Call to Arms

by Frederick Nolan

  Well, Jo, he thought, another one gone. Joanna had been dead over three years. He missed her as much, indeed more now, than ever. He was a man careful never to be too certain about anything, but of one thing he was sure: that whatever happened to him in the rest of his years on this earth, nothing worse could ever happen than seeing Joanna die. He sat down on the edge of her grave, as he always did.

  ‘Hard times coming, Jo,’ he said. ‘Just the way you said they would.’ She had read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin and espoused the cause of abolition on the spot. No use to argue that the book was wrongheaded and often highly-colored. Joanna reached her decisions all at once, and once she made them she never budged. Stubborn Dutch streak, David used to say. You’ve got a streak of stubborn that would make a mule jealous. It was almost as if Joanna had known her life was destined to be a short one and she had no time for arguments. She wanted to know everything about everything, cramming information into herself, talking a blue streak as though to say, I must know, I must know! She was four months short of her forty-fourth birthday when the thing which was eating her up finally killed her. David buried her upon the knoll beneath the great old tree, because one of her greatest pleasures had been to sit in the shade of the ancient oak behind the house, drinking tea served English-style in the porcelain cups which had been the wedding gift of her tobacco-merchant father, Frederick Ten Eyck. Her gravestone was a simple granite marker. David had carved her name, the dates, and the inscription himself, not wanting any but himself to perform this last act of love for her. The inscription was her last words: Remember me. She had whispered them as he bent over her in the big bed. Her voice was as soft as the lifting of an angel’s wing, arid a moment later she was gone. He touched the inscription with his fingers. Remember me, he thought. As if I could ever forget.

  ‘They’re choosing up sides, Jo,’ he told her now. He still felt close to her, even though the wasted body they had buried was only a shadow of the lovely, lively woman with whom he had shared a happy, secure and loving quarter century. ‘They’re set on keeping slavery in the western part of the state, and just as set on abolishing it back here. Hanging John Brown has put a torch to the fuse. I feel like a mart who’s heard the thunder and is waiting for the lightning to strike. Worrying times, Jo. They’re worrying times.’

  He tamped down some tobacco into the bowl of the blackened old briar she had given him and lit it with a kitchen match. The sun was sliding over the meridian, and it was getting a little cooler.

  ‘I worry about the boys, Jo,’ he said. ‘Though they’re boys no more, grown to men. You’d be proud of them, Jo, but worried, like me. If there’s a war, they’re bound to be caught up in it. Even Andrew, who says he’ll never raise his hand against a fellow man, even he won’t be able to escape it. And little Jed, he was down there at Harper’s Ferry, you know. I told you he was there, didn’t I?’

  He came up here often, two or three times a week, to talk over family matters with Joanna. He felt sometimes as if he could just reach out, just stretch out his hand and she would be there. She was not gone, he was sure of that. You only died. There was another life waiting for you, another existence. The Lord in His Wisdom decided when it was time for you to begin it.

  Won’t be long, he thought, I don’t know how I know that, but I know it. I don’t want to live forever any more, anyway. I did when you were around, Jo. But not anymore. He shook his head. Got to cheer up, he told himself. Tell her something a bit more cheerful, for God’s sake.

  ‘Andrew’s going over to Washington,’ he said. ‘Didn’t tell you that, did I? Aims to bring little Ruth Chalfont down here for the holidays. Hell, I wish you could have met her, Jo. She’s just the nicest thing you ever saw. Did I tell you about her already? I guess I must have done. Well, it won’t hurt if I tell you again. She’s maybe the same height as you, Jo, only her hair’s real blonde, almost white. Blue eyes she’s got, and smart! Her folks sent her to college. Set a lot of store by education, Quakers do. They’re good people, the Chalfonts. They think real well of our boys, Jo. Figure you’ll be pleased to know that.’

  Got to stop calling them boys, he thought. They were grown men. Hell, I reckon I’ll always think of them as boys. Men outside, but inside the same little boys, the ones I taught to ride and to shoot and to try to tell the truth. They once thought I knew the answers to all the questions in the world, he reflected. Well, they don’t think that any more.

  ‘You think they love me, Jo?’ he asked his wife. ‘I think they probably like me all right. I always thought they loved you so much there wasn’t a lot left over for me. I never minded, you understand. I never minded at all.’ He shook his head. ‘By God, Jo, men are damned funny critters and no mistake, aren’t they?’

  He got up, knocked out the ashes from his pipe. Got to go now, Jo, he thought. Got to get back to the house and listen to them all jaw about the coming troubles. You know what they ask me, Jo? They ask me, when the war comes – you notice they say when, now, not if – they say, who you going to sell your horses to, David Strong, the North or the South? They say to Sam, you’re a man knows all about guns, Sam Strong. Who you going to give that knowledge to? Which cause you going to support? As if a gun or a horse knows or cares who uses it? As if you aid a cause by selling a horse or a gun! Like I said, Jo, men are damned funny critters, and for all sorts of reasons. Well, enough of that. Can’t spend the whole day wool-gathering. He said good-bye to his wife and walked down the hill towards the big house.

  The big, airy dining room with its long polished table and stout chairs was noisy and warm. Sunlight streamed in through the tall Georgian windows looking out across the terraced garden to the river valley, where willow, elm and slender beech trees marked the threading course of Mountain Run. Sitting in the old carver at the head of the table, David found himself thinking, yet again, that the Strongs had become a tribe. He imagined Grandpa Davy looking down on them. ‘My God, where did they all come from?’ he’d be saying. ‘The whole fan damily,’ Joanna had dubbed them. They had all come down for Big Jed’s funeral and stayed. No point coming all that way with Christmas just round the corner, as Sam said. One more Sunday, David thought, and it’s Christmas Day. It would be the first one in which David sat at the head of the table in what had always been Big Jed’s chair.

  Well, he thought, I suppose I’m just going to have to get used to being head of the family, same as I had to get used to the idea of Jed and Andrew being grown men. Yet still it seemed like only yesterday to David that he had watched the two of them romping across the fields with fishing poles. He remembered the time little Andrew had latched on to his first catfish: didn’t know whether to shout with joy or wet his breeches, he was so excited. It was as though it had all happened in another existence, on some other planet.

  With Sam and his family staying, with Andrew’s fiancé Ruth Chalfont visiting, the big house was once again full of noise and laughter. The boys – all right, men – had embarked on a holiday round of riding, visiting and calls at the tavern in Culpeper. Andrew and Ruth spent a lot of their time walking. They didn’t seem to notice how muddy it was. Love, David thought. Love makes the world go blah.

  ‘Well, David, say grace and let’s get our eating done!’

  Sam’s wife Abby said, in that direct way she had. ‘Else we’ll be late for church.’

  ‘If we’re late, Abby, I don’t doubt but what God will forgive us,’ David said with a smile. ‘After all, that’s His specialty.’

  ‘You let Pa be, now, Aunt Abby,’ Jed grinned. They all knew Abby was a mite ‘pushy’. Probably had to be with Sam. She enjoyed nothing better than a good argument. The best thing was to head her off before she got started, which was what Jed was doing right now David realized. Hope he doesn’t think he’s got to protect me from my own brother’s wife, David thought, amused by the idea. Abby might be outspoken, even argumentative, but she hadn’t got a mean bone in her body. Sam Strong was a damned lucky man to be marri
ed to her.

  ‘Hurry’s like worry,’ Sam said from the far end of the table. ‘Gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you anyplace.’

  Sam, Sammy, where have the years gone? David wondered as he looked at his brother. Sam looked older than his forty-five years. He was inclined to portliness and his hair was prematurely gray. Both tended to give him a distinguished air, a look of prosperity at odds with the reality. Sam was making a living, but you couldn’t get rich mending guns. He’d always been Grandpa Davy’s pet, Sam had. It was to Sam the old man had passed on all his own skills, teaching him patiently for long hours in the little workshop out behind the house he kept for tinkering with guns. Grandpa Davy had been a gunsmith and a gunsmith’s son. Sam was the one who now kept the family tradition alive.

  ‘Well, Jed, you aiming to call on Janie Maxwell while you’re home?’ Andrew asked. ‘I seem to recall you were kind of smitten with her last time.’

  ‘Ah, she’s just a kid, Bo,’ Jed smiled. ‘Same as you.’

  ‘Not so much of the “kid”,’ Andrew grinned. ‘I’m big enough to whup you, you don’t mind your manners!’

  ‘You and whose army?’ Jed said. ‘Quit showin’ off for Ruth.’

  ‘Don’t do any such thing!’ Ruth Chalfont smiled. ‘I like it.’

  She was a pretty little thing, blonde and petite, with a lively sense of fun that David had not expected. Somehow you got the notion that Quakers were deadly serious, full of preachifying. Well, little Ruth was not like that and neither were her parents, Jacob and Eleanor Chalfont. David liked them all very much: especially Eleanor, a damned attractive woman.

  The good-natured banter around the table was a little forced, but that was understandable, he supposed. Big Jed’s death was still very fresh in their minds. He was gone, but he was still with them: his portrait looked down on them from the wall. The artist had painted him wearing the buckskins and fur hat he’d worn on the ascent of the Missouri with Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, but had not properly caught the vibrant presence of the man, except in the eyes. Big Jed seemed to regard them all with satisfied benevolence. David Strong bowed his head and folded his hands.

  ‘Lord’, he said. ‘We work long hours to plant the seed and nourish our stock, and we all try hard to earn what we eat. You give us the sun and the rain and the warm spring weather and we thank You for Your help. Amen.’ He looked up. ‘Pass the biscuits, Abby.’

  They fell to with a will. Mealtimes at Washington Farm were always an occasion because Aunt Betty, the cook, was renowned throughout eastern Virginia for her table. She had served presidents and princes, and was as proud of her kitchen as her husband Moses, David’s manservant, confidant and friend, was proud of the Strong family’s history. He probably knew more about it than any one of them, David thought. He had made Moses and Betty free on the day of his marriage to Joanna in May 1831, a good two years before the long crusade of Wilberforce, Macaulay and Clarkson culminated in the abolition of slavery in all British possessions.

  ‘Little Jed – Hell, I guess we’ll be calling you plain Jed from now on, won’t we, boy? – Jed here’s been telling me about this John Brown business,’ Sam said. ‘Now what do you make of it all, David?’

  ‘What I make of it is what any fool with a nose on his face would make of it,’ David said. ‘That damned idiot Henry Wise has made as big a hash of things as any man could make!’

  ‘I agree with Pa,’ Andrew said. ‘Why in Hades did he have to make such a meal of it? If he’d only treated Brown like the common criminal he is, instead of elevating him to political status—’

  ‘Well!’ Abby sniffed. ‘You think that fine man nothing more than a common criminal?’

  ‘How about charlatan, then?’

  ‘If he’s such a charlatan,’ Sam said heavily, ‘tell me why his hanging has caused such a furor? D’you know that they rang bells at Concord on the hour of his death? Concord, where your own grandfather fought against the British!’

  ‘Grandpa Davy didn’t—’ Jed began, but Abby’s voice drowned his intended correction.

  ‘Are you aware, Andrew, that Emerson has called John Brown a saint? Did you know that no less a person than Henry David Thoreau dubs him an angel of light?’

  ‘That doesn’t make him either, Abby,’ David said. ‘I must say I lean towards Andrew’s point of view. I can’t see why people are trying to canonize the man. His intentions were perfectly clear. He was just stupid.’

  ‘And you will no doubt tell us why,’ Abby said tartly. She was as much of an abolitionist as Joanna had been. The slaves must be freed. It didn’t matter who got hurt; it didn’t matter how much it cost; it didn’t matter if the world went to Hell in a hand basket. The slaves must be freed and there was no argument against it. Abby and Sam had run slaves to freedom on the so-called “underground railway” through Kansas. Both of them tended to see slavery in only one dimension. Of course, they lived in New York. That made a difference, too.

  ‘Any soldier could tell you that, Aunt Abby,’ Jed said. ‘Just look at the mistakes he made.’ He held up a hand and ticked off John Brown’s tactical errors, one finger at a time, as merciless as a West Point examiner. ‘One, he didn’t secure his lines of retreat. Two, he made no provision for holding his position. Three, even if a thousand slaves had rallied to his banner at Harper’s Ferry, he had nothing on which to feed them. And four, he made no advance plans. He hadn’t stocked or fortified any strong point to which he could retreat in the face of the army – and he had to know he would eventually confront it.’

  ‘Maybe he just plain didn’t give a damn.’

  The speaker was Sam’s oldest boy, Travis. It was the first time either of Sam’s sons had spoken all through the meal. Travis was the wild one. Tall, with hair bleached the white-yellow of corn in late summer, Travis had spiteful blue eyes that always looked as if he was daring someone to take issue with him, to pick a fight. He’d spit in Satan’s eye on a bet, David thought. The diametric opposite of his brother, Henry. Henry was plump, glum, dispirited-looking. He always wore the expression of someone who knows his ship will never come in.

  ‘There’s that,’ he allowed. ‘He may just not have cared.’

  ‘One bold stroke and on to glory, eh?’ Jed said. ‘That the way you see it, Trav?’

  ‘That’s the only road to glory there is,’ Travis said, eyes wary, as if somehow he expected every word he spoke to entrap him. ‘He might have pulled it off, Uncle David. You look at the way the army’s spread to Hellan’gone all over the country. Shoot! There ain’t more than fifteen companies atween here and Florida. All the rest are on the frontier. Whole damned army don’t amount to more than about thirteen thousand men. Maybe old John just figured he could raise that many slaves an’ go marchin’ up Pennsylvania Avenue and knock on President Buchanan’s door. “Good morning, Mr. President,” he’d say. “How’d you like to free the slaves, or would you rather get your head shot off?”.’

  He had a wicked grin, the white teeth like a scar against the dark brown of his skin. He acted out the words with relish, like a man who wished he could play them in real life. David caught Ruth Chalfont staring at Travis, eyes wide with admiration. Travis could be damned attractive to a simple, wholesome girl like Ruth. Better keep an eye on that, he told himself.

  ‘Trav’s right,’ Jed said. He and Travis were the same age but for a few days. They had always been close friends, all through childhood. David had sometimes wondered which of them was the wilder. Now they were older, he knew. Jed was every bit as much of a fighter as Travis. But Jed would never be more than reckless. Travis? Well, it was David’s judgment that if the pressure ever hit Travis in a certain way, he’d snap. He had that light in his eyes. He shook his head impatiently at his meandering thoughts and put his mind to what Jed was saying.

  ‘ … any real fighting, Congress is going to have to take note of what General Scott has been telling them for years. We need a regular army of—’

  ‘—Oh
, come on, Jed!’ Andrew said, testily. ‘Don’t let’s get started on that “we need a bigger army” business. Somebody ought to pension that old fool Scott off. He’s past it. He wants to enlarge the army to be ready for troubles that won’t occur unless he enlarges the army.’

  ‘Speaking personally, I wouldn’t mind the army being a mite larger, Andrew,’ Sam said with a slow smile. ‘Maybe then I’d be able to sell them some rifles.’

  Sam had spent nearly two years working on a design for a repeating rifle. He couldn’t get a hearing in Washington, much less an interview with the Ordnance Department. People thought a repeating rifle was about as realistic an idea as a flying machine. Even his own family were not altogether convinced that Sam’s idea had any merit, but the Strong loyalties would never permit its being said.

  ‘We could have used repeaters down at Harper’s Ferry, I can tell you,’ Jed said. ‘When do you suppose you might begin to manufacture in bulk, Uncle Sam?’

  ‘About the same time John Brown gets up out of the grave and gives a sermon,’ Sam said glumly, ‘the way things are looking right now.’

  ‘Well, if there secession,’ Andrew said. ‘Won’t the government need all the weapons it can lay its hands on?’

  ‘If, if?’ Travis said. ‘There’ll be secession, for sure. John Brown has taken care of that all right.’

  ‘You’ve been in the South, Henry,’ Jed said. ‘What’s the feeling down there now?’

  Henry looked up as if he was surprised that anyone would want his opinion about anything. His thick eyeglasses glinted in the bright sunlight, giving his face an almost oriental look. There was a sheen of perspiration on his upper lip. For no reason David recalled that Travis had contemptuously dubbed his younger brother ‘Mary Ann’. It was cruel, but it had stuck.