Mad Boy

by Nick Arvin

  A soft wooden noise of collision sounds against the boat. They discover the barrel floating beside them. The sling has fallen away entirely, and the barrel bobs rather merrily at starboard. Henry regards it suspiciously. “Mother,” he says, leaning over the barrel, “we’re all together, and you’re to sea. You can go. Why don’t you go?”

  Phipps says that they must bring her back to shore and locate more rope. Henry strips his clothes and goes back into the water to push the barrel into the boat. But without the sling, Phipps and Franklin have difficulty gaining purchase on it, and Franklin hasn’t all of his strength. He trembles over the water. Finally Phipps calls Henry back into the boat, puts a hand on the barrel, shoves it toward the open horizon. “Go on, my love!” he cries. “Go! Go! Your labor here is done! Enjoy the everlasting mercies that you have earned!”

  “This isn’t proper,” Franklin says. “She’ll float around out there.”

  “She might like that!” Phipps says. “Yes, I think so.” And he sets to the oars.

  Returned to the beach, Franklin stumbles over to where Mary sits with the baby. Phipps claps Henry’s shoulder and says, “A perfect day! Gulls croaking in a blue sky! A mild breeze off the water!”

  “Why did she come back up?” Henry asks, still dismayed.

  “She was ever active,” Phipps says.

  “Except when lying abed,” Henry says.

  “And what blame would attach to that? Her life was more toilsome than she ever deserved.”

  “But why?” Henry asks, with a stirring in his gut, feeling mean.

  Phipps, however, doesn’t notice. “Poor fortune,” he sighs. “Lamentable fortune has been our lot. Of course it must turn.”

  Henry supposes there is nothing to say to this. He is not disappointed, however, since it never crossed his mind that the experience of prison might better Phipps. When Phipps was paid out, Franklin gave him several dollars. By the next morning all of the dollars had either been converted into drink and drunk, or turned into empty air by the alchemy of the faro table.

  Phipps wanders away toward his friends, but a moment later he circles back. “Son.” Phipps squeezes Henry’s shoulder. It seems to Henry that people are always grabbing him as they speak to him, and he pulls away. “Mother has gone,” Phipps says, “and I must be more of a father to you than ever before.”

  But he is full of whiskey and tight as a ringbolt, and Henry knows that any promises will soon be forgotten. “I’m going to work for Suthers,” Henry says, “in Alexandria.”

  “What! No! Not at all. Now that I’m out of prison, I’ll provide for you. We’ll work your brother’s farm. We’ll build ourselves up.”

  “I’ve already decided.”

  “No, you haven’t, no.” Phipps waves a hand. He stumbles a step, though he is standing still. “We’ll talk of it tomorrow.”

  Henry has already told Franklin that he intends to honor his oath and work for Suthers. Franklin thought on it for several minutes, then said, “It was a promise made under threat, so it’s not binding.”

  Henry shook his head. “I’m sure he would kill me.”

  The night darkness seeps into the sky, fills the water, rises onto the beach. The men from the tavern grow drunker and drunker. They yell and caper and laugh. In a warbling tone, one of them offers a new tavern song he heard.

  Oh, say can you see by the dawn’s early light

  What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming

  Someone brings out a fiddle. Another plays a Jew’s harp. The others drink and dance around a fire. Even Franklin is a little drunk and dancing.

  Henry watches while the others fall asleep, sprawling here and there on the sand. He looks out to sea and thinks of Mother carried on the circulation of the great currents, and thinks perhaps that is not so bad after all.

  Finally, only the baby lies awake beside Mary, staring at Henry. Henry kneels close, lets the baby grip his finger, and shakes his hand solemnly. He salutes the great sleeping shape of his brother and gazes a moment at Phipps, curled on his side near the fire. Then Henry departs to present himself at Suthers’s office.

  EPILOGUE

  Henry’s days are full; he often wobbles at the limit of exhaustion. If he has a minute, he curls in a corner to nap. Sometimes he sleeps on his feet.

  For his few hours of rest at night he has a backroom pallet in a house that rents to sailors and dockworkers, dozens of them, who keep strange hours. Various men constantly come and go from Henry’s shared room, but there is one man who Henry sees every night—Rion, a small, limber man, with a birthmark across his eyes like a raccoon mask. Rion knows that Henry is Suthers’s son, and he says, glowering, “I suppose if I did anything against you, I’d find myself in considerable pain, or considerable dead.” Rion rises before dawn and goes to the docks, and Henry goes with him. They join the work gangs, loading and unloading boats. Henry is the smallest and youngest, as they often remind him with foul words while sending him to the smaller boxes and crates.

  Sometimes Rion sets a crate aside from the others, and soon it vanishes. Sometimes a passerby leaves a crate or a hogshead beside the docks, and Rion lifts it and places it among the others.

  At sunset Henry leaves the docks to report to Suthers’s warehouse. Lodowicke sits in a corner and tells people what to do. He tells Henry what to do. Most nights this involves working one of the gambling tables—dice or faro or backgammon. The dealers tell Henry to watch for cheats, to bring drinks, to retrieve whiskey from the warehouse. Sometimes he is sent to collect bets at a boxing match. Sometimes he is told to sit outside a house and report if anyone leaves, and, if so, where they go.

  The docks grow increasingly busy. When Henry begins, the British still control the Chesapeake, and goods must be moved by small boats that slip through the blockade by nighttime or bribery. And some shipments, operating under arrangements of third-hand payment, are sent out for intentional capture by the redcoats. But the British are withdrawing pieces of their fleet, and by the end of 1814 the fortifications on Tangier Island have been abandoned, and all of the former slaves there have been evacuated. Only a half dozen British light frigates remain in the area, and even these are not inclined to engage a well-armed privateer.

  On an evening in February word arrives that the war is ended. The church bells clamor, and enormous crowds parade and dance in the streets with lamps, torches, and bottles of whiskey. Henry dances too at first, but ends up watching drowsily from one side. He falls asleep with his back to a haberdasher’s shop. When he wakes a couple of hours later, he returns to the docks. He can’t see that anyone gained much by the war, excepting the smugglers like Suthers, the slaves like Radnor who joined the redcoats, and the looters who did their work better than Henry. And Charles and Hollis, who departed for Philadelphia, where Hollis said he knew of a friend of a cousin who is a free black and owns a ropewalk. “Cables, spun yarn, rigging, marline, log-lines, lead-lines whipping twine, and drum lines,” Hollis said. “Don’t have to be able to see to walk the ropewalk. Just count your steps.”

  The war’s end doesn’t slow Suthers’s enterprises. It seems there is always smuggling and bribery to be done, if not to evade the British, then the collector of customs. And while Henry’s work is exhausting, he’s delighted by the sights and things and people and smells and sounds. The great ships moving in and out of the harbor. The piles of goods and tumult and cries on the docks. The bars with oil lamps hanging low over battered tables, smoking and stinking of whale oil. The men with monkeys and parrots. A camel with two humps. A living headless chicken that takes water and corn into the hole in its neck. The tones and rhythms of a dozen different languages. The sailors’ chants. The men on the docks talk of Savannah, of Boston, of the Northern Lakes, of China, of Madagascar, of wan sea monsters and golden mermaids, of mountains that reach the clouds, of landscapes of sand, of floating islands of ice, of cities f
illed with silver and music, of jungles filled with incredible beasts. A knowing grows in Henry—it feels sure as knowledge—that one day he will go to see these things.

  Henry works seven days a week. Sundays he helps to set up the horse races at a muddy, egg-shaped track a mile outside the city. And Lodowicke’s debt collections often occur on Sundays, because men are most likely to be home. Lodowicke says, without further comment, that Suthers calls these excursions “hygienic events.” He leads Henry to a house, sets Henry to stand as lookout, then goes to the door. If a knock is not answered, Lodowicke—skilled with a pick, and with the long crowbar he often carries to these appointments—enters regardless.

  Henry stands at the side of the street, unsure what he should watch for. And what should he do if the to-be-watched-for appears?

  It doesn’t seem to matter. Perhaps he is here to learn some other lesson. The hygienic events mostly pass quietly. On occasion Henry hears breaking crockery, furniture, glassware. Sometimes he hears a sob, a scream. He listens, waits, watches the passersby.

  Over time, he notices that there are fewer passersby, and he realizes that people seeing him now circle wide, or turn back. He’s become known, his presence in the street like a sign, advertising Lodowicke at work.

  Henry can imagine Lodowicke working on Phipps, a notion that flutters his stomach. But the trepidation of the people in the street amuses and irritates him. He puts out his tongue. He stares until they look away.

  He sees Suthers at the faro games, at the horse races and boxing matches, but they only talk once or twice a month, when Henry is summoned to supper. They eat at Suthers’s desk—roast pig or fricasseed chicken or alamode beef or boiled brains, with baked beans, cooked dandelion, mashed potatoes, rennet pudding, a jug of beer. Henry eats until he might burst. Suthers talks of his operations and plans, of how money flows through Alexandria, and how it always eventually passes over the docks. He talks of the value of goods, of land, of reliable men, of the character of the gamblers, the merchants, the boxers, the horses, the card dealers, the ship captains, the prostitutes, the dock workers, the sailors, the city councillors. He seems to know everyone. Henry asks about this. “I’m always watching,” Suthers says. “But anyone can watch. The crux of business is to know when to act.”

  Henry supposes this is how a father is meant to be, but maybe he preferred the old one. On a few occasions, Suthers says nothing at all as they eat, and this reminds Henry of Mother.

  The seasons turn; summer becomes winter becomes summer. One warm evening Henry climbs a cobbled street uphill from the docks. The night’s faro games have ended. Henry is thoughtless with exhaustion. He stumbles, catches himself. Away toward the docks someone sings. Nearer, a baby cries. A drunk lurches past, breathing hard.

  A movement catches Henry’s attention. He looks up. A bright star flashes overhead. Not a second later, another falls down more slowly, fainter, seeming to pulse, and vanishes behind the roof of the house before him.

  More follow. Henry watches them go. He recalls a similar night years ago with Father. Or, rather, Phipps.

  Then he continues to his pallet and collapses into deepest sleep.

  He wakes before dawn and finds that Rion is gone. He rises, dresses, walks to the docks. The sky is only beginning to lighten. Rion stands with a cluster of men, talking low. One notices Henry and stares. Soon all of them stare. Rion crosses over, leans close. “Lodowicke wants to see you.”

  “What?”

  “What?” Rion sneers. “What?” He turns.

  Henry enters the office and finds Suthers alone at his desk, facedown, unstayed. Henry’s breath stops. He doesn’t think of saying hello: he can see that Suthers is dead.

  He edges nearer. In the side of Suthers’s neck are the flat lips of a knife wound, seeping blood.

  Then he turns and discovers Lodowicke on a stool in the corner.

  “I killed him here,” Lodowicke says, “so that everyone can see him ended in his throne.”

  The lid of Lodowicke’s dead eye twitches. He rises. On his belt he carries an ivory-handled knife and a leather cartridge box. In his hand is a pistol. He opens the cartridge box, begins loading the pistol.

  “It’s been coming due ever since he abandoned me over the side of that wagon.” Lodowicke contrives to shape his ruined face into a type of smile. “You have the intellect of a rabid squirrel, but I don’t dislike you, Henry. You and I both were wronged by him. You’re freed now. Fly off.” Lodowicke primes the pan on the pistol and pulls back the frizzen. “One thing I’ve never killed before is a child, but if you’re still here when I finish loading this pistol, I’ll kill you.” He pushes a powder charge into the pistol barrel, ball, wadding. “Suthers chose to trust me rather than to put his own hand to the blood of the business. ‘Hygienic events,’ indeed. That’s a mistake I’ll have no trouble avoiding.” While Lodowicke is speaking, Henry’s indignation flares and mounts. Soon he is full of fury, with a roaring mind and vibrating limbs. He says, “He was my father!”

  Lodowicke ramrods the pistol barrel. “I’ll tell you what I believe. A father is only one more person who will betray you. Better to live as if we’re orphans.”

  The rage is too much, and Henry leaps.

  He crashes bodily into Lodowicke, which is much like running into a barn wall. Lodowiche grunts, grips Henry by the arm, flings him.

  Henry bounces off the desk, drops to the floor. With his breath gone, he lies in a jumble of his own limbs, his vision aswim with luminous shapes. But he has hold of the thing in his hand, the thing he wanted, the ivory-handled knife from Lodowicke’s belt.

  Yet as the room spins he has difficulty sorting out his arms and his legs, which one goes where, what to do with them to make his body rise. When finally he stands, Lodowicke brings back the cock of the pistol.

  A horrible scream erupts.

  Henry wonders, Am I screaming? But he is not. It is loud and piercing as needles thrust into the ears. He says, “Mother?”

  Lodowicke, however, seems not to hear the scream. “Mother?” He snorts. He pulls the trigger. The flint snaps, throws sparks—

  Nothing.

  “Damnation,” Lodowicke says. “Of all the luck.”

  The scream fades.

  Henry raises the knife.

  “Boy,” Lodowicke says. But Henry thinks he detects a twitch of hesitation. He knows Lodowicke’s work. Lodowicke wins by intimidation, by striking first. Ever since Lodowicke was thrown off Suthers’s wagon, he has moved a little clumsily.

  Henry rises on the balls of his feet. He may be quick enough to get under Lodowicke’s reach.

  Later—years later—he will wonder if Suthers had lived a little longer, might he have done differently, might he have grown more accustomed to the violence, might he have loved Suthers more and felt obliged to avenge him?

  Instead he looks into Lodowicke’s good eye, and, at the behest of an obscure feeling, as if the faintest end of Mother’s scream wrapped a thread around him and drew him back, he steps away. Perhaps it is only that he likes Lodowicke a little, or understands him a little, which might be the same thing.

  “I’ll go,” he says. Somehow his anger has turned sad.

  Eyeing Lodowicke cautiously—but Lodowicke only seems to slump—Henry circles to the door, and he goes.

  The first two days Henry walks. For twenty dollars he buys a tin water bottle, small pan, butter, salted beef and tripe, and a Harper’s Ferry rifle with shot, wadding, and flints. He shoots squirrel as he walks. On the third day he finds a pony offered by a tavern-keep who took it in exchange for debts, a bright bay gelding, four years old, with a star on his forehead and mild mannered. Henry pays twenty-five dollars.

  He follows the Wilderness Road cut by Daniel Boone through the Cumberland Gap to the Ohio River. He ferries across on a raft and continues onward, into vast forests.

  There are
oak and hickory, beech and maple, hemlock and pine, trees of astounding girth that rise seventy feet and more to the first branches, where they weave together in a dense canopy. The shadowed space below lies open as a park, and the road is a faint track through the leaf litter. Scratches show where the turkeys have been searching for food. He sees bear, deer, fisher, and, across a grassy meadow, on a hill, a group of elk. Some days he sees no people at all. He has heard horrible stories of the Indians, but the only ones he sees are a family idling outside a trading post. They wear white men’s clothing and eat sunflower seeds.

  Sometimes he stops and listens for Mother, a habit that won’t pass.

  He rides a rough path over a rise, passes among a number of dying girdled trees, and enters an open field. Against the trees on the far side stands a small, square cabin built of logs, a wooly thread of smoke rising from the chimney.

  The dogs sight Henry first. They rush toward him, barking. Between three dogs there are ten and a half legs. Henry leans down to hold out a hand. They sniff it, wag their tails, trot with him toward the cabin.

  The baby is alone outside, naked, a great fat child assembling on his head a mud hat. Sighting Henry he shrieks, rises, waddles to the cabin.

  Phipps appears in the doorway. He whoops, dances, weeps. He has grown a huge gray beard. “Father,” Henry says.

  Franklin runs up, drags Henry off the pony, throws him in the air, catches him. Even Mary—pregnant, Henry observes—hugs him, briefly. The baby stares from the cabin doorway and laughs.

  Only a few dozen people live within fifty miles. Franklin has talked with all of them, made himself clear: no one should give Father so much as a half-cent if they expect to be repaid, and neither should they give him a drop of whiskey or anything else on credit. This has been fairly effective, Franklin says, excepting the night when Father traded away the clothes he wore and stumbled home naked.