by Howard Fast
So I have told you a little of my life in each direction, a little of what was in the old days, when one day was not so different from the other while I learned the best way to ease my back so that Fritz Tumbrill’s blows fell as lightly as possible, while I learned how to bevel the leather for the sole and how to sew it for the upper, how to cut, shape, trim and awl, how to drink and coddle and roll – and some of what came after, when I grew old and away from the memories of my youth.
But Fritz Tumbrill never made an animal of me, or I would have become like him. Instead, I hardened and I became something else, and through Molly Bracken – of whom you will hear more – I learned to read and write. So I was able to read in a newspaper of the incident that happened in Massachusetts in April of 1775, and I was able to read as well that they were raising a regiment of Pennsylvania men and all others who would enlist for pay, bounty and glory, to strike down the tyrant. I knew what to do and I did it, because the answers to my questions were written on my back and on my memory too.
That is enough of Jamie Stuart to justify this narration which I will set down. He was like the other men, of whom I will also tell, and he loved them deeply and came to know them.
May they sleep well, do I say, myself. They reached up for the stars and they made a crude key to unlock the gates of heaven. This, other men will do, and the key will become a better one; so I will not weep for them or have you weep, but only give them their due.
PART TWO
Being an account of the death of Tommy Mahoney, and the Congress we held and the pledge we made on the eve of the New Year of 1781.
THE FACTS which I am about to set down in a narrative to do honor to my dead comrades – for no other honor has been done to them – had a beginning somewhere; but the more I ponder the interconnection of things, the more I come to understand that the beginning is not traceable – which is all for the best: for then a spark of hope burns in my heart, and I ponder the possibility that the end is as little traceable as the beginning. And if that is the case, then I for one believe that there was a meaning and a purpose and a final chapter still to be written out in life to what we did.
But however that may be, there must be a starting point, and for that I have chosen the death of little Tommy Mahoney, the Protestant drummer boy from Dublin town, who died on the eve of the new year of 1781, in the encampment outside of Morristown, New Jersey. I will also tell you that I choose the death of this poor, damned little lad because our first Congress of the Line followed; but there were other places for the beginning. Even before the war, there was a beginning to what we did, and even before any man there was born, and even maybe so long ago as when Christ led men not so different from ourselves, and no more poorly clothed and fed.
It is something we know and which doctors cannot explain, that a man will not go on living if he has lost the desire to do so; and it was plain to everyone after we had marched from Totowa to Morristown that little Tommy Mahoney was not long for this earth. It was not the cold winds that blew so cruelly from the northern forests; it was not the fact that we lived on a little parched corn with never a taste of meat; it was not our nakedness, our lousiness, our sickness – for all of these things we were used to, and these things we had lived through before and had a ripe belly of, when we lay at Valley Forge. It was because we had stopped hoping, and because we were bereft and betrayed; and the little lad knew better than some of us who were old enough to be his father what the situation was. His beardless face became gray and the sparkle went out of his eyes. When he beat on his drum, it was a new rhythm, a sad and hopeless rhythm.
I beat because my heart is breaking, his drum said.
There was a time when such a drumbeat with such a sad and frightened rhythm would have angered us, and then some of us would have said, Twelve on his backside, that drummer lad needs. And others of us would have said, Stop your chopping dirty sticks, if that is all the kind of a tune you can beat out. And there would have been many a clip alongside the head and chin for little Tommy Mahoney as a reward for the devilish and persistent means he took of beating that drum.
But we were changed too, along with the lad, and nobody clipped Tommy Mahoney and nobody shouted at him; for inside of us we knew that the tune he played was the truth and nothing but the truth. We had all of us, all of the men of the ten infantry regiments and one artillery regiment of the Pennsylvania Line who were marched from Totowa to Morristown to go into winter encampment, become gentle. We were soft-spoken; we were quiet; we were sad. And as we set to work to repair the little log huts that stood in various stages of decay from the encampment of the year before, it seemed to many of us that there was never a time but when we were what we were now, such homeless, lonely, lost men as the world had not seen before. The heart had left us; we did not fight; we did not beat our women; we did not sing – and one time when big Angus MacGrath strode forth to play on his pipes, the music that came forth in spite of himself was such cursed and lonely music that he laid his pipes away and vowed never to play upon them again, so long as he lived.
For that reason, we did not clip Tommy Mahoney when he beat his crying rhythms. The lad is not for this world, we said. He is making a requiem for himself, and who will deny him that privilege?
He was undersized, the way most of us in the Line were, coming as we had from foreign soil, or out of bondage and poverty. When Massachusetts or Connecticut had first marched alongside us, they made many a joke of it, shouting things like, Ho for the dirty little runts! Ho for the little men! Are you going to war now, little men? But the Yankees sang another song when the grape opened up, hissing like a great kettle boiled over, and when the muskets balls whistled from the British volleys. Then they ran away but we stood and died, even as we stood and died on every field, New York, White Plains, Trenton, Monmouth, Stony Point – how many there were, and we in our line stood with our Irish and Scotch and Germans and Poles and French and Portuguese, our black men and our Jews and our Romans – we stood and they stopped calling us little men!
