by Nick Arvin
His unit had dragged their forage carts through Bladensburg behind the fighting—the air still stank of burned powder when they came into the long, sloped meadow, but the looters had already stripped the corpses nude and the flies moved on them like agitations of black lace. The regiments that had led the fighting were sent to the rear, and Radnor marched among the first men to enter Washington’s streets. He gritted his teeth, watching the dark windows on either side, expecting shots. But the streets lay quiet, except for the crackle and tumble of the timbers of a single house that a scouting party had set ablaze. The only souls to be seen were a few blacks watching the British. Several approached and pleaded for a musket and a uniform. “No time, alas, no time,” the officers yelled, shooing the men away. “We have urgent business.” Radnor, tangled inside with guilt and grief and delight, kept his eyes forward when he felt the onlookers’ gaze.
Capitol Hill was taken with no fighting at all, almost a disappointment, the cartridges in his cartouche box heavy on his hip, the musket in his hands longing for use. In the weeds around the hulking Capitol building they formed ranks, and a dozen of the Colonial Marines, Radnor among them, were pulled out and dispatched to the White House. Radnor helped to rope a flagpole and pull it down. They used it to smash the White House windows, while others threw in pots of burning oil. Then they were sent to torch the Treasury.
At first it pleased Radnor to play a role in the arson, and he felt considerable pleasure in watching the White House and other buildings burn. But then it struck him that the British were parading himself and the other black marines to these places for a reason: to taunt the Americans with the image of freed slaves torching the nation’s symbols. Radnor didn’t know that he cared to escape slavery only to be made a token of someone else’s purposes. The other black marines didn’t seem to care, but Radnor brooded on it.
Some eight years ago, Suthers had taken Radnor and his two brothers as debt service from a Virginian tobacco farmer. Radnor’s mother had been a house slave and taught them a little of how to read and write and behave in a civilized manner, but then she was sold away to Alabama and vanished forever; Radnor never knew his father. Radnor, Hollis, and Charles were young, strong children when they came to Suthers’s estate, but the Virginian farmer likely believed he’d gained a measure on Suthers, for Hollis’s eyesight was failing, and Charles had a lump hidden in his throat. Within the year Hollis was blind, and Charles’s lump had to be excised, after which Charles could not speak. That autumn the Virginian farmer’s tobacco harvest burned in the barns, and while he was fighting the fires, his house caught and burned, too. It was considered perfectly obvious that this was Suthers’s doing. The Virginian farmer went the next day to Suthers—not to complain, but to ask forgiveness.
Suthers had no interest in farming; he held the estate only as a marker of prestige. He told Radnor and his brothers that if they would work hard, he would not bring in an overseer to drive them. He also said that if Hollis or Charles attempted to run off, he would kill them. “And if you run off,” he said to Radnor, “I will catch you, sell you away, and kill your worthless brothers.”
A couple of times a year, Radnor slipped off in the night and journeyed to see Frisbee, his mother’s cousin, and the only remaining blood relation of himself and his brothers that he knew of on the Chesapeake. To journey to Frisbee’s plantation, spend an hour there, and return, while staying off the roads monitored by the slave patrols, took the entirety of a night, sunset to sunrise. The last time Radnor had been there, in March, Frisbee told Radnor that he would soon be gone. Working at night with a stolen adze, he had fashioned a one-man canoe in the swamp, and as soon as he had a reliable report of the position of the British ships in the bay, he would paddle to join them. Frisbee said that if he could, he would bring the British to Suthers’s plantation to claim Radnor, too.
Radnor might have begun at that time to worry for his brothers’ fate, except that he allowed no hope Frisbee would be able to fulfill his promise. Hope existed in Radnor’s experience as a sufferance, a thing with tiny talons for tearing at the flesh, to which he gave as little attention as possible. Surely it was more likely that Frisbee’s makeshift canoe would founder and vanish in the open water.
