The Proud and the Free (29 page)

I was glad when Jacob Bracken came in, for I feared my own thoughts and had no desire to be alone with them. He gave me a mug of hot flip, and we sat down before the fire, and he said:

Well, Jamie, here we are, myself and you too, snug and safe in front of the fire —which in a way is God's judgment for whatever small good we did in our lives. Do you believe in God, Jamie?

It took a while for me to answer that, for in the flames and come to life, as pictures do when you sit and ponder a burning log, were all the troubles I had known in my own young life, and all the little bites of glory, and all the faint heart and fears, and all the marches and countermarches since that long ago time when the 1st Regiment of the Pennsylvania Line had paraded through the streets of Philadelphia and then set out to join the Yankee farmers outside of Boston town, each of us with a sprig of May finery in our hats, each of us with something or other in our hearts. Thus moved the possessed and the dispossessed and we were one together, but I was not one with them any longer; and here was a man of God asking me if I believed in his Master.

I think not, I said finally and unhappily, for I never saw any judgment between the good and the bad which was not either the whim of chance or the working of the gentry. There was a little drummer lad in the beginning of this revolt, and his name was Tommy Mahoney, and while some drummer boys become mean and sly and bad in every way – which is not so strange, when you consider the terrible life they live – this one was good and pure, and he died without cause or reason, as did so many of my comrades in all the years of this bitter war.

And was the Revolution no reason, Jamie? asked Jacob Bracken.

Sure – reason enough, if you say that what we went away to strive for might have been. But soon enough we discovered that the grudge and gripe of the officer gentry was not our grudge and gripe, and it was only to serve their purpose that we existed. There was one class in the Line of the foreign brigades, and there was another class who led us, and never was there a meeting between the two or any kind of understanding. They turned us into dogs; it was the whip and the cane, week in and week out, with no pay and no food and no clothes – and soon that became no hope, which could not be otherwise, it seems to me. We in the Line were Jew and Roman and Protestant and black and white, and we learned to fight and live and work together; so when you ask me if I believe in God, what should I think about the big Bantu Nayger, a slave and unbaptized without grace or salvation, and he came into the Line with blood on his hands and a heathen name, Bora Kabanka, a great black man who had slain his master? What should I think about him, when at Monmouth he picked me up in his arms and bore me from the field under fire, like I was a little babe – and if I had a guinea for every lash he took from the officers because he was a proud black man, then I would be rich indeed? There is dying for a cause, which is one thing, and there is dying for the proud folk who do not give two damns for us. I leave that. I will not go back and serve under them again, and I will not believe in a God who stands firm behind the man with property but has only a curse and a blow for men like me.

Well, Jamie, Jacob Bracken said thoughtfully, there's a way of looking at things, and belief in God is not an easy matter to argue, is it? I don't hold with those who say
Don't discuss religion —
for what is better meat for chewing than the food of one's own soul? Now I believe in God and in the Lord Jesus Christ the way I believe in my own right hand, and I attempt to serve Him, you know; but consider that I who talk of God with such certainty have never ventured in His behalf any more than a little speech and now and then a bout with a sinner, whereas you who deny Him, Jamie, have given five years of your life in His holiest service.

Have I? I said.

Indeed you have, Jamie, and on that point I am completely clear.

Well, I wondered, what of the King's soldiers, who are blessed with the blessing of God when they put on that lobster suit of theirs?

Now, for the first time, Jacob Bracken lost his calm manner; a flush came over his long, narrow face, and the broad mouth roared out:

Who said?

The Archbishop of Canterbury, for one.

The servant of the Devil! he cried. On his lips, the word God is an abomination! Ye hear me, Jamie? An abomination! Every sacred martyr of Protestantism is proof of that! Cursed is the Church of England as the Church of Rome is cursed –

But, I interrupted, a great many of the lads in the brigades were Romans.

Jamie, he roared, have you become a damned theological pettifogger? Do my words mean nothing to you?

