“They have small pox,” the Lieutenant explained. “The Colonel ordered our entire Regiment to be inoculated. Some of the men do better than others. Thank God, none have yet died from this dread disease.”
Will nodded. Nat had told him Dr. Thaxter had inoculated the Mariners in the fall of ‘75. It was a condition of serving as General Washington’s Headquarters Guard. Will was uncertain what inoculation entailed and he was too tired to ask for an explanation.
Will studied the Lieutenant in the firelight. He was tall, with exuberant brown curly hair that peaked in the middle of his forehead. It covered his ears on the sides and was tied loosely behind his head. His eyebrows were equally thick, arching over deep brown penetrating eyes. His face, unshaven for a few days, showed a thick dark stubble which gave him a more manly, physically fit appearance.
The barracks door opened and shut quickly with a bang. A short and portly soldier limped down the room toward them, the wood of his cane thumping in a regular rhythm on the floor boards.
“Ah, there you are, Sergeant. This young man, Will Stoner, is a guest of the Regiment for the night. Colonel’s orders,” he added by way of explanation.
The Sergeant limped to the fire, sat down with a groan on an empty cot, stretched out his right leg and extended a hand to Will.
“Thomas Merriam,” he said by way of introduction.
“How is the foot healing?” Hadley asked.
“Better every day sir. It has been five days since the ball rolled into my ankle. I will be ready when the time comes.”
“That will be soon, Sergeant. Very soon, indeed,” the Lieutenant said, adjusting his tri-corn and buttoning his coat. “I must be getting back to camp,” he said.
“Good night, sir,” the Sergeant said. Will nodded and took his wooden bowl and pewter spoon from his haversack. Careful not to touch the iron pot, he ladled out the soup and oats, now soft from boiling, and sat down on the cot next to the Sergeant.
Merriam massaged his calf and flexed his foot. “Carelessness occurs when you least expect it. One of my crew did not stack the balls correctly. One rolled off as I was near, and I could not get out of the way because of the ice. The ball hit me hard. I went down as if it had been fired from a cannon.” He leaned forward, easing off his boot. The ankle, through Merriam’s thin white stocking, was an ugly bluish purple and swollen to at least twice its normal size. The Sergeant gingerly rubbed his ankle down toward the arch.
“Because of this, I stay with these men at night, nurse them and get relief in the morning. There was none today though because of the bombardment,” the Sergeant said as Will eagerly slurped the soup until the bowl was empty. “Only the doctor came by around midday. At night I could hear our artillery pounding away at the Regulars. I pray to God their aim was accurate. Many of us still have family down there.”
Will took another bowl and told the Sergeant about what he had seen and the explosion at the first howitzer battery.
Merriam became more somber. “That crew was Bixby, Jarvis and Phineas Stowe. There were only three men for that howitzer and Sergeant Otis as the gun commander. All good men,” he muttered. He clasped his hands together and closed his eyes. Will took the opportunity to study him. Merriam had a high broad forehead with barely any hair for eyebrows or eyelashes. His cheeks were ruddy and jowly. His lips seemed too thin in comparison to his strong square chin. Except for an odd long hair on his neck, no one would notice if he didn’t shave for a week. He moved his lips silently. When he opened his eyes, Will saw there were tears in them.
“I prayed for all four,” he said by way of explanation to Will. “Tomorrow, I will know which one God has permitted to be still of this earth,” he added, running his hands through the tufts of ill-kempt black hair sticking out of the side of his head.
One of the sick men groaned and Will motioned for Merriam to stay seated. He took a basin of water to the bedside, removed the dry folded cloth from the man’s forehead and dipped it in the water. At the sound, the man’s eyes opened. Startled, he looked around, attempted to sit up, recognized where he was, and collapsed back on the linen sheet, wet with his own sweat. Hoarsely he whispered, “Water. Please some water.”
Will took the cloth from the basin, wrung most of the liquid out, and brushed it against the man’s lips. The man opened his mouth in anticipation and Will squeezed the cloth, letting a steady stream of drops fall on his tongue. The man nodded, his eyes pleading for more. Will found the soldier’s pewter cup under his bed, filled it a third with water, and lifted it to his lips. The man swallowed slowly, snorting through his nose in appreciation. The pustules around his eyes were oozing and Will wiped the yellowish thick liquid away. After a few minutes, the man, with a small satisfied smile on his face, lapsed back into his feverish sleep.
