The Proud and the Free Page 5

  And where is Angus?

  Seeing to the guard over the Kemble House, and then to sleep, which I must have too, otherwise I will not be able to set a foot in front of the other.

  I would sell me own sweet mother for a pot of steaming hot coffee right now, said Sean O’Toole.

  Then heed me, Jamie, Billy Bowzar nodded, marking the words with his quill, and then you can turn in for two hours but not a minute more. We have made certain decisions, the main one being that a man on a gallows trap had best get off it or prepare to dance in the air. There is no more turning back from what we decided, and no more delaying it either. So we have chosen sundown this day to expel the officers and take the Line, and the Revolution too, into our own hands. There is our commitment; either we succeed tonight, or we will pay for it tomorrow.

  But it ain’t humanly possible to convince all the men before this evening, I protested.

  And we don’t want to, said the black man, Holt. If they all know of this, they will set to pondering it, and they will coddle right and wrong until they’re tight in it as a worm in a apple. Let them do what they feel when we hail them. They do right – and we win. They don’t do right …

  It is the only way, Jamie, insisted Dwight Carpenter. Either the men are with us or they are not with us, and there is no persuading them with words, not if we had a fortnight to plan and plot. This is the only way.

  Like casting dice …

  Ye see it wrong if you see it that way, Jamie, for the hopes and dreams of men are not dice to play with. We have been too much played with already, and if this was just a wild adventure for our own hope and glory, why then there would be somewhat in your say. But we got a simple and unclouded stake in freedom, not in wealth and property and power as the gentry do, but for the right to hold up our heads a little and taste some sweetness in living, and don’t you think that every lad in the line has a similar stake?

  I don’t know.

  You are overweary, Jamie, said Billy Bowzar, and it’s truly a miracle you wrought out there in the darkness. So turn into your straw and rest your head for a time.

  This, I did. I was past thinking or caring, and the moment I had covered myself with straw, I slept.

  It was that morning, during my short rest, I think – for I kept no journal then, being more concerned with remaining alive than with telling the tale someday – that I dreamed so sweetly of my lovely lass, Molly Bracken. I make note of this because I believe it helps somewhat to show the simple, ordinary nature of folk we were; which might be taken for granted, as you might take for granted that most men are wrought out of the same stuff as you yourself, were if not for the slander that every learned scholar places upon the great rising of the foreign brigades. But the learned scholars sit snug and warm; they never took a barefooted march of thirty miles in a day, and they never went hungry for weeks on end, and they were never called forthright with the earnest, Come and enlist in the army of freedom, for ten dollars a month and eternal glory! So they never took that glory apart to see what it was made of, and less they care what the men who found that glory were made of; and the most they give thought to is how passing strange it was that the great land of Pennsylvania, with its three hundred thousand folk and all its great resources, could never call more than fifteen hundred native born to its colors and had to enlist the remainder out of the foreign scum. But the native born and the foreign scum both dreamed, and I dreamed of the future and the past.

  And in my dream of that past that morning, I sat at the cobbler’s bench of Fritz Tumbrill once more: I, Jamie Stuart, an apprentice lad of sixteen summers, and for the grits and greens and fatback he fed me, and the patched shirt and trews he lent me, I cobbled all day, from the dawn to sunset. I swept the shop and blacked the boots and cleaned the panes and weeded the garden, and for all of this I never saw a minted penny. My reward was in blows from the huge, hamlike hand of the enormously fat half-German, half-Yankee master cobbler. And I stood it because until I had my trade, I was no part of the world of men. I gritted my teeth and stood it until they nailed up the first enlistment bill, and then I stood it no more, but flung my apron in the fat pig’s face and told him:

  I’ve a new trade now – and when I and the other lads have driven the British back into the sea, take care, take care!

