The Pursuit Of…

by Courtney Milan

  “What?” Curly Hair asked.

  A man willing to lie for him? John knew better than to provide that answer.

  “Determination. He looked those devils in the eye and said one thing: ‘I cannot allow you to kill my commander.’”

  That sounded like a great deal more than one thing. Still…

  “General,” John interjected.

  “General,” Henry agreed. “That’s what I said, isn’t it? Stop interrupting. ‘I cannot allow you to kill my general,’ he said. ‘You’ll get to him when you go through me.’”

  “So what happened next?” Gap Tooth asked.

  “What, next? Oh.” Latham paused. He looked up at the sun and sighed. “I’m sorry, gentlemen. We haven’t had a hot meal in days, and we mean to make South Brunswick by nightfall. We must be on our way.”

  Gap Tooth glanced at Curly Hair. Curly Hair looked back. The two men gave each other a nod.

  “I’m William,” said Gap Tooth. “William Williamson. This is my friend David Poitier.”

  “Williamson. Poitier.” Latham nodded at them. “We’re pleased to make your acquaintance. I’m just Henry Latham, but I hardly need to introduce my traveling companion. Jonathan Lewis Hunter himself.”

  The men glanced at Hunter.

  “He may shake your hand if you ask nicely,” Latham said. “But he’s very circumspect. Too humble, really. He hates admitting his role in things.”

  Poitier and Williamson had apparently forgotten that they’d started the encounter by attempting to rob John. They glanced at each other. Then Williamson turned to John.

  “Mr. Hunter,” he said, holding out his hand, “it’s truly an honor.”

  “I…” John sighed. He took the other man’s hand. “Right.”

  Poitier elbowed Williamson, who coughed and spoke. “Would either of you…want some soup?”

  Chapter Six

  They had soup—thick soup, laden with beef, barley, and carrots. There was bread, cut in generous slices and spread with butter.

  There was, of course, the continuation of Henry’s tale, which he was determined to render with as much animation as possible. It had, after all, earned them a dinner. He invented details. He was the best at inventing details. John defeated one man with a map pulled off a table, another with his own musket. He confounded a third by slinging buttons pulled off a fallen comrade into his eyes—“very effective weapons, buttons are, if hurled hard enough,” Henry explained, and the two men nodded, drinking in every word as if the tale were as good as the soup.

  Poitier cut up apples, listening with starry eyes, as Henry made his way through the ending.

  “As our good corporal faced the last man,” Henry said, “bodies strewn about him, blood streaming down his face, his knife held before him in a low grip, well, what do you think he said?”

  Williams was watching, wide-eyed. “I don’t know. What did he say?”

  “‘You’ll get to my general when you get through me.’” Henry gave a low growl. “He had no thought of his own wounds. He thought only of Washington, our great American Republic, and freedom. He raised his knife.”

  Henry gestured with his hands—one raised like the blade he’d described, the other gesturing an unknown assailant forward.

  “What heroism!” Poitier clasped his hands together.

  Beside him, Hunter rolled his eyes. “It was nothing,” he said in a tone that conveyed that it had, in fact, been literally nothing.

  Henry ignored that shameful failure to play along. “Faced with such courage, there was nothing the enemy could do. The man dropped his sword and ran, a coward to the end.”

  Poitier cheered. “Good riddance to the British bastard!”

  Henry nodded solemnly. He was himself a British bastard; he ought to get some small satisfaction playing the role. “General Washington himself gave me the sacred command to accompany Hunter home. Loyalists still speak his name in hushed, envenomed whispers. Washington feared for his safety on the road. So here I am. And, gentlemen, we thank you for the meal—but we must be on our way.”

  Williamson sighed, as if he didn’t wish to come to his senses. Poitier looked as if he’d been struck with a bouquet of daisies, a silly smile playing all over his face.

  “Take some biscuits,” Poitier said. “You’ll be hungry come evening. It’s the least we can do for such a hero.”

  “I’ll wrap some roast chicken,” Williamson offered.

  “And the apples. We’ve an abundance of apples; we’ll be sick of apples by midwinter.”

  They returned to the road fifteen minutes later, laden with fruit, nuts, and wax paper packets of chicken.

  There was a feeling of exuberance that Henry got when he managed to make others happy. He felt it now. It put a lightness in his step, got him to whistling. Why, when he’d first encountered those men, they had been…

  Um.

  Too late, he realized that they’d been incredibly hostile to Hunter. So hostile. Good God, he’d forgotten about that, getting carried away with his story. He’d intervened, not thinking of anything except lightening the mood. And then… He had gotten a little carried away. They’d lost an hour’s walking time.

  “So.” He glanced over at Hunter. “Well. About that…story. I’m sure…you’re wondering where it came from.”

  Hunter looked over at him. His face was an unreadable mask. “A stick. A knife. That’s what I fought seven men off with?”

  “There were buttons,” Henry protested. “Do not forget the buttons.”

  “Did you know those two intended to rob me before you appeared?”

  “Indeed. I panicked, not remembering any Latin.”

  Hunter was probably angry. He had every reason to be. The two of them had even been talking about Henry’s lies when he’d wandered off. Now the man must think him an even bigger liar.

  And he wasn’t wrong.

  “I suppose…” Henry bit his lip. “Maybe… I shouldn’t have…”

  John broke and snickered. He actually snickered. “No, please don’t apologize.”

  Henry stared at the other man a moment.

  “You’re not…angry?”

  “That was the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen. You just…you told them that I—and a stick—” Another round of guffaws shook his shoulders.

  “I got slightly carried away,” Henry admitted. “I don’t know why I do this—these ideas just pop into my head and I say them without thinking. I can’t even blame my upbringing. My father did his best to make me stop, but…”

  “But people like listening to you talk,” Hunter said, “and so he never managed to make the lesson stick.”

  Henry blinked. He looked over at Hunter. “Did you just say…?”

  “Of course people like listening to you talk.” Hunter repeated that as if it were obvious. “You’re funny, and even when you’re lying you say things that people want to believe. You’re not frivolous, no matter what you’ve been told. You mean well and you like people, and you make them want to like you in return. Anyone who mistakes that for frivolity has no understanding of human nature.”

  Henry stopped walking. A brown bird flew overhead. The sky was clear and the air frigid. Reality seemed very close all of a sudden.

  Hunter realized he’d stopped a few moments later. He turned, raised one eyebrow inquiringly. “What? If you’re going to stop dead in your tracks every time I say something vaguely positive about you, this will be a very long journey. Hurry up now.”

  The implication that there would be more… Henry hastened to catch up, his head spinning.

  “What?” Hunter asked. “Surely you’ve noticed that people like you by now?”

  It had never been put to him in those terms. People like you. It was such a radical departure from the image he had in his own head—talks too much, barely tolerated—that for a second, he could not accommodate both thoughts. They warred in his head.

  Nobody wants to listen to you.

  Just thinking that
it might not be true made Henry want to babble all the more.

  “It’s not that,” Henry finally said, struggling to mask his feelings. “It’s—it’s amazing, I suppose, that instead of saying, ‘Well, Henry, I think you’re a decent fellow,’ you have to hide behind general talk of people and such-like. Admit it. You like me.”

  “People like you.” Hunter shrugged. “I generally count myself as a person. Where is the problem?”

  “You admit it, then. You don’t hate me!”

  Hunter just smiled. “If I did, I’d have killed you outside Philadelphia. I’ve been known to take on an entire British regiment with a stick and a paring knife. You’d go down, no trouble at all.”

  Their eyes met. It was such a foolish thing, to be so happy that someone was issuing threats in his direction, but they weren’t threats, and it was so lovely, so lovely. After a moment, they both laughed.

  Oh, Henry thought, oh. This was nice. This was very nice. He could get used to this. He could get used to this, even though he knew he shouldn’t.

  “Hunter,” he said, “I’ll remind you that you said that later. No trouble at all. It sounds not very like me, doesn’t it?”

  Hunter just looked at him and shook his head. “Oh for God’s sake.”

  “Mmm?”

  “Call me John.”

  * * *

  “Here.” It was night. They’d made camp, and a small fire to warm their hands over. Henry leaned across the stone that sat between them, handing John something. “I’m not taking no for an answer again. Try it.”

  He dropped the slice of cheese into John’s waiting palm. His fingertips touched John’s hand briefly—a hint of warmth, quickly disappearing into the cold of night.

  Henry cut off his own bit of cheese. The odor was rank this close, pungent and foul.

  “Has it got any better?” John wrinkled his nose, inspecting the cheese.

  “Not yet, but it should start improving any day now.”

  “You want me to voluntarily put this in my mouth and eat it?”

  “Yes, and furthermore, while you do, say to yourself: ‘The cheese is delicious.’”

  John’s eyes met Henry’s. A spark from the fire popped, burning orange between them before going dark.

  “‘The cheese is delicious.’”

  “Not in that monotone. Say it like you mean it. ‘This cheese is delicious.’ There. Like that.”

  John’s voice lowered to something almost smoky. “This cheese is delicious.”

  Henry felt that last word inside him, like a caress.

  “There.” John brought his hand to his mouth.

  Henry did likewise. It would have been almost romantic—looking into each other’s eyes, raising their hands simultaneously to their lips.

  It would have been romantic, except the taste of death hit his tongue, dissolving into a thousand liquid deaths.

  The cheese was most decidedly not delicious.

  Across from him, John coughed. He sputtered.

  “Oh fuck me,” John said, spitting the cheese out. “No warning! You gave me absolutely no warning.”

  Henry laughed through his mouthful. “I did! I told you it was terrible every night!”

  “I knew it was bad—you said it was bad—this cheese is not bad.”

  The main objective in the moment, Henry realized, was to not snort grains of foul-tasting cheese out of his nose. He clamped his hands over his mouth.

  “Bad is for things that are ordinarily bad. Armies would unite to fight this cheese. This is the cheese of hell.”

  Henry swallowed his own cheese. “The cheese is delicious,” he managed to choke out. “My…taste in cheese? May need some time to, um, become accustomed to that fact.”

  John pointed a finger at him over the fire. “That is not how reality works,” he warned. “You cannot change reality just by insisting it’s not so. That’s called delusion, not reality.”

