Patrick Henry and the Frigate’s Keel: And Other Stories of a Young Nation (15 page)

Someone was saying to the tall man in buff and blue, “Really, sir, it's a shame they can't make a better show.”

“Better show?” His thoughts were miles away.

“I mean, sir, even in triumph it would be better if they had uniforms instead of rags, I mean if only to produce—”

“They are citizen soldiers,” the tall man said coldly. “That's hard to understand, isn't it?”

The other mumbled something and the Virginian's mood changed. Watching the marching men, he said, “I think they understand—look at the way they march.”

“Sir?”

He was trying to think it out. The war had been won; the men would go home and try to put things together where they had left off. Some would succeed and some would fail; that was the price and he realized it was a larger price than had been paid for the victory. Did the men know? Were they strong enough?

People forget, he told himself. Here was a new country and a new world and everyone would be too busy living to remember the few thousand poor devils who gave it to them. Things were that way and gratitude was a short-lived virtue.

Someone was saying to him, “But the enemy will see them, and that won't make the best impression, will it?”

“Why, I don't know,” the Virginia farmer said, more lightly than he felt. “Why, I really don't know.”

As the troops approached New York City the weather turned colder and the men licked up their pace. They marched smartly and with precision, and the thud, thud, thud of their feet echoed over the fields and woods.

A brisk November wind, blowing from over the Palisades, sent dead leaves swirling among the ranks, and occasionally, when they came to an open space on a bluff, they could see the little whitecaps dancing on the Hudson. A single small boat scudded along, its white sail dipping again and again as in salute.

Someone picked up a song. They sang The Green Hills of Pennsylvania, The Pretty Lady of My Heart, The World Turned Upside Down and last of all, their own mocking doggerel, Yankee Doodle. In fine spirits they roared it out, swaggering as they marched along, tilting their long muskets from side to side.

And everywhere along the line of march people had gathered to applaud and gape, boys swaying on fences, clusters of townsfolk who had walked up to welcome them, cheering the way cheers are given for the victors.

The Virginia farmer no longer listened to the chattering of the great men who rode with him. He was living over the time eight years ago when his army fled like rabbits from these same fields and woods of lower Manhattan.

Frightened and defeated and beyond hope: that was what everyone had said. They said that it was all over then, eight years ago, when it had scarcely begun. The faint of heart came out of their holes and pleaded with him to understand that it was all over. And he had been too stolid, too stubborn, too insensate.

He had gone on with the lost fight against impossible odds. Now it was all very far away; eight years dims everything, including suffering; and as he rode along he tried to reach back and understand why the cause had never been lost.

He remembered a letter he had written to his wife, in which he had said. “For me, there is no way back until this is over. You know how I love my home, yet if this last for twenty years, I must stay by it until it is over.”

Governor Clinton was saying, “We hear rumors—that the men are dissatisfied, even that they would mutiny and march on Philadelphia.”

“And that they would set me up as a dictator? You need not be afraid to say it.”

“I've heard that. I trust you, sir—believe me, everyone trusts you—if you could stay?”

“It would accomplish nothing. Who am I? I fought a war with them. I am going home. They would go home too.”

“But will they?”

“We aren't soldiers, we are men who took up guns for a little while, do you understand? And now we will put our guns away. We are not a people who live by guns.” He could quiet Clinton, but in himself there was an aching doubt.

They were in the city now. Two redcoat files had been drawn up and the Continentals were to march between. The redcoats, disarmed, stood at attention, so stiff and straight and precise that they reminded the Virginian of wooden dolls. Anxiously he looked at his own men; they were not precise; they walked with a swagger, slouched, rolled their shoulders.

There was a difference.

The drums played and the Americans marched between, and now, somehow, no one cheered, no one spoke—because this was so finally, so completely the end.

He had planned, some time before, to slip away quietly; but now he was relieved when word came to him that they would all be gathered in Fraunces' Tavern, where they would expect him to say something before he went.

He made it clear and they knew that he was going away, that he would become a private citizen, just a man, just a farmer. They wanted him for a little while more as he had been for eight years and he in turn knew that in Fraunces' Tavern he would find the answer to the question that perplexed him.

He wore his buff and blue uniform, the uniform he had always worn and which his fellow officers had copied as a symbol of their esteem. He would continue to wear it until he arrived home and then Martha would put it away. She would reseam it and lay it, full of camphor, in a cedar box.

Now at the end, when it seemed that the going home he had planned for so long might be put off indefinitely, the details of the life he had left eight years ago became clearer than ever. Long, long past, it had been something that he accepted, the broad fields, the houses, the trees and fences, the horses and dogs, all his, the property of a very rich man. Martha was a wife who could annoy a man, she had a long tongue, she could scold with the best, as when he lost at cards, as he so often did.

“Of course you lost.”

“I sometimes win,” he would protest.

“Do you? Either way, it seems a childish fashion of finding pleasure.”

Having no children of his own, sometimes a realization of loneliness would strike him in the face like a wet cloth and then the emptiness would grow and grow. Then, in those days when everything had been his by right, he had no defense against the dark moods; when they seized him it would seem as if there was little enough reason for him to live.

And suddenly it was gone, his security, his wealth, his broad acres, not taken from him, but at the same time not his by right. Nothing was his by right, not the house, not the life he lived, nothing.

All of it had to be won, to be paid for; the simple right to exist had to be won and wealth was nothing. The right to walk as a free man on his own soil had to be paid for in blood and suffering. Even eight years was not too high a price; when there is only one way, the price is not measured.

Now he looked forward to seeing them in Fraunces' Tavern. How could it be any different for those who had served alongside him?

He recalled the time Martha had come to the terrible winter encampment at Valley Forge, to live there with him for a while, and the way she had said, “Has it always been as bad as this?”—softly, almost fearfully.

“Sometimes better, sometimes worse.”

He wasn't wearing his woolsey and suddenly she began to scold but this time there was a difference in her scolding; she too had realized that the good things have their price. Holding her in his arms then, he saw clearly how all his values had changed.

“Will there ever be peace again?” she asked him.

“I think so.”

He felt that there would be peace and war and peace for many, many years. Men would have things and those things would be theirs by right and then suddenly it would all be nothing unless it was paid for.

In Fraunces' Tavern, which still stands on Broad Street, they were waiting for him. They had been speaking about many things, the little knot of officers who commanded the army of the United States of America, recalling this and that. Knox had just finished telling how in '76, when they had lost the city, he had tried to make a stand on a little hill just to the north. And apologetically, “You know, I was just a boy, twenty-six then. I thought it was all over—how many times did we think that? He never thought so. Now it seems incredible that he's going away. To go back—well, he was able to do the rest. I suppose it's right to go back.”

“If you have something to go back for—”

Copley, a colonel of cavalry, said, “If he goes back, I go back; and if he says, ‘Follow me to hell,' I follow him there.”

“You could see him saying that? I tell you, he goes home. Haven't I lived and eaten and frozen and starved with him for eight years—and do you think for nothing, for some cheap revolt after all those who have died to make a place where people can live? Then I tell you, you don't know him.”

“We know him—”

Knox said huskily, “There is only one way—” feeling a terrible aching fear that perhaps he had been cheated, that perhaps all this had been for nothing, and then added, “It's the only way; you trust him; it has to be that way.”

“There might be another way,” Alexander Hamilton said thoughtfully. “We'll know when we see him.”

They looked at Hamilton, who had loved the Virginian, hated him, been willing to die for him, turned against him and then for him; they knew Hamilton's ambition.

“It's in what he says and does, isn't it?” someone said softly as if in that phrase summing the whole matter up.

“Yes, in what he does.”

Then the Virginian came in and there was a sudden hush. Watching them he stood at the door and then he smiled, and still no one said anything.

“I've known you when you were more talkative,” he said.

“Sir?”

“Sit down,” he nodded. “Haven't we been on our own feet long enough, gentlemen? We've earned the right to be comfortable, to sit in chairs and stretch our feet at the fire.”

“You're leaving today?” Hamilton asked. Everything hung on his words and they watched him anxiously.

He refused to think of plots and schemes and said quietly, “I'm going to resign my commission and go home. It's a right I have earned, I think. I am a farmer, gentlemen, not a soldier. The war is over but I'm afraid the peace is just beginning. It will be a good feeling to take off our uniforms after all this time, won't it, gentlemen?”

They stared at him.

The only sign he gave was when he poured a glass of wine. Then his hand trembled slightly and a few drops spilled over the edge.

“To our good health—and to a long, long peace!”

They drank with him. Then he bit his lip and turned away for a moment. On almost every face there was an expression of realization combined with relief.

McKay said, “Sir, will you take my hand?”—stared at Washington and added, pleading, “What is one to know, sir? I'm human; if I wanted too much, I'm empty of that now—”

He remembered McKay in battle; it didn't matter whether he liked McKay or hated him; it mattered what the others thought and now all of them were watching. The war was over; men go home because they believe in what they fought for.

He took McKay's hand and when McKay murmured something about being forgiven, the tall Virginian pretended not to hear. He drank another toast and said, “I wish you all that's good, health and happiness. Go home and live quietly but remember that things come high. We've paid the price, we know.”

They poured another toast all around and drank to one another. Knox shattered his glass in the hearth.

The tall man said, “Come to me, each of you.”

Knox came first; they grasped hands, the tears running down their faces.

To Whitehall Ferry they all walked together, with their own ragged troops lining each side of the street. The sky was overcast and there was promise of an early snowfall. The troops held their cloaks tight about them and the drums took up a marching beat. The Virginian kept looking at his men; he was no longer afraid; somehow the issue had been decided; a democracy had been made and for many years it would go on. And so nebulous was the whole thing that he was not quite sure now how he managed to turn it so.

“Perhaps I was a fool to be afraid,” he thought. Now he could think of nothing but that he was going home.

At the ferry a barge was waiting to take him over to the Jersey shore. The boatmen had already cast off and now held the craft to the docks with their hooks. The boatmen were cold and impatient.

Turning at the last to his friends, the Virginian found nothing he could say; the surge of happiness and gratitude inside him could not be put into words. Awkwardly he stepped into the barge.

“Ready, General Washington?” the mate of the crew demanded.

He nodded. The boatman pushed off; the oars bit at the water.

At the dock, men and officers stood in a close silent group. Their eyes were on their commander and now as never before they knew him and understood him. They were bereft, yet at the same time strangely happy. Almost to a man there were tears on, their cheeks, yet looking at each other they were not ashamed. Knox bit his heavy lips, shook his head like a shaggy bear. Hamilton was like a boy, crying without effort to halt the flow of tears, and McKay was looking at something he had never seen before, smiling curiously. Copley clenched and unclenched his hand, and Mercer stood mute, head bowed.

Just before the boat rounded the point of the Battery, the tall man took off his three-cornered hat and dipped it in salute.

They returned the salute and then the boat was gone.

8

Amos Todd's Vinegar