Conceived in Liberty

by Howard Fast

  “It’s the German lad,” Ely says. “Why won’t he come in?”

  We wait, and then I get up and fling open the door. A rush of snow, and then a figure stumbles into the room.

  “Who the hell are you?” Jacob demands.

  I force the door shut. She lifts her head, and we see a woman, wrapped in a blanket, barefooted, her feet blue and broken open from the cold.

  “Jesus Christ,” Green whispers.

  She lets fall the blanket; she’s half-naked, wearing only an old pair of men’s breeches under the blanket. Blue with cold, thin, her breasts the small breasts of a girl, her face sunken, long black hair, curious thin features that might have been lovely once. I stare at her the way we are all staring. Henry Lane wakes and stumbles out of his bunk. He moves toward her, a haggard, bearded, sleep-ridden figure, and she shrinks back against me. I’ pick up the blanket and cover her shoulders. She gropes toward the fire and crouches next to it.

  “Who are you, lass?” Ely asks her.

  “Leave me alone,” she says. “God’s sake—leave me alone.”

  Kenton’s woman says: “I’ll tell ye who. She’s a fair whore of a Virginian brigade. Her name’s Bess Kinley.”

  “Leave me alone—”

  Jacob gets up. He goes to her directly and takes hold of her blanket. “Get out,” he says hoarsely.

  Vandeer joins him. “Get out—there’s enough of rotten women in here. You’ll make blood flow between us and the Virginians. Get out.”

  “Leave her alone,” I tell them. I force myself in front of Jacob.

  “Boy—get away. The woman’s no good!”

  “She’ll stay,” I tell Jacob. “Her feet are bleeding. Let her stay and warm by the fire.”

  Jacob grips my shoulder, raises his hand to strike. Ely’s sharp voice stops him. He stands there, watching the girl.

  “They’re drunk,” she says. “They’d kill me. Look at this.” She opens the blanket.

  Kenton cries: “They’re drunk—drunk. That swine Quiller swore there was no rum, but the Virginian brigades are drunk!” Quiller is the commissary.

  “Lead her out,” Vandeer says tonelessly.

  Green’s woman says: “You stay there, honey. Let them try to put me out! A man wouldn’t put out a dog on a night like this!”

  The door opens, and a man stoops through. He wears the long grey hunting shirt of a Virginian. He’s bareheaded, panting. There are others behind him. Some of them carry their long rifles. They hold the door open and the cold eats into the room.

  “Close the door,” Ely tells him.

  “I’ll have her—she’s our woman.”

  “She’s a Virginian woman!” someone behind him yells.

  “Close the door.”

  “You can go to hell!” I say. “You can get to hell out of here!”

  He starts across the room, and I fling myself on him, bearing him back. His fist crashes into my face, and then I hear Jacob’s roar as he beats the Virginian through the low door. Ely follows with Kenton and Vandeer. I get up and stumble after them, Lane and Green with me. I catch one glimpse of the Jew, sitting by the fire like a figure out of time.

  Outside, there is a mad tangle of figures. I direct all my hate and resentment into the fight. Voices break the night’s quiet, and the Pennsylvania men pour from their dugouts. Muskets are clubbed—knives.

  The cry goes up: “Virginians!”

  There aren’t many of the Virginians—a dozen perhaps. They’re beaten back. They’re overwhelmed by numbers. We stand panting—warm even in the cold.

  “Drunk,” a Pennsylvania man says.

  “We’re rationed on rum—and those damned Virginians drink.”

  We go back to the dugout, grumbling, but feeling that the fight has kept us from madness. We crowd in, close the door; body heat and heat of the fire. The Jew stares at us, as if we were things beyond his understanding.

  “Ye’re Pennsylvania men?” the girl says. “You’ll let me stay tonight?”

  “We’re no Pennsylvania men,” Jacob says.

  “What’s your name?” I ask her.

  “Bess Kinley.”

  “Sit by the fire and warm yourself” I tell her. “No man will drive you from the fire.”

  I look at her, and something passes between us. I feel bigger than before, different.

  “She’ll stay,” I tell them.

  “She’ll stay tonight,” Ely agrees.