Yet Tommy Mahoney was smaller than most. His arms and legs were like sticks; he had a pinched face, pocked and tired and sad, but for all that a little boy’s face. He had sandy hair, close-cropped, that stood straight up from his head, and he had a dainty alto voice that was the sweetest thing men ever heard. How he loved to sing once! But he sang no more now. We urged him and urged him, thinking that music would be like medicine, but only when Christmas time approached did he lift up his head and sing, On the first day of Christmas, my truelove sent to me, a partridge in a pear tree. On the second day of Christmas, my truelove sent to me, two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree.…
And then he sang on and on and we joined in the round, and made a real ringing roundelay out of it; and that was the only real roundelay we sang in all that Christmas time. The women kissed him and petted him; and Handsome Jack Maloney, of whom you will hear much more, beat time with the tears streaming down his face and said:
Sing more and more, my lad, with old tunes of the old country, so you will make my rotten old heart crack with the joy of it all.
I can sing no more, the drummer boy answered, for I remember the beauty of Dublin city, before me uncle sold me to go overseas into bondage.
But ye’re not in bondage now, me lad, the girls pleaded.
I can sing no more, he said, for me heart is breaking, and I want to lay me down and die.
They went on with their persuasion until big Angus MacGrath roared, Now let the lad be, for will ye make music out of a broken lute, like the officers make war out of our own lifeblood?
He withered, did little Tommy Mahoney, like the apple that is picked too soon and then goes uneaten, and when the last day of the year 1780 came, he laid himself down and he died.
We were hutted up then with our own bitterness, and because you should know to understand what followed, I will tell you what our huts were like. This one of mine will serve, for I was sergeant over the drummer boy, and apart from
myself, fifteen men were hutted there in my house. Also, in this same house, the first Congress of the Line was held, and also in this same house there came into being the Committee of Sergeants.
The hut was twenty feet long and sixteen deep, fronting on the parade – which made it somewhat bigger than most of the others. It was made of logs, and chinked with clay, and had a dirt floor and a bark roof, no windows and a clay and log hearth. We bedded in threes, one atop the other, and there was a sawbuck table and two benches down the middle, at which we ate when there was anything for eating. The bunks were split logs with straw bolsters, only it was years since we had sewn the last of the bolsters into shirts and the last of our blankets into coats, so that now we slept on the straw and under it too. Such were our hutments.
In this hut of mine, Tommy Mahoney breathed out his last; and we laid the little lad out on the table, and Katy Waggoner and Olive Lutz came in to wash him and make him ready for the ground. We took off all his clothes and washed his poor skinny body clean, and then we washed the few rags he wore, dried them by the fire, and dressed him over again. Katy Waggoner went to the quartermaster general to beg a winding sheet, but for her pains all she got was a curse and a slap in the face – which was no way to treat her, for all that she was a loose and slatternly woman. But even if she had gotten a winding sheet of the purest linen, I do not think that what followed would have been noticeably altered. I start this narrative from the death of Tommy Mahoney, only because I must have a starting point somewhere and not because I believe it was the death of the drummer boy, from sadness, starvation and bleeding lungs, that caused what followed. Nor do I believe that the beating of the two Kelly brothers, John and Dobie, made any decisive difference. The two of them were Romans who had come to us as replacements, signing in for what they and theirs had suffered in the old country from the British and from their own tyrants; and not knowing that the boy was a Protestant lad, and not knowing that in such a village as Morristown there could be no Roman priest, they now set off, without leave, to fetch one.
They were men out of the 2nd Pennsylvania, in which there were many Polish and Irish, and particularly eleven Jews, which gave the officers a singular reason for hatred. It is such a long time back that I may have a name twisted here and there, but I think it was Captain Sudburry and four or five of his fellows who stopped the Kelly brothers, demanding of them:
Now where are you going, my lads?
We’re off to Morristown to fetch a father for a little lad who died unshriven, John Kelly replied.
The hell you are! And where are your papers for leave? the officers said ungraciously.
We have no papers, John Kelly answered, courteously enough as we heard of it, but his brother spoke up and asked, Now would ye want papers to enter into the gates of heaven, or hell also? Here is a little lad from the old country, from Dublin town, from which me blessed mother came, and he wasted away into his death all unshriven, and we only seek a holy father to give him a little unction.
Whether they knew what either Kelly brother spoke of, I know not; but they fell into a fury and cursed them out.
Now to hell with ye, for ye talk like a damned Englishman, said one of the Kelly brothers.
That was all that was needed. The officers, of whom there were at least four or five, drew their swords and set about to belabor the two boys with the flats and backs. One of the officers was armed with an espontoon, a weapon like a pike and much in favor by officers in those critical days, and this he drove into the stomach of Dobie Kelly, while the other was bruised and cut all over the face and head. Then both of them were taken under guard, and when we heard about it, early on the eve of New Year, Dobie Kelly was already dead.
You can imagine how it was. We were sitting in a wake around the body of the little drummer lad, and the word came to us, brought by Stanislaus Prukish, sergeant in the 2nd. Already, there were grouped around the boy, in the flickering firelight, small delegations of one or two sergeants or corporals who had come from each of the ten infantry regiments and from the artillery company too, for the lad had been much considered for his singing and the good spirits he once owned. Prukish told us what he knew of the incident of the Kelly brothers.
