The Proud and the Free (13 page)

So I folded the General Orders, put them in my pocket, and went out once more into the foggy morning, waking those who had a white rag around their left arms, until there were six of them, and while they still rubbed the sleep from their eyes, told them:

Now we will shave ourselves and clean ourselves, and begin to make a new army.

Yet the words were as strange to myself as to them, and the affronted wonder in their eyes must have been matched by the doubt in my own. However, we shaved; without mirrors and without soap, we cut off our beards and scraped our skin and scrubbed our dirt away with the melting snow; and those of the soldiers who woke and saw us laughing, and then crying with pain as we cut our flesh, thought we were mad – as perhaps we were.

The encampment was coming awake, but I could not wait. I was eager, like a boy again, and it made me feel like a boy to finger my smooth face. I ran through the sleeping men, shouting for the trumpeter, and after me ran the six guards, whooping and laughing. Then the trumpeter sounded and the camp came alive, and there was never such a reveille as that one. The sun was breaking, warm as a winter sun rarely is, and everywhere the snow was becoming slush and dirty pools of water; but to me it was all beautiful; and it must have been beautiful to the men as well, for never before in all the history of the Line had they laughed this way, romping with each other as if they were children again. We picked up the guard as we went, and I found Angus sleeping under a caisson, and I dragged him awake and told him to shave and clean himself up, so that he would not be a disgrace to us.

Are ye daft? he asked me.

But then his eyes opened wider as he noticed that seven of us were shaven already.

Pawky, pawky, he grinned. And what in hell are ye up to, Jamie? Women?

Angus was well onto forty, which was old for me and old for most of us, so I told him:

Shut your mouth, you dirty old goat! I want them paraded in the brigades, like they never was before!

The men were crowding around us, and they doubled over laughing with what I said to Angus. Old goat, roared Stanislaus Prukish, old goat – and Angus caught him by the shoulders and threw him like a tenpin. That was how we felt that morning. I sent Angus to lay out the order of the parade with the guards, and then I was off to find the Gary brothers, so that they might organize some sort of scouting line for our march. I saw none of the Committee, but I felt that if they left it to me, it would be well done; for this was my own meat and not one of those fine theories of where the Revolution was off to – a bone they chewed day and night, filling paper with little script and burning every bit of tallow in the Line.

To hell with their theories, I thought. I am twenty-two years of age, Jamie Stuart by name, and the blood in me runs quick and free.

Already, the commissary was distributing mixed grits of buckwheat and corn, and here and there a pot was bubbling. Voices followed me with:

Hi, Jamie, what goes today?

We did not do bad, eh, Jamie?

Stop and have a bite, Jamie!

The smell of porridge touched my nostrils, and I realized all in a moment how famished I was; so I sat in with a group of lads from the 4th, and they filled a great bowl for me, a spoon of molasses upon it, and the whole topped with a fine lump of gribbled lard.

Now this is eating like I haven't seen in a nation of days, and where in hell did it come from?

From the Dutch crofters, and before God, I think me they broke open the bins of the stinking patroon!

Ye don't say?

I do say it. They must know of this rising now in China, for before the sunrise the woody-shoes were clumping in with the provisions. We ask them why? Because ye will burn down the patroon's castle, they tell us, and hang him high as Haman.

So see that ye do it, Jamie, another added.

Laughing, I stuffed myself, and the sun rose and splashed us with its light and warmth, and the sparrows sang as foolishly as if it were spring already. The women of the brigade were primping and cooking and scolding the children and singing:
The squire came along the road, he saw the huntsman's bloody load, and Mary Jane will weep but sing no more. Heigh-ho, heigh-ho
…

I wanted no better than this, to be here with my comrades all around me and to see the love in their faces because they trusted me. So I ate me my breakfast and finished my rounds and went back to the command tent to make my report. By then, the parade was forming and Chester Rosenbank was marshaling his drummer lads and his fifers to beat to station; but the two Highland pipers were walking their bags in a circle of delighted men and children, skirling the Devil himself awake.

Entering the tent, I saluted; but here was more than I had been prepared for. The candles were gutted, yet the weatherworn tent gave light enough. At one end stood Emil Horst, with Sammy Green on one side of him and Dennis Sullivan on the other, each standing like a ramrod, with musket in line from navel to chin; and Emil Horst looked like the very Devil, his face all stained with dry blood, his head swathed in cloth, his lips as white as the skin around them. A few feet away, the Reverend William Rogers sat upon a camp stool, his long, thin face fixed on the ground in somber meditation. At the camp tables were the Committee, shaven and cleaned and somber as the Reverend Rogers, but starker in their look and grimmer in their aspect.

So you are here, Jamie, said Jack Maloney as I entered.

Is this a wake?

A court-martial, he said flatly. And how is it outside?

The men are parading for a reading of the Orders. We will have them read up and down the Line, so that all may hear. And then?

And then we march, answered Billy Bowzar. But wait here, Jamie, for you are a part of the Committee, and it's fitting and proper that you should have a vote.

So there I stood, while Abner Williams arose and spoke, apparently continuing what he had been saying before.

We have seen a peculiar treason, he said, for this man Horst has betrayed his comrades and nothing more, and when has there been a punishment for that? He claims loyalty, and I must defend him, for it would not be fitting that he should have no advocate.

You are his advocate, Billy Bowzar nodded. He needs no accuser since we have all seen what he did.

Yes, he did an awful thing, Abner Williams agreed, more thoughtful than angry.… He had a lighted match in his hand, and he would have fired a cannon loaded with loose grape, sending his own comrades to their deaths. For this he should be slain, which is what the men would ask if we brought him before the Line and demanded their will. That is what they would ask, but he must be defended.

I did what a loyal soldier does! cried Horst. I stood by the colors when you all had betrayed them! That's what I did!

Ye had better shut up, said Dennis Sullivan, or it will be me duty to tie a bayonet atween yer God-damned teeth.

This question of loyalty, said Jack Maloney tiredly, is the strangest of all questions. I have thought about it too much – too much to know the answer.

He rubbed his bloodshot eyes with both clenched fists, shaking his head as he did so; then he laid his hands, so small and dainty that they might have belonged to a woman, flat upon the table in front of him, staring at them and examining them as he spoke. He and Billy Bowzar and the Jew Levy were the only ones among us who seemed to have been marked for greatness; but Jack Maloney more than the others, for he was a man racked in perpetual combat with his destiny; and because he struggled against wrong, as he saw it, as if it were embodied like Lucifer the Devil, he had a great and sometime splendid dignity. To the very end, he had that dignity, as you will see; for it is my intention to pursue this narrative to its ending, making a whole thing of it.

Now, however, he spoke searchingly and painfully:

What is one loyal to? he asked. That German – and he nodded contemptuously at Horst – is loyal to the colors, as he puts it, but there are other colors too, and the blood of all men is tinted the same. When I wore a red coat, I read a book by a man called Thomas Paine, and I decided that I had been loyal to the wrong things. I was born a bastard and weaned on gin, but I was told to be loyal to my sovereign liege, George III, for that mighty privilege. And when an officer of the King took me as a drummer lad and did terrible things to me that are best not even spoken of, I was told to be loyal to him. I was in the regiment the half-witted Howe marched against the fishermen at Pelle's Point, and only I and eight others lived from the regiment; but we marched, because we were loyal – the way a whore is loyal to her pimp. But after Pelle's Point I said, Since I am destined to die with a bullet in my belly, let it be for freedom; not for Wayne, not for that cold Virginia farmer, not for that craven Congress in Philadelphia, not for the fine Pennsylvania ladies in their silks and satins, not for the property of every dirty lord and fat patroon in Jersey, not for the tobacco plantations and the merchant fleets of Boston and the warehouses of New York – not for that, but for freedom and a little bit of dignity for them that was born like me and raised like me. For this, do you see. I talk pretty and sweet, but I not only can dance like an ape – I got an ape's ear to mock the talk of the British officer gentry who turned me into a servant to black their boots and shine their metal. So there's a variety of loyalty, and a complexity to it also, and sometimes I think we are all the accursed, who are loyal to a dream and no more. But I take no talk of loyalty from him!

So spoke Jack Maloney and without bitterness, but only tiredly.

Yet I must defend him, said Abner Williams stubbornly, and the Reverend Rogers raised his head and nodded.

That is so. His is a different kind of loyalty. Don't scorn it, Jack Maloney, for some of us are loyal to God as we know him, and others are loyal to a piece of rag – and some are loyal to the Devil.

At this point, the reading of the General Orders began, and through the open tent-flap we could see the Line drawn up on parade, and though we could not see him we could hear plainly the booming words of Angus MacGrath. Five or six little boys and girls, flaxen-haired Dutch children from the neighborhood thereabout, raced past to see this great wonder of men and guns and wagons that had come down upon them during the night, and I bethought me of how strange it was, the way life and death mixed themselves; for we who were subjects for hangmen so shortly past were now debating the life or death of this dull and obstinate man, Emil Horst, and still children played and laughed under our noses – and soon they would be listening to the great lies and tales of the children of the camp, and thus were legends born and thus would one of these children someday remember how the Pennsylvania Line, the terrible, savage foreign soldiers, had come into their valley and drawn up on parade, so that documents might be read to them.

… To ask for his death, Abner Williams was saying, would be an evil thing. We are not such an army as the officer gentry would have made us. Somewhere in him, fat and dull though he is, there is a streak of the gentry, so let him go to his own kind without stripes and without caning.

And anyway, I said, without any by your leave, this is one thing that was not in the General Orders. We made no provision for those who betray us.

Horst stood still and eager, mouth open, for somewhere in the words he scented life and freedom; and he cocked his head as the Jew Levy said:

True – true. You can see the gentry in him.

Ay – ay, and that you can, said old Lawrence Scottsboro, twisting his wrinkled neck and spitting over his shoulder. And Danny Connell broke the spell for fair, leaning back and laughing as he said:

Gentry or me eyes have never seen it.

But on no grounds of loyalty, said the Jew Levy softly and meaningly. He is loyal to nothing, that animal.

There was no courage in Horst. He stood there and hung his big head and stared at the ground.

Remember, cried Sean O'Toole, that the blood in you is blue – blue blood of gentry! Go to them and tell them that you are like they are – and if ye doubt it …

Like a flash, like an animal, the little Irishman was out of his chair, knife in hand, and the knife flicked and left two crossed cuts on Horst's cheek.

Damn you, O'Toole! Billy Bowzar cried; but O'Toole stood in front of the cringing Horst and laughed, and then wiped his knife on Horst's overalls, sheathed it, and spat on the floor.

Do it yer own way, he told the Committee. Me own gut is too sick with him.

Yer gut is like your head, said Jack Maloney, and you're too damned quick with a knife to satisfy me. But get Horst out of here because he stinks the place.

Sure, get him out, said Jim Holt, and Bowzar nodded and the others of us nodded too. But still the man stood where he was, cringing and weeping as the blood ran down his cheek. The Reverend Rogers rose and took his arm and led him out, and as he went past I severed his bonds with a stroke of my knife; but I felt sick, sicker than I would if they had killed him, and my sickness increased as he walked across the fields, away from the parading soldiers of the Line, across the fields and into the woods.

PART SIX

Wherein we discover that roads must be made before men may travel.

I
T IS SAID that certain officers remained near us, and others watched us in great danger of their lives; but of all that I know nothing, and until the sun set on Wednesday night, we saw not hide nor hair of any officer. It is true that late on Tuesday afternoon, we had word that one hundred and twenty officers were massed ten miles away with two thousand militiamen, but that proved to be nothing but a wild rumor, and so did every other rumor of militia being massed against us dissolve in smoke. For the militia could only come out of the countryside and the town, out of the crofter on shares and the tenant farmer and the little freeholder, out of the artisan, the carpenter, the cobbler, the weaver and the ropewalker, out of the hatter and the barber and the saddler and the cooper and the soaper and the tinker and the staymaker and the vintner and the silker and silverer – and they were with us, and would make no militia to go against us and shed their blood and our blood. And how much they were with us we learned on this very morning.