He was half serious, half humorous. Jamie, he said, there is not that much obscurity concerning the works of God.

Molly joined us now. Across the village, they could hear you, said she.

And with reason.

That I doubt, she answered him, drawing a chair up to the fire, so that the three of us sat in front of it now, and in this all my dreams were realized. Yet the rum I held was without taste, and Molly Bracken was a stranger to me.

Jamie, said the Pastor, surrender not grace that easily.

But I had surrendered, and staring at the flames, I held my rum untasted and tasteless.

Outside, said Molly Bracken, a great storm is making. And it will snow and snow.

Said the Pastor, Jamie, when you made the uprising, you and your comrades, what was in your minds?

Not God, I said sourly, not anything like that – but only that it was unbearable.

Yet there must have been a thought of what would be afterwards.

How do I know what the others were thinking?

I will not lose my temper with you, Jamie Stuart, said Jacob Bracken. You are under my roof, and under my roof you shall stay.

Molly said, Leave him be. Leave him be. Look how tired he is.

This I was thinking, I said suddenly. I was thinking that we would strike a flame that would ignite everywhere, and everywhere plain folk like myself would join us. And that we would sweep the British into the sea and make a place here of justice and decency.

That's a grand thought, Jamie, said Jacob Bracken.

And look what it came to. Where are the foreign brigades now …?

Consider, Jamie, said Jacob Bracken, that you have given five years, and how many have given nothing!

I have given nothing! I cried. How can I tell you?

But there was no way in which I could tell them, and they were more gentle and good to me than I deserved; and presently Jacob Bracken led me up to the little attic room where my bed was, and I crawled in between the clean sheets and lay there, looking out at the big flakes of snow that drifted past the window.…

So it was that I came back to York village and to my friends and to what life had been before I went away, and I picked up this thread and that thread, and presently the numbness in my heart, which had been there ever since Jack Maloney left me that cold and rainy night in Philadelphia, eased out, and I began to forget the whole violent wash of war that had surged up and down and through the Jerseys for so long. Here, we were a long way from Jersey; life went on here, and in the wintertime, when the roads were closed with snow, this was a world to itself.

The town made no fuss over me; Jamie Stuart had gone, and now Jamie Stuart was back, and it mattered very little indeed. The war was something they had long since become used to; and like most Pennsylvania people in good circumstances, they were only nominally in favor of it. Perhaps a little more in this town than in others, since the war had brought business and money, but the fact that the Pennsylvania Line was no more – a piece of news that came to the village from this direction and that – gave them no great concern. This was a war that had gone on too long. If Jamie Stuart washed his hands of it, that was sound sense from where it was least expected; for what real good could come from a miserable Scottish lad born from parents who had been bondslaves?

I stayed with Jacob Bracken because I had no other place to stay; but often enough I thought to myself that it was time for me to be moving on, and I decided that when the snows began to melt, I would take the road for Philadelphia, perhaps to sign onto one of the sailing vessels, or to get a job in the ropeworks, or even to find a place there as a cobbler. York village was not for me, and Molly Bracken was a stranger, as if she had never kissed me upon the lips, as if we had never exchanged words of love; but she was a grown woman now with the need to think seriously of the future, and what was the future of a soldier out of the army? In no way did I hold this against her, but I tried as much as I could to avoid her; and when they took me on as a hand at the sawmill at half a guinea a week, I saw her almost not at all – for it was up at the dawn and back with the night, and only at the table did we exchange a word or two.

Once or twice I said to Pastor Bracken, I have no right to stay on here like this, and suppose I found a room and board elsewhere?

But his response was always something to the effect of my wanting to drive home a disagreement; and indeed I did not take too much persuasion, for there was nothing in York for me now but the sight of Molly Bracken, if even for a little and without hope. And when, here and there, one of the long-tongued gossips in the village let it drop that they did not approve of the wild and wicked Jamie Stuart living under the same roof as the poor, motherless Bracken girl, Jacob Bracken's spine stiffened like a ramrod.

