by Nick Arvin
“I wish you would just tell me where it is.” Henry groans. “Give me the stick.”
Through the night and the rain Henry tracks the road, mostly by the feel of the ruts underfoot. In the rain it is as if he is stumbling along troughs of porridge.
He comes upon a party of sodden soldiers working by lantern light in a dim, fulvous scene, wielding axes and saws to fell loblollies, sycamores, and blackgums into the road. They are ancient trees with trunks as big around as wagon wheels, and when the wood gives way they fall through the night-dark air with mysterious, tortured sounds—the screams of old hard fibers parting, the clash of branches, the collision with the earth.
As the day grays into daylight the rain slows and stops, and Henry emerges from the forest and turns onto the Philadelphia Pike. He’s come to the foot of Baltimore’s fortifications when a tremendous crash rolls out of the south, followed by a low, long boom. Crash and boom, cannon and mortar—they repeat over and over. Then the rockets join in with their whooping cough noises, tracing smoke trails over the horizon in long high curves. The British ships in the bay are bombarding Fort McHenry.
Henry asks among the American fortifications and eventually finds Franklin in a muddy spot behind a fragile palisade of boards pried off of some house or barn. Franklin lifts Henry and crushes him to his chest, as if to squeeze the water from him. “Where have you been?” he asks. “What’s happened to you?”
When he drops Henry, Henry’s inertia pulls him straight down onto his seat in the mud. His worries seem to follow down on top of him. He sits in the wet, exhausted and bitterly troubled. He feels he may sit here and say nothing forever.
When finally he glances up he sees Franklin’s expression—confused and fearful—and it reminds him of how Mother’s silence makes him feel, and he becomes a little frightened of himself. He opens his mouth, and in a rush he tells Franklin of Mary and the baby, of escaping the nurse and hiding Mary at the whorehouse, of finding Radnor, and what Radnor said.
Franklin’s gaze lowers under a weight of consideration. Henry remains in the mud, sets his head on his knees. The roll and roar of the bombardment two miles behind him goes on and on, while he sleeps without dreams.
Men call and curse, run with heavy, sucking steps. A series of shells explode on Fort McHenry in fast succession, like a roll on a great drum. Henry lifts his head. He feels as if he slept only a minute or two, but the sun’s height says it’s been a couple of hours. He stands to peer over the flimsy palisade—red figures tremble in the distance on the Philadelphia Pike, the same road he came down earlier.
“The redcoats are here,” Franklin says. “You ought to go.”
“We should both sneak away,” Henry says. “When the redcoats have the city, we can take what we want.”
Franklin draws back his shoulders. “Behind us are families, mothers, children. If Baltimore falls, the redcoats will ransack and burn it all. My wife and child are there. Besides,” Franklin says, “I would certainly be shot for deserting again. But you must go.”
“I will.”
Henry means it as he says it. He thinks of rousing himself to stand and go, expects his arms and legs will raise him up. Yet he doesn’t move. He sits studying the mud. He listens for Mother. Nothing. He has not heard her in a great while, and he feels as if she has abandoned him.
He says, “I’m tired of being alone.”
Franklin rests a large hand on Henry’s head. For a moment he stands like that, thinking. Finally Henry twitches irritably under him.
“All right,” Franklin says. “If the British come near enough to shoot at, I’ll tell you you have to go. But Lord knows you probably won’t do it.”
Nearby a man leans against the palisade, and a section of mud-stuck boards topples, slides downhill.
Henry looks at the men scrambling to recover the boards, peers at the long and lengthening column of redcoats on the pike, says, “We’ll never stop them.”
Franklin replies only, “Henry.”
As the morning becomes afternoon, the red line makes a right turn off the road and caterpillars across cornfields. They are some two miles away, well past the reach of the American artillery, but everything they do can be seen plainly. They come to another road, which also slants into Baltimore, and the red line bends onto it, toward the city.
Away to Henry’s left, American troops hurry to form battle lines across the road, and in the fields on either side.
Bugles call thinly. The redcoats halt. British officers trot up and down, bunching, consulting, dithering. Finally, bugles and drums sound, and the red bodies about-face, and the line returns the way it came, up the road, back into the fields, toward the Philadelphia Pike.
“They’ve gotten lost,” Henry says.
Franklin studies a moment, shakes his head. “It’s like a wrestler circling, looking for an opening, a stumble.”
The redcoat line returns to the Philadelphia Pike and stretches across it. They step into double ranks facing Baltimore, a formation that circuits an imposing breadth of the horizon. Bugles, drums: the vast line sets forward.
A few American cavalry burst out of the fortifications. They rush downhill, shouting and whooping, until, some three hundred feet from the redcoats, they rein up, watch the red line a moment, then turn and circle back. A minute later they reappear, rush the British line again, halt and turn back again. They remind Henry of dogs flinching from a bear.
The redcoats have closed to within a mile, and the American artillerymen stand leaning over their guns with lit match cords, but the British bugles sound again. The red line quivers to a stop.
No one moves. The only sound is the boom-crash-whoop of the bombardment of Fort McHenry. Minutes ease by.
Henry twitches in aggravation. “What’re they doing?”
Franklin turns to look back at the city. He examines again the line of redcoats. He contemplates the sun’s location—a hand’s breadth over the horizon. “Maybe,” he says, “they’re going to wait until night.”
Morley has crept a little distance away from his crew. He squats behind a berm, where he can edge back and forth and peer over now and again. There’s nothing to be done but wait, and he hates cowering in a huddle with the others. He mutters imprecations, encouragements, invocations. Characteristically, the American earthworks are deplorably constructed, their cannon are a melange of French antiquities, and they neglected to bombproof the powder magazine, so they decided to take out the barrels of powder and put them here and there all around. Madness.
Morley is soaked through; the rain resumed around the time it fell dark. Rushes of wind drive it into his eyes, but he can see the British mortars fire with gouts of flame, and the burning fuses of the mortar shells rising, until finally they slow, turn, and come down. Those shells, Morley knows well, weigh 200 pounds. But he isn’t especially fearful. The British fire from two miles away on ships that roll with the swells. Some rounds have crashed into the fort, but most go long or drop short.
And there’s a rocket ship sending over rockets driven by long burns that shine off the ceiling of clouds with the color of a nice Spanish wine. But, while the rockets make a spectacle, they are basically harmless and ridiculous.
Indeed, in spite of all, as Morley twitches and moves back and forth behind the berm, he feels rather cheerful. The characteristics of war that he dislikes are the monotony, the slogging about at the behest of half-wits, the want of drink, and the dismal remuneration. But the fighting itself is a fine thing. He knows his business with a cannon, and it is a pleasure to enact his part in a crew, to feed the roar and spasm of a great machine, to propel many pounds of metal into objects far away.
It is irritating, however, that the British vessels carry guns with greater range than any of the cannon at McHenry, so they can hang beyond the Americans’ reach and blast away with no risk to themselves.
There’s nothing t
o do, but his nerves are ablaze. He’s edging further and further out along the berm, whispering to himself, when he comes to the body.
He touches the hair, the face—it is a woman. Earlier he saw a woman bringing water and food to the men. She had a large wart on her cheek like a hairy insect. But otherwise very demure and rather pretty. She must have been struck by a bomb fragment as she crossed the open stretch between the fort and the earthworks, then pulled herself here to the berm, unseen in the dark.
Is she dead? He touches her throat. She is wet, chilled, dead. It’s too bad she’s dead. He reaches to see what she has in her clothes.
A rocket passing low sheds a stark light. Morley glances round—the lieutenant is only some twenty feet away, staring.
“You!” The rocket light vanishes, and the lieutenant’s voice roars from the dark. “What are you doing?”
“Just found her, sir. She’s expired.”
Two mortar shells explode in rapid series, flashing light and cutting off talk. Morley ducks, but the lieutenant lurches closer.
“Your hands! In her . . . places!”
“Not at all,” Morley cries, indignant. “Why, not a dead woman! I only wanted to examine what she carried, to be sure it would be returned to her family, of course.”
“Liar! I saw you hawk-eyeing her!” the lieutenant says, voice breaking. “Charlotte.” Another mortar shell explodes as he casts a wild look toward her. “Charlotte Malker has been aiding men in this fort for years. Years. And she and I— And you— You. You!”
“I’d give immediate physical defense to my honor, sir, if I could see you,” Morley says, backing away.
“That you would touch Charlotte that way—” It sounds as if the lieutenant has bent to the ground beside the body.
Morley backs further away. It’s damnably hard to see. He pauses for a flash of light to show him the scene. But time passes, and no light follows. Morley stands and looks out to the bay, but it’s dark. No muzzle flashes, no rockets. “Ho! Ho!” Morley says. He moves toward the crew. “They’ve stopped!”
He pushes through the men and scrambles atop the earthworks. “Why stop?” He peers into the rain and darkness. A faint wide luminescence arises, as if exhaled by the bay water itself. That is all he can see. “They’re about something, aren’t they? Why should they stop? Because they fear hitting their own.” Voices elsewhere in the fort cry out, too, words lost in the rain slosh.
Wiping the wet from his eyes Morley stares into the darkness, muttering. The silence bears on. He sees something, perhaps—he rubs his eyes, squints.
A moment later he is sure. The rain-beaten water reflects as pinpricks the downcast light of several shaded lanterns moving into the Ferry Branch, toward the rear of the fort. “There!” he shouts. “To the west! Swing the guns west!”
Someone in the crew has lit a little, low lamp. Morley sees wet faces gaping up.
“There they are!” he shouts in fury, jabbing his finger. “West! West!”
At that instant, an emplacement of American guns in a muddy battlement a few hundred feet further down the Branch blaze into the night with a fusillade of six or eight cannon at once. The discharge parts the night as Morley points, and for a flicker, the British vessels—a spread of barges, launches, gigs, and a schooner—show against the black waves. “There! There!” Morley cries.
The British vessels return fire toward the battlement, and their muzzle flashes betray them unmistakably. “There!” Morley shouts one last time. He jumps down, casts around for the lieutenant, sights him still crumpled over the woman’s body. Morley shouts orders. “Shield the vents from the rain and check the priming!” He takes charge of sighting the cannon. “We’ll wait on a flash, then reply before they can move away in the dark!”
Cannon erupt up and down the earthworks in chains and pulses of terrific noise. The dozen British vessels in the Branch return fire, and one launches rockets whooping toward the fort. Morley laughs at the rockets and sights another round. When the American cannonballs strike the water, white spouts tower up, visible only for the length of a muzzle flash, so that they seem never to fall.
Henry and Franklin stand in the mud peering toward the yellow points of the British campfires, which continue to burn despite the rain. “I don’t know where they’re at,” Franklin says, “but they’re not at those fires.”
For a time the bombardment of Fort McHenry stopped. Now it has resumed, with a new tone. For the first time the guns at the fort are roaring in reply to the British.
The palisade men check their powder against the damp. “Radnor’s out there,” Henry says. “I don’t want to shoot him.”
Thinking, Franklin twists a finger in his ear. “There’ll be lots of them. If I see Radnor, I suppose I’ll shoot a different one.”
“Do you think he’d kill us?”
“I don’t know. It’s a war.”
“It seems an awful jumble, if we’re to shoot at Radnor.”
“He joined the enemy.”
“Wouldn’t you, if you were a slave?”
“That’s not the question in hand.”
Henry kicks at the palisade. It wobbles dangerously. “What’s the question in hand, then?”
Franklin wipes rain from his eyes, says nothing.
Radnor, too, hears the change at Fort McHenry.
“It’s the Americans firing now,” the marine beside him says.
For hours now they have stood in the middle of a mile-long column in the mire of the Philadelphia Pike, thousands of waterlogged soldiers, bayonets at ready. They have been told they will knock a hole in the center of the American line, then roll them up in either direction.
The British fleet resumes its bombardment of Fort McHenry. The explosions of the big mortar shells make an especially monstrous noise. Radnor guesses the order to advance will come soon. He stands ready.
He waits.
Waits.
A command passes up the column, shouted from officer to officer. The shouts are made strange by the rain and nervous excitement; Radnor steps forward, jostling the soldier in front of him, before he understands. The order is to about-face.
They move back along the Philadelphia Pike, back down the North Point road, back into the forest, retracing the way they came.
Radnor stumbles, exhaustion heavy in every bone. He’d looked forward to the fighting, curious whether or not he would die. Now he must figure out how to carry on.
CHAPTER 6
The wind and rain die. Dawn lights the sky with purple and amber.
Henry wakes, shuddering in the marvelous warmth of the sun. After a moment he recalls where he is, notices a silence. The bombardment of Fort McHenry has stopped.
He stands to look over the palisade. The red line is gone. Franklin grips his shoulder. “They tried to send troops in boats to sneak around the far side of Fort McHenry,” he says. “They were caught and turned back, and now the redcoats are gone. The Virginia and Pennsylvania regiments are chasing them, down North Point.”
Looking at the empty fields below, awash in the rosy morning light, it makes Henry mad. “What a sorry sort of war. I haven’t been able to do any good looting at all.” Henry takes off his shirt, irritably wrings out a dribble of water, puts it on again. “Maybe the redcoats are circling around, setting a trap.”
Franklin stares off, considering. “Maybe. But if I were a British admiral, I wouldn’t let up on Fort McHenry for a minute, unless I was done with it. Can’t bring ships in to help while the fort is there.”
“If you were an admiral, I’d be a muskrat stew,” Henry says. He feels shifty, bored already. He can’t stand to idle here. “I’m going to find Charles and Hollis.”
“You mustn’t go alone.” Franklin bends to Henry. “We must stay together now.”
Henry puts out his tongue, backing away.
“Maybe, if you
won’t stay,” Franklin says slowly, “I’ll have to come with you.”
Henry feels he would like that, and yet to hear Franklin say it only makes him madder. “Don’t be stupid,” he says. “You can’t come. They’ll set up the firing squad and really shoot you.”
Mention of the firing squad strikes Franklin hard. He recoils, turns to gaze toward the fields where the redcoats were.
Henry takes a step backward.
Franklin stands still and quiet, looking off.
Henry whispers, “Sorry,” and slips away.
Morley walks the Baltimore streets, penniless, contemplating the caprices of providence. By every right, he ought to be hailed a hero—he, the very pivot on which the Battle of Baltimore turned! With his command of batteries at Fort McHenry, the British flanking maneuver in the Ferry Branch was repelled! That he—he! one of Wellington’s Invincibles!—should do such a thing for the American rabble! And that they should be so ungrateful!
Here is a tall freckled woman looking at sweet rolls in a window. Morley says hello. She glances at him, appears alarmed, hurries away.
Morley thinks of following her, but his spirits are too much diminished. This morning, after they’d run a preposterously large flag up over the fort and everyone was in good cheer, the lieutenant who had impugned him over the dead woman’s body had stomped over and said he believed that Morley ought to be shot. But the captain had seen Morley directing fire during the fight and instead ordered a discharge, free and clear. When Morley asked for his pay, the lieutenant began to scream and wave his arms like a bear fighting bees. “You will not have your pay! Go!” He drew his saber. “Go! Before I open your head!”
So Morley slouched away, to the city, where he plods with little attention to direction. What does it matter, in a benighted, unjust world?
Until he sees the boy. The boy is headed away from the innumerable masts at the docks, passing right by the busy market and its stink of fish, walking fast with strides as long as his boy legs will swing. “Henry!” Morley calls, chasing him down. “What now! Where to? Wouldn’t you know, in gratitude for extraordinary service, I’ve been granted an early release. Freed to seek my wealth as I see fit. Truth is, no one in the army ever gets rich. Let’s put our minds to the task. Let’s make plans!”