  “You’re probably right. But—for the sake of argument—what if we were born deluded, and had to be, um, undeluded? I imagine it would take time.”

  “No amount of time would change the Cheese of Death into anything other than the Cheese of Death.”

  “Care to place a bet?”

  “What stakes could possibly justify that? I’d have to eat the cheese. Often.”

  Henry frowned. “Loser must provide the winner with a medal proclaiming ‘Well, at least you tried.’”

  Their eyes met across the fire. Henry waggled one eyebrow in what he hoped was a winning manner. And apparently, it worked.

  “Well.” John’s lips twitched into a crooked smile. “Who wouldn’t risk certain death for such a prize?”

  * * *

  “To you,” John said, lifting his cheese like a libation of hard spirits about thirty miles from the Connecticut border. “The cheese is delicious.”

  Henry ate his own cheese. “A fine bouquet,” he said, still choking on the taste. “There’s…an underlying flavor, if you pay attention.”

  “Beneath the taste of death mold.”

  “Yes, beneath that.”

  “Once you ignore the feeling of impending doom that takes over your taste buds.”

  “Yes, definitely ignore that. There’s an underlying subtleness that is almost…not completely terrible.”

  “Not completely terrible,” John said. “You are making strides.”

  “Do you see what I mean? That…subtle…thing there, at the end? Surely you taste it.”

  “No,” John replied. “It’s all terrible.”

  * * *

  “Speaking of not completely terrible,” Henry said, two nights later after they’d performed their usual ritual of cheese eating and cheese complaining, “if you think Jefferson is so awful, how is it you were fighting with the Continental forces?”

  John looked at him over the fire. Slowly, he sighed.

  “You had to have some feeling for this…America…thing.” He could not believe it had not occurred to him before.

  John’s eyes shut. “I wasn’t fighting for the Revolution. I was fighting for Lizzie. And Noah.”

  Henry waited.

  “When I was sixteen,” John said, “my master hit hard times. Mostly self-inflicted—gambling was always his issue. He sold my mother.”

  John said that so matter-of-factly, yet at his side, his hand clenched.

  “Up until that point, I had only dreamed of running away. I’d made elaborate plans. I knew when I’d leave. What I would say beforehand to allay suspicion. I even knew what to do to guarantee my freedom so long as I made it far enough. But…”

  “You needed a push?”

  “But there was my mother. And Lizzie, my little sister? I had told myself a pack of lies—that I could protect her, that I could make our master listen. She was his child. I thought that meant something, that one day, as long as I made myself useful…” John shrugged this away. “It was a delusion, and I lost my delusions. At the end of the day, he sold my mother, and my delusions were no comfort at all. So I left.”

  “As you should have.”

  John’s hand clenched at his side. “I left Lizzie. She was too little to come, too little to even trust. I couldn’t tell her I was going; if there was any chance she would spill my secrets, it would ruin everything. I left her there, in slavery, all alone, at eleven—no mother, no brother, no protection.” His voice trembled. “Anything could have happened to her.”

  “Did it?”

  John exhaled a long breath. His hands unclenched. “No. I made my way north. I found a job, I learned to read. I changed my last name to Hunter—it sounded strong, and the name he had given me did not seem like one I wanted to keep.” A faint smile touched his lips. “I knew my master had been cheating his business partner, and that plan I had for freedom? When I left, I took his account books. Once I had a firm foothold in life, I found someone trustworthy to go to him and tell him that if he didn’t release me and my sister and give us paperwork that declared us freed, I’d send
his partner his account books.”

  “Did that work?”

  “It did.” John sighed. “My mother—finding her, raising the money to free her, that took another five years. But Lizzie came of age a free woman in Rhode Island, and…” John’s smile was just a little sad.

  “And?”

  “She fell in love. His name was Noah Allan, and he was enslaved.”

  “In Rhode Island? I thought slavery was a Southern practice.”

  The fire flickered across John’s face, illuminating those perfect cheekbones. He was looking away, at something.

  “Mmm. Not so much. There are more than a handful of slaves in Rhode Island. As for Newport itself… It depends heavily on the slave trade. Or at least it did, before the British occupied it. I told Lizzie to love someone else, but… Well, apparently love doesn’t work like that.”

  No, Henry thought stupidly, watching the fire play across John’s skin. It didn’t.

  “We had plans for him, too. It was going to take time and saving. But then war broke out, and Mr. Allan’s son enlisted, full of patriotic fervor. Some time later, Rhode Island announced that any slave who enlisted would be automatically freed. Noah was all set to enlist. Newport was occupied at the time, but it would have been no large matter for a slave to slip out in order to pass muster. But Mr. Allan cried that he needed the help, and Lizzie just cried, and…” John shrugged. “And I thought Lizzie had had enough of men she loved leaving her to obtain their freedom. So I made a contract with Mr. Allan. I’d enlist in Noah’s stead, and in exchange he agreed to free him when the war ended, or upon my death, or after three years.”

  There was a way that John said Lizzie’s name, something both soft and impenetrable, all at once. “You fought in a war you didn’t believe in for years to free the man your sister loved?”