Now you stay here, Jamie, he said firmly, and from his pulpit he thundered at those, who carry false witness.… Aye, we have a militia, he told his congregation, but a militia waits for the war to come to it, and the good Lord has seen fit to keep the war far distant – for His own purposes – although one gunshot in freedom's name might be a better sermon than all my words. But who else is there except one orphan lad among you who has ventured his life in what we discuss so glibly?…

And I squirmed and avoided the eyes of those around me; but Molly Bracken sat with her head up and smiling, and that made me wonder.

But themselves, the townsfolk were a little afraid of me; I was not only different from them now, but the distorted tales they had of the rising made them think of me as a wild and lawless person, and when finally I came face to face with Fritz Tumbrill, he was a meek and a chastened man.

It was when I had my first half-guinea in my pocket that I went to his shop to order a pair of boots, which was my greatest need at the moment. Believe me, it was a strange thing to be back there now, to see how small the shop had become in its insignificant frame building, all covered with snow, so insignificant a reality in comparison with my memories – and I often think now that there is the best sign of maturity, the reality of things instead of the unreal threat of them. My world had been a world of spirits and demons and witches and ogres, but I had faced real fears and found them not so awful as they might be, and death itself is not the worst thing in the world if you can face it with your eyes open. And here was this man I had feared so, all shrunken and old and small, and now he was afraid of me.

But let me tell you how I came in, how I pulled at the latch and how the little bell tinkled, and how a child's voice told me to come in, even as I had once told people to enter. Inside, nothing at all was different; a boy at one bench and Fritz Tumbrill at the other, but when he looked up and saw me, his face became pale; his big jowls shook; and he said to me, almost pleadingly:

Why, welcome home, Jamie Stuart.

Good evening to you, Fritz, I nodded. I have come to have a pair of boots made.

And glad I am to see you, Jamie. I tell you now, they will be the best boots I ever turned out of my shop, and not a penny will they cost you. All the time when you were off to the war I said to myself, There is Jamie Stuart gone with never time to give him a little gift. So this will be a gift in a way of speaking, Jamie.

I want no gifts from you, Fritz Tumbrill, I said. I will pay you what the shoes are worth.

Are you holding old scores agin me, Jamie? he asked, cocking his head and looking up at me.

Well, I had been, I had been; but looking at him now and from him to the thin, pale-faced boy who sat on the other bench, his head down, his skinny little hand frozen in midair, clenching the hammer, his mouth full of tacks – looking from one to the other, my hatred for this fat, gross man who was now part owner of a mill went away, and I asked myself, What are you doing here, Jamie Stuart? What are you doing here with this fat shopkeeper, in this fat and contented town, living with a pastor who will patiently convert you to God again? What are you doing here, Jamie Stuart? I asked myself, remembering the worst of times I had known – and the worst of them were not like this, not like this in this place, where the Roman was hated and the Jew maligned and the black man considered an ape from dark Africa. Yes, standing there in the cobbler's house, I felt that my soul was shriveling up within me, and all the goodness and greatness that had been mine once when I marched in the companionship of Revolution was plain to me now and made plain too late; and as my heart had never hungered for anything, so did it hunger for the ugly little men of the brigades who were my comrades.

Old scores? I questioned. No, cobbler – no; there are no old scores left. Make me my shoes and be done with it.…

So I had new boots and work at the mill and a home with Jacob Bracken, who spoke to me gently of God and of humility and of my future. The month passed and March came, and with March the warm sunshine to shrink the snow – so that by the middle of the month it already appeared that spring was at hand. There was one fair Sunday when I took Molly to church to hear her father preach, and I sat as I always did in the church, stiffly and uncomfortably, counting the minutes until it was over, filled with a turmoil of doubt and unsatisfied longing and hesitation and the brooding wonder that attempted to extract some meaning from my life and from my deeds. When the service was finished, I rose to leave, and Molly Bracken said: