that … .

  Marie, perfectly good Christian name too, went to market with her sisters one day, carrying produce on her head and then laying it out on a coconut cloth in the square, and he’d followed with the men. Folks were buying and selling and swapping and there were dogs and children and burros and chickens pecking dung apart and mangoes, whatever they were, stacked on cloths in golden piles and a fiddle was playing and everyone was talking and laughing when the soldiers came.

  French troops in their fancy uniforms, bayonets on muskets carried at the ready. They were chasing a tall, skinny man with frantic eyes who plunged into the market crowd. The soldiers followed, knocking people aside with rifle butts, and then someone yelled and he saw two of the soldiers fall and the others raised their muskets. He ran toward them, crying out, heard the roar of firing, saw them reload and fire again, and there were half a dozen people fallen, and he saw Marie on hands and knees with blood pouring from her mouth. He picked her up and watched the light fade from her eyes and then the soldiers were jostling him aside, and still holding his dead wife in his arms, he cried, “Why? Why?”

  And they laughed at him. He cursed them. Their officer, a little major with pointed mustaches, slapped his face and said—he stopped, glancing at Rachel, and she, caught in the horror of the story, said very steadily, “Go on.”

  —Slapped his face and said, “You like dark meat, do you? Look around. There’s plenty more where that came from.”

  She was horrified. You’d think he would want revenge, sin though it would be, but something in his face decided her not to ask, and into the silence he said, “They’re coming here, Judge; you understand that, don’t you?”

  She looked at Jack, who was watching Fosby intently, his face noncommittal. Jack could be tenderhearted but now he was listening as a soldier listens, and so was Andrew.

  No white man could live in the village after that, and Mr. Fosby’s family, loyal to the end, smuggled him down to the port city of Santo Domingo that night and he found a ship for New Orleans. But it didn’t sail for two weeks, and he decided to learn what he could. Every night he was in the taverns talking to French soldiers sodden with rum.

  “Everyone—soldiers, sergeants, officers, everyone—understood that the goal was New Orleans. Bring the blacks to heel in a month or two, then on to Louisiana with fixed bayonets.”

  “Bayonets?” Andrew said. He glanced at her. “An army? Talk here is they’ll just replace the Spanish.”

  She’d heard Andrew say often that such talk was wishful thinking in the extreme; he was simply drawing Mr. Fosby out.

  “That’s not what the army thinks. They believe they go to conquer. I figure that’s right too, ’cause one night I met an American mercenary, a colonel, he was pretty far along in his cups, and he laughed out loud when I asked the question. Don’t be silly, he says, these Frenchies intend to take over the continent. Everything west of the Appalachians, Tennessee, Kentucky, the Ohio River, all French. Said this Napoleon was a pistol, got whatever he w
anted, no one could stop him.”

  He cleared his throat. “So what I figure, Judge, the point of that big army, it’s to conquer us.”

  Jack Coffee had to own up—Fosby’s story had impressed the hell out of him. First time he’d seen what all the rumor about the French could really mean. Imagine those bastards in the square at Nashville shooting down women and children!

  The judge had been affected too, though you never could be sure what that canny man was really thinking. Anyway, Fosby’s story had strengthened his decision to go after the major generalcy, when everyone knew challenging Sevier was no small matter. But Jackson was a natural commander; you could see that in his response to crisis. It would never occur to Coffee that it was up to him to rally the state, place himself at the pass, defend the nation. Oh, he’d volunteer, do his duty, die if necessary—but see himself as the key to it all? Great men had that image of themselves, and it was ever more evident to Coffee that Jackson was a great man.