There it is, he said, in his thick Polish accent, which I cannot reproduce. We are not fast enough dying, so they have begun the killing. We are the enemy instead of the Lobsters.
If there was a drop of rum in this cursed encampment, I would be howling drunk this evening, said Sean O’Toole of the 4th Regiment. I would spin my head like a top and go out into the white snow and howl like the devil at the stars. But there is no rum, and here we are sitting at the wake of two good lads, with never a little bit of a drop to wet our throats.
Be damned with it! I have not been paid these eleven months, not even in the lousy Yankee paper; I have not been clothed; I have not been fed. The cold is in me bones.
Silence fell, and in the next half-hour it was only interrupted when someone said to throw another handful of faggots on the fire. I don’t know what would have been that evening had we been drunk, the way soldiers have a right to be on the eve of the New Year; but apart from the officers’ quarters in the fine and genteel houses, there was not a dram of spirits in the camp. Sober we were, sober and moody and angry. Nor were we cold, for one by one, men entered to pay their respects, and women too, until more than fifty of us were packed into the one cabin, on the floor, on the bunks, sprawled, squatting, standing; and those who came stayed. Sergeant Billy Bowzar of the 10th came in, and with him Jim Holt, the black man who was corporal in the 2nd. The two Jews, brothers in the 2nd, Aaron and Moses Gonzales, entered, and with them was Danny Connell of my own 11th. Connell had been a minstrel in the old country, and when I saw him first, in 1776, he was as fair a lad to look upon as you would find in all the tidewater countries, twenty-three years old then with black hair and black eyes and a swagger and a dash, and as ready for a fight as a cock with spurs. But now, in his rags, he looked fifty if he looked a day; his hair was gray, as was his big, bushy beard, and his eyes were deep-sunk into his head, and he was as dirty as we all were, and as smelly and as lousy. He had his lass, Mathilda, with him, a mountain girl from the buckskin folk over westward; she was faithful to him and stayed with him from year to year, so thin a breath of wind could blow her away, yet with spirit in her. To look at her made my heart yearn for my own sweet Molly Bracken in York village, but I would not want her here to share my own misery and dirt.
Connell had been to look at the Kellys, and he said as he entered:
It was a wanton thing they did to the boy, and if I had ever raised my voice, they would have done as much to me. For it is in me head that they are stricken mad and that this is the end of everything.
If it’s the end of everything, said Freddy Goulay, a black man and corporal in the 6th Regiment, it’s an end they made. The only gift they got is to lead us to slaughter. They are whipping men, like overseers, and each of them would be a king. They fill their cup with hate, they do. The people hate them and the land hate them, and we hate them too. Now they don’t come near us, they don’t touch us, they afraid.
Each had something to say of that sort, but it was surprising with what little anger they said it, and how slowly and regretfully. Our tone was gentler than our appearance, for crammed into the hut, sitting almost one on top of the other, with the little lad’s mortal remains stretched out on the table square in the center of us, we looked like something that man had never made of himself before. It was a long, long time, yes many, many months since we had been given money or clothes or a blanket to shelter us from the cold. Put a man in rags, feed him on cornmeal until his teeth are all loose in the sockets, and he will not look after his body as if it were a thing to be precious about; we had stopped shaving because we had stopped caring, and our hair was long and wild and knotted. When we had fought, we were taken into battle like cattle into a slaughter pen, and when the battles were lost, as almost every one was, we were left to h
old the field while the Yankees fled.
… So I went into the fine house of Thomas Hardwick, continued Danny Connell, still telling of his journeys to know why and how the Kelly boy had died … and the officers of the 9th Pennsylvania Regiment – may it be glorious in battle, this heart and soul of the Revolution – they sat at dinner. And on the eve of this New Year, when there is no eating or drinking or dancing or singing, would you like me to spin you a tale of the officers at dinner?
You should be sitting with respect at a wake, with respect and sober sorrow, said Olive Lutz.
And have I no respect in me voice? And is my heart not breaking with sober sorrow – me, Danny Connell, who sang such songs of gladness when he was a lad? If ye don’t recognize that, you dirty bitch, it’s because you got the soul of a slattern!
To hell with that, I told him. If it’s the Roman way to have foul talk over the dead, you swallow your tongue, Danny Connell. For this is a Protestant lad laid out on the table.
Then would ye have a theological discussion? asked Connell, combing his beard with his fingers and looking at the ceiling. Here we are Jew and Protestant and Roman and heathen too, but I do not find discrimination among our officers. They hold with equality, me dear Jamie Stuart …
I was on a top bunk, perched with my head against the roof beams; I was bent over – a taller man than the foreigners – chin on knees, and staring with smarting, watering eyes.
… Me dear Jamie Stuart, ye are not the only lad in the regiment can read and write, and I got in me head here four hundred songs. Tell me I’m lying, ye scut.
When our anger rises, we fight each other, said the Jew Aaron Gonzales, so sadly that the tears ran down my cheeks; and Connell cried too, and said more gently: