by Nick Arvin
“You oughtn’t to be wandering alone,” Dosia says.
“You’re but a boy,” Hy says.
This last strikes Henry wrong. He shifts. He says, “I don’t know.”
“Terrible things have happened,” Hy says, “but surely it is for the best somehow, and maybe this is the how of it.”
“You have to stay with us,” Dosia says. “I am so sorry for a boy without a mother or father. We’ve always wanted a child.”
They gaze avidly at Henry, and he squirms. When Dosia touches his knee, he jumps. “I have a father,” he says. “And I have a mother.”
“You told us your mother is dead,” Dosia says, gently.
In truth, it has slipped his mind a moment. Reminded, the absence of Mother, and the absence of her voice puts a hole in Henry’s chest. He backs away.
“Wait a moment,” Dosia says. “Don’t run off.”
But Henry thinks of Mother waiting. He thinks of Father waiting. He says, “Thank you for the food and everything but now I have to go.”
And he runs.
Henry discovers Morley asleep on his back in a ditch beside the road to Baltimore, no coat, his head cushioned on his folded cap. Henry contemplates him, breathing softly among grasses and the lacy flowers of wild carrots. He remembers how furious Morley was when the British captured him outside the Patent Office. But, after all, he did help Morley at the halberds.
Somehow it is a consolation to see a face that he knows, even such an unpleasant looking face.
Henry wavers under a soft crush of exhaustion. It is now late afternoon. Since leaving Hy and Dosia, he has eaten only unripe apples, and he hardly slept last night. He tried to nap around noon, but it rained. His clothes are damp.
Trying to think of what to do is like trying to balance on a greased tightrope.
He lies down to rest a moment.
“My favorite Yankee boy!”
Henry wakes, blinks, rolls, peers up: Morley’s hideous face grins down.
Seizing Henry’s hand, Morley shakes it with vigor, at the same time dragging Henry onto his feet. “Wonderful to see you! Why, I almost even recall your name! Gerald? Edmund?”
“Henry,” Henry says grumpily, still sleep muddled.
“Exactly! Terrific name for an ambitious American boy. I admire you Americans so much, I’ve decided to turn American myself. I’m going to Baltimore, and you must go with me. Unless you don’t want to. American boys named Henry go where they will! But I would miss your company, and my former countrymen will now certainly sail on Baltimore. Opportunities will be at every hand and under both feet.”
“I’m going to Baltimore,” Henry says.
“That’s what I mean! And I’m going to Baltimore too! We’ll travel together! I’m going to join the American army and take their bounty payment, of course, but I expect there will be a period of confusion during which I might slip away and join you in hunting opportunities.”
Morley cheerfully shares a massive cut of ham, which he says he acquired from an unlocked smokehouse. Then they set out. Morley chatters on and on as they walk, and Henry feels happy.
The journey to Baltimore is three days by foot with bad roads and poor river crossings. They walk as long as there is light, and they glean food from fields and farms as they go. In the evening twilight they build a campfire with wet wood to smoke away the mosquitoes and sit pinching ticks off their ankles.
The first morning, when they return to the road, Henry stands a moment looking southward.
Morley says, “See something?”
“No.”
“You are thinking of a girl.”
“No!”
“What then?”
“Oh. I’m only thinking of home.”
“My boy, you’ll never make a liar. What is it?”
Henry scuffs his foot in the dirt. He hesitates, but it is too much to keep in. “There is a great deal of money back there. But there is no way of finding it.” He tells of the chest, of the hooded rides with Suthers—the story he tells Morley excludes only the two notched sticks in his pocket. “I could see nothing, and we went for miles and miles across country that may have no track or trail.”
Morley seizes Henry by the shoulder and makes him tell it all again, in absolute detail. “Dear God, boy!” he exclaims. “We’ll find that horse that threw you, and it’ll lead us back! We’ll get hounds and sniff it out! We’ll trick this Suthers into telling us where to go!”
It takes Henry an hour and more to calm Morley and convince him that the rain has washed away the scent, and any attempt to gain information from Suthers or even his horse will inevitably end with Suthers’s terrible wrath landing on them.
Finally, groaning, Morley sets to trudging northward, toward Baltimore, although he often glances backward. Henry says, “Suthers’s silver won’t come trotting up behind us like a lost dog.”
“You oughtn’t even have told me of it,” Morley says. “But it’s not the first time that riches have brushed my fingertips.” As they walk he tells of treasures and profits he almost had in Iberia—he once covertly acquired a dozen valuable casks of twenty-five-year-old Armagnac, only to be foiled by the inopportune death of a tumorous nag; at another time, he had information from a lover of a fortune in bullion hidden in the maze of stalls, storerooms, chambers, and tunnels under the bullring in Badajoz, but he became horribly lost in a series of forgotten caverns, and he survived only by eating rat meat.
That night, after they have been silent a while, staring at the quivering fire, Morley says, “Perhaps I have mentioned that I am married.” He speaks in a reverential tone. “I do not speak of her often, for she deserves better than I can say with words. Her name is Mercedes.”
Henry has never heard such a name before, and he asks Morley to repeat it.
“Mercedes. Her dimples! Her laugh!” Morley says. “I know that I am a poor thing to look on, but she never flinched from me.” Morley sighs. “She is still in Spain. I could not bring her with me when the fighting ended. We had won the Penninsular War, you see, and the time came to leave the Continent. We sailed from Bordeaux, and it was a terrible scene, for she was not the only one. Every soldier’s wife who had no papers to prove a legal marriage before the Crown was refused transport. Imagine the vast crowd of weeping and desperate women at the docks, Henry! We sailed away as they pulled their hair in bunches, beat their breasts, and held their tiny children aloft.” Morley himself wipes a tear. “When I have my fortune,” he says, “I will return to Spain and find her! I swear it! I will take her from the oak forests where she now herds pigs, and I will give her every luxury, my boy. I will lift her from squalor, nigh to the stars themselves!”
After this, as they travel Morley mentions Mercedes from time to time, always hopefully and with a kind of wonder. It reminds Henry of how Father speaks of the day his luck will turn.
The high sun dries the road, and the dust splashes like water. In the late afternoon the cicadas shrill, on and on. Then it rains again, and they rest under a plank bridge until the rain slows, and they walk in the drizzling wet.
When the clouds go, they leave the atmosphere rinsed clean, and that night Henry traces the movements of bats by the flicker of the stars that they cross before. He wakes in the darkest hour to find the kind of light that takes the color out of the world, leaving only blacks and grays. He closes his eyes again, and in the morning he wakes with spiders in his hair. He stands, and where he had lain the grass is dry and holds his shape, as if he looks down at his own ghost.
Radnor leans at the rail, gazing on the restless iron-colored water. Around him the other Colonial Marines talk, shout, laugh. A lazy drizzle begins, no more than a falling mist. As the mists gather into larger and larger droplets, the captain orders the sails down, and presently it is raining, falling in drifting curtains, hissing on the waves. A sailor calls, “You ought t
o go belowdecks, get out of the wet.” But Radnor stays at the rail, turning through thoughts of his mother long lost to Alabama, of his brothers cast into hiding. He wishes he could stop these weary thoughts at the same time that he fears if they stop he will lose them completely. When Hollis and Charles are caught, will Suthers kill them? Or, because Suthers holds a coin dear, will he try to sell them, separately, far apart? Which of these two alternatives would be worse? What will they do if they do not have even each other—Hollis to speak for both, Charles to see for both? Radnor doubts himself and his purposes and reasons. He should have stayed. The cold and wet seem nothing to what he deserves. Before him the indifferent sea chews and works itself.
They disembark on sandy Tangier Island, at the mouth of the Chesapeake—the British have a built a pair of redoubts with long walls of earth and logs and armed with cannon. It is called Fort Albion. Hundreds of liberated slaves are here. Many have become Colonial Marines, others have become sailors in the Royal Navy, and yet others work at reinforcing and provisioning the fort.
Some of the freedmen have brought wives, sisters, and children to live in a village of huts beside the fort. After days of military drills and labor, families splash in the sea at sunset. Men paint the faces of former masters onto pumpkins and take extra practice with muskets and bayonets. The British provide rations of whiskey and rum, and folks gather at fires to eat, to laugh, to sing.
Radnor sings with half his voice, on the dim edge of the scene. He is drawn to watch the others though it hurts to watch, and to sing with them though it hurts to sing. He shies from conversation, as if he will have to leave at any moment, and he cannot afford to make friends here.
He wonders if there would’ve been a way to bring along Hollis and Charles, if he’d only been smarter, if he’d tried harder. He watches the men with their families, and he thinks of things he wishes he had said to his brothers before he left. I am sorry. I do not deserve to go. I wish you could go in my stead. These would have been true things to say. But he had thought only of his own freedom.
He asks around, if there is any possibility that someone can take a message to Charles and Hollis. Some of the other marines say that they hope to convince the British to return to raid one plantation or another, where they can free family or friends. But no one cares to go to the swamps where Charles and Hollis hide. And as days pass, Radnor understands that the British have lost interest in making landings for loot or slaves. All preparation now is toward the invasion of Baltimore.
One evening a green-eyed British captain also stands at the edge of firelight, watching. He begins talking to Radnor. He regards Baltimore as a particularly despicable base of villainous, malicious pirates and indolent Republican resistance. He talks of slaughtering the bungling militia that guards the city, looting the place thoroughly, and burning it down into the mud.
Radnor asks permission to speak. He tells the captain about his brothers’ debilities, their situation in hiding, the impossibility of merely conveying a message to them. “But,” he asks, “when we win this war?”
“What we ought to do,” the captain says, frowning, “is take and hold a city like Washington or Charleston, build fortifications, and spread word to the slaves all around that they may join us, and be free, and fight for their kin. We announce that we are assembling an army of freed black men, that we will march and conquer every American state and liberate every black man, woman, and child on this continent. Slaves would come from all directions, by the hundreds and the thousands. I am certain we could raise an army of ten or twenty thousand in a month. As we march and conquer territory, we free more slaves. Word of our purpose will spread as we go, and slaves will come across great distances. We could have America on its knees in a year. The New England states are already sympathetic; the Federalists trade freely with Canada and talk of secession. Meanwhile the southern states fear their slaves, their internal enemy. At the prospect of a vast slave army, they will demand the northern states send more soldiers, more matériel, more taxes. The New England states will revolt, secede, and make peace. With the nation cleaved in two, our job is half-finished. We end the matter with a march to New Orleans, under a banner of freedom carried by an army that grows larger, more ferocious, and more glorious every mile we move.”
“Yes,” Radnor says. “Yes.” But he remains still, because of a sadness in the captain’s tone.
“It’s known here that this is what we should do, that this is how we can win the war, force terms, and end the abomination of slavery, at little cost to ourselves. Here, we know it. But in London the view is different. In London this is dismissed as a risky strategy. In London the American war is peripheral to the great conflagration on the Continent. In London’s view, the purpose of the American war is not to conquer the states, nor to free black men. The purpose is merely to punish the Yankees who initiated hostilities, to punish the attempted invasion of Canada, to punish the burning of York. In London’s view, the purpose of this war is humiliation. It is enough to pillage a few cities. London isn’t interested in expending good men and arms on the governance of barbaric colonies that do not wish to be administered in a civil manner.” The captain shrugs. “I’m sorry.” He smiles a little. “But you, at least, are free, and that is invaluable.”
“Maybe it’s invaluable,” Radnor says. “But then how can I ever pay the debt for it?”
“Surely,” the captain says, “your brothers want you to be free and happy, not to squander your freedom in despair.”
Radnor says nothing, lets the conversation end, feeling there is a chasm between himself and a man like this, who has never even noticed his own freedom, he takes it so much for granted.
Later, as he looks around, he notices a girl near the fire, watching him. She smiles. Her face is shaped by high cheekbones and great dark serene eyes.
Radnor turns away, feeling ashamed.
Now comes the familiar stream of refugees—men and women in flight with children and laden wagons, carts, horses, goats, and cattle. All morning they have plodded past Henry on the road out of Baltimore, in numbers that grow as the sun gains height.
“What news?” Morley calls to an oxen driver.
“British sails in the Patapsco!”
“Ah, good!” Morley says to Henry. “I feared we might arrive too late to join the fight!”
They circle past a great barricade of logs laid over the road. Hundreds of slaves shovel trenches and heap the earth onto long bulwarks. And now Baltimore lies before them, the largest city Henry has ever seen: a vast number of buildings extend in a sprawl below columns of smoke rising from chimneys and kilns; docks and ships spread into the water; and on a peninsula in the bay stands the stone-walled star of Fort McHenry.
Morley leads on, eager to claim his bounty. “I haven’t even funds enough for a dram of rum,” he complains. “And I don’t want to miss the fighting. I enjoy a piece of cannon blasting. It’s all the rest of army life that isn’t worth a damn.” They skirt the city toward the fort. Peering along streets as they pass, Henry sees people moving in flurries, gathering and dispersing, like fretful hens. From time to time the boom of an explosion rolls in from across the water—it is the sound of ships being scuttled to block the harbor.
At the fort entrance a drawbridge spans a muddy trench, and a blinking, sausage-faced young soldier stands guard. Morley strides up, more or less every inch of him filthy with the dust and mud of travel and sleeping in the open, so that he looks like a singularly ugly indigent or perhaps a mad prophet as he raises his arms and cries, “I am a soldier of the Royal Regiment of Artillery and a veteran of the Peninsular Campaign under Field Marshal Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington! I have left my position in the King’s Army to join the freemen of the republic of the United States of America!”
“What?” The guard looks at Henry.
“He wants to enlist,” Henry says. “He’s good with a cannon.”
> “Oh, that’s fine then. We need help with the cannon. Go in and ask for Captain Evans.”
Henry imagined that the debtor’s prison would be a large, forbidding gray structure of stone, but instead it is a pleasant brick house, someone’s home not long ago. “You’re the first visitor for that one,” the jailer says, peering at Henry. Rheum glistens under his eyes and trails down into his beard, as if a pair of snails had gone that way.
He rummages in a box of keys on the floor. A commotion of wagon drivers yelling and horses shrieking beats through the window. “Will you take the prisoners away before the redcoats come?” Henry asks.
The jailer cackles. “No one’s leaving here! You think Johnny Bull wants these shirkers more than we do?” He leads Henry into a narrow, dark hallway. Leaving the fort, Henry had been intent on finding the jail as quickly as possible, but now he drags his feet. He loves Father beyond measure, but Father’s faults make him furious. And the usual anger is complicated by fresh uncertainty, sorrow, wretched guilt—as if what Suthers said were Henry’s own fault.
The jailer stops at the end of the hall, turns a key, swings the door, steps away. Henry scuffs up to the doorframe.
Father sits on a small stool, a mouse in his hands. When he looks over, his eyes are bigger and more protruding than Henry remembers, while the rest of him seems smaller, lined and dry, with wild hair and a rough beard. His neck is long and corded. He wears a one-piece, coarse smock like the slaves wear.
Seeing Henry, his eyes grow bigger yet. The jailer swings the door of the cell shut behind Henry, and Father makes a sound like a puppy shriek of joy. He rises, drops the mouse—it hastens to a corner—and grabs up Henry, crushing him and swinging him so that Henry’s legs whip back and forth. Though thin, Father is still big-framed with big joints that squeeze Henry the way Henry remembers. Henry tries not to cry, but it’s hopeless, and he sobs against the familiar feeling of Father’s beard on his face and Father’s familiar fusty, uric smell. “My boy! My dearest boy!” Father says. “Why tears? Father is here!”