by Becky Akers
“Well, son, I’m Colonel Charles Webb, and I been commissioned by the Connecticut General Assembly to raise a company of brave Patriots, case the Redcoats take a fancy to sweep through here. Fact, we’ll probably go up to Boston and help whup them. What do you say?”
“Be an honor to defend our freedom, sir.”
“Good. Now mark me, we’re having trouble with provisioning, so I can’t issue a uniform just yet. You be sure and bring along a good musket and powder horn. We start to drill soon as I get the rest of the company signed up. You teach school here, you say?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You got any boys there want to enlist? I don’t aim to take them much younger than eighteen, though.”
“My oldest student just turned sixteen, sir. He’ll be leaving for college soon.”
“Well, keep your ears open, son, for any man wants to fight for liberty. You been to college and you’re a schoolmaster, so I’m appointing you a lieutenant, pending approval from the Assembly, of course. Pay’s thirty pounds per annum, and term of service is through the end of the year or soon as we kick the Regulars back to England, whichever comes first.”
Nathan wrote his family that he had enlisted, pushing from him the thought that he might never marry Ally, and drilled for the next two months with his company on the village green. Several times, he accompanied Colonel Webb on recruitment. Nathan spoke when they arrived in a town while Webb filled out commissions. “Too bad we can’t take girls,” the colonel said after their third outing. “We’d have us a whole regiment in no time, the way they drool over you, Lieutenant.”
More men and a drummer were with them; they walked instead of riding; and it was now September, not April. Otherwise, it might have been the march of half a year before to Massachusetts. Within four days, they had thrown up huts on a hill overlooking Boston.
Camp had changed: the militia was becoming more soldierly. Though they lacked uniforms, the officers wore differently colored cockades, ribbons, or facings on their jackets to distinguish their rank. Their quarters, as varied as their clothing, stood at attention in neat rows instead of wandering over the hillsides. These improvements were due to a dignified man come all the way from Virginia to command the Yankees. George Washington carried an appointment as Commander-in-Chief from the Continental Congress and was determined to transform these farmers and shopkeepers into an army that could prevail against His Majesty’s. He sufficiently awed the New Englanders, who disdained rank and airs and would hardly salute the men they elected as officers, that they addressed him as “Excellency.” So far, he was succeeding in the impossible: his mob of civilians held the Redcoats at bay.
Other than a few sorties, which Howe felt obliged to mount now and then, the Regulars sat quiescent. Winter drew close, and they abandoned all idea of evacuating the warm city. But the Patriots in their makeshift shelters eyed the lowering skies and counted the weeks until their terms expired. Few men knew or cared that all enlistments were up within days of each other, nor that they would leave Boston at the same time.
Nathan settled into the camp’s routine with its drills and exercises. He read voraciously to enliven days that were numbingly alike. Though his taste didn’t run to military history and tactics, he devoured every such tome he found, determined to compensate with knowledge what he lacked in experience. He haunted Harvard College’s library when His Excellency’s staff wasn’t meeting there and spent his pay in the bookshops surrounding the Yard. In one of these, he found a set of John Locke’s philosophy, bound in calfskin with tooled and gilded lettering, and began saving to buy it.
Most of his college friends were serving. Billy Hull joyfully thumped his back at their reunion. “Say, Secundus, plundered any pies lately? Remember how mad that fellow Arnold was at us over that?”
Nathan grimaced. “How could I forget?”
“Did you know that’s the same Arnold went to New York a few months back and captured some fort there from the government? Yes, sir, slid in there smooth as you please and took it right out from under the Redcoats. How’s Primus? I hear he’s taking on a congregation. Ladies’ll be swarming all over him, they just love a man with a pulpit. Thought of it myself, for just that reason, though I guess it’s sacrilegious to say so.”
“Enoch’s ornery as ever, thanks. Heard anything from Tallmadge?”
“Had a letter just last week. Says he’s thinking of enlisting soon. There’ll be some high times if he joins us here.”
