From Sea to Shining Sea Read Online Free Page A

for authority was esteemed.
    “No, now,” Annie interjected. “We’re talking about my wedding, not about politics, remember?”
    John Clark laughed heartily. He was relieved to be back on the topic of the upcoming event. He always got unsettled when George urged him to move the family west. Ever since George had taken him on a tour of that country two years ago, he had wanted to go to Kaintuck so badly he could taste it, but the day-by-day business of running a plantation had kept him tied down in Old Virginia, and he was comfortable here when he wasn’t being prodded to uproot. Now the prospect of his daughter’s marriage to a scion of an old family was comforting, like an anchor.
    “Will Jonathan be down for the event?” George asked.
    “Sure he will,” said Mr. Clark. “I’ve writ to ’im, and I’ll write again and tell him you’re here.”
    “Ah, but y’ heard, Pa, I told you I can’t stay. I would fondly love to, but I can’t. Sorry, Annie.”
    “Well, y’re never here for anything else. So how should I hope y’d be here for the main time o’ my life?” she accused.
    “Annie,” Mrs. Clark said sharply.
    Sometimes the family felt that George had forsaken them.With his energy, imposing looks, and golden tongue, he reasonably could have become a lion amidst the Tidewater gentry. He could have married into the Pendletons or Lees or Hancocks, gone into the legislature, grown fat and prosperous, and occupied himself, as most of the gentry did, in being English-like. Many a daughter of the plantation aristocracy had had a coy eye on him. But George had not deemed himself precious, and instead had chosen that dangerous and comfortless world out beyond the mountains of his boyhood dreams, leaving his peers to their balls and minuets, their cards and fox hunts and social rivalries, and their fine-horse breeding and their mating games, both of which they conducted in much the same way. He had gone to be a land finder, a phantom of the woods, and a consort of savages, and thus had deprived his neighbors and his family of himself, it sometimes seemed to them.
    But in a way, distance had made him closer and more dear to them. Because of the hazards of the wilderness, real and imagined, he was always in their prayers. And whenever he came home, he found himself ever more of a prized curiosity, a storyteller, a voice of boundless optimism. For John and Ann Rogers Clark themselves knew and loved the frontier. They had in fact started their marriage as pioneer homesteaders, out in remote Albemarle County, in the shadow of the Blue Ridge. They had carved an estate out of the forest there, in seven happy, hard years, and their first four children had been born out there, in a log house that John Clark had built with his own hands and tools. Only the terrorism of the French and Indian War had finally driven them back to the Tidewater, in 1757, for the sake of their children’s safety. John and Ann Rogers Clark still felt the pull of western horizons, tied though they were now to this lowland plantation. In a way, George was dwelling where their hearts dwelt, and they were still free and young through him.
    “Reverend Archibald Dick will say the vows,” Mrs. Clark said. “And we’ve sent word for the old Albemarle neighbors to come, those who’ll think it worth the journey.” She smiled a sly smile. “Meseems a few o’ those earthy folk ought to leaven the spirit o’ the occasion, mixed in with the gentility hereabouts.”
    George grinned and winked at her. “That, I wish I could see. Say, maybe I should send some of those ring-tailed river rats and bear-biters from Red Stone Fort back here as I go through. Give them a dram o’ corn and they’ll whump you up a wedding celebration fit for th’ history books!”
    “George,” said Annie, drawing out his name, hardening her eyelids and pointing a threatening finger at him, “ye do any sucha thing and I’ll disown you. My wedding’s going to be good and