by Ron Carter
On the frozen ground of the Pennsylvania side, the first load of soldiers just landed dropped their knapsacks and thrust frozen fingers in their mouths until the warmth brought feeling, and then they fumbled to strike a spark from flint and steel and light what few lanterns they had among them. They held them high to peer about in the feeble yellow light, and Billy’s eyes widened. In full darkness, guided by something unknown to Billy, the Marbleheaders had put them ashore at exactly the place they had left.
The temperature had dropped ten degrees since sundown and was going lower with every passing minute. The bitter cold cut into them, and the emaciated soldiers grimly set their jaws in the stark realization they must build fires or be dead before morning. They took the few axes they could find in the piled equipment and trudged away from the river to the trees, and with their lanterns casting surreal shadows they sought out the dead windfalls to cut branches and drag them back to the riverbank. They broke and stacked small twigs and lighted them from their lanterns, then added larger branches and limbs until the fires were high, sending millions of sparks spiraling into the black heavens to glow and disappear.
Bone-weary, they slumped down to sit on anything they could find, or the frozen ground if there was nothing. With their hands and frozen feet to the fire, they squinted against the heat, not knowing or caring where their camp gear was in the growing pile. They only knew there would be no rest until more than five thousand men still on the Trenton side of the river had been brought across. They said nothing as they stared into the firelight, noses running in the heat, ice in their hair and beards melting, dripping on the front of their ragged shirts and frayed coats while steam rose from the wet, icy rags and blanket strips bound to their feet. Heads nodded and chins dropped. Men slowly toppled onto their sides to move for a moment, then settle, unable to fight off sleep and other men reached to move their feet to keep them out of the fire.
They heard the ferry crunch into the landing downstream and Billy rose to look for the lights. The heavy sound of the ramp dropping onto the frozen landing came echoing and then the faint voices of the men and the staccato stamping of nervous horses’ hooves as they began unloading. Billy drew a deep, weary breath and spoke.
“We’ve got to get picket ropes strung in the trees.”
Those who could picked through the tangled heap of camp equipment for ropes, then followed Billy down to the trees near the ferry. Quickly they strung one-inch hawsers to oak trunks while men brought the horses to tie them, then return to the ferry for the trip back to the Trenton landing for the next load.
The lights of the fifty incoming Durham boats were approaching as the soldiers returned to their fires for a moment’s warmth, and once again they walked down to the riverbank to cast ropes to the fishermen crouched in the bow. They held the boats steady while the soldiers jumped to the frozen ground and kept moving to make room for those behind.
From the north came the clank and rattle of the great black cooking kettles and the heavy, twelve-foot iron tripods from which they hung, and Billy straightened to look, puzzled at why a boat had landed with equipment and not men. A voice came piercing, “Hallooooo … we need help.”
With his boat empty and moving steadily back towards the Trenton shore, Billy and half a dozen others trotted north to find men wrestling the big iron cook pots out of a Durham boat onto the riverbank while others struggled with the heavy tripods and chains. The dim lantern light at both ends of the boats showed the shadowy shapes of a dozen more of the round kettles upside down in the boat. The men were straining to unload them over the bow of the boat onto the riverbank, one at a time, frustrated by the rise of the gunwales at the front of the boat. Billy studied them for a moment, then picked up a rope and threw one end to the men farther back in the boat.
“Tie it to the handle of one of the kettles and dump it overboard,” he called, and the men on the boat slowed to watch. Billy motioned to four other men standing near him and they waited while a man on the boat quickly looped the rope through the thick, heavy handle and tied it off before three other men seized the rim of the kettle and the stubby legs and heaved it over the side. Water and ice flew ten feet in the air and the great black pot sank out of sight as Billy and those with him on shore grasped the rope, set their feet, and backed up. The cook pot broke the surface three feet from shore and ten seconds later was twenty feet inland, upside down. Billy and those with him walked back to the boat and again Billy threw the rope, and others threw their ropes, and moments later the heavy kettles hit the water, and the boat was emptied within minutes, riding high in the water.
Billy walked to the man who was setting the tiller in the slot on the near end of the boat.
“You didn’t bring men?”
The man shook his head in the firelight. “Colonel Glover’s orders. He sent word with some officer on one of the boats farther down the line that there’s fresh meat coming on the ferry with the first load of cannon and he wanted those cook kettles set up over the fires and halffilled with water.”
Fresh meat! Never had the thought of fresh meat reached inside Billy as it did at that moment, and then his forehead wrinkled. “Fresh meat? How did he get fresh meat?”
The man wiped at his frozen beard and weighed his answer. “Mule. An accident. Broke both hind legs. You heard those musket shots earlier?”
By half past nine the three-legged tripods straddled thirty fires and each of the fifty-gallon cook kettles was hanging from the heavy chains and filled with thirty gallons of river water. By half past ten, wisps of steam were rising from the kettles, and men peered at them in disbelieving anticipation. Fresh meat. Fresh meat. Fresh meat. It ran through their brains like a chant.
A sliver of crescent moon arose a little after eleven o’clock in a clear sky, with the temperature hovering at ten degrees above zero. The fires reflected rose and gold and blue from endless frost crystals on the riverbank and in the woods as the men established a rhythm with the incoming and outgoing boats. Knapsacks and gear were carried back from the riverbank and dumped haphazardly into unsorted piles to make way for the next incoming load. In the minutes when no boats were unloading, the shaking men returned to the fires to stand near the flames, first facing, then with their backs to the warmth while they waited for feeling to come once again into their hands and feet.
At half past eleven the ferry thumped into its dock with the first load of cannon and a hundred men walked downstream, past the horses picketed in the trees, to unload. Two men tied a rope to the ends of each of the long trails on the cannon, while two others took their places at the brass handholds. Two more men took positions, one on each of the big wheels, and on signal, the eight men rolled the cannon up the ferry ramp onto the landing, backwards, muzzle toward the ferry, and tilted down. Two other men walked beside with long poles, ready to jam them between the spokes if anyone slipped, or a rope broke, or for any reason the men lost control of the heavy guns. They moved the cannon away from the landing and turned them sideways to the slope so they would not roll, and they blocked the wheels and staked the restraining ropes.
With the last cannon rolling forward on the thick, frozen deck of the ferry, half a dozen men went to the far end and stopped, gazing downward at the carcass of the dead mule, black and unreal in the dim lantern light. They wasted no time. A rope was looped around the two broken hind legs and they turned their backs to the dead animal to drag it off the ferry, onto the landing, and up the incline.
A little past midnight, with a fire on both sides for warmth and lanterns held high to cast yellow light, a dozen men tipped the mule onto its back and braced it from both sides with sticks. One man slit the hide, vent to throat, without opening the cavity. Two men removed the head and took it to one side, while two others began at a foreleg on either side. They skinned out and disjointed the leg at the knee and continued downward, laying the hide on the ground as they went. They worked back towards the hindquarters, skinned them out, and disjointed the tail, handing the bo
nes and the tail to waiting men as they went. One man carefully opened the cavity between the hind legs, inserted his hand into the opening with his knife blade upward, and carefully moved the knife forward, opening the cavity from vent to brisket, smoking. Carefully they let the carcass roll onto one side and the viscera, paunch, and contents of the chest cavity rolled out onto the hide and they turned their heads for a moment, away from the stench and the rising vapors. They disconnected it all from the carcass and left it lying on the hide to once again roll the carcass onto its back. A man stepped forward with a broadaxe and split the brisket to the throat, then to the hindquarters to chop through the pelvis bone, and the two halves of the carcass sagged away from each other.
The men down by the river working the incoming Durham boats turned from time to time, watching the group gathered around the carcass, swallowing at the thought of hot broth and meat. They turned back to the boats, to glance over their shoulders again and again.
Four men knelt on the hide, frozen stiff, and began removing great chunks of meat from the neck back to the shanks on the hindquarters, and dumped it in waiting wooden tubs. The head was stripped to the bone, the tongue removed, and the brain removed with a broadaxe while a man cut through every joint in the tail, and others diced the great chunks of meat into tiny pieces and dumped the mix back into the wooden tubs. With the skeleton exposed, they began disjointing it and piling the disjointed bones on one side of the hide. Others took the bones and set them on rocks and smashed them with sledges to expose the rich marrow, then put the shattered bones back into the tubs.
They washed the liver, tongue, heart, kidneys, and brain in the river, then set them in the glowing embers of a fire to roast. They dragged the paunch down to the river to split it open and dump the contents into the frigid water, then wash the empty belly as best they could and bring it back dripping, ice forming. They laid the intestinal tract on the frozen hide, stripped out all the connecting tissue, then slit the intestine lengthwise and took it to the river to wash it clean and bring it back. Then they diced the lungs, empty intestine and paunch, and the connecting tissue and dumped it all into the wooden tubs.
A little before three o’clock they lifted the heart, tongue, kidneys, liver, and brain from the coals of the fire and chopped them fine, then lifted the tubs and walked from fire to fire, portioning it into twentyeight of the thirty boiling cook kettles. They put the shattered bones in the last two; thirteen hundred pounds of meat and bone boiling in nine hundred gallons of river water. The only things that escaped the cook pots were the hide and the hooves, and before morning the hide would be thawed out and cut into strips to wrap frozen feet. Someone walked from pot to pot with a ten-pound canvas bag of salt, sprinkling a handful into each while the men stood by the fires, silent, looking at the pots, struggling to believe that sometime in the morning they would have a bowl of hot broth and meat. No man among them could remember anything so sweet as the stench of a dead mule simmering in the big iron kettles in the black of night, ten degrees below zero, on a frozen riverbank hundreds of miles from home.
At four o’clock twelve men lifted the two kettles filled with boiling bones from their chains, set them on the frozen ground, and used threegallon dippers on five-foot handles to sift out the bones. They dipped the broth, rich and nourishing with the bone marrow, along with the shred and scraps of meat into five-gallon buckets and portioned it out among the remaining twenty-eight kettles. Strong hands lifted the great smoking kettles from their chains and set them on the frozen ground while the soldiers found anything that would hold the steaming mixture and lined up. They were all given their fair portion, holding back enough for those yet to come from the Trenton side of the river. They walked back to the fires to sip at it, not caring that it seared their mouths, feeling the rich broth and the warmth hit their empty, cramped bellies and spread, pausing with closed eyes to feel it, savor it, aware only that they could remember nothing they had ever eaten which meant so much as the dead mule. When the broth was gone they picked the pieces of chunked meat from the bottom of the bowls and slowly chewed them for a long time, then wiped the bowl clean with their fingers and licked them. They washed the bowls in the river and returned them to wherever they had found them, and turned back to the incoming boats.
By five o’clock they knew they would still have men on the Trenton side at daybreak, and growing desperation drove them on. They peered across the river into the blackness beyond the village, searching for a line of distant lights moving towards them, and listening for the faint sound of fife and drum setting the cadence for soldiers’ feet, and the rumble of moving cannon. More boats hit the shore and the waiting soldiers forced frozen hands and feet to move as they unloaded men and baggage, then dragged the great, heavy craft inland, over the rise and among the trees to tip them over and cover them with brush and willows away from British eyes and cannon. They walked stiff-legged back to the fires by the river to peer anxiously eastward, again searching for the first flash of lights and the sound of a distant marching army while they watched the lanterns on the water move steadily towards them.
Imperceptibly, the blackness to the east became deep purple and then gray. Dawn came bleak in the bitter cold with the last of the boats still on the water, their exhausted crews holding them on course against the pull of the current and the slamming jolt of the heavy ice chunks, while the tattered soldiers on shore stood by the fires, vapor rising from their bearded faces, waiting for them to land, and to see if the Revolution lived or died on the banks of the Delaware.
Billy stood among them, bone-weary, hands raw from pulling frozen hawsers half the night, shivering in the coat he had made from two gray, threadbare, abandoned blankets, and the trousers he had fashioned from half-burned sailcloth he had found on the banks of the Hackensack River in a time he could now hardly remember. He looked about at the chaotic stacks of equipment scattered for half a mile among the cannon. Driven by the fear of being caught by the British on the Trenton side, or on the water, where they would have been chopped to pieces by British grapeshot, they had hastily dumped it where they could and kept working through the night.
The sun rose to flood the frozen world with light and Billy held his outstretched hands towards the fire while his clothing steamed and his nose dripped. Steam rose from his round, plain face, and for a moment his thoughts went back to the shock he had felt two days ago when he had seen his own reflection in a bucket of water dipped from the Assunpink Creek south of Trenton. He had stared in disbelief at a man he did not recognize: sunken eyes, hollow cheeks, and heavy beard and eyebrows clogged with ice. Shocked, he had stood stone-still peering down at his body, and was stunned when the realization struck into him that he was a scarecrow, dressed in rags, beard and hair unkempt, his stocky, robust body shrunken, skin loose and sagging.
He pushed the memory away and licked at his cracked, bleeding lips and closed his eyes to avoid the smoke from the fire. He reached to wipe his dripping nose and the ice melting from his beard, and looked at the men milling around, disorganized, exhausted. Those who arrived in the last boats were wandering, searching through the piled knapsacks and rolled blankets for their own, turning every few minutes to peer across the river, watching for a glimpse of red on the distant skyline or on the flatlands approaching the river, or in the village of Trenton. Billy narrowed his eyes and held his breath to stop the vapor while he carefully studied the town and what he could see of the land beyond. There were no red-coated British or blue-coated Hessians.
He turned back to the fire, ringed by men who had little left to give, standing silent, staring into the flames. A man of average size moved in beside Billy, and Billy glanced at him. He was dressed in a heavy winter coat and scarf, thick-soled shoes, and a fur cap. His face showed no trace of the ravages of war. Billy could see an artist’s sketch pad bound in leather stuffed inside his coat, and he saw the shock and disbelief and sick revulsion in the man’s eyes as the man stood rooted, mouth hanging open, looking up an
d down the riverbank at what was left of the Continental army.
Billy spoke. “Newspaper?”
The man answered while still looking at the havoc around him. “No. Artist. I heard about this and thought someone should come make sketches for the world to see. I came in this morning on the backroads from Philadelphia.” He swallowed hard, then turned his eyes to Billy. His face was white, eyes glazed in shock. “It’s not possible. I’ve never seen anything so hellish in my life. I’ve never known men could look like this.”
At that moment, across the fire a man sat on an upside-down wooden bucket with the bottom cracked. His bearded face was a mass of open sores, crusted, cracked, bleeding, so thick he could not clean them. He wore no shirt, only a filthy, frayed blanket jacket above his waist. His legs were bare and he was huddled close to the fire barefooted, shaking violently. Suddenly he raised his face and he called to the man standing next to Billy, voice high, cracking.
“Charles! Charles Peale! Is that you?”
The man beside Billy flinched at the call of his name and turned his face to peer at the stranger, drawn by something familiar in the voice. He narrowed his eyes to study the stricken face, the matted hair, the sunken eyes, and suddenly he started. His head jerked forward and he stammered—”James? James?”—voice thick in disbelief.
“Yes! It’s me—James!” Instantly Charles Peale was on his knees beside his brother, whom he thought had been killed at the battle of Long Island when Clinton’s ten thousand redcoats had used the Jamaica Road to flank the Americans and the battle had become a wild, bloody rout—a nightmare of blasting muskets and cannon and lunging bayonets.
“Oh, James, James,” he said, and sobbed openly as he tenderly wrapped his brother inside his arms and held him close. James reached both arms around his brother’s neck and clung to him, weeping, murmuring, “Charles, Charles.” A time passed before Charles leaned back to look into the eyes of his brother, and he gently touched the oozing eruptions on the thin face. He turned his eyes upward to the men standing in the circle, and shaking hands pulled blankets from rounded shoulders and helped wrap them around James’s exposed legs and feet. Charles carefully lifted his brother into his arms and started north, up the riverbank, carrying him like a child, calling for a doctor.