November rains lashed them, and pay and supplies ran short. The troops might have done without wages. With clothes and food supposedly supplied, money wasn’t a necessity. It was often lost in a game of chance anyway as soon as the paymaster handed it to them: better to let it pile up against their names in the ledger.
But then rations failed, as did gunpowder. Such lack infuriated Nathan’s company. How could they fight the government when their hands shook with hunger as they lifted their muskets? And even if they could steady their tremors enough to shoot, they still couldn’t fire without powder. This embittered them most. They would starve with caustic gibes and a handful of corn to ease the way, but if British bayonets advanced on them, it was hard to lack powder, to stand and merely watch the sun glinting off certain death as the Regulars charged.
In vain did Nathan report to General Putnam, a brash hero from the last war, that his men felt ill-used. Provisions were not to be had.
“That’s all right, Lieutenant,” he heard often when dinner was a rind of salt beef. “Enlistment’s up soon anyway, and I’m going home.”
“You know, I don’t ask much,” Billy Hull said one day as he and Nathan returned empty-handed from a trip to Cambridge for supplies. Winter’s first snow was blanketing the countryside, filling the raw camp with enchantment. “I know we can’t drive the enemy out of Boston overnight, and the militia can’t do much in the way of shelter, and they want to give me this little yellow ribbon,” he pointed to the bedraggled cockade on his hat, “and call it a uniform, I’ll play along. But they ought to feed us, Secundus. I’m like to starve, and that’s saying a lot after the food at Yale.”
They were passing Ploughed Hill. Nathan nodded to the orchard at its base. “Lots of apples over there. Seems to me apples saved us once before.”
“Yeah, but they were baked into pies instead of hanging in an orchard. And there was only Arnold’s whip to protect them, not a British man-o-war.” Hull waved toward the river, where gunboats at anchor seemed less lethal through the falling snow. “Those apples are probably frozen anyway.”
“Aren’t we all?”
Hull’s stomach growled. “I’m emptier than a pork barrel in March.”
“So am I. Well, beggars can’t be choosers. Shall we?”
They counted on the pale, wintry light and the screen of snow to hide them from the Redcoats as they dashed for the southern end of the orchard, furthest from the Mystic River. A dip in the ground there would protect them from the men-o-war. They slid into the depression, skidding on the snow, and grinned at each other, pleased at still being alive. The ships’ guns continued silent. They began gathering apples, though most were rotten, pecked by birds or riddled with insects, and they threw more away than they kept. They had collected but a pitiful pile when Nathan sat back on his heels to survey the trees closer to the riverbank. The neighbors of one had overshadowed its branches, cheating them of sun so they still bore plenty of fruit.
“Don’t be stupid, Secundus.”
He started as Hull read his mind and then smiled. “That an order, sir?”
“You’ll be in direct sight of the gunboats. In range, too. And it isn’t snowing hard enough yet to dampen their powder.”
“Well, but wouldn’t some applesauce taste good with the ham we’re not eating tonight?”
“Hale—!”
He was gone, sprinting from their hollow to the bank of the river. He stood with arms crossed and assessed the tree, as if no British navy were waiting to blast him to smithe
reens, then grabbed the trunk and shook. With the fruit frozen to the branches, only a few pieces fell to the ground. He piled them into his tricorn and dashed back with his prize.
“All right, let’s go,” Hull said.
“Billy, that won’t make half a kettle, and I love applesauce.”
“Now, look, Secundus—”
“They haven’t even fired a musket. Let me go, or you’ll have to listen to puns about the core of the problem and Redcoat worms. Come on, give me your hat.”
Hull was still shaking his head when Nathan snatched the tricorn from it. He raced back to the tree but loosed only two apples when he shook it this time. He was peering upwards in disappointment when the sound of a charge ramming home carried to them.
He had already thrown himself to the ground by the time Hull shouted, “Duck!”
The cannon roared, and shot sailed overhead through the branches. Thinking to rout them, the enemy had helped instead, raining more apples down. With a few moments to spare before the next explosion, Nathan pitched apples into the tricorn.
He heard them loading a second charge and again dropped flat. This one brought not only apples but a limb from the tree. He glanced up in time to see it coming for him. There was a crash and splintering wood and he lay convinced he was dead but for the heart hammering in his ears. Then he leaped to his feet.
Other guns swung into action, providing the beat for a macabre dance as he retrieved apples and ducked when the enemy launched shots—wasted shot, Nathan corrected himself. How was it His Majesty’s forces could squander so much ammunition—ammunition the Patriots sorely lacked, though their taxes had bought it—on trying to kill one man? But at length, the gunners admitted they were too close to bring the balls low enough and desisted. The silence after so much noise was stunning, until a cheer for his daring broke it.
He gave an exaggerated bow to the ship and shouted, “Our compliments, gentlemen, on your assistance. You’ll have some applesauce for your trouble.” He picked up the branch, laden with fruit, in one hand and balanced Hull’s tricorn in the other, and the cheers grew louder.
Their kettle of applesauce that evening yielded barely a bowlful to the men in their companies. But Nathan set a pan aside for the gunners and took it to them under a flag of truce.
December loomed, during which the enlistments of Rhode Island and Connecticut expired. Then, on January 1, everyone else’s did, too, with the Redcoats watching from Boston as the rebels’ strength crumbled. Continental officers talked of little but the dissolution of the army and how best to retain the men, as well as the arms, such uniforms as there were, and cartridge pouches that would seep away with them. One snowy night toward the end of November, Nathan gathered with Billy Hull and seven or eight others in General Charles Lee’s quarters. Formerly with His Majesty’s army, Lee was an emaciated man with tiny hands and feet but a nose large enough to compensate. He was arrogant, unkempt and misanthropic, declaring that he preferred dogs to people. “And no wonder,” Hull was fond of joking. “People prefer dogs to him.”
They had earlier seen Lee haranguing a company preparing to depart. He ordered them to form a hollow square around him, from which he cursed them: “Men, I do not know what to call you; you are the worst of all creatures!” He threatened to summon Pennsylvania’s famed riflemen if they continued refusing to reenlist. When one soldier tried to talk a friend into marching home with him, Lee knocked him over the head with his musket.
Colonel Webb and several officers joined Nathan and Hull to stand glowering, but only when His Excellency appeared did the general cease his abuse.
That evening, Nathan filled with new contempt for Lee as the man paced the parlor of his quarters in the Royall Mansion. Hull had dubbed the place Hobgoblin Hall and secured his reputation as a wit.
Lee ignored his duties as host to rant about the dereliction of Connecticut’s troops. He turned beseeching eyes on Nathan and the others drinking rum as the candles guttered. “Don’t they think about anyone but their own damn selves? Cowards, all of them. I’ve risked everything, by God. They leave us here, at Howe’s mercy, and I’m captured...by damn, they’ll stretch my neck. Treason, you know. God damn it.” The dogs that forever circled Lee’s feet had caught their master’s anxiety, growling, snapping at each other.
Nathan shifted uncomfortably on his windowsill. Hull whispered, “Ignore him. His rum’s good.” But Nathan slipped from his perch into the night, unwilling to hear the general’s profanities against his friends.
He meandered through the dark to find his company gathered around a small fire. Though their terms ran a fortnight yet, they already talked of little but going home, lending weight to Lee’s charges. He stood in the shadows as Jabez Minard said, “Can’t wait to get back to my pa’s shop. I always thought tavern-keeping the hardest work there is, but it beats soldiering by a long shot.”
“Get paid regular, too,” Isaac Hammon said.
“Get paid regular and well.” Jabez spit tobacco juice into the embers, where it sizzled satisfyingly. “Ain’t none of this, ‘Well, son, how about we put it on account again this time?’”
“Way I look at it, they oughta be glad we stayed this long,” another said. “We had a deal. Said we’d fight the government, even though it’s Massachusetts’ quarrel, for so much a month. Most of the time, pay’s been late, and sometimes it never come at all.”
