Mad Boy

by Nick Arvin

  Two more men in redcoats emerge from the adjacent warehouse. One holds a smoking musket. Suthers says to him, with disgust, “I told you to hold your fire.”

  The one with his hands raised leaps—he lands in the water with a great splash.

  “Let him go,” Suthers says. “The chest. In the wagon.”

  The wagon—Henry can’t climb out without being seen, so he rolls and tucks himself under the driver’s bench.

  From somewhere further down the wharf come shouts, pounding steps, metal clattering. Henry glimpses Suthers running to untie the horses. The chest crashes into the wagon. In a mad, noisy scramble Suthers climbs onto the driver’s bench above Henry and lashes the horses while the other men swing into the wagon, yelling. A musket fires, and another. Someone screams, and the lash snaps on the horses. Another musket shot. Hooves strike rock. One last body crashes into the wagon, right in front of Henry—it is Lodowicke, holding his head with both hands, bleating. Henry cringes. He’s blocked under the bench, against Lodowicke’s back. He can’t see Lodowicke’s face, but there’s some terrible wound there. Another musket blast, away behind them now. The wagon moves faster, faster, crashes off a wall, leans around a corner. Lodowicke’s bleats stretch into screams.

  They race onward. Suthers bellows, “Quiet, damn it!”

  But Lodowicke still screams. The other men are shouting at Lodowicke to shut up, while Lodowicke flails, his back writhing before Henry.

  Suthers calls, “Be rid of him.”

  Hands seize Lodowicke, lift him, tumble him over the side of the wagon.

  Henry hears a moist snap, like a rat under a boot.

  “Aye, his leg,” the man nearest Henry says.

  Suthers is working the horses, Lodowicke is gone, and two men remain in the back of the wagon with Henry. The fifth member of the group must have been left behind or killed at the wharf. The man nearest Henry turns. He has a wide, bearded face that reminds Henry of the hideous door-knockers on fancy houses. His glistening, bulging eyes settle their gaze straight onto Henry.

  Slowly, bracing himself against the lurching of the wagon, he bends, gets Henry by the hair, yanks him out, holds him up, squints. “Who in the blessed hell are you?”

  Henry can barely breathe, much less answer.

  “Suthers,” the door-knocker calls. “Do I throw this one right out, or do I carve him up first?”

  Suthers glances back. “Henry? Henry Phipps?” Suthers looks at Henry for an instant with widened eyes, then some new feeling compresses his gaze. What that feeling is, Henry isn’t sure. He is fairly surprised that Suthers knows his name. “Set the boy down,” Suthers says, returning his attention to the horses. “In the wagon.”

  The door-knocker drops Henry. He and the other redcoat imposter look down at him. The second man has the dangling jowls and wilted look of a fat man who came on hard times and lost his fleshiness. He gives Henry a narrow, mean glance, then, turning away, knocks Henry in the ribs in a way that could almost seem unintentional. Even with Lodowicke gone, the box of the wagon is crowded with the three of them, the muskets, the chest. Suthers keeps the horses at a trot, and the wagon sways and jars violently. Henry glares at the back of the jowly man’s head.

  “Henry,” Suthers calls. “Up here.”

  Henry hardens his astonishment into a frown, swings up onto the bench, sits tall. Suthers, holding the reins with both hands, leans into Henry. “Why are you here? Why aren’t you with your mother?”

  “She died,” Henry says. “She’s dead.”

  Suthers straightens and does not speak. He rides the jouncing wagon as if nailed to it; only his hands with the reins move. Perhaps he lifts his head a little. “I’d like you to ride with us,” he says. “All right?”

  Henry weighs this for only a second. He is reluctant to set out alone again and feels a willingness to trust Suthers—perhaps because of the orange. But, mostly, he is profoundly curious about the chest in the back of the wagon. He says, “All right.”

  They have come out of the center of the city and pass smaller and smaller houses. The man with the door-knocker face and the man with the jowls reload their muskets. They emerge from the last of the buildings and pass between corn-fields, toward the British checkpoint.

  A couple of redcoats sit in the wagons set across the road; the others idle nearby or rest on their haunches amid trampled corn.

  Suthers slows, stops, smiles.

  “The admiral wants roast pig for supper,” he announces, in an imitation of English tone that startles Henry. “This boy—” Suthers claps Henry on the shoulder. “—has volunteered to show us a well-stocked sty.”

  “That right?” An officer comes to Henry’s side of the wagon. “What about wine?”

  Suthers winks at Henry.

  “Maybe we can find wine,” Henry says. “Whiskey’s more likely, though.”

  “Sorry, can’t let you back in without wine. Whiskey hereabouts tastes of sawdust and horsemeat.”

  One of the men in the back of the wagon makes a little hiss. Henry, glancing round, sees figures in the distance coming up the road.

  “I understand that’s exactly what it’s made from,” Suthers says.

  “No reentry without wine!” the officer repeats, pleased with his joke. “Hear me, boy?”

  Henry nods. He doesn’t dare look back again, but a commotion can be faintly heard.

  Neither does Suthers look back, but his smile drops. “All right,” he says. “We’ll get your wine. Let us through.”

  “Good wine!” The officer laughs. “None of that American vinegar and bile. You only get through with good wine!” He slaps one of the wagons in the road. “Make way!”

  Two of the redcoats set to shoving the wagons apart to open a path. They do not move quickly. The noise behind them comes nearer. Shouts carry faintly over the distance.

  The officer turns and squints.

  “Don’t!” comes a cry, thin but clear. “Don’t let them pass!”

  A musket shot explodes behind Henry—one of Suthers’s men. A redcoat in the road sits down and looks curiously at the hole in his chest. Suthers snaps the reins, but it hardly matters, the horses are in a panic and bolt forward, knocking men aside. The redcoats yell and fumble to level their muskets and blast the wagon, shots that splinter the sideboards and whistle the air. Suthers bellows insults at the horses, and they buck and scrape between the two roadblock wagons.

  In a moment they are free, but Henry, bent low, watching backward, sees one more shot pop off with smoke, flame, and the sound of a hammer hitting mud as the ball strikes the shoulder of the man with the door-knocker face.

  “Bah,” he says. He sits to look at the wound. “That there is horseshit. That’s a damnable injustice.”

  In a minute they have run clear out of sight of the checkpoint, but Suthers continues to lash the horses. The door-knocker blanches, holding his shoulder. A considerable amount of blood slops on the floorboards.

  Finally Suthers whoas the horses. They are sweat lathered, frothing. Suthers says, “Losing Lodowicke is a heavy price.” He looks round. “But it’s ours now. The redcoats won’t come this far into the countryside. Take off the uniforms. For God’s sake, bind that wound.”

  He doesn’t wait but a moment before he sets the horses to a trot again.

  The moon rises three-quarters full in the twilight, and the road glows whitely. Suthers keeps driving the horses on. The door-knocker lolls in the back and gasps.

  “Hm,” the jowly man says. “Mr. Suthers? Say, why’re we taking this boy? He will slow us.”

  “The boy is fine.”

  “He seems indeed a fine enough boy, as boys go, as you say. It’s only that I don’t recall planning for any boy.”

  “If I tell you the boy comes, he’s coming.”

  “I only mean that it doesn’t seem like a stone-hard p
lan if it changes every time a boy pops up. See what I mean? Who is he? Just want to know the plan.”

  “Bite your tongue,” Suthers says, “or I’ll cut it out for you.”

  The jowly man scowls and cuts nasty glances toward Suthers’s back, but he says no more.

  A little later they come to the black skeleton of the bridge at the Potomac, deserted and quiet but for the trill of crickets and the plash of the river. Suthers jumps down, stalks to a small boat pulled onto the riverbank, kicks it.

  A man rises out, grumbling.

  Suthers talks low to him. The man stops grumbling.

  Suthers returns to the wagon, leans in, opens the chest, removes two heavy sacks. He turns away, leaving the empty chest in the wagon. The boatman unharnesses the horses and leads them into the darkness. A few minutes later he returns. Suthers, his men, and Henry climb into the boat. The ferryman pushes the boat into the water, climbs in. He works the oars. Suthers sits in the prow with the two sacks at his feet. The air on the river lies still, muddy smelling. The river surface gleams with all the stars overhead.

  “Where’re we going?” Henry asks.

  Suthers says, “Shh.”

  Henry looks to the shore ahead, a black fringe on the shimmering dark water. He eyes the two sacks. Suthers has a firm grip on them.

  When they reach shore the burned bridge lies somewhere away in the darkness upriver. Suthers pays the boatman from his pocket, puts one sack on his shoulder, gives the other to Jowls. In file they walk a trail along the bank of the river, stumbling, tripping. At one point, Jowls falls, and the sack he carries clinks.

  Door-knocker struggles and lags.

  “Faster,” Suthers says. “Faster.”

  This goes on a long while.

  Finally they reach the burned bridge. They turn onto the road into Washington and soon come to a tavern, windows dark. Suthers says, “Wait,” opens the door, goes inside. Jowls drops his sack to the ground and stares at it. After a minute Suthers returns with a fat boy with a lantern who takes them around the tavern to a barn. The fat boy saddles and brings out three horses. Suthers lashes the two sacks behind the saddle of one, mounts, motions for Henry to climb up behind him. Jowls and Door-knocker mount the other two horses. They start into the dark streets of Washington.

  No one is about. The moon has gone down, and a suggestion of dawn twilight seeps into the blackness between the stars. Henry sways with the movement of the horse. Why is Suthers taking him? Where?

  Henry doesn’t know.

  He thinks of the orange Suthers gave him. He remembers Lodowicke pitched over the side of the wagon, the crack of his leg. He is curious, uneasy, and uncommonly tired—he tries to stay awake, but his head hangs until it touches the broadcloth of Suthers’s coat, and a moment later he sleeps, with his hands at Suthers’s waist and his cheek on Suthers’s back.

  Mother stands beside the road, barefoot in her gingham dress. “Henry?” she says. “Henry?”

  Henry tries to answer but somehow cannot: all that comes from his throat is a tiny grunt. Suthers doesn’t notice, and their horse carries them onward. Henry attempts to grab Suthers by the shoulder, to point, but he cannot move. To his immense vexation, as they pass Mother he cannot even turn to look. “Henry!” she cries, sounding already far away. “Bring him to see me. Make him stop. Bring him.”

  Henry makes an anguished effort to cry out, to turn, to topple himself from the horse. Finally he succeeds in leaning a little, and he feels gravity rolling him sideways—

  He wakes in a spasm as Suthers throws an arm back to grab him. He shoves Henry back onto the horse. “Ease up, son.”

  Henry blinks, his ability to see in the morning-bright world returning by degrees, even as he hears Mother calling, Bring him to me. Bring him to me.

  They are well down the road from Washington, nearly to Bladensburg. Henry looks back—in the distance behind them huddles the Fiddlestick’s End, where Franklin punched the harelip. He and Suthers ride alone; there’s no sign of Suthers’s two underlings. Below Henry’s legs, black streaks of sweat mark the bay flanks of the horse. The two sacks from the chest on the docks are tied behind Henry.

  Henry says, “Where are we going?”

  “You’re awake,” Suthers says. “Now tell me what happened. What happened to Francine?”

  Henry tells about the cow, while at the same time he hears Mother shouting, Bring him, Henry! This once, you must do as you’re told!

  As Henry talks Suthers is quiet and his back is straight and tense, until the end, when Henry has fallen silent, and Suthers says, “Awful,” and he bends over the reins.

  Henry bursts into tears.

  Suthers, brooding, says nothing. Henry quits crying as soon as he can.

  Mother calls, Henry!

  Henry says, “Halt the horse, please.”

  “Not here,” Suthers says.

  “She wants to see you.”

  “Who?”

  “Stop!”

  “I said, not here.”

  Henry throws himself sideways off the horse, hits grass hard with one shoulder, tumbles, sits up.

  Suthers turns the horse, looks at him. “You’re daft.”

  Henry says, “Let me show you.”

  “Show me what?”

  Henry doesn’t answer. He starts away. Presently he hears Suthers dismount and follow, leading the horse.