  I sit close to her. She doesn’t speak. I look at her face, and for once try to read the mystery of a woman who follows the army.

  Finally I say, sullenly: “Why don’t you get out of the camp? Why don’t you get out of here?”

  “Where would I go?” she asks me.

  Kenton’s woman sobs softly; silence takes hold of us. Occasionally, someone puts a piece of wood on the fire.

  “I’m hungry,” she says.

  We give her some gruel, and she holds the wooden cup with both hands, drinking it slowly. Nobody speaks. Henry Lane is sleeping again. Green and Kenton crawl into their beds. Already they have lost interest.

  Edward comes in, blue with cold, shaking off the snow. He stands and looks at the girl.

  “She’s Allen’s woman,” Jacob says. Thus our morality. Thus our years of prayer on the hard floors of hard wooden churches. She was mine without marriage, without the word of any man of God. Because I took her, she is mine.

  The girl turns and looks at me, her dark eyes biting into mine. I say nothing. Ely tells Edward what has happened.

  “They’re hard, bitter men, the Virginians,” Edward says. “The girl’s a slut. Did she expect them to nurse her?”

  “Shut up!” I cry.

  “I’m not holding for the Virginians, Allen.”

  “Where’s Brone?” Ely asks Edward. “He should have been back already.”

  “I didn’t see him,” Edward says. “I thought he was back.”

  “I forgot,” I mutter. “The boy was sick with cold. I forgot and I had no thought for him.”

  Ely stands up and puts on his coat.

  “Ye’re a fool to go out,” Jacob says.

  I crawl into my coat. I’m sick with weariness, but I know about Brone. Deep in my heart, I know.

  I followed Ely out. Jacob came behind me. None of us spoke. We walked across the hillside, away from the dugouts, and then down toward the Gulph Road. It was easy to find the path Brone had beaten in the snow, and follow it. When we came near the end, two low shapes shot away across the snow.

  “I should have brought my gun,” I said miserably. “You should have known to bring a gun, Ely.”

  We came to Brone. Jacob knelt down. “Wolves,” he said. “Wolves,” he repeated bitterly, his voice rising, “and the lad was too weak—too weak.”

  “He was telling me tonight——”

  “He didn’t know,” Ely said. “He was asleep.” We knelt around him, our breath making a cloud, as if from candles. I had to look. Ely tried to hold me away, but I had to look.

  “We’ll bring him back,” Ely said.

  “The women——”

  “We’ll bring him back to the fire,” Ely said, and he looked at Jacob and me in a way that made us nod and bend to Brone.

  We come into the dugout and put the boy down.

  “By the fire,” Ely says grimly. “Lay him by the fire.”

  The Jew stands up, his face full of the pain of the world. He bends his head, touches his head simply with his hand.

  The girl is crying, as with pain.

  We gather around Brone. Vandeer kneels down. He says:

  “God—forgive us. Forgive us tonight.” He kneels down, and he prays. He prays with words that we haven’t heard for a long time. He prays, simply, gently, compassionately.

  PART TWO

  THE WINTER

  V

  IT IS the time of the great hunger, in the middle weeks of January, seventeen seventy-eight. The hunger has been on us three days, and for those three days we have eaten nothi
ng. We have eaten nothing that is food.

  Snow has drifted up to the roof of the dugout; snow in the valley in drifts twelve and fifteen feet deep. There are no parades, no drills. There has been no parade for two weeks. There is a rumour that much of the army has disappeared, but we have no check on rumours. As our strength goes, we move slowly, fretfully, the way old men move. A path is cut through the snow for sentries. We hate sentry duty, curse it, but it keeps us from going mad.

  Today, we lie in bed, huddled close for warmth. The fire gives out no heat. Only Kenton sits close to it, painstakingly carving a rhyme on his powder horn. His big hunting knife glints in the light, his large hands guiding it with difficulty. On and off, for months now, he has been working on the carving of the rhyme and the picture of a child with arms clasped about the end of the horn. He can forget things with his carving, remembering only that he began it in the warmth of the summer. Now and then he asks Charley the spelling of a word. Kenton is not much for writing words or spelling them out.

  We wait for Ely, who has gone to the commissary. The light from the fire lingers in the centre of the dugout; the bunks are in the shadow.