“Yeah, and all those times we ain’t been paid, we still kept up our end of things even though the Congress didn’t. But come December 10, I’m lighting out for home, and His Excellency and General Putnam and Webb and you too, Lieutenant,” Isaac Hammon nodded at Nathan, “you all can beg me to stay much as you like, won’t make no never-mind. I got a wife and new baby to home, and she tells me the farm’s just gone to weeds since I left.”
“I been gone, what, five, six months now,” said Joseph Hillard, a little man whose layers of dirt nearly obscured him, “and Betsy still don’t understand why I got to be fighting someone else’s battles. ‘Them folks up in the Bay started all this,’ she says. ‘I don’t see why you got to finish it.’ Got another letter from her just last week harping on it.”
“Well, she’s right. Time to let someone else take a turn at licking them Redcoats.”
“Yeah, and they been cowering inside Boston since we knocked the stuffing out of them at Bunker’s Hill. Don’t seem like they’s going anyplace anytime soon. What we need to sit around here guarding them for?”
“Lieutenant, you leaving with us?” John Holmes said from across the fire.
Nathan shook his head. “I want to stick around, see how the thing turns out.” He squatted near the flames, held out his hands to the warmth. “Meantime, I’m laying a wager. I’ll bet you a week’s wages you’ll stay too, Holmes.”
“A whole week?” Holmes said as another man asked, “Hey, now, how about me?”
“Sure, you too. The more the merrier.”
They were silent as they looked from him to each other and back again. Finally, Isaac said, “You saying you bet us a week’s pay that we’ll stay here?”
He nodded.
“Aw, that ain’t nothing,” Amos Shaw said. “A week’s pay parcelled out to all of us ain’t but tuppence apiece.”
“Yeah, Lieutenant, whyn’t you make it two weeks’?”
“Two weeks’!” He saw his calf-bound Locke skittering away. “You’re robbing me. None of you look good enough sitting around camp to make it worth two weeks’.”
But Amos Shaw shook his head. “Make it a month, or I ain’t interested.”
“All right, a month then. But—but,” Nathan held up his hand as they exclaimed, “you have to throw in something beyond the sight of your pretty faces for the next month.”
“Like what?”
“Well, let’s see.” But he knew he had them, and he grinned. “I’m partial to birdsong in the mornings. But what with the cold and the gunfire, seems there aren’t any birds left around here. So I think, gentlemen,
that for the next month, you can wake me each morning with bird-calls.”
Alice sat so close to the kitchen fire that it nearly singed her hair as she rocked Jonathan in her arms. He lay listless, colder than ice however many blankets she wrapped around him, no matter how she tried to warm him against her. He was fearfully thin, his arms and legs mere twigs, his ribs poking through the blanket.
All summer, she had shied from acknowledging that Jonathan’s cough was worsening. His nose never stopped dripping, and crawling from their chamber to the kitchen for meals winded him. But she dismissed these symptoms as the sniffles children are prone to. Abigail agreed, and the two women kept an eye on him as they scurried about the farm.
Then her worries over Jonathan yielded to those for Nathan when they received his letter telling them he had enlisted.
She had been frantic when the Deacon read that letter aloud at supper one night. As she scrubbed dishes afterwards, her tears dripped into the water, and Abigail scolded her. “For shame, Alice. You’re more upset that Nathan’s enlisted than you were over Elijah’s death.”
She swished the ball of soap through the water, splashing waves over the pan’s sides. “Oh, Mama, don’t you see? He’ll die. I know he will.”
“These things are in God’s hands—”
“All that sickness in camp, the distemper and smallpox, and if that doesn’t get him, he’s so brave, he’ll charge out onto a battlefield ahead of everyone else and be killed. He will, Mama, you wait and see. There’s some stupid Latin saying he likes, something about how good it is to die for liberty, but he truly believes it.”
Enoch stepped over to them, reaching for the pitcher of milk on the shelf above the wash bench, and Alice said, “What’s that saying Nathan likes, Enoch, the one in Latin?”
“‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,’” he said and put the pitcher to his lips. Catching Abigail’s eye, he lowered it and grabbed a mug.