  And I walked off to the tune of his curses and abuse. But it is of before then that I dreamed, of the first time I saw Molly Bracken. I sat at my bench, alone in the shop, for Fritz was out for a pint at the tavern and Tibby, the junior apprentice, was over at the tannery, picking up a hide. In my dream I worked at a set of buskins for a little boy, awling the high uppers, when there came a tinkle from the bell at the door. Come in, I called, and there entered a slim reed of a girl, with hair so black it startled one, and eyes so blue they fair frightened one – until one saw how direct and open they were, how wise and knowing they were. And those eyes looked at me calmly and appraisingly as she said:

  I have come to be fitted for a pair of walking shoes. I am Molly Bracken, the daughter of the new parson at the Lutheran Church.

  To that point, my dream matched in a fair way with reality, for it was much in that same fashion I had met Molly Bracken. But in my dream I rose up and took her in my arms and kissed her, for I knew her well and nothing held me back. But in life itself, four months passed before I dared to take her hand and set my lips to it. And in those four months, she taught me to read and write and she taught me to know the flowers of the field, the stars in the sky, and some of the noble things men have done which are greater than either – in a certain way. Her father was a wise and humble man, and he took a liking to me and made his house my house. He unlocked his bookcase for me; he fed me, and he was as much a father as I ever had.

  What a hunger I had for the things he gave me! As you will see, there was much apart from me in Pastor Bracken when I grew to manhood and had become proficient in the one trade I knew aside from cobbling, the trade of killing; but at that time of which I speak now, when I was a tall and stringy lad of fifteen years, he was the best and wisest person who had come into my life – the more so than my poor father, who had loved me but could give me naught.

  In my dream, I dreamed among other things of my coming to the manse for the first time, where Molly Bracken brought me as she would bring a wild animal into a tame pasture, saying:

  Never in all my born days did I see the like of such a boy as you.

  Well, let me be, then. Let me be as I am. I ain’t asking to be no different, so let me be.

  You’re a creature, not a boy, she said.

  Well, you can go to the devil and be damned then, calling me a creature!

  We were outside the manse, and she stopped and turned to me, wide-eyed and horrified.

  Jamie Stuart!

  What you asked for you got.

  Then I’ll leave you alone to your dirt and your nasty mind. You’re a miserable little boy!

  And she stormed into the house and left me standing outside alone, and there I stood, first on one foot and then on the other, and then on both feet, but unable to move, unable to go and unable to remain – in that wholly ambivalent condition that only a boy of fifteen, deeply and wholly in love for the first time in his life, can experience. And there I remained until Pastor Bracken came along on his way into the house, cocked an eye at me, prepared to pass on and then paused to question.

  Waiting for someone? he wanted to know.

  Nope.

  You’re the Stuart boy, aren’t you?

  Uh-huh.

  Tumbrill’s apprentice.

  I nodded, feeling shame cloak me and run all over me. Evidently, he sensed what was going through my mind, and in any case there was visual evidence in the way in which my toes crawled for cover into my broken shoes, the way in which my elbows crawled from their holes, my knees from the gaps in my breeches. But mostly my toes, writhing over each other like terrified snakes, for what could be more incongruous or humiliating than a cobbler’s apprentice
shod as badly as I?

  Why don’t you come in, he said, and meet my daughter?

  I know her, I answered, staring at my toes as I manipulated them.

  Oh.

  She don’t like me, I said.

  No? Well, maybe she could learn. That happens, Jamie Stuart. People start out disliking each other fit to tie a cat, and then they change. So why don’t you come in and have a cup of tea with us? How about that now? Won’t you come in? Come along now, won’t you, Jamie Stuart?

  And Jacob Bracken put his arm through mine and took me into his house with him, and of this I dreamed and of other things as well. How he made Molly my teacher, I dreamed; for he gave me a book to read and I pretended to read it. Yes, one fine day this happened, as I sat with them in their unbelievable kindness, and the man who wrote that book was a poet called Milton. And there in it was a picture of the splendid and awful turmoil of heaven and hell, so that my very heart ached to know what it meant.

  Read it aloud, Jamie, said Pastor Bracken.

  My head was bent and I would not raise it.

  What is into the boy? asked Pastor Bracken. Molly, what is into the boy, do you suppose?

  Leave him alone, she answered, God bless her. Then and there, I said to myself, God bless her for her kindness, for she is the best and sweetest lass in all the world.

  Jamie! cried Pastor Bracken then, in the thunderous voice he used on a Sunday morning in the pulpit. Jamie! he cried.

  And I raised up my head all covered with tears, and answered that I was as ignorant as a pup just whelped, and not a word of the English language could I read or write, and here I was, fifteen years and better.

  So Molly taught me, and I dreamed of her teaching me. I dreamed of the ABC as I, a big gawking lad, learned it out of a hornbook, and I dreamed of the first little verses I put together. But such is the magic of words that I dreamed also of the first book of depth and beauty that I was able to make out for myself, and how eventually I lay before Pastor Bracken’s fire, reading like a cat gone mad in the catnip, first from one book and then from another, all unconcerned with the beating these late hours away would earn me when I returned to the shop.

  So I dreamed of this and that, of one thing and another, of my meeting Molly Bracken, of seeing her, of learning from her, of defending her once from a mad dog, holding the dog at arm’s length, both my hands flexed around its neck until it strangled like that, and conscious for the first time of the strength in my long, lean body, and proud – proud as when I said to her:

  There was a spark inside me once, which I always knew. But now it will burn, and you will not be ashamed of me.…

  But the dream placed all together, and in the dream, after I kissed Molly Bracken, I took her hand in mine and we walked down the street through York Village and out to the meadows beyond. And as we passed along the street, everyone whispered:

  See there, it is that worthless orphan lad, Jamie Stuart, but we must honor him now, for there is by his side the loveliest lady that ever lived.

  We walked into a meadow all carpeted with daisies, and suddenly we were ringed around with fragrant pine woods, alone under the sun and the breeze. Oh, my true love, sweet Jamie Stuart, she said to me, and I answered, For all eternity, I will be true to fair Molly Bracken. We stroked each other’s face and hair, and our happiness was so great that it seemed we must surely die of it, for it was too much to bear.

  And then Jack Maloney was waking me, with:

  Time’s up, Jamie lad. Would you sleep away your whole last day of grace?

  Let me go back to my dream, I begged him.

  There is no going back to dreams, Jamie, he said, with strange tenderness. As a matter of fact, it seems to me that there is no going back ever, whether in dreams or out of them.

  I resisted him and closed my eyes and tried to slip back into the pool of sleep. Weary enough I was, but he kept shaking me, and as he shook me the dream dissolved and I knew I would never regain it.

  You have lost me the fairest maid in all of Pennsylvania, I said.

  How, Jamie?

  You have never loved, so how would you understand?

  And do you think there is a man who never loved, Jamie, even a soldier of King George III who was put into the camps with the pap still on his lips? Let that be …

  I crawled out of the straw and dropped to the ground. The hut was dark, as it always was, with just one narrow bar of light through a crack in the door.

  Close the damned door! I cried.

  You’re mighty mettlesome, Jamie, nodded Maloney, closing the door. Then he said:

  There are some of us who have had no sleep, Jamie, so sit on your temper. You’ve got a day’s work ahead. The Committee wants a check on every hut in the encampment, and at least one member of the Citizen-soldier Guard should be chosen from each hut, if that is possible. Then, tonight, when we issue the order to stand to arms and parade, the guards can lead. We have also heard gossip that a ration of rum has been allotted and will be issued out in honor of the New Year – which is something, for all the officers’ crying that they had no rum or food either. Also, it is a piece of madness, for that rum on empty stomachs will drive the men crazy. All the more reason for the guards to be good men and to keep their heads. Also, keep your foot down on powder and shot. The hotheads will want to load muskets, and to the Committee’s way of thinking, there’s more danger in that than in anything else; for if we pull this off, bayonets will be ample to deal with a hundred and fifty officers, and if we fail, there will be nothing gained by turning it into a blood bath. We have had reports from the Hardwick House and the Kemble House and from three houses in the village where gentry are quartered. They stuffed themselves last night and most of them are still sleeping, and unless I mistake their temper, they’ll give the encampment a wide berth all this day. But if any officer seems to get wind of what we’re up to, Jamie, you are empowered to place him under arrest, binding and gagging him. The old hospital hutment will be turned into a guardhouse. Both barbers have joined us and taken the pledge to be true to the Line and the enlisted men.