  With Bess beside me, I lie in a broken dream. Sometimes I speak aloud, and then Bess says: “Allen—Allen, what are you saying?”

  I don’t know. I try to explain a figment of a dream. I try to explain that my mother’s name was Anna, that if we have a child, her name will be Anna too.

  “A girl?” Bess asks me.

  “A boy and then a girl.”

  I sleep again; I wake and my hands grope for her body, frantically. I say: “You slut—you God-damned little slut, you’ll go back to the Virginians. You’re no fit woman for a man.”

  “Allen—what are you saying?”

  I close my eyes, and my lightheadedness takes my mind away. I am at all places at once. I am out in the snow, pacing a sentry beat. I am in the deep lush, bottom valleys of the Mohawk. With her hands, Bess tries to reassure me. Her hands travel over my torn clothes, seeking out parts of me. Her hands unravel my beard.

  I sink into sleep, and I dream, and I dream that I am a child. It is the morning of a hot, sunny day, and we are moving westward. Where we came from is not very clear to the child in the dream, from some place many marches to the east—Connecticut, perhaps. There are four wagons, four narrow, old, swaybacked wagons. Brown canvas covers them, stretched over bent hickory hoops. The road is bad, and the wagons surge and rock and threaten to fall apart with every step the horses take. But somehow the wagons hold together. They’ve held together a long time.

  I sit at the back of the first wagon, my feet hanging over the tailboard. The hot sun is in my face. Mr. Apply, driving the second wagon, keeps grinning at me. Now and then he snaps his long whip and cries:

  “Gotcha then, Allen!”

  We both laugh. It’s a standing joke between us, the whip. Mr. Apply is a lean old man who sits on his high seat with a long musket balanced across his knees. Somehow, no matter how the wagon sways, the musket never slips from his knees.

  My mother cries: “You, Allen, come in or you’ll take a fall under Mr. Apply’s horses!”

  The whip flicks out again. Half-asleep, I cling to the dream. I want the hot sun. When I know that the dream is over, I close my eyes and still try to feel the sun on my face.

  When I awake, I turn to Bess with deep, childlike love. A love that’s different from the love of a man for a woman. She’s warmth for me; she’s something for a weak, dying man to hold onto. She doesn’t complain. She has never complained. I know she is dying, but I know she won’t die until I am gone.

  She married a Virginian farm boy at the outbreak of the war. She tried to follow him to Quebec, in the expedition of Morgan’s riflemen. She dropped out, went to Boston, and later heard that her man had never reached Quebec. She fell in with a group of Maryland militia—became a camp follower. It was not difficult to understand.

  She tells me about it in a slow, truthful voice. “I don’t hide anything, Allen. But I was a good woman once. I swear to God I was a good woman once. I’m nineteen years, Allen, and I’m a slut already. You don’t have any call to love me, Allen.”

  Our tears come together, slow tears of weakness. We cling together, and she clutches desperately at my filthy body. I cry the way no man would cry. Each successive wave of sleep is relief.

  What she says, she has said before. We dream about it day and night. “You can desert, Allen——”

  I think of Edward. Eight days ago, he walked out. He said, simply—he was going to the Mohawk. He took his gun, and nobody answered him, or tried to stop him. He was a great, strong man. “He’ll walk through,” Ely said. Jacob raged like a madman. Nobody believes but Jacob. We hate the revolution; we hate our officers and each other. Jacob believes. That you must keep in mind. A man can be parts of many things, or a man can be only one thing. And those who believe in only one thing are like torches; they don’t burn forever. That you must keep in mind to know how Jacob is—without weakness, without fear. He hates officers because they are a contradiction. He is not a man for thinking too deeply, and what he believes he believes instinctively. And he believes this—that the people are one. Officers are not of the people; they separate themselves: so he hates them but endures them because they lead the revolution. Yet he refuses to believe that they are part of the revolution they lead. But more than that, he hates weakness. A man is nothing, and the revolution is all. Edward was his friend; for years Edward had been his friend;, yet Edward was weak, putting himself before the revolution. For that he cursed Edward—who was dead.

  He raged like a madman, and then when he had used himself up, he sat by the fire, sobbing hard, dry sobs for hours.

  I would have gone with Edward, but I was afraid. I was afraid of the great distances in front of me.

  Some of McLean’s foragers brought Edward back. He had gone only a mile. They found him in the snow. Captain Muller came to us and said: “Did he desert?”

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?” Jacob muttered. “What does it matter now? The man’s dead.”

  “He was hunting,” Ely said, lying. But even Ely could lie for a man who had died that way—alone and in the snow.

  We went to bury him. He was huddled up, his limbs hard and fixed.

  “He was sleeping,” Ely said. “I thank God he was sleeping. He didn’t know. It’s an easy way to die, when a man’s sleeping …”

  I ask Bess: “Where would we go?”

  “I’m not dreading dying, Allen. But if you go away without me——”

  Ely enters the dugout. He closes the door and stumbles over to the fire. The strength of Ely is no thing that can be measured, it’s not the strength of a man’s body.

  He sits by the fire and stares into it.

  We climb out of bed and crowd round him. Our faces are sunken death’s-heads. Bones stand out through the clothes. Ely looks at us, but he doesn’t speak.

  Jacob said: “You brought food, Ely?”

  “I walked to his house,” Ely said. “It’s a wonder to see the fine stone houses the officers have. You go in and you hear no sound of storm outside.”

  I try to visualize it. The houses where the officers are quartered are a mile away. I try to understand a man beating his way there and back. Ely hasn’t eaten in three days. Edward walked a mile in the snow and they brought back a dead man. Ely is here by the fire.

  “God damn them,” I said.

  “They told me a food train comes tonight. They took the name of the regiment and company.”

  Jacob cursed them. He paced back and forth, screaming his rage until it seemed to fill the dugout full and overflowing.

  “Enough—enough!” Clark yelled. “The fruit of sin—do you hear me! You’re no men, and you reap no fruits of men, but the fruits of sin! As ye sow, so shall ye reap! You lie with your women without shame. You sport and you have no shame for your sporting. You curse God, and in turn you are cursed by God! You made an idol of freedom, and now the
idol’s smashed open. Allen there—with a slut in his arms. Kenton sharing his woman among the lot of you. Charles who would look from the face of God to the face of a woman! You whore and murder among yourselves! I call God to blast you for your crimes—I call God!” He fell on his knees; he stretched out his arms. His face grew livid and then deathly pale. Then he crumpled up on the floor.

  Ely tried to pick him up. He said: “Help me, Allen.”

  We put him on his bed. His eyes were closed, his chest heaving. Jacob tried to make him hear; Jacob was calmed suddenly.

  “We’re taking yer words to heart—Clark, you hear me?”

  I went to Bess.

  She was crying softly, without hysteria, but in an agony of pain. She said to me: “Allen, I’m not a bad woman. He laid a curse of God on me.”

  “You’re not—you’re not,” I said.

  “Allen—I’ll sleep no more. Even if I die, I’ll not sleep in peace.”

  Bending over, I tried to kiss her. She pushed me away. “Don’t kiss me, Allen.”

  Charley Green’s woman cried: “Who’s he to curse me? Who is he, the rotten mock of a man?”

  “Ah—be quiet, Annie,” Charley groaned. I took Bess’ hand. I turned it over, put it to my lips. “You sleep,” I said, “sleep.”

  I turned to Clark. Jacob had dropped onto his bunk, a mass of helpless bones. Ely stood by Vandeer’s bed. The Jew stood just behind him, a bent figure for the ages, as filthy and ragged as any of us—but different.

  Ely said: “I’m afraid for him, Allen. We need a doctor.”

  I looked at Clark. He lay in bed, breathing hoarsely, sweating, his eyes wide open.

  “There’s no doctor in the Pennsylvania huts. A leech won’t come here from the hospital.”

  “We’ll bear him down there,” Ely said.

  I shook my head. “I can’t, Ely. There’s no strength left in me.”

  I watched Ely’s eyes pass round the dugout. His shaggy, bearded head turned slowly: Jacob of no use, Charley Green sick and unable to move, Henry Lane with great festering sores on his feet, Kenton by the fire, as if he heard nothing of Clark Vandeer’s raving.