“If you could take a watch of two hours, it would give me a brief respite,” Merriam said, looking at his cot longingly. “As you can see, there are plenty of empty beds for you to choose from.”
“I can well do that,” Will said. He was physically tired but not in need of sleep. “Perhaps for longer, if need be.”
“Thank you, lad” Merriam replied, lying down and covering himself with his coat. “If they wake, give them water and keep them covered,” he said. “Those two over there,” he pointed at the two cots to his left. “They have trouble keeping down the little food they ingest. It happens with the pox at this stage. You may have to help them up to clean themselves. You can use some of the linens,” he said helpfully. He shifted to favor his ankle, sighed and fell into an exhausted sleep.
Will found a three-legged stool, roughly carved and well worn, and moved it closer to the fire. He opened his haversack, caressed the precious paper Mrs. Knox had given him along with one of the books she had promised, and began, in his mind, to compose a letter to Elisabeth. Perhaps tomorrow he would find a quill and ink. There still was no word from her, but Mrs. Knox had urged him to continue writing. He resolved he would because he couldn’t bear the alternative of not doing so.
By the time he had satisfied himself, going over the words of his final draft in is mind, he was alert and wide awake. Two of the soldiers were moaning and tossing with fever. He quickly went outside and under a cold, clear starry night scooped snow into the basin and applied it with cloth compresses to their foreheads. It seemed strange to him to be cooling them off and keeping them warm at the same time. He threw a few more logs on the fire, heating his cold wet hands in front of the crackling flames. He opened the pages of The Vicar of Wakefield and looked at the illustrations before setting it aside.
He untied a packet of newssheets, expecting to find another novel protected by the papers inside. Instead, they were prior issues of The Boston Gazette & County Journal from the month of February. The masthead proclaimed, almost defiantly, that it was printed in Watertown due to the illegal British occupation of Boston. He read a broadside of The Salem Gazette, looking closely at the drawings of forty black coffins above the headline in large type proclaiming “Bloody Butchery by the British, or the Runaway Fight of the Regulars.” He absorbed the account of the particulars of the battle of Concord, “twenty miles from Boston,” the previous April. There were other papers and journals, and copies of the Royal American Magazine, which he at first thought was pro-British. From the cartoons Will quickly understood it was making fun of the King and various Lords and Earls for trampling on the rights of the Colonialists.
There was an issue of The Essex Journal, which supported what Nat had told him when they first met, that a British General was a secret Catholic and intended to make the Colonialists swear obedience to the Pope. He found a pamphlet entitled “A Sermon Preached at Lexington, by Jonas Clark, Pastor of a Church in Lexington.” Will read the bold letters explaining that the sermon was to commemorate the “MURDER, BLOODSHED, and Commencement of the Hostilities between Great Britain and America.”
3
He skimmed over many of the newssheets, magazines and journals, intending to
return to them. The sermon captured his interest and he read it first. The Pastor described how the British troops had set fire to buildings with people inside. Women in child-bed were either “cruelly murdered in their beds, burnt in their habitations, or turned into the streets to perish with cold.” Will read on about the ravaging and plundering of homes along the road as the troops retreated from Concord to Lexington and on to Cambridge, of the bayoneting of the “unarmed, the aged and infirm, who were unable to flee and were inhumanly stabbed and murdered in their habitations.” The Pastor confirmed what Colonel Knox had told the teamsters in the Berkshires. If anything the Pastor’s account was more accurate, Will reasoned. This man had been in Lexington and had digested what he had seen and been told by his neighbors and parishioners. He felt a cold hatred inside of him of the troops who could commit such atrocities and the Officers who ordered them to do so. The Americans had no choice but to defend themselves against such savage and inhuman barbarism.