  I was out of my sleep and my dreams now, and I noticed that Billy Bowzar and the Jew Levy still sat at the table, scribbling away on paper in the light of a tallow wick they had obtained from somewhere. While Maloney gave me my instructions, two men entered the hut, spoke softly to Bowzar, received slips of paper, and left. And as the door opened, I noticed two other soldiers on guard outside.

  The men of my command, who shared the hut with me, were all of them awake, which was strange since they had missed most of the night’s sleep. Curled in their straw, which was the only place they could find warmth when they did not have parade or drill – neither of which would be given us on New Year’s Day – they were oddly grave and quiet. From somewhere by some means, an organization was shaping itself, and the wild venture of the night before, which should have been revealed for all its lunacy on this cold, clear morning, managed to maintain itself.

  Well then, I said to myself, swinging my feet down to the floor, here you are, Jamie Stuart, twenty-two years old, with a little reading and a little writing and a little cobbling, making a great uprising. And I bethought me of Jimmy Coleman of my own regiment, who was hanged here on this same parade in Morristown only May past. Nothing had Jimmy done or said that could match the distance we had traveled since the evening before; he had only talked openly and publicly of the gap between the punishment and food issued out by the officer gentry. He had written down in charcoal across a posted order of the day, When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? And it was also charged that he fomented plots and had made insulting remarks to Colonel Chickering, of the Connecticut Line. For this, he was put on the gallows and hanged by the neck until he was dead. But I remember well his behavior there, how he was calm and easy as any of the gentry might be, fingering the rope as he said: A little bit of freedom is not enough, my friends, so mind you treat us better or you will find the tiny spark you struck a mi
ghty flame – and it may be that flame will even singe an officer or two. So the officers cursed him and he swung out of this life, and the officers said: Good riddance to bad rubbish. When an apple is rotten, you pluck it from the barrel.

  Well, here I was, Jamie Stuart, and that was that, and there was no use thinking about it any more, and Jack Maloney was saying:

  Hop to it, Jamie. There is much to be doing, and after we have made an army out of ourselves and driven George’s men into the salty sea, we’ll clean house. So there’ll be no rest for a long time to come, and you might just as well put that in your pipe and smoke it.

  I had slept with my shoes, and there were needles in my feet as I moved across the floor to the musket rack.

  As I passed the table, Levy caught my sleeve and said, A moment, Jamie. I am writing you our credentials, and you had best wait for them.

  Credentials? What in hell’s name do I want with them? Is there anyone in this Line who don’t know me?

  Know you or not, said Billy Bowzar quietly, every Committee man will have credentials from here on. And no order need be obeyed unless a man can show his credentials and his warrant from the Committee.

  Yet if it peters out, I reflected, a man carries his death warrant in his pocket.

  That’s right, Jamie, said Billy Bowzar, regarding me evenly from his bloodshot, fatigue-ringed eyes. We are all in this together, you know.

  But Levy smiled slightly as he handed me my credentials, a slip of paper I still have here beside me as I write, so many years later, the paper less mortal than the men who made and wrote upon it. On it, it says, in the fine, cultured script of the Jew Levy:

  To all men who may examine this: Let it be known that this warrant empowers Jamie Stuart, Sergeant in the 11th Regiment of the Pennsylvania Line, to carry out all and sundry orders, desires, needs and complaints of the Committee of Sergeants, which is now and until the enlisted men of the Line shall rule otherwise, the supreme authority and the commanding power in the army of Pennsylvania – which power was invested in them by a representative Congress of the Regiments of the Line, notably as follows: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 9th, 10th, 11th and Artillery.