by Nick Arvin
Henry crosses the bridge, swings around the cannon, and leaves the road, dragging his cart across the meadow before the serried ranks of soldiers, grasshoppers boiling from the weeds ahead of his boots.
He comes to the apple trees and weaves through until he reaches the edge of the deep forest. “I have to leave you here,” he says.
Everyone abandons me, Mother says quietly.
“I can’t drag you uphill through an army when the battle might start any minute!” he says. He pulls the cart further on, taking a rough path into the trees, then turns into the shadows and brush. “I’ll hide you here. No one will find you, and I won’t be far away, and I’ll come back soon.”
Go on. Why not? she says mournfully. No one ever gives any regard to me anyhow.
He shoves the cart deep into a chokecherry patch. Mother’s gingham dress is under the barrel, and he adjusts it to better hide it. “I’ll be back quickly! With money!” he shouts, turning away. He devoutly intends to return the moment the fighting ends and he has in hand money, items of value, something.
Nearing the army’s second line, Henry studies the soldiers. If Franklin’s big form is among them, Henry doesn’t see it. Doubt touches him like a cold finger: the thought that Franklin may in fact be dead.
Amid the triple ranked first line are two clusters of small cannon, several cannoneers seated in the shade of their caissons, and a few officers with fancy hats and shiny accoutrements surveying the field. The civilians are in a messy sprawl of groups and clusters above the second line—there are men in finery and men in tatters, men on sleek horses and men with no shoes, women in dresses and petticoats and sun hats and bonnets, and women with cook soot on their faces. Among them are a number of boys and girls Henry’s own age and younger, with their families, chattering, eating lunches from baskets like folk gathered for a horse show or a hunting dog demonstration. Other children roam in gangs or hawk apples, or corn cakes, or dippers of water from a canvas bucket.
He discovers Abigail deep in conversation with a man with purple, pox-scarred cheeks and an ear trumpet—she flicks Henry away with her fingers. He doesn’t mind, goes onward. The sky is clear; the sun throws a dazzling light on the lines of troops. Laughter rises high and sharp. A man clutches his son, points to a rider amid a half-dozen men in fine black jackets, says, “Madison!”
Henry knows of the president mostly through Father’s vulgar complaints about his appalling Republican warmongering politics. It scarcely surprises Henry that Madison is an unimpressive, small, sweating, fat man, straddled on horseback like a toad.
A cannon, sighting its distance to the bridge, erupts—the ball skips through the meadow and neatly leaps the bridge. Cheers rise. Henry circles back to a position not far from the orchard, wondering, when will the redcoats come?
Mother grumbles faintly. More American units march in, a few score from the east, then several hundred from the Georgetown road. Sweat-black horses come in at a trot, pulling cannon that slew and sway, raising streams of dust. The soldiers in the field never stand in place long before someone in fancy dress gallops up and orders them to slightly different locations. It’s growing hot.
Then a few dozen American soldiers appear on the other side of the river, running hard through Bladensburg. They turn onto the bridge with shouts and sprint across.
Finally now the officers cease trotting about. Everyone stills.
For what seems a long while nothing happens. Even the birds are quiet, and the cloudless sky is like a bell of blue glass.
A voice cries, “Hush!”
Which, in the perfect quiet—except for Mother’s distant natter—seems to Henry a silly thing to say. But then he hears, from away over the river to the right, the wafting rattle of drums. A minute later, a bugle’s warble.
No—it is several bugles. And now the British come out of the trees into sight on the Bladensburg road, redcoated, bayonets glinting, a single, long, long column that comes on and on from the trees, in hundreds, then thousands. In the red column there are also streaks of blue, and some of the soldiers are black-skinned, although they are much too far away to see if Radnor is among them. There are also men dragging small cannon, carts, and tumbrils. A few men ride on stolen farm nags, with improvised blanket saddles and rope reins.
The head of the column halts a hundred yards short of Bladensburg. A few dozen redcoats depart the ranks and move forward. They break into several houses. After a minute they return to the street and wave.
