Mad Boy

by Nick Arvin

  Henry moves as fast as he can, but he is winded and wet with sweat. On the slope above him, everyone is running—the American troops stream westward, the redcoats following like wolves after sheep.

  Henry passes wounded making awful noises and looters stooping to their work. As he crests the hill, he stops to regain his breath. The British officers are calling their men, reforming a column in the road. Henry can’t see Franklin anywhere.

  He hesitates. He took nothing from the battlefield. He looks back down the hill—he can see hats, muskets, knapsacks, and jackets lying all about. There must be valuables to be found. But a few of the redcoats are turning to chase off the looters. An officer fires a pistol toward a group of men gathered at a broken caisson, and they scatter. It upsets Henry that he’s gained nothing here.

  Presently the British bugle and drum strike up. The column’s rear is still collecting men and forming up as the front end sets into motion toward Washington.

  Do not go without me do not go do not go do not go do not go do not go do not go do not go do not go! Mother’s shouting comes faint as a whisper on the air.

  But the sight of Franklin, alive, has set Henry’s nerves afire: he must go after Franklin. He cannot go back now, or he will lose his mind, will die. He raises onto his toes and moves with sneaky steps, silently, away from Mother crying, Come back come back come back come back come back.

  Fainter and fainter her voice reaches him, and then he puts his head down to run.

  CHAPTER 3

  Mary contemplates forgiveness. Who can she forgive, and who can she not? Can she forgive the nurse beside her? Mary thinks no. Her father? Certainly not. Her sisters? She thinks of her eldest sister, who never forgives anyone, though she is a devout woman and knows as well as anyone that Christ urges forgiveness, for everyone. But can any mortal woman find such depths of generosity in herself?

  They proceed in a silence broken only by the drop of the lash and the thrum of a million insects, a churning, almost mystical sound so continuous that Mary no longer hears it. She sweats in streams, and all her body aches. Her enormous belly cannot be positioned in any way that feels natural. Franklin is dead, her father said, and he put her on this wagon to Baltimore. She has drifted through a fog of nausea and horror for hours upon hours, the hired nurse stiff beside her, and the hired man hunched before her, lethargically putting the lash to one and then the other of two harnessed mules. The nurse has patchy scraps of white hair and one of her cheekbones is collapsed and scarred, as if staved in with a table leg. She keeps a sharp-edged thimble on one finger, and she has a trick for flicking her hand to land the thimble like a whip’s end-knot—on Mary’s cheek are two small half-moon bruises.

  Mary is miserable, but she is also minding the scene going by. In Baltimore she will be locked into another of her father’s houses, to give birth alone, far from anyone she knows. Her best chance for escape is in this journey. She needs only to slip a little distance away, then hide. The driver is old and limps. The nurse, while cunning, is a townsperson who knows nothing of woods or swamp.

  They move on oozing black ruts, marsh plants simmering greenly on either side, issuing a moist smell of decay. Flies ring the mules’ eyes. The continual lurch of the wagon shoots flame into Mary’s back. She fades in and out of a doze and finds scores of mosquitoes on her face. The black tracks extend forever ahead. She has been and will be here forever. Franklin is lost to her. The baby will be born while they still creep through this swamp.

  She admonishes herself for her despair, sits up, attempts to sharpen her mind.

  It doesn’t last. She’s slumped and dazed when a violent pitch and jerk of the wagon startles her up again. She sees the mules leaning in the harness. The hired man curses and lashes; the mules stamps and shake their heads. The wagon is pitched to an angle and stuck.

  The driver climbs down to examine the right rear wheel. It has slid off the track and down to the hub in a hole filled with molasses-colored muck. The driver sets both hands on the wheel and strains to lift it. The wagon doesn’t budge. He looks up. “Everything out.”

  The nurse assists Mary to the ground with a pinching grip to her elbow, and Mary stands in the soggy track while the nurse and the driver unload the baggage—two heavy chests, sacks of provisions, a rocking cradle. The nurse climbs up to lash the mules while the hired man pushes the wheel. Mary moves a step backward.