Then one day Radnor stood up from rooting potatoes and saw, unlikely as a dream, faded red jackets coming through the corn, Frisbee himself in the fore. A fist seized Radnor’s heart, tears welled in his eyes.
When he talked to Charles and Hollis they told him he must go, but by then, secretly, Radnor had already decided. He would go. And it troubles him deeply, now, standing here in the uniform of the British Crown in the street of an infernal Washington, that he didn’t think for an instant that he actually might stay with his brothers, that he abandoned them without hesitation, Hollis and Charles, as much family as he possesses in this world. Before him lies an abyss of loneliness.
The lilt of a bird—a strange, misplaced sound—scrapes Radnor’s attention. It sounds again, and again. Then he realizes—it’s the boy’s whippoorwill call. He certainly wouldn’t have expected it here.
He makes no sign that he has heard while he considers. Now he’s a free man, there’s no need or requirement for him to associate with lower sorts like the Phippses.
The whippoorwill call continues, growing loud and shrill, less like a bird and more like an anxious dog.
Radnor sighs, moves into the shadows down the street. Against common sense, he is not entirely without fondness for the child, always running about, laughing or fuming. Also, he feels he bears a debt to Mrs. Phipps. When he and his brothers were brought to Suthers’s estate, Suthers intended to keep Hollis and Charles and sell Radnor to a trader in Arkansas, but—Radnor witnessed this himself—Mrs. Phipps, muttering, marched across the fields, and, standing barefoot in the dirt, told Suthers that he simply mustn’t split a family, even a slave family, that he must keep the brothers together, since to one another they were the only family they had. Suthers looked over Mrs. Phipps with a strange look and said nothing. And maybe Suthers had had his own reasons, but the sale never happened. Radnor tried once to thank Mrs. Phipps. She waved him away. “It’s simple enough,” she said, “family being all we have in this world, really.”
An ox lies dead at the edge of the street, its hulk sunk into a black pool of its own blood, throat cut, perhaps to prevent use of the creature by the redcoats. Two eyes and a top of filthy hair peek from behind its flank. “Henry,” Radnor says. “How did you come here?” Henry says nothing, only grins—dirty, thin, jittering. “You arduous boy,” Radnor says. Henry laughs. It is remarkable, how that sound causes memories to stir.
“You’ve turned redcoat,” Henry says.
“Fight this war, and I’m free. Or so I’ve been assured.”
“Suthers didn’t treat you so bad.” Henry looks doubtful. “We lived nearly as poor as you.”
Radnor laughs. “Whatever amount of truth is in that, it is on account of the Phippses’ blood disinclination toward hard work.”
“Father’s luck will turn,” Henry says, patiently. “And Mother works hard, when the sickness hasn’t got her—”
“Henry.” Radnor cuts him off. “We labored for another man. I saw my mother sold away in chains, screaming, beating her own head bloody. And for you there comes a day when you can strike out and make your own life, but for a slave that day will never come. That’s a heavy weight on the soul.”
Henry whispers, “What’s happened to your brothers?”
“The British wouldn’t take them, because of their afflictions.” Radnor glances back—the lieutenant is still in discussion with the patent official. “They’ve gone to hide.”
“How long can they hide?”
“A long time,” Radnor says, looking up and down the street, determined that he will not weep before the boy.
“I’m going to get money to buy out Father.”
“I could name
a whole lot more useful purposes for such money.”
“Radnor,” Henry says, solemn. “Mother’s dead.”
That’s unexpected. “I’m sorry.” Radnor touches Henry’s shoulder. “A fine lady, your mother. Talked a great deal, and considerably variable in her mood, but a fine lady.”
Henry says, “I still hear her.”
“Well,” Radnor says, “of course you do.”
“She wants to go to sea. I put her into the pickle barrel, for now. And you were wrong about Franklin being dead. I saw Franklin, alive.”
“Really?” The mother dead in a pickle barrel, but talking; the brother executed, but alive. Possibly the boy has lost his mind. But, Radnor notes, I am leaving all this behind. “Well, I’m glad.” Radnor takes out of his jacket pocket a little stick that he has carved with notches. “If you see my brothers, will you give this to them?”
Henry turns it in his fingers. “What is it?”
“It’s a message.”
Henry tucks it into his pocket, nodding. He seems to be thinking about something else. “The thing of it is—” Henry, so thin and small, seems scarcely there in the flickering firelight. “Well, you’re with the redcoats. What if you’re supposed to shoot Franklin?”
“Then I’ll shoot him.”
“He can hit a snake in the head at fifty paces.” Henry peers solemnly at Radnor. “He’ll shoot you first.”
It occurs to Radnor that Henry isn’t worried about Franklin; Henry is worried about Radnor.
Radnor chuckles. Then flinches as a wetness strikes his cheek. Rain.
“You!” Someone in the dark shouts. “You! You there!”
A scuffle erupts, and several soldiers rush to join in—grunts, inarticulate cries, sounds of fists landing, fabric ripping.
They haul into the lantern light the ugliest man Radnor has ever seen. He wears an unbuttoned redcoat, a shirt torn open, no hat, no weapon, trousers high with strange bulge below the waist.
Henry says, “Morley.” All this time he’s been hidden behind the ox, but now he steps into the street.
“Looter! Looter!” the men call, jabbing the ugly fellow with their muskets.
“No! No!” Morley shouts. “A misunderstanding! Operating under strict orders! Conveying a message to Colonel Brooke! You’d best unhand me!”
A redcoat swings a musket at Morley’s groin, and the blow clangs. Something drops from Morley’s trouser leg. The lieutenant picks it up, turns it in his hands—a silver saucer.
“Looting is three hundred lashes,” the lieutenant says. The rain begins falling faster. It seems everyone has forgotten or given up about burning the Patent Office. The lieutenant waves toward the bivouac. “Bring him along,” he says.
“The hell you doing, boy?” Morley shouts to Henry as he passes. “By God! I waited and waited on you!”
“No one said you should try to pass so close to them!” Henry yells, quivering.
“Friend of yours?” Radnor asks.
Henry only gazes after the prisoner and seems to fall a little into himself.
Radnor nods goodbye to Henry, follows after the others. The rain slops down in torrents. He glances back once, expecting to see Henry alone in the street beside the ox. But he’s gone.
Once when Henry was five or six Father woke him with giddy whispers and led him outside. “Look,” Father said. “Watch the stars.”
Henry, groggy, watched.
A barred owl raised its usual questions: Hoo cooks for yoo? Hoo cooks for yoo all?
But nothing happened overhead, and Henry, feeling cold and irritable, scuffled his feet. “Watch,” Father said.
“My neck hurts,” Henry said.
A star slid fast over the sky.
“See,” Father said.
“I’ve seen a shooting star before,” Henry said, still cross and muddled with sleep.
Another slipped by. Another. Another.
“Oh,” Henry said.
“See!” Father cried. “Look at them, a-going it.”
Some went long and slow, others fast, short, scarcely present before vanishing. A bright one grew brighter as it fell, blinked out an instant before colliding with horizon. Father hooted and cheered for it.
“Will the sky run out of stars?” Henry asked.
“Naw,” Father said. “They’re just showing off for one another, like boys jumping into a swim hole.”
Henry loves Father. Curled inside an abandoned chicken hutch, he thinks of Father, of stars, of swim holes. He feels bad: he has done Father no good yet.
He has been snugged in here for hours, and although he shoved the yellow dress under his head for a pillow he is sore of shoulders, back, neck, one arm asleep. Hearing the rain finally stop he wriggles from the hutch, sits in the opening, rubs his head—feathers spring aloft and spiral down. He locates peas on the vine and several small hard green apples and crunches on these, squatting in the mud, contemplating the irregular fall of water off the leaves of a cottonwood and a little box turtle that moves laboriously toward a low place filled with debris and sewage. Although the rain has ceased, the light is oddly dim, the sky filled with roping dark clouds. The air sits on Henry with a cool wet weight, unmoving.
