by Ron Carter
Patiently Dorman had wrapped Caleb’s hands with canvas strips, then stepped back to watch in critical silence as Caleb squared with the bag and began his evening ritual. Dorman’s eyes narrowed in intense concentration as he saw the rage, the consuming hate welling up in Caleb, driving him to swing with all his strength, grunting as his fists slammed in.
Too much anger—more to this than Murphy beating him—deeper—dangerous—headed for trouble—ruin—too young—what could it be?—what?
With the experience and finely honed instincts of one who had spent much of his life in the harsh, brutal world of two gladiators facing each other in a squared ring with the all-consuming purpose of beating the other man senseless, Dorman missed nothing as he studied Caleb. The boy stood nearly six feet tall, one hundred sixty pounds, with brown hair, blue eyes, and a smooth, unmarked face that could only be called handsome. He had reached his full frame, but not his full weight. His knees and elbows were a little too prominent, his feet slightly too large. His movements lacked full coordination, but with each passing day they were a heartbeat faster, more accurate, more confident, smoother.
Dorman’s eyes narrowed as he watched—slowly, steadily framing a mental picture of the boy before him.
He has heart—intelligence—balance—he’ll gain speed—but what’s driving him?—too much for a boy his age—the wrong reasons will bring trouble.
As he dropped his eyes to study the movement of Caleb’s feet, he found his thoughts reaching back into the gray mists of his own childhood, filled with heartrending pain and soul-destroying ugliness. He felt once again the seething rage at the evil into which he had been born and the hot lust it had shaped in his breast to strike out against all authority. For twenty years he had disciplined himself to push away from the terrible torture of those memories, but now, watching a boy with an unknown inner torment that could ruin him, he let the memories come as they would.
Dorman’s fifteen-year-old unwed mother had died giving him birth in the filth of a waterfront alley in the great seaport of Liverpool, England. His father, a Dutch sailor, never knew he had left an unborn child behind when his ship sailed from Liverpool for Minorca seven months before the sweating, terrified girl delivered her child alone in the squalor of the narrow alley. She lived only long enough to wrap the infant boy in her bloody skirt and crawl to the street. A grizzled old sail maker heard the cries of the newborn and took the shivering, wrinkled infant to an orphanage not fifty feet from the stench and unending sound of water lapping at the heavy oak pilings that supported the wharves.
The newborn infant was accepted with a cold disgust by the tall, wiry beadle and his wife, who saw nothing more in the boy than another one pound sixpence each month from the coffers of a stingy, reluctant public charity that paid to keep the shame of Liverpool’s fatherless children hidden. They entered him on their pay vouchers as Jonathan Smith.
For fifteen years Dorman endured the Spartan poverty of the Liverpool orphanage before he exploded in a fit of rage. The beadle had once again ordered him to the front of the crude dining hall for a caning with an oak stick, the consequence of Dorman having dipped his spoon into the greasy supper gruel before the pronouncement of “Grace.” Dorman dutifully walked to the beadle, obediently bent over and seized his ankles, and tightened every muscle in his body to take the first blow when something inside him, primal beyond anything he had ever known, came surging in wild rebellion. The hickory struck, Dorman jerked erect and tore into the tall, wiry beadle with both fists flailing wildly, tears streaming, screaming like one demented. He struck again and again as the startled man stumbled backwards and went down. Dorman was on him like an animal, fists pounding at the eyes, nose, mouth, while he screamed his rage. He leaped up and shrieked at the man to get up, get up, but the man lay curled on his side, arms thrown over his head. Dorman kicked him in the stomach, then the throat, then wherever he could while the other horrified orphans turned the dining hall into bedlam. He seized his wooden bowl and hurled the container of thin, steaming soup at the man’s head, then turned and ran to the great doors, threw them open, and disappeared into the dark of the rain-slick cobblestone streets of the Liverpool docks.
The following day, with the authorities combing the waterfront for a runaway orphan worth one pound sixpence each month to the beadle of the orphanage, he gave himself a new name and a new position in life. Thus it was that Charles Dorman became cabin boy on the Pelican, a ship whose captain, Abijah Morton, cared more for profits than his crew. Dark stories spoken quietly in dingy taverns told of Abijah Morton selling part of his own crew to slave traders on the African coast.
At age eighteen Dorman had brawled his way through every major seaport in Europe, Africa, the Orient, and the Mediterranean. He had learned to use his hands and feet to break bones and disable men with deadly efficiency. Twice he had taken knife wounds that had nearly killed him. Once he was certain he had broken a man’s neck and killed him, but with the police pounding on the door, he had fled before he was certain. At nineteen he jumped ship at midnight as she lay anchored in the Thames River a mile below London town, waiting to have her cargo of China silk unloaded. Two days later he was a seaman in the Royal British Navy.
Within three months his explosive temper and deadly fists had his shipmates silently avoiding him, while his superior officers gleefully entered his name in the Royal Navy boxing register to compete for the title of fleet boxing champion. The best trainer in the British navy saw the talent that lay beneath the wild flailings of this tavern brawler. He arranged to meet the angry young man and began the yearlong training that slowly gave direction to the volcano that seethed within. At age twenty Dorman was fleet champion. At twenty-one he was champion of the southern half of England. Five feet nine inches tall, one hundred seventy-three pounds, dark wavy hair, his relentless training and many fights had made him thick-necked, heavy in the shoulders and arms. There was very little bridge left to his nose, and his bushy eyebrows showed deep scars, as did his lower lip and both cheekbones. He had not been beaten, nor had he ever learned to completely control his hot rebellion against authority.
In 1757, at age thirty, Dorman the British sailor found himself in a vast, strong, primeval land, at war with the hated French for possession of the thirteen American colonies and Canada. Within days he realized two things: he was drawn to the power and strength of the pristine wilderness called America, as to no other place on earth, and there was a sense, a spirit, of unfettered freedom among the colonial people like none he had ever felt. With the surrender of the French forces in 1763, Dorman let his enlistment with the British navy expire, then remained in America as a soldier in the New Jersey militia. He chaffed against the authority of the British Stamp Act, and when King George III and Parliament passed the Boston Port Act that blockaded Boston Harbor, Dorman became an open rebel against his native England. He joined the headlong retreat of the American Continental Army across New Jersey after its catastrophic defeat at Long Island and crossed the Delaware River into Pennsylvania to try to save anything they could of the shattered, beaten, freezing, starving Continentals. He was with General Washington when they recrossed the Delaware River in a blizzard on the night of December 25, 1776, to strike and take Trenton at eight o’clock the next morning, then moved on to Princeton. He wintered with the army at Morristown, knowing in his heart he had found a home and a people and a cause to which he could pledge his life. America. Liberty.
At age fifty his hair had grayed. He had never lost the inner fires of anger and rebellion, but with age had learned to bank and control them. With the onset of the spring greening of 1777, and the eruption of color as the flowers flooded the Morristown mountains and valleys, Dorman rolled his few belongings in his blanket, took up his musket, and followed the march of most of the Continental Army from Morristown south to Middlebrook, probing to find General Sir William Howe and the British army.
It was in the early evening of an eventless day that a panting, wide-eyed priva
te came running, shouting for Dorman. The young soldier was one of the few in camp who had previously seen the single occasion in which Dorman had quietly stepped between a big, raw-boned North Carolina braggart holding a tomahawk in his right hand, and a smaller, white-faced youth with a rock clutched in his fist. “You best put down the tomahawk,” Dorman had quietly said, looking up eight inches into the big man’s face. The man had laughed and reached to wrap Dorman inside his arms to break his back. Dorman stepped within the encircling arms and swung once. It had taken a North Carolina sergeant more than an hour to get the unconscious man to open his eyes, and the regimental surgeon four hours to set and tie his broken jaw.
Dorman stopped unrolling his blanket and stood with narrowed eyes as the sweating soldier gasped, “Murphy’s beating on a boy down by the river. Might kill him. You better come.”
Conlin Murphy! Dorman knew well the proclivity of the Irish to settle things with their fists, sometimes for fun, sometimes to break the monotony, sometimes in anger. But not Murphy. Murphy took a depraved delight in picking fights with his inferiors and pounding them bloody. Despite his fifty years, Dorman had never risen above his overpowering hatred for a bully. The pain and remembrance of endless beatings with a hickory stick until he bled still burned bright in his memory.
Dorman nodded, the private pivoted, and Dorman followed him at a trot, working his way toward the river, through the disorganized clutter of ragged tents and ragged soldiers and evening fires. A knot of men opened a corridor for him, and he strode to the center of the circle, where a boy lay on his side, trying to rise. His face and shirt were smeared with blood. With a bone-deep cut on his left cheek streaming blood, he was shaking his head, sending blood and gore flying from his nose and mouth. His eyes were glazed, the left one purple, swollen nearly closed. Two men held him while he feebly fought to rise, shouting, sobbing, “It’s not over. Bring him back! It’s not over!”
Dorman spoke. “I’ll take care of him.” The two men turned to see who had spoken, and Dorman repeated. “I’ll tend to him.”
“Are you the regimental surgeon?”
“No, but I understand these things.”
Both men rose and backed away while Dorman knelt beside Caleb, who was still struggling to rise. Dorman placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder and pushed him down, and Caleb slowly settled. Dorman tenderly pressed the angry swelling of the left cheekbone. He shifted his thumb and finger to the bridge of the swollen nose, closed his eyes, and carefully pressed first to the right, then the left. He studied the cut on the left cheek, then forced the left eye open to study the pupil. Moving his fingers gently, he worked his hand down Caleb’s left rib cage, collarbone to belt.
“Son, can you hear me?”
Caleb nodded.
“You’re lucky. No bones broken. The bridge of your nose is cracked. I think it will heal without showing. I don’t know about your left ear. We’ll find out if it’s been hurt in the next couple of days. I think you got two cracked ribs, but none broken. I’m going to get some of my things, and I’ll be right back. Don’t move.”
Blinking to make the world come back into focus, Caleb waited until the man returned with an old, small, dented metal box; a canteen; and some clean sheeting. Dorman stripped Caleb to his trousers, washed him from the waist up, then soaked the cut on the cheek with alcohol, threaded a needle, and spoke.
“This will sting.”
“Go ahead.”
Caleb jerked when the man took one stitch to close the cut, then smeared a strong, thick, foul-smelling salve on it.
“Still taste blood?”
“Yes.”
He uncorked a small bottle, poured a thick, dark liquid into a tiny cup, and said, “Wash your mouth with this. Don’t swallow it. Spit it out.”
Caleb drained the cup and for a moment thought his head was on fire. He held the foul mix as long as he could, then spat it onto the ground. “What is it?” he choked.
“Carbolic salve and alcohol. It’ll help heal the cuts in your mouth. Where’s your bedroll?”
They both turned as a corpulent, officious man with gold epaulets on the shoulders of his homespun coat came puffing up behind them. “I’m Major Waldron, the regimental surgeon. Is this the injured boy?”
For five minutes Waldron examined Caleb, then rose, eyebrows raised in surprise. “Seems it’s all taken care of. If you need me, send word.” He rose and was gone as quickly as he had arrived.
Dorman looked at Caleb. “Where’s your bedroll?” he asked again.
Caleb pointed.
“What’s your name, son?”
Caleb lisped through bruised, swollen lips, “Caleb Dunson.”
“Come on.”
With Caleb’s arm over his shoulder and his box and canteen under his arm, Dorman walked Caleb to his bedroll and sat him down.
“Who are you?” Caleb asked.
“Name’s Charles Dorman. Company Five, just north of here.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“I got my reasons.”
“Like what?”
“We’ll talk about that later. For now, we get some water from the creek and keep a cold compress on that cheek and eye. I don’t think there’s any permanent damage, but you’ll want to get that swelling down.” He turned on his heel and walked toward the river.
With the sun now below the western horizon, the world was cast in dwindling shades of bronze when the man returned. He wrung water from a rag and positioned it over the closed eye and swollen cheek. “Hold that,” he said, and Caleb reached with his hand.
The following morning the reveille drum echoed through a silent camp, and Dorman quietly watched Caleb grit his teeth against the torments of the worst aches he had ever known. His face was puffy, the left eye swollen, purple, and yellow. It took the boy ten minutes to put on his shoes and roll up his blanket. Dorman turned his head to listen as Lieutenant McCormack sang out the work assignments for Third Company, then stopped to speak to Caleb.
“I heard about it. Murphy’s on report. You’re off duty for today.”
Dorman’s ragged eyebrows raised when Caleb shook his head. “No, I’m not. Give me my orders.”
McCormack’s mouth fell open. “What?”
Caleb glared through swollen eyes. “Give me my orders.”
McCormack shrugged. “All right. Fire detail. Haul wood for the cooks. Where’s your musket?”
“Don’t have one.”
“Then you carry a spear. Make one.”
Caleb bobbed his head. Dorman watched with deep interest as Caleb, hunched over to favor cracked ribs, winced as he used his left hand to load wood on his right arm, dumped it by the great black kettles, and went for a second load. Finished, Caleb picked up an ax from the woodpile, cut a nine-foot pine sapling, trimmed it clean, then with nearby soldiers glancing at him as they worked, held it against a log with one foot while he swung the ax one-handed to sharpen the end. With his pine sapling spear in hand, he shouldered his bedroll and marched out with Third Company, eyes straight ahead, chin set against the pain of cracked ribs.
Evening mess was finished when Captain Venables came striding, calling for Caleb. Men crowded around as the captain spoke.
“We’re going to have a hearing. What charges do you want to bring against Private Murphy?”
“None.”
Venables started. “What? After what he did to you?”
“It was a misunderstanding.”
“A misunderstanding of what? Have you seen your face?”
“No charges.”
Venables turned and called, “McCormack, come over here.”
McCormack approached, and Venables pointed. “McCormack, this man says he does not want to bring charges against Murphy, and I want a witness.” He turned back to Caleb. “Do I understand you do not want to hold a hearing? You refuse to bring charges against Murphy for what he did to you?”
Caleb looked from Venables to McCormack, then glanced at the faces of the other men
in the circle. “That’s right. No charges.”
Venables tossed his hands upward. “Well, I can’t force you. If you bring no charges there won’t be a hearing because we have no bill of particulars to bring against Murphy. You understand that?”
“I do.”
“I’ll write it up just that way in the regimental orderly book. All you men, go on about your business.”
Caleb had settled onto his blanket, hunched over his aching ribs, when a sound came from behind. He tried to turn his head but could not because of the pain.
“It’s me, Dorman.” The man settled cross-legged, facing Caleb as Caleb spoke.
“I want to thank you for all you’ve done.”
The man nodded and Caleb went on.
“You said we would talk. Why did you take the trouble with me?”
The man’s eyes dropped. “I can’t stand a bully. And I thought there must be something about you, the way you swung back at that man, and tried to get up when you knew you didn’t have a chance, and then wanted them to bring him back because you didn’t want it to be over. And I’ve noticed you today. Hauling wood. Making that spear.”
Caleb asked, “You saw it yesterday?”
“No. It was over when I got there. Others told me.”
Caleb remained silent and Dorman went on. “I know something about fighting. I did it for a living for a time. I was champion in the southern half of England a long time ago.”
Caleb’s eyes widened in stunned surprise.
“I can teach you a little about it. At least enough to take care of the bullies of the world, like Conlin Murphy. If you’re interested.”
“I’m interested.”
“It won’t be easy.”
“I’m interested.”
“When you’re able, we’ll start.”
“I’m ready now.”
Dorman’s eyes widened. “You can hardly raise your arms.”