From Sea to Shining Sea (25 page)

As the battle story was pieced together, Colonel Moultrie grew steadily in stature as its hero. Word from deserters and prisoners was that about seventy of his projectiles had struck the
Bristol
alone, killing forty of her crew and wounding perhaps twice that many more; not a man stationed on the flagship’s quarterdeck had escaped injury. Casualties aboard the other ships had brought the fleet’s death list up to at least seventy. “Our decks looked like a slaughterhouse,” said a defector. “Never’s the Royal Fleet had such a drubbin’!”

Ten Americans had died and about twenty had been wounded.

Colonel Moultrie insisted that if General Lee had allotted him enough powder from the beginning, “I could have sent the whole damned Armada to the bottom.” No one doubted him.

Another popular hero was Sergeant William Jasper, the man who had stood on the ramparts raising the South Carolina flag. Jasper was offered an officer’s commission for his bravery, but declined it because of his lack of education. So he was awarded a sword.

In the aftermath of the battle, many prominent Carolinians whose sentiments were still loyalist gave up all they had and fled from Charles Town. The rest of the population went into a sustained celebration of deliverance. For a week, Charles Town society held feasts and balls in their elegant homes for the defenders; gracious and beautiful ladies danced on the officer’s arms and thanked them with glittering eyes; some eluded their husbands and chaperones and bestowed gratitude in closer and deeper ways. Everyone was happy and falling in love, and while this heady romance between soldiers and citizens was still in the air, a swift rider from Philadelphia thundered in with the news that the Continental Congress had declared independence from England. There was a thoughtful pause in the celebrations while the populace considered this stunning, hopeful, but frightening news. Then the celebration started again with increased gaiety.

It continued until the smallpox came.

T
HROUGH THE BEATING OF HIS HEADACHE
, J
ONATHAN
heard the voice of the physician. “Open your eyes, Captain. Talk to me.”

He didn’t want to open them. His eyelids were swollen and itchy and when the bright summer light hit his eyes it stabbed like needles into his headache, and it made him sneeze because his nose itched constantly and intolerably. And he was almost overpowered by sleepiness. He was always sleepy, yet he was kept from sleeping by the palpitations of his heart, and by dread of the night terrors that would come when he did sleep.

He opened his eyes and for an instant saw the silhouette of the physician’s head and shoulders. Then the sneezing started, the great, racking sneezes that shook him from head to foot and made him gasp for breath and started the interminable dry coughing. He coughed until he was bathed in sweat, and the sweating made his skin prickle so intensely that he twitched all over. His throat was so parched that his voice rasped.

“Ye could be wrong, eh? I’ve been malarial for quite a spell, I know.”

“In Charles Town,” the doctor’s voice rumbled, “we well know the small pocks.” His voice drifted off; he was saying something to somebody nearby. Then his voice came back to say: “Regrets, Captain, but I’ll have to put you with the rest.”

With the rest.
Jonathan’s heart clenched. He knew that meant the quarantine hospital: the sorrowfully polite name for the old sheds at the end of the freight road, next to the swamp beyond the city. The doctors of Charles Town knew well how to quarantine the dreaded pocks. Often they had stopped ships outside the harbor to isolate the sick sailors aboard until their whole crews died or recovered. Charles Town would do anything to prevent another great epidemic like the one in 1718.

This time the small pocks had come to Charles Town by land, carried by the Continental Army, and so now it was necessary to isolate a large number of their recent heroes, to take the suffering heroes and stack them in the old rat-infested sheds where rice and hemp, tobacco and cotton, lumber and indigo had been stacked for the last hundred years.

“Eh, well,” Jonathan groaned. “Then see that I’m put near my friend Ensign Croghan.”

Bill Croghan had been taken away to the sheds three or four days earlier, Bill Croghan of the jovial nature and the baby-smooth complexion.

J
ONATHAN’S CONSCIOUSNESS WAS DARK ABOVE AND DARK BELOW
, droning with a million flies and a dismal chorus of groans and sobs and screams; and between the darkness above and the darkness below was a yellow-white, shimmering glare: July sunlight
on parched sand and scrub beyond the open-sided shed. It must be a hundred and ten degrees in here, he thought. His blood felt as if it were boiling in his veins.