  They wend through the orchard and come into the brush and the chokecherry patch. Here is the cart and pickle barrel.

  “What’s this?” Suthers says.

  Henry opens the barrel.

  “What is that?” Suthers asks.

  Mother looks dreadful. It startles Henry; he had a different image in his mind. Her skin is puckered and sallow, except where dark stains of coagulated blood show through. But it is her. “Mother,” he says.

  “Good Lord!” Suthers jumps back, casts around, then creeps forward to peer into the barrel. “Francine,” he says. He rubs his face. “Henry,” he whispers, not looking at him, “why did you do this?”

  Henry listens for Mother amid the fume of his mind, but she only hums now, happy. “She’s happy,” he says.

  “Please,” Suthers says. “Elaborate.”

  “She says she doesn’t want to be buried. She wants to be sent to sea with her family around.”

  “Says?”

  “She says it now. Well, not just now. Now she’s humming.”

  “I don’t hear any humming.”

  Henry shrugs. “I do.”

  Suthers listens. Then he shakes himself, turns, puts his hands on Henry’s shoulders, bends, and watches Henry’s eyes with unnerving intensity. He says, “She’s dead.”

  “She told me to bring you here,” Henry says. “Just a moment ago. She shouted as we rode.”

  Suthers blinks as if Henry had puffed air in his eyes. He nods, stands up straight. “Shut the barrel.”

  “Why did she want me to bring you here?”

  “She’s dead,” Suthers says. “We should bury her. But I am in a hurry, and I expect she’ll keep until we return.”

  Mother says, her voice achy, Take me with you.

  Henry says, “She wants to come with us.”

  “No!” Suthers grimaces. “That’s madness.” He touches the side of the barrel, says, “Goodbye, Francine.” He turns away. “She’ll be fine here.” He leaves Henry to tighten the lid.

  Henry expects Mother will complain, but she says, The two sacks, Henry, and then return.

  As they walk the horse back through the orchard, Suthers hands Henry a water flask, and a piece of salted pork. Henry asks, “Where are the other two?”

  “I paid them and sent them on.” Suthers looks around as if thinking of something else. “Henry,” he says, “how does a man measure himself?”

  Henry instinctively
dislikes this question, its tone. He says, irritably, “Probably with some sort of a stick with marks on it.”

  “Yes, a measuring stick. But of what kind?” Henry says nothing, but Suthers bears on. “I believe the measures of a man’s success are two. One is worldly success, measured in money. The other is eternal success, measured in family. I began with little of either, and I have built them up by my own efforts. Everything I do, I do for one of those two ends. Money and family. And of course we attend to the love of family by the mechanism of money, and we extend both measures of success by passing money to our heirs. Such is how we recognize great families. Generally they have been royal born, but it is possible now for any man to raise himself up and make a great family. Family over all others. Family before oneself, even. This was my father’s abject failure. I’ve had to start all anew.”

  Henry squirms.

  “A thing I have learned with dire certitude,” Suthers says, “is to never be in debt to another. A debt offers great power over a man. It has a spiritual force. If we measure a man with money, what is a man worth if he is in debt to another? He is worth less than nothing. And what has such a man done to his family?”

  Henry, trailing a little behind, can see only Suthers’s back and the hair on his head, speaking mouthlessly. He hates it. “I’m going to get the money to buy Father out,” Henry says. “It’s what Mother wants.”

  “I will not help you with that,” Suthers says. “I never give away unearned money, and although I do make loans under certain terms it is better that you stay out of debt with me. Neither will anyone else give you money for Phipps. Phipps’s character is clear enough and cannot be changed. If you raise the funds to free Phipps, he will only put himself back into the debtor’s prison. You might as well ask a grain weevil to stay out of the grain.”

  Henry shakes his head. “His luck has to turn.”

  “If there was ever a matter that had nothing to do with luck, Phipps’s condition is it. But I do believe you are different from him, Henry.”

  Although he has often thought that he does not wish to be like his father, at the moment Henry feels he would rather spend a lifetime in prison than agree with anything Suthers says. Henry says, “I am a Phipps.”