A command is shouted. The thousands of British bayonets lift, and a flash of light travels down the length of the column, like an enormous animal rising to hunt.
The drums roll, the bugles sound, and the red column starts forward.
As the leading troops reach the center of Bladensburg, the two American cannon in the meadow road explode. The trails kick back gouging the dirt and roily smoke rises. The balls strike the Bladensburg street and bounce into the redcoats—one soldier is caught in the stomach and rises upward, arms outflung like a preacher. The British break ranks and scatter, and the civilians on the ridge cheer and laugh, and Henry with them.
Subsequent cannon shots, however, uselessly knock holes into the town roofs, while the redcoats scuttle from house to house, and soon hundreds are crowded behind the buildings and trees nearest the river.
An officer rides forward, shouting, and raises a shining sword.
The redcoats hurrah and surge as if a sluice gate had opened. Many stream for the bridge, but others run to the river, raise their muskets overhead, and splash into the water looking for fords. The cannon on the road open fire and sweep a dozen redcoats off the bridge—flying and tumbling, spun like toys, limbs torn from torsos. The men behind fall back briefly, then push forward, stepping over and upon the bodies.
The first line of American muskets fires raggedly as the redcoats enter the meadow, and it doesn’t slow them much. Henry notices certain rough-looking civilians, one by one, slouching into the orchard and drifting downslope. Henry joins them. As he sidles from one apple tree to the next, a man leers with the yellow teeth of scurvy and gums the color of swamp mud. “Going to get you some, boy?” he says. “Just keep yourself well out of my way. There’ll be plenty to go around.”
The British troops split left and right, some toward the orchard, others toward the first American line. The line gives way almost immediately, breaking ranks and fleeing as the redcoats surge forward to seize the two cannon in the road. Henry, fearing that the battle is already over, nearly runs out of the orchard to chase down some American troops and yell at them. But the second American line stays in place, and some of the men from the first line begin attaching themselves there.
Redcoats behind a warehouse in town ignite a series of rockets that fly over the river spewing fire and sparks and making a sound like enormous shears tearing through cloth. They seem horrible and glorious to Henry. But they only land in the grass and scuttle around, and then the American cannon begin hitting the warehouse, and the rockets stop.
The second line starts downhill, toward the British, marching with muskets at shoulder, officers yelling where the wide triple rank bulges ahead or sinks behind, drummer boys beating the march, while overhead the red and white and blue flags and the regimental banners ripple and snap. Some of the redcoats are forming ranks in the meadow to meet the Americans, while others continue to flit into the orchard. Henry runs alongside the march of the second line. The scurvied man trots nearby, his body bent as if he were in a cellar.
When the American line halts on the hillside Henry can see red jackets only a couple hundred feet downhill, spread across the meadow and all among the apple trees. The Americans spend a few minutes straightening their formation, and meanwhile the redcoats in the orchard pot several of them. Then the American officers shriek, and all the long line of American muskets discharge flame and a sudden billow of smoke with the sound of a great wave s
mashing a stony beach.
A few of the redcoats in the ranks at the foot of the meadow drop, and others break and run. But the redcoats in the orchard continue loading and firing at the Americans standing in ranks. The Americans begin shooting as fast as each man can load. Some aim at the troops ahead; some aim at the orchard, making pale wounds in the trunks of the trees.
It is a strange, reversed scene—Father told Henry how the rebels won the War of Independence by sniping from the woods at rigid British formations, and he and Franklin played it that way when littler. The American troops are going about it incorrectly, and Henry dances on his feet in irritation. Meantime, there are still many redcoats across the river, and they have found a ford upstream of the bridge and pour into the orchard, so more and more redcoats are firing from the trees, and the American line grows crooked and broken as men scream and curse, working to reload or turning to the wounded. A man casts his musket aside and runs: others follow. The British burst from the woods, running with bayonets.