Finally he rises and makes his way through deserted streets littered with trash, finds the British bivouac on Capitol Hill and joins a few civilians watching nearby.
The hulk of the burned Capitol looms like a foundered wreck, surrounded by fire-browned grass and stinkweed where dozens of sparrows hop to and fro. The British troops stand in formation. A tripod of halberds has been driven into the earth. A shirtless man, arms out, is roped to a fourth halberd tied across the tripod. Nearby slouches Morley, also shirtless.
A drummer boy beats a slow cadence and calls the count—twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five. The soldier with the cat-o’-nine-tails appears little older than the drummer boy. On each beat of the drum he raises the cat and brings it down.
A wind gusts, stutters, dies, and comes again.
Blood slimes down and drenches the back of the man at the halberds, soaks the length of his trousers, drips to the ground.
Henry, in guilt and helpless discomfort, shifts on his feet and gives his attention to the uncommon weather—the clouds have turned blacker and blacker, and they writhe and weave, trending, strangely, east to west.
The count has reached one hundred thirty-seven when the man under the lash groans and collapses, pulling down the halberds. Two redcoats drag him away. The drummer resets the halberds. Morley with his face bent down lifts his arms to be tied.
An expectoration of rain sprays everyone, then stops.
The drum sounds, the cat rises and strikes. Morley moans.
The count passes twenty, thirty, and there’s no more rain—until at the count of forty-four the wind punches with startling power into the face of the regiment.
Everyone flinches.
An instant later the rain comes down in a collapsing wave.
The wind screams and drives the rain so that it stings. The officers flail their hands and shout. The regiment fragments and flies to all directions. Henry stares after them, squinting into the wind and rain. Then he sees that Morley has been abandoned at the halberds.
Bent low to grip the weeds, Henry fights through the wind. Morley has pulled the halberds down, but they are still bound to his wrists—Henry unties them.
Together they lie flat while the wind grows more and more wild, an unbelievable force. A tree tilts to the ground, raising a tangle of roots from the earth. Tents sky overhead. A wooden sledge spins past.
It is a hurricane. Morley has crawled away. He shouts something. Henry pulls himself along the ground toward the dark shape that seems to be Morley, a journey that takes several minutes. He finds only a low shrub. He calls and casts around. He drags himself blindly on, shouting thoug
h he scarcely can hear himself. Finally he rolls into a ditch.
Here he surrenders and waits while the stormwater flows around him in torrents. The sky grows so dark that he can only see by the lightning that scars the sky. The thunder crashes monstrously in his ears, and the weather rages an hour and then another, or perhaps it is many, many hours, Henry cannot tell as the storm seems to have broken time’s usual passage, leaving him in a chasm of soaking violence.
Yet there’s nothing to be done. He even dozes a little.
Finally he notices that the wind is faltering. Slowly, the rain thins.
He wrenches his limbs from the mud and crawls from the ditch, into a world of mire and battered things. The rain dwindles. Through the clouds the sun smolders—it is late afternoon.
He wanders about, looking for Morley. He pulls flattened greens and carrots and radishes from a drowned garden and watches a party of redcoats work to right a wagon upside down in the street. Chewing a radish, he lingers near a half-dozen blacks talking on a street corner. One of the men has arrived from Alexandria. The British fleet has captured Fort Washington, giving them an open path up the Potomac, he says, and everyone who can is fleeing Alexandria. He glances at Henry. “Seems,” he says, “like the redcoats might roll up the whole American nation, easy as anything, like one of those nice Turkey rugs.” Gazing at Henry, he tilts his head.
The others turn to Henry.
Henry looks around. “What?”
“Sir,” the one from Alexandria says, “if I may speak rather boldly, intending no insult, you are so dirt-covered that someone almost might not know if your skin were black or white.”