  The driver shouts, “Hit them! Hit them, damn it!” The nurse beats with the lash. The driver puffs, sweats, turns red.

  Mary turns, runs. There’s swamp to either side, but just ahead the road bends into high, tangled growth. She despairs, however, at how slowly she moves. She was always fleet—faster than the boys in a foot race, not that any would admit it, except for sweet Franklin, his duty to honesty overriding his embarrassment. But now she plods heavily.

  She glances back. The nurse and the hired man do not notice yet, and ahead is the bend. If she can make the bend, then hide in the willow and reeds—

  “Mary!” the nurse cries. “Reprehensible child!”

  Mary swings her feet fast as she can—the mud of the road seems to clutch her shoes and grab the hem of her dress. Her heart goes as hard as it ever has. She leans forward, ready to leap to the willows, ready to ball herself around her belly and roll like an egg.

  But the nurse comes up with startling speed. She seizes Mary’s arm and spins her back toward the wagon. “Where will you go?” the nurse demands, her face near. “You have nowhere to go.”

  This is true. Mary weeps as she climbs back into the wagon. Mary’s sisters—eleven, eight, and six years older than Mary—told her, again and again, how their mother died giving birth to Mary amid an extraordinary hemorrhage of blood that overspilled the bed, leaving a stain that could not be scrubbed away, so that finally the floorboards had to be torn out and replaced. Mary had been given suck by a black nursemaid, and Mary’s sisters said that the milk had transmitted to Mary the nursemaid’s debased negro character. Abandoned amid sisters who regard her an intruder and a species of murderer, Mary has, at moments, wondered if her own motherhood will kill her and balance matters, if it might be as well if it did. It’s a thought she shakes off, but it seems to cling a little more after Franklin was taken away to the firing squad.

  The wagon goes on, the nurse gripping Mary’s wrist with boney, sweating fingers. “You’re a fool to run. Your father will find you a rich husband,” she says, “or he will make your husband rich. You’ll tell servants and slaves what they must do. They’ll wash your clothes and make your meals and empty your chamber pot and mind your children. You’ll be like a queen.”

  “My father will marry me to some horrible, simpering man who will do whatever my father tells him.”

  “What could be wrong with that? Your father is a great success.”

  Mary shakes her head miserably.

  An hour later they come into the shade of the forest, and Mary rouses herself, says, “After all, Franklin promised to marry me, and I can have my own baby.”

  “You’re, at best, a kind of widow,” the nurse says.

  Tears come again to Mary’s eyes. “There’s no reason I should be forced to behave as if I am ashamed.”

  The nurse snorts. “It will be easier for your father to find you some proper husband if the matter is kept quiet. You can simply say that your new husband is the father.”

  “I’ll never do that.”

  “If you insist on that attitude, and if that baby is a boy, I do believe your father will take him from you.”

  Mary feels savagely that no one will ever be forgiven for this.

  Her father would not forgive his daughters first for not being sons, and then for not marrying and having sons. Her sisters would not forgive the world for disappointing them. Mary could see plainly how grief came from the knots of unforgiving. But taking her child from her: how could she forgive it? She w
ould hate her father, her sisters, her mother, every person alive and dead. She would live only with animals, who never needed forgiveness.

  “I want Tuesday,” Mary says.

  “Pardon?”

  “Tuesday.”

  “An indulgence, a creature like that.”

  “So that I can have the one thing that’s nice. I’m sure I’ll feel better if I have Tuesday.”

  The nurse pinches her lips and twists the thimble. After a moment she relents. “If the cat will make you less difficult, I will mention it in my letter to your father. Perhaps he will grant it. I don’t know.”

  Mary tries to straighten her back against the pain there. She cannot understand how she can sweat so much without bodily seeping through the wagon’s floorboards and mixing into the wet all around. It is Franklin’s fault, poor Franklin, she would punch him if he were here, not that he would notice much. “He said this wouldn’t happen,” she said, “if I was on top.”

  The nurse glares. The driver guffaws.

  “I don’t know why I believed him,” Mary says. “But I’m sure he really believed it.”

  Washington lies only a few miles from Bladensburg. By the time Henry has walked halfway there, the sun sulks low in the west and the road is swarming with people fleeing the city with possessions and provisions piled in wagons and carts with slaves and livestock trailing behind, while soldiers from various American regiments and militias trudge the other way, looking for their army. Henry talks to a soldier with a star-shaped wound on his forehead, a cobbler with a sack full of shoes, a pigkeep with piglets in a box—they all tell Henry that the army will go to Washington to stop the redcoats.

  A painted sign advertises the Fiddlestick’s End, an inn that appears to have been constructed and amended using loose scraps of wood by men largely ignorant of the techniques of carpentry. The door has come off the hinges and lies on the ground, revealing a rowdy crowd demanding space for the night. Nearer to the road, a group of men stand round a fire passing a jug. They are old men, or men who look old, laborers with savaged hands and creased faces. All watch the jug, except one harelipped man who shakes a panful of dried corn over the fire. It passes Henry’s mind that he’s hungry, and that he left his food with Mother, but he rushes on.

  Presently he comes to an American soldier walking the other way—toward Bladensburg. “Where are you going?” Henry says. “The redcoats are headed to Washington.”

  The soldier shrugs. “General Winder says we’re going to Baltimore.”

  Soon Henry meets another soldier, and another, more and more, headed toward Bladensburg, bandaged men, empty-handed men, walking in ones and twos, slumped, quiet. They form a rough line, and near the end a large shape appears out of the sunset and dust—Franklin.

  Henry runs, crying, “Franklin! Franklin!”

  Franklin blinks, blinks, grins—he sweeps up Henry and holds him high. “Pest!” he says. “Vexation! You’re here!” He crushes Henry in an embrace, sets him down, smiles, smiles, frowns, squints. “Henry. Why’re you here?”

  Franklin has Henry by the hand, and he pulls Henry along the road toward Bladensburg while Henry jabbers—he saw Franklin and his regiment at Bladensburg, fighting, the last Americans on the field.

  “That wasn’t my regiment,” Franklin says. “The captain ordered a retreat, which seemed disgraceful to me, when others were fighting yet, so I slid over to stand with Barney’s marines. But that’s not the point.” He considers, recalling the point. “Why aren’t you home?”

  “Franklin,” Henry says. “Mother’s dead.”

  “Mother?” Franklin halts, gapes, shakes his head, peers at Henry. “Dead? No. Mother?”

  Henry opens his mouth, but his throat closes.

  Franklin bends backward, looks to the sky, lifts his thick arms, and roars—a terrible, animal sound of pain.

  When it stops, Henry hears it whisper back off the trees. Or, no, it is Mother’s voice, far off, shouting something he cannot make out.

  Franklin drops his arms, stands slumped, stares at his boots. Then he clumps forward. “This way. Tell me.”

  Henry casts a glance back toward Washington, but Franklin has taken his arm again and drags him along. Henry tells about Mother, the redcoats, the cow. “But,” he says, “she still talks to me.”

  “You said she’s dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which is it, she’s dead, or she talks to you?”

  “Both.”

  “That is considerable strange.” Franklin ponders for several paces. “I don’t see how it can be.”

  “When she is close, I can hear her as clearly as I can hear you.”

  “What does she say?”

  “Oh, you know how she talks. She wants to go to sea. Can’t hear her very well now, though. I think she’s too far away.”

  “Too far away? I don’t understand it. Maybe you’re touched in the head.”

  “She says we’re all to be there—Father, too—and send her to sea.”

  “That does seem the kind of thing she would say. But Father, too?” Franklin says nothing for a distance. They tail behind the line of soldiers. Before them a man staggers and groans. The dying sun throws wine-colored light onto the clouds. “No,” Franklin says finally. “No. It’s not possible. You know I tried. I gave him my bounty, and I am duty-bound to the army now because I tried. You know how he spent the money.”

  “If Washington has been abandoned, there’ll be things for the taking.”

  “You mean—” Franklin squints, thinking. “Theft?”

  “We need money. Father—”

  “That’s a mean, dishonorable idea,” Franklin says.

  “Things people have left behind,” Henry says, “can’t be needed very much, really.”

  “No. That’s not right.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t thieve things, Henry. I have to tell you about Mary. Mary is going to have a baby. You will be an uncle.” Franklin looks down at Henry with a great smile and claps his shoulder. “But Suthers’s men took her away. I have to find her. For now, you’ll join my regiment. You can help the cooks. You’ll have food and a place to sleep. They may even pay you something.”

  “It will take a hundred years to buy out Father that way!”

  Franklin says nothing. Henry assumes he is thinking, but then realizes that the angle of Franklin’s head is not his thinking angle. Franklin is listening.

  “Washington’s that way! Over there! Behind you!” It is the men by the fire at the Fiddlestick’s End.

  A soldier says, “We go to defend Baltimore.”

  The harelipped man with the pan of popping corn has abandoned it and now stands at the edge of the roadway. He has bloodshot eyes. His harelip gives his words a lisp that sounds like mockery. “Ah! Baltimore! Right! But Johnny Bull hasn’t even gotten to Washington yet, has he? Odd. And I hear there were races today at Bladensburg. Say, who won the races at Bladensburg? Maybe that skinny one there? He looks quick! Surely it wasn’t that fat one, or that bandy-legged one. Who won the Bladensburg races? You? Or you?” Behind the harelip, his friends grin.

  Franklin slows. As if it were a happenstance of the mechanics of his slackening pace, he reaches a stop before the harelip. He still has a grip on Henry. “I didn’t see any races,” he says.

  “You finished well back, I suppose. Not your fault, you’re so big. But you beat those redcoats, I guess, showed them how sprightly an American can be, even a great big one.”

  “There were—” Franklin appears confused, works a finger in one ear. “—no races.”

  The harelip smiles and his gums show high. “Coward.”

  Franklin lets go of Henry and reaches with a fast, reflexive movement, as if grabbing a cup that someone has elbowed off a table, except that this movement ends with Franklin’s fist meeting the harelip’s n
ose.

  The harelip stumbles, twitches once, then drops straight down. In a heap, he lies unmoving, except for the blood that flows from his nostrils.

  The other men look at the harelip, look at Franklin, then turn from Franklin, to the fire and the jug.

  Franklin reaches for Henry, but Henry has danced backward several steps. Franklin says, “Come here, you.”

  “I’m going to Washington,” Henry says.

  Franklin shakes his head. “I forbid it.” He steps and reaches. “Come with me.”

  Henry ducks the big arm, spins, runs. He hears Franklin’s heavy step follow, but he knows he is lighter and faster than his brother. Soon the footsteps stop.

  “Henry!” Franklin calls. “Father’s a wastrel! You cannot redeem him by debasing yourself!”

  But Henry has no care about wastreling or redeeming or debasing. He knows the words—from Father’s rants—but is indifferent to them. He only wants money, his father free, his mother to sea. He runs on.

  An enormous draft horse has died in its traces, backing up several wagons coming out of Washington. A carriage attempting to detour through an adjacent field has broken an axle in a ditch. Henry skirts by. He passes a man carrying a framed painting on his back, two traders leading a chain of slaves in sackcloth, a woman with rabbits in a barrow. A man leads what appears to be second man on a leash, naked, moving on all fours. But then Henry sees that the leashed creature is not a man but a sickly thin bear with mange.

  A red-haired boy Henry’s own age is coming the other way, and Henry asks him for news. The redcoats are putting the government buildings to the torch, the boy says. “Soon you’ll be in eyeshot of the fire.”

  It is true—minutes later, a blushing orange glows over the horizon.

  Henry alternates trotting and walking, thrilled in his heart—ahead stands an entire city, abandoned. He feels drawn like an animal to bait, and wonders if this is how Father feels pulled to drink. He doesn’t care for that idea, and begins to run.