  So he was thinking when he walked into the Nashville Inn where the field officers of West Tennessee militia had invited Jackson to what amounted to a final judgment dinner: Should they elect him their commander? Eastern regiments would vote for Sevier, so Jackson must carry these western regiments. Coffee stood in the doorway of the small dining room and spotted his own commanding officer, Col. Robert Hays of the Davidson County Cavalry, under whom as a captain he commanded a company. Hays was talking with Col. Sam Farrow, who ran the regular militia of Davidson County, of which Nashville was county seat. He saw Bob Weakley from over at Lockland and Jake Hemphill of Sumner County, Dick Childress of Murfreesboro, and Dave Phillips from Lebanon, and the others, twenty or twenty-five all told. Just about everyone from the Mero District, westernmost in Tennessee, and some from the middle district too. Jim Scorsby, their brigadier, had been called to Louisville, but he was a Jackson man. Coffee waited till he caught Bob Hays’s eye before entering; the militia was democratic and all that, but the CO was still the CO. Coffee was only here as a courtesy to Jackson. He would keep his lip sealed; no one wanted to hear his views.

  Hays was an old Jackson friend; indeed, Jackson’s whole military career had started with him, when he’d been appointed judge advocate of Hays’s regiment. That was ten years back, before statehood, before Nashville had turned into a real town, when the Nashville Inn was still one big room with logs unpeeled on the inside. Of course, that did point to Jackson’s main weakness: he had never really commanded troops and now he wanted to command them all as major general.

  There were three districts; each constituted a brigade, a regiment for each county plus one cavalry outfit like that of Bob Hays’s. Regimental officers were elected by their men; field-grade officers elected their brigadier, who joined with them across the three brigades to elect the major general. The governor would decide ties. It was a funny kind of election, when you got down to it—so few voting, so much at stake. That was what the judge had to make them see, that this mattered … .

  The odds were agin him, no doubt about that, for Sevier was the military man; but then the door opened and Jackson came striding in, the very picture of a commander. Tall, thin, whipcord strength as obvious as if it were written on his forehead, wearing a fine suit of black broadcloth with newstyle pantaloons loose over well-brushed boots, a glowing cigar jaunty in his left hand, circling the room, shaking hands, a quip, a question, a word of recognition for each man and his regiment, the whole room glowing with his presence. Coffee knew him well, and yet this seemed a new Jackson, lifted by some inner fire, rising to the need—an—other mark of a natural commander. Immediately Coffee’s optimism returned.

  All these men knew him, supreme court justice riding circuit in their counties, already a power by virtue of his office, widely recognized as the civil leader of West Tennessee—but civil was one thing and military another. Someone put a glass of whiskey punch in his hand and they stood close, chatting not with each other but with him, talking hunting, horse racing, a new bull someone had imported, a stallion likely to tear up the track at Clover Bottom, a new plowing technique someone was trying down toward Murfreesboro, a bear that mauled three men before they put him down. They had dinner, venison with pork sausage to spice it, and ale from Bob Hays’s brewery: and cigars were lighted before the judge turned serious and said it was time to talk.

  He laid it out straight. The rumors of the French were true; they were coming and we had to get ready for them. Said Nathan Fosby had come to see him.

  “No!” Jake Hemphill cried. “Nathan Fosby’s back? Why, I grew up with him. Good man too. In love with Julia Fairchild, Judge Fairchild’s oldest? And she up and married Sam Griswold, the one the bull killed later, remember? And Nathan said his heart was broke and he went down the river and never came back. I’ll be damned.”

  “Well, he’s back and he’s rendered us a service,” Jackson said, and took them through Fosby’s story with neat efficiency, senior officer talking to other senior officers.

  “Everyone Fosby met—he’d learned passable French—said they were going on to Louisiana and couldn’t wait to get there. Now, gentlemen, I think you’d agree that among soldiers the rumor of the day is usually wrong, but they pretty well know what’s going on. Correct?”

  There was a burst of laughter. “Correct,” Colonel Hays said.

  “And then consider,” Jackson said, “twenty-five thousand troops to quell natives armed with machetes? Fully equipped artillery units? More on their mind than Santo Domingo, I promise you. And their commander is General Leclerc.”