The novel, lying on the cot in its leather binding, no longer interested him. Will read page after page of the newssheets, leaning close to the fire to make out the smaller type of the articles. He read about the hardships caused by the British occupation and blockade of Boston, the unprovoked attack almost six years ago by British troops on the unarmed people, called “the Boston Massacre,” the burning of small towns along the coast, and the forays of the Regulars into the countryside, even on the Sabbath. He devoured the tracts on the illegality of the Crown’s actions under the abominable Coercive Acts, banning all representative government in Massachusetts, and the blockade of the port of Boston.
He was in the middle of the tract explaining the right of the Colonists, as free Englishmen, to govern themselves and elect their representatives, when one of the soldiers cried out. Will helped him sit up and offered him water from the man’s cup. The soldier waved him off, signaled for something else that Will didn’t understand, and then rolled to his side and vomited on the floor. Will waited until the man had stopped and lain back flat. He unfolded a linen sheet from nearest pile, wiped up the floor with it and threw the soiled fabric in a corner.
“Would you like me to get you some broth,” Will asked. “There is some in the pot.”
The man shook his head. “It will not do me any good if I cannot keep it down,” he said. He tossed his head from side to side, the pustules blossoming through his unshaven skin. “This ache in my head never leaves me. I am so weak,” he whispered. Will had to lean closer to hear. “I will not be able to lift the rammer.” He mumbled something else that Will couldn’t make out. The soldier, sapped of the little energy he had by the strain of awakening and throwing up, closed his eyes. Will put a fresh cloth on his forehead. The man mouthed the words “bless you” but no sound emerged from his lips. Will put his hand on the man’s arm and sat on the edge of the cot until he was satisfied the soldier was asleep.
He returned to his stool by the fire and opened another newssheet. It set forth the argument, the logic of which was plain to Will, that if the Crown could impose the Coercive Acts and punish Massachusetts, it could do so against any of the Colonies. If the Colonies did not remain united in their opposition to the Crown, the author argued, the King and his army would devour them one by one. And finally, Will reread Pastor Clark’s Sermon and The Salem coffin broadsheet. He ran his fingers over the two rows of twenty coffins and noted the names of the men they represented, killed by the Redcoats at Concord.
If he could be part of the battle for Boston, Will thought, these words and the memory of the British atrocities would strengthen him in his resolve to fight. He stepped outside to relieve himself and saw that it was near dawn. He carefully packed the novel and papers in his haversack and woke Sergeant Merriam. As Will lay down, he realized The Vicar novel had come from Mrs. Knox. The rest had been given him by the Colonel. He smiled at the realization the Colonel thought enough of Will to provide broadsheets and gazettes about the nature of their cause. He fell asleep immediately.
Will was on the verge of awaking. Subconsciously, he knew it was daylight. He was jarred into consciousness by a deep voice shouting near his cot.
“Sergeant. Who authorized this man to be here?”
Will sat upright and recognized Dr. Thaxter, his round, dignified figure drawn up in righteous indignation, his hand extended toward Will, his face red with anger turned toward Merriam.
“Has this man been inoculated? Do you understand the risk he has been exposed to if he has not?”
“Doctor,” Merriam said hastily, nervously smoothing his thinning hair back on his forehead and limping forward on his cane. “All I know is the Lieutenant brought him here last night, after midnight it was, and said it was the Colonel’s orders to give him lodging and food.”
“Lodging, to any intelligent person, would mean” the Doctor replied, staring sternly at the Sergeant, “anywhere but in a smallpox ward. Well, the lad is awake and we shall soon find out. Have you been inoculated?” Dr. Thaxter peered at him, waiting for his response.
“No sir. I am not sure precisely what it is but I am reasonably certain it has not been done to me. I have had the pox though,” Will added almost as an afterthought.
“Have you now. When and where may I ask?” Doctor Thaxter cocked his head and studied Will.
“Johan, my brother who is older, had it first. His face bears more marks than mine. My grandmother kept me in the same room as him so I would get it also.” He pushed the hair away from his temples. “I have some marks there and a few on my neck,” Will said, holding his chin up.
“So you do,” Dr. Thaxter conceded, coming closer and examining Will’s head and neck. “So you do. And one or two on this side of your nose, if I am not mistaken,” he said examining Will’s face closely. He held Will’s chin in his hand and turned Will’s face toward the daylight.
He walked over to the cots, still grouped around a now-roaring fire. “Let me examine these men first. Then I will decide what to do with you. I cannot have you spreading the pox, ravaging the Army and decimating its ranks,” he said gruffly.
Sergeant Merriam stirred a large container of porridge over the fire. A tall pot of what smelled like coffee sat on one of the logs. The small side table was laden with loaves of bread and wedges of cheese.
“There is more than enough for you, Will,” Merriam said. “These men will not eat much.
Take what you want and you can help me feed them afterwards.”
“Who was the third man of the gun crew,” Will asked, lowering his voice. “Did you ask the doctor?”
The Sergeant nodded, taking a bite of bread. “It was Bixby, Jarvis and Stowe who died. Sergeant Otis was unharmed. Those iron howitzers are untrustworthy beasts. Give me a solid brass twenty-four pounder any day.”
Dr. Thaxter grunted as he raised himself up from the last cot. “You will all live,” he concluded, addressing the sick soldiers. “The fever and pox must run its course. Each day is better though. One day closer to recovery.” He turned and rolled down the cuffs of his overcoat. “Now let me take a look at you again, young man.” He motioned Will over toward the window and examined his face again. “Your grandmother was a very wise woman.”
Will nodded in agreement. “Yes sir. She said it was the way it was done in Holland in her parents’ time. To put well children in with their sick siblings, I mean.”
Dr. Thaxter absorbed this information and studied Will’s face. “You do seem to have had a very mild case. I do not know if that is enough to protect you. How long ago was it?”
“I believe I was four at the time.” The doctor waited, until Will realized he was not about to guess his age. “I turned sixteen in February, Sir.”
“Well,” Dr. Thaxter said, rinsing his hands in cold water and drying them on a linen sheet. “What we do know is that if we inoculate soon after exposure, the patient is either protected or the pox is of less severity. I will inoculate you now. With Providence’s help, you will not even develop the pox. Now, take
off your coat, roll up your sleeve and sit at that table by the window.”
Will did as he was told, shivering in his shirt in the cold drafty room. Dr. Thaxter removed a glass vial from his brown leather bag and placed it on the table. He took out a scalpel, went to the fireplace and heated it over the flames. Will watched him with apprehension as he returned.
“Are you able to hold your arm steady or do I need the Sergeant to help?” the doctor asked.
“I can, sir, if I may rest it on the table,” he replied with more courage than he felt. The doctor nodded his assent and plopped down on a chair opposite Will, after first fanning out the tails of his coat so as not to sit on them.
“You will not even feel this,” he said, as he drew the scalpel across the inside of Will’s forearm, making a shallow cut three to five inches long. Will looked at the thin line of blood that marked the incision. Dr. Thaxter removed the cork top from the vial. With a tweezers he pulled out a thread covered with a thick yellow pus. It looked like half melted lard. He grasped the free end with another tweezers and carefully lining up the thread in the cut, pulled it back and forth, leaving some of the pus in the wound.
“Hold this cloth tightly on it until I say you may remove it,” the doctor directed, as he reinserted the infected thread into the vial and put his equipment back into his bag.
“I was with the Mariners when you came to their barracks,” Will said, pressing the cloth on his arm. “Your assistant treated me. How is Titus Fuller?” Will asked.
Dr. Thaxter studied Will before answering. “So, you were a participant in the fight with Morgan’s Rifles.” Will nodded.
“A colossal waste of good men,” he said bitterly. “And a disgrace to the Army,” he added. Will was not sure whether he was referring to the Mariners and was about to rise to their defense, when the doctor added, “What can one expect from illiterate backwoods people.” He shook his head. “Titus is recuperating nicely. His right eye is gone but otherwise he is physically fit and ready for duty. If Colonel Glover will have him, the man desires to stay with the Mariners.” He noticed Will was still pressing the cloth to his forearm. “You may remove it. No trying to rub it off now. Leave it alone and let it heal by itself. You understand.” Will nodded. “I will trust my instincts you are not infectious. You have my permission to leave the barracks.”
Cannons for the Cause Page 19