The Proud and the Free (6 page)

Indeed I do. There is no more sleep for us, Angus, until this is finished.

There is sleep for me, the Scot said stubbornly. I have done my round of this mad duty.

I slid my musket from the rack and looked at him. Then I said:

Well now, Angus MacGrath, this is a new hitch for me, but the skin of my neck is tight enough for me to play it out, and to tell you the truth, I don't much give a damn at this point. I have lived in hell too long, and I will not see my sweet Molly again, and the whole fact of it is that I'm past caring for anything but the one chance in a thousand we are playing for. So what do you say?

I leveled the musket at him; and from me he looked to the eleven grim-visaged men who sat at the sawbuck table, all of them watching us, but no one of them saying a word, and still Katy Waggoner in front of the fire, keening her plaintive lullaby.

What will I do? I thought to myself then. What will I do? Will I shoot down this great brave man, this large ugly Scotsman who is like a brother to me – or will I back out? And if I do back out, what then? What sort of a wild venture have I embarked on, that every step of the way it comes to a crisis that must either be driven home, like the peg into its wooden loin, or left to triumph on the ashes of our insane hopes? Are any of us sane? Or are we all mad with hunger and cold and humiliation?

Yet for all of these thoughts, I knew that I was sane – saner indeed than I have ever before been, in all of my life, and I also knew that I would slay Angus MacGrath or any other who stood in our path from here on. Something had happened to me, just as something had happened to the eleven at the table; a new fire had been lit, and the heat of its flame was still untested.

Well, I will be damned, said MacGrath. Here is Jamie Stuart, with the pap still wet on his mouth, and he holds a gun on me. By all that is holy! Well, it will take the gentry to slay me, not such a skinny lad as you, Jamie Stuart. So let us go out into that cursed cold night and do yer crazy business.

And I went out arm-in-arm with Angus MacGrath, and when I returned, as I said, there was dawning in the smoky air, and still hardly a beginning had been made by the Committee. I brought them an accounting of the Line, which was three thousand and fifty-two enlisted men, as near as I could reckon it with no access to the officers' records.

Just for a moment before I entered the hut, I paused and looked across the silent, flat parade ground, with its lines of huts and its tracked-over, dirtying snow. It slumbered in uneasy peace; but what, I wondered, would it be like a few hours from now? Would that pale, cold sun, nudging the mist so timidly, look down upon a sanguine plain of fratricidal horror? And would this be the end of all the best hopes that the ragged band of us had ever entertained? Yet I was committed, so what did it matter? And as for nightmares – had I not lived long enough in the midst of one?

The Committee listened as I made my report on the number of soldiers we had in the encampment. I spoke and blew on my hands alternately, edging to the fire to warm myself. Now Danny Connell rose and spread his ragged coat over the two women, who lay sleeping before the bed of coals, and old Scottsboro shook his head sadly, commenting:

A sight of men is three thousand and more, Jamie, and has any of us the head to lead them?

Cut that grumbling, said Jack Maloney.… How did you and Angus make out with the Guard, Jamie?

I reported that we had enlisted at least sixty more lads who pledged to stand by us; but that it was no easy work, crawling into bed with a man in the dark and persuading him with whispers. The call for the Guard was the refrain of the Yankee camp jig, to be sounded three times on the trumpet; and whenever that came, if there had been no further instruction, the men pledged to us would lead their hutments out onto the parade, with arms and bayonets fixed. But so far we had nothing to speak of among the 4th and the 2nd, and were particularly strong in the 10th and 11th.

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.