The smoke swells so that Henry cannot follow the scene, although he glimpses figures silhouetted by the haze and hears the muskets banging, and the cannon booming—these fewer and fewer as the Americans begin hauling the artillery away. Bayonets clash and men scream and horses scream. The air stinks of burned powder, and the dead lie here and there in humps in the haze. Jutting from the banked smoke is an American flag, but then it teeters and falls, and the redcoats in the meadow huzzah and press ahead.
Henry lurches to one direction and another, trying to see. The sloping meadow directly before him has begun to empty as the Americans retreat, the redcoats chasing, but bullets still fly nearby with short, sharp noises of keening and thwacking when the scurvied man springs up, and, with prancing steps and startling recklessness, shouting “Lord Lord Lord!” runs into the meadow. He falls on the nearest body, an American, tears opens the blue jacket, begins to rummage.
Henry’s surprised to discover how many civilians are peering from behind trees and through the bushes, rough-looking men and narrow-eyed women, frozen, bated, leaning to watch the scurvied man work amid the flying bullets.
The scurvied man lifts up a chain that gleams gold. He puts it in his teeth, grins, cackles, whoops.
The others rush forward, Henry with them.
He bolts past a couple of men who seem to have actually hidden themselves in the landscape, for they appear as if out of the ground to bend over the dead and wounded. He passes a wild-eyed old man cursing and clouting on the neck a crone already working over the body of a bespangled officer. As the British swept out of the trees into the meadow, Henry noticed one gut-shot redcoat who doubled over, then straightened and fell backward out of sight amid tall weeds. He sprints the last distance, crouches. The fallen redcoat is a young man scarcely old enough to scrape hair off his face, staring skyward with surprise and consternation, as if a shopkeep had just quoted an outrageous price. A hole in his belly emits a red ooze.
Henry sets the soldier’s gleaming musket to one side, lifts his warm, heavy hand, drops it. He says, frowning, “Maybe you’re the one that loosed the cow.”
A musket ball crackles through the weeds: Henry looks after it absently, then again at the soldier. He squirms his feet, cracks his knuckles. He feels shy. Why? The feeling angers him. The man is dead. No one is watching.
Faintly, faintly, Mother shouts across the distance, Henry, after all, it’s nigh impossible for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven!
“He doesn’t look very rich,” Henry says doubtfully, but supposes he might examine the dead soldier’s possessions before deciding what’s to be done with them, so works the jacket’s shining buttons, reaches in—
Hands seize Henry from behind.
Henry squeaks, flails. He is lifted like a sack of flour: his view gyres from earth to sky and back. In a rush of air, Henry flies.
The landing crushes the breath from him. He opens his mouth wide but, fishlike, cannot breathe, while darkness and stars crowd in.
Then air comes in a wild gasp. Coughing and wheezing he scrambles to his feet. Bending over the body of the redcoat is a tall stout man, bald and brown as leather on the top of his head, and hairy everywhere else with tufts of wiry stuff sprouting from face, hands, neck, ears.
Henry jumps at the man’s back—the big man grunts and ignores him, even as Henry pounds him. It is like punching the ribs of a draft horse. Henry slides down the man’s back, but as he drops he catches hold of something on the man’s belt, pulls it free—a knife.
Henry raises his gaze from the knife in time to witness a remarkable event: the redcoat sits up.
Henry and the hairy bald man stumble back. The newly animate soldier blinks, smacks dry lips, furrows his brow, looks at the wound in his gut. “Hurk?” he says. “Hurk? Hurk.”
He coughs blood onto his trousers; then reaches forward as if to wipe at it, but the gesture loses momentum; his hand falls.
The hairy bald man regains his footing and steps toward the redcoat, feeling at his hip. Finding nothing there, he feels to his other hip, his stomach, his back. He peers at his belt. He turns. Henry laughs and waggles the knife.
“That’s mine,” the hairy bald man says.
“You’re going to knife him!” Henry cries.
“You stole my knife. This is robbery.”
“You can’t knife him,” Henry says. “Go find a dead one.”
They both glance around. Where, Henry wonders, did all of these people come from? Dozens of looters have spread across the meadow, up and down the slope, bending to the bodies, running from one to the next, like ants on a sugar spill.
“That’s my good knife.” The man scratches in his tangled beard. “I need that knife. I can’t afford to lose things, like a good knife.”
“Hurk!” says the redcoat.
Damned is the man to whom too much is offered, Mother shouts.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Henry says, irritably.
“Weevils ate our crop,” the hairy bald man says. “We are starving. My wife has boils on her eyelids. I have six daughters, and how many have the ague? Six. We have nothing. Nothing but illness.”
Henry says, “A cow fell on my mother and killed her.”
“I am sorry for your misfortune. But I need that knife. It is my good knife. Also, I need the dead man’s things.”
“He’s not dead!” Henry says.
“Hurk!” says the redcoat.
“Well, he ought to be. Isn’t he a redcoat, invading our republic?” the hairy man says, face pinkening. “Aren’t we Americans? Isn’t he an assailant on our national sovereignty? Is this not a war?” His eyes glisten, and he rubs a hand in the sweat on his head. “Our well? Dry. Our horse? Sores in the mouth. Cow? Gives no milk. The knife, please.”
Tell him to go away, Mother shouts.
“Go to hell,” Henry says.
Language, Henry! Mother shouts.
The bald hairy man roars and lunges with a quickness that startles Henry. He catches Henry’s knife hand by the wrist, squeezes, and lifts straight up, so that Henry’s feet come off the ground. For a moment he holds Henry at eye level, his wooly, filthy face inches from Henry, stinking of rancid grease. He says, “Sorry boy,” and joggles him violently, as if to see what will happen first, a snapped neck or an arm torn out of joint.
Something explodes, and a crimson rag seems to drop onto the hairy bald man’s head—he lets go of Henry to touch his head, and his fingers come away dripping blood from a wound slashed there.
“Hurk!” The redcoat lowers his musket, smoke seeping from the barrel.
Henry looks at his hand—the knife is still there, in his fist. He flourishes it.
The hairy bald man gazes at the knife, then whimpering and burbling he turns and retreats with his head in his hands.
The redcoat slumps back to the ground, goggles the sky, sm
acks his lips. Henry leans closer. “Hello?” he says. “Hello?” He shouts: “Hello?”
The redcoat’s eyes jump, then still, jump, then still.
Oh no, Mother says.
“Please breathe, sir,” Henry says. “After all, you’re probably not the one who let the cow loose.”
Mother says, Who the Lord loves he chastises, and scourges every son he receives . . .
Henry says, “Won’t you stop? You don’t believe in any of that.”
Mother says, But maybe this boy does.
Henry sits in the grass, takes the soldier’s hand. The flesh has cooled alarmingly. Henry says, “It’s too much of everyone dying.”
The redcoat doesn’t appear to hear. Mother says, It is a war, Henry, and you see you need family, now especially.
The redcoat shudders. A cicada noise comes from his throat. The color falls from his face. His gaze looks nowhere.
Sadness and loneliness swell in Henry. He squeezes the redcoat’s fingers.
He sits for a while. Uphill, where the armies still clash, the American second line is gone, and most of the third line is too, except for two hundred or so Americans at the high point of the Washington Road, working several cannon and loading and firing long rifles at the redcoats who venture into the open on the slopes below.
The smoke covers much of what is happening, and Henry only watches vaguely until a breeze rolls the smoke aside, and although the Americans are thousands of feet away, one of them is plainly much bigger than the others.
Henry jumps up. He starts running. Soon he can see the big soldier—tall, bull-necked, a man who fills his uniform like a sausage fills its skin.
“Franklin!” Henry shouts, leaping along, “Franklin! Franklin! Franklin Franklin Franklin!”
Smoke drifts in and hides the Americans. Henry runs on. He can see redcoats working around to the backside of the hill. They have nearly surrounded the position when the American officers start screaming and waving. Their troops abandon the cannon and break down the road toward Washington.