  Coffee had never heard of Leclerc, and from the blank faces he suspected no one else had either.

  “Napoleon’s favorite and evidently the very devil of a general officer,” Jackson said. “Those lightning marches that gave Napoleon the Italian campaign, there was Leclerc always in front. And it was Leclerc who led troops into the Chamber of Deputies in what they call 18 Brumaire—the coup that put Napoleon in power. And to top it off, he married the dictator’s sister. You don’t think Napoleon would send such an officer just for a miserable island? More to it than that, gentlemen.”

  They were looking at each other, reflecting the surprise that Coffee felt. How the hell did Jackson know all this when Coffee figured he was pretty well informed and he’d never heard it? It was those newspapers—they came in from all over the country, stack you couldn’t see over on his desk, he’d come off the circuit and spend days poring down those narrow columns. Coffee had been studying Jackson a good while now, and what surprised him most was Jackson’s capacity to surprise him. Just a plain man a lot of the time, interested in what interested everyone else, loved a good cock fight, cheered his horses at Clover Bottom louder than anyone, liked a joke and a glass of whiskey and a pipe, and could gossip with the best of them; and yet he had a quickness of grasp about him and a way of seeing things that other men didn’t see. He’d be thinking way out ahead of you—well, Coffee couldn’t explain it exactly, but this was a worthwhile man. One place he went off the edge though was that temper of his that could right easily get him killed one of these days. Coffee knew Aunt Rachel counted on him to keep the judge on track, and he tried.

  “So why is the dictator sending his favorite general? Because, gentlemen, he wants what we’ve got. What we’ve built over these years. Look at us! Look at our own riverfront, half a mile of docks, boatyards, ropewalks, hauling yards, hoists and lifts and more warehouses going up every day. No wonder General Scorsby was called to Louisville; same kind of growth going on there. Cincinnati—I was there three months ago—every time you go it’s like they tore it down and started over, it’s so new looking and big.

  “Look at the new glassworks at Knoxville. Gins sprouting all over the country. I’ve got one myself, ginning cotton for twenty neighbors, and I’m small. We’ll have a real road connecting us to Knoxville one of these days soon, and I hear they’re working on the Lexington road now. I’ll warrant we have a hundred thousand population right here in Tennessee, d
amn near double our statehood figures, and growing every day. They say Kentuck’s over two hundred thousand. Ohio a state now, means at least sixty thousand but probably it’s a hundred. We’re talking half, three-quarters of a million, put ’em all together. And you know what kind of folks they are, hard-driving men out to make their fortunes, willing to risk, willing to fight; they’d have stayed back in Carolina and Virginia and Pennsylvania if they wasn’t. I tell you what you already know, gentlemen, but think about it—we have made this country the garden of the nation and we’ve done it by our hard work.

  “So why are they coming here just now? Because we have built it so. Because that dictator of theirs dreams of empire, wants to conquer the world. Such a man looks at us—why? Because in his pride he believes he can have an American empire too, use us to feed his troops while they take over the rest of the world. Oh yes, they’ll squeeze us, allow trade on their own terms, and finally, the way they see it, they’ll take us over, vassals to a French dictator!”

  His fist crashed down on the table and dishes jumped. “And by God, we won’t let that happen! We’ll fight!”

  Well, they liked the sound of that, Coffee saw: Build our fortunes and defend them like we’ve done from the start. Looking around the table he saw no doubt that the French coming meant war, and he sure never doubted it himself.

  Then Jackson was talking military affairs, but at a whole different level from what they expected. Talking inspiration, really, how you made men want to follow and obey, how you could discipline the very men who elected you, the shooting competitions with real prize money he’d like to start, forced marches called suddenly to get the boys used to the idea that military service could ask everything of you and that was its glory, and then he was talking about supply, the obligation to see that men were well armed and well fed and well led if you were going to ask them to follow you into enemy fire … .