When he was awake he could remember to keep his hands from scratching the maddeningly itching pustules. What was that his mother had used to say? “A gentleman should keep his fingers away from his face except when he eats, shaves, or prays.” It was the ones on his face that itched worst. When he was awake he could remember not to scratch. When he was asleep they had to tie his hands to the sides of his cot with strips of cloth. Even then, he would work his itching wrists against those bindings, and writhe to scratch his back against the bedding under him, and this would break many of the bumps open and he would wake up lying on a slime of his own pus and sweat.

Now and then in the hellish cacophony of voices there would be a pulsating cackle or an outburst of incoherent words as some wretch would go crazy with the heat and the itching. Several times Jonathan had barely managed, by force of will or by talking to Bill Croghan in the next cot, to keep from slipping off the edge into that wonderful tempting madness. Sometimes he believed that if he could just let go and scream and cackle and wail like those others, it would cool him and make the itching stop.

Instead, he had clenched his teeth and prayed silently, or talked to Bill, and had been able to bring himself back from that awful, tempting edge.

And sometimes he had been able to control himself by concentrating on the disease itself. Sometimes he could not bear to think directly on it; other times it helped to consider the very essence of it. When he did this, he could explain his discomforts to himself and assure himself that it would last for only a certain number of days.

He and the other officers had been given a reading from Dr. Thatcher’s old broadside, titled
A Brief Rule To Guide the Common-People How to Order Themfelves and Theirs in the Small Pocks, or Meafels.
Most of the Charles Town physicians used it; others departed from its suggestions according to their own notions. Jonathan understood from Dr. Thatcher’s writings that the pocks was a disease in which “the blood is endeavoring to recover a new form and state,” as the pamphlet said. In the first four feverish days, it said, the blood is trying to separate by boiling; in the second stage, that which he himself was entering now, the fever abates and the separated poison is expelled through the skin by the appearance of pustules. There would be
nearly a fortnight of this itching and mattering and soreness to be endured, he knew, and then, if he was to survive, there would be a spell of copious nosebleeding, and the pustules would dry up and he would recover.

I can stand anything for a fortnight, if I know it will end then, he told himself sometimes.

Other times he was not so sure he could. A minute in such torment could seem an hour; an hour could seem a day; a day could seem an eternity.

And sometimes he would think about the scarring he would have after it was over, and he would think: What’s the use of enduring, anyway?

T
HE DOCTORS WOULD NOT PERMIT MIRRORS TO BE
brought into the sheds. No man, they felt, should see his own face while he was poxed. This was both blessing and curse. Jonathan did not want to see his face. But in not seeing it, he was left at the mercy of his imagination. And his imagination was merciless. He could see what was happening to Bill Croghan’s once-flawless countenance.

And then in his mind’s eye he would see his own face as clearly as if he did have a mirror.

It was better to keep thinking about living than to bother with thinking about how one would look.

T
WO AIDES WERE TRYING TO CHANGE THE BEDDING OF A
lieutenant in a nearby cot. The lieutenant was groaning pathetically as they turned him. He was an extremely grave case.

Before the small pocks had struck, Jonathan had come to know every officer of the Virginians by face and name. He knew he must have known this officer once, but he could not recognize him now. Every inch of the man’s skin was pebbled by furiously red vesicles topped with greenish and bluish heads of pus: his shoulders, arms, hands, even his ears and eyelids. On each cheek the pustules were coalescing into one great seeping sore. If the lieutenant survived, Jonathan knew, this would leave the worst sort of scarring. But it was doubtful that he would survive. He could neither eat nor drink, and the doctors had been saying that his kidneys and circulation would be damaged surely.

The lieutenant’s groans built to a catlike moan now. He had been left lying on his back too long on his soiled bedding, as there were so few doctors or assistants; the seeping pus had dried to a hideous glue, and as his back was raised from the bedding,
the rotten skin came off in patches to reveal the striated muscle beneath. Farther down, blood was gushing from his anus. Jonathan swallowed a great surge of pity and nausea and turned his eyes away.

Now, in turning from the sight of the dying lieutenant, he found his friend Bill Croghan looking on in pity. Jonathan’s eyes and Bill’s eyes met, wavered, stared a moment in unutterable remorse, glanced apart, then returned and held. The whites of their eyes were barely visible through their swollen, glistening red eyelids.

It was hard for Bill and Jonathan to look at each other, but it grew less horrible each time.

“How are you, friend?” Croghan asked, managing what appeared to be a smile.

“Not one of my best days ever, but I get by. And you?”

“Better, I think. I’m breathing quite free now.”

This, small as it was, was cheering. Suddenly Jonathan began to expect that Bill really would survive. “Oh, for a breeze,” he said, trying to remember the nearly forgotten sensation of fresh, cool air on healthy skin.

“Aye. Hey, now, look at me,” Bill said. “I’m going to sit up, I feel that good!”

Wincing and shuddering, he raised himself weakly onto an elbow and swung his red-pocked legs sideways till his feet were on the dirt of the floor. He wore only a wad of sheet around his loins, his doctor being one of those who believed dressings and ointments aggravated the pustules. Croghan sat now, flaming red and disfigured by swellings, but smiling proudly.

“Bravo,” Jonathan said.

Croghan tried to laugh; it came as a raspy chortle. “Hey, now let me have a look at you up close, old fellow,” he said. “I’ve learned enough from Dr. Thatcher I reckon I could prognose you.” He leaned close and examined Jonathan’s arm and gradually his gaze traveled up until he was looking at his face. Jonathan felt all squirmy as his friend looked so closely at him. “Looks to me like they’re ripening up nice,” he said cheerfully. “Nice and red and distinct, nice white tops on ’em. Not green or black, not hard, eh? Good signs, good signs, the good doctor says.” He prattled on cheerfully. It was amazing. He sounded like anything but a victim of the dreaded pocks.

Now Croghan began examining his own arms and legs, looking at each with a careful detachment as if he were a healthy doctor and this diseased limb his patient. “Mine’s a bit messier,” he said, “but not so bad as some I’ve …” He went into a spasm
of coughing and sank back gingerly on his cot. “Pardon me. Must lie down a minute.” He lay there coughing and pouring sweat. His tongue began a dry clicking against the back of his palate. Jonathan, alarmed, raised himself painfully up on his elbows and called for a water boy.

The water carrier came. Like most of the aides, he was someone who had had the pocks already and was not afraid to be among those sick with it. He was a private, perhaps nineteen or twenty, short, with a pit-scarred face. He was gentle. He raised Croghan’s head and put a cup to his lips. “Thankee,” Jonathan said for his friend.

“Aye, sir.” The lad stood back and for a moment stayed and waved his hand back and forth over Bill Croghan, stirring up the flies, which immediately settled again. There was just nothing that could be done about the flies. Even if there had been a slave available to stand over each patient with a fly-whisk, the buzzing multitude would have prevailed. They droned through the shed, darkening the air by their numbers. They fringed the eyes, mouths, and sores of every man who was unconscious or too lethargic to raise a hand.

Croghan was sleeping now, it seemed. Jonathan looked at him for a while, then sat up painfully and waved a rag back and forth over him. He looked around the dolorous scene in the stinking, murmuring, suffocating gloom under the old shed roof. There might have been two or three hundred men in this shed. As an infantry officer Jonathan could make a fair guess of numbers of men standing or marching, just at a glance. But lying in rows on pallets, all inflamed limbs and putrid flesh in sweaty, wadded, bloody, or yellowing sheets, under the blurry gaze of his swollen eyes, they were uncountable.

And this was just one of the sheds.

It occurred to him after a while that he was sitting here, moving his arm, waving flies away from his friend. He would not have thought he could sit up and do anything.

But doing this for Bill Croghan, he realized, somehow made him less aware of his own torment.

G
OVERNOR
H
ENRY HAD PREDICTED EXACTLY HOW HIS PRIVY
council would respond to George’s request for gunpowder for Kentuck. It was well received—up to a point. Bedecked in a new scarlet coat he had bought for the occasion, George stood before the eight councilmen and argued vehemently. These men all knew his brother Jonathan and they knew of George’s connections with Henry and Jefferson and George Mason, and so, despite his
youthfulness and his somewhat overpowering frontier directness, they listened very respectfully to him, and without much quibbling agreed to write a requisition for five hundred pounds of gunpowder. But, they stressed, it was only a loan to needful friends, and George would become liable for it in case the Assembly should later refuse to receive Kentuck as a county of Virginia.