Conceived in Liberty (7 page)

I sink into sleep, and I dream, and I dream that I am a child. It is the morning of a hot, sunny day, and we are moving westward. Where we came from is not very clear to the child in the dream, from some place many marches to the east—Connecticut, perhaps. There are four wagons, four narrow, old, swaybacked wagons. Brown canvas covers them, stretched over bent hickory hoops. The road is bad, and the wagons surge and rock and threaten to fall apart with every step the horses take. But somehow the wagons hold together. They've held together a long time.

I sit at the back of the first wagon, my feet hanging over the tailboard. The hot sun is in my face. Mr. Apply, driving the second wagon, keeps grinning at me. Now and then he snaps his long whip and cries:

“Gotcha then, Allen!”

We both laugh. It's a standing joke between us, the whip. Mr. Apply is a lean old man who sits on his high seat with a long musket balanced across his knees. Somehow, no matter how the wagon sways, the musket never slips from his knees.

My mother cries: “You, Allen, come in or you'll take a fall under Mr. Apply's horses!”

The whip flicks out again. Half-asleep, I cling to the dream. I want the hot sun. When I know that the dream is over, I close my eyes and still try to feel the sun on my face.

When I awake, I turn to Bess with deep, childlike love. A love that's different from the love of a man for a woman. She's warmth for me; she's something for a weak, dying man to hold onto. She doesn't complain. She has never complained. I know she is dying, but I know she won't die until I am gone.

She married a Virginian farm boy at the outbreak of the war. She tried to follow him to Quebec, in the expedition of Morgan's riflemen. She dropped out, went to Boston, and later heard that her man had never reached Quebec. She fell in with a group of Maryland militia—became a camp follower. It was not difficult to understand.

She tells me about it in a slow, truthful voice. “I don't hide anything, Allen. But I was a good woman once. I swear to God I was a good woman once. I'm nineteen years, Allen, and I'm a slut already. You don't have any call to love me, Allen.”

Our tears come together, slow tears of weakness. We cling together, and she clutches desperately at my filthy body. I cry the way no man would cry. Each successive wave of sleep is relief.

What she says, she has said before. We dream about it day and night. “You can desert, Allen——”

I think of Edward. Eight days ago, he walked out. He said, simply—he was going to the Mohawk. He took his gun, and nobody answered him, or tried to stop him. He was a great, strong man. “He'll walk through,” Ely said. Jacob raged like a madman. Nobody believes but Jacob. We hate the revolution; we hate our officers and each other. Jacob believes. That you must keep in mind. A man can be parts of many things, or a man can be only one thing. And those who believe in only one thing are like torches; they don't burn forever. That you must keep in mind to know how Jacob is—without weakness, without fear. He hates officers because they are a contradiction. He is not a man for thinking too deeply, and what he believes he believes instinctively. And he believes this—that the people are one. Officers are not of the people; they separate themselves: so he hates them but endures them because they lead the revolution. Yet he refuses to believe that they are part of the revolution they lead. But more than that, he hates weakness. A man is nothing, and the revolution is all. Edward was his friend; for years Edward had been his friend;, yet Edward was weak, putting himself before the revolution. For that he cursed Edward—who was dead.

He raged like a madman, and then when he had used himself up, he sat by the fire, sobbing hard, dry sobs for hours.

I would have gone with Edward, but I was afraid. I was afraid of the great distances in front of me.

Some of McLean's foragers brought Edward back. He had gone only a mile. They found him in the snow. Captain Muller came to us and said: “Did he desert?”

“He's dead, isn't he?” Jacob muttered. “What does it matter now? The man's dead.”

“He was hunting,” Ely said, lying. But even Ely could lie for a man who had died that way—alone and in the snow.

We went to bury him. He was huddled up, his limbs hard and fixed.

“He was sleeping,” Ely said. “I thank God he was sleeping. He didn't know. It's an easy way to die, when a man's sleeping …”

I ask Bess: “Where would we go?”

“I'm not dreading dying, Allen. But if you go away without me——”

Ely enters the dugout. He closes the door and stumbles over to the fire. The strength of Ely is no thing that can be measured, it's not the strength of a man's body.

He sits by the fire and stares into it.

We climb out of bed and crowd round him. Our faces are sunken death's-heads. Bones stand out through the clothes. Ely looks at us, but he doesn't speak.

Jacob said: “You brought food, Ely?”

“I walked to his house,” Ely said. “It's a wonder to see the fine stone houses the officers have. You go in and you hear no sound of storm outside.”

I try to visualize it. The houses where the officers are quartered are a mile away. I try to understand a man beating his way there and back. Ely hasn't eaten in three days. Edward walked a mile in the snow and they brought back a dead man. Ely is here by the fire.

“God damn them,” I said.

“They told me a food train comes tonight. They took the name of the regiment and company.”

Jacob cursed them. He paced back and forth, screaming his rage until it seemed to fill the dugout full and overflowing.

“Enough—enough!” Clark yelled. “The fruit of sin—do you hear me! You're no men, and you reap no fruits of men, but the fruits of sin! As ye sow, so shall ye reap! You lie with your women without shame. You sport and you have no shame for your sporting. You curse God, and in turn you are cursed by God! You made an idol of freedom, and now the idol's smashed open. Allen there—with a slut in his arms. Kenton sharing his woman among the lot of you. Charles who would look from the face of God to the face of a woman! You whore and murder among yourselves! I call God to blast you for your crimes—I call God!” He fell on his knees; he stretched out his arms. His face grew livid and then deathly pale. Then he crumpled up on the floor.

Ely tried to pick him up. He said: “Help me, Allen.”

We put him on his bed. His eyes were closed, his chest heaving. Jacob tried to make him hear; Jacob was calmed suddenly.

“We're taking yer words to heart—Clark, you hear me?”

I went to Bess.

She was crying softly, without hysteria, but in an agony of pain. She said to me: “Allen, I'm not a bad woman. He laid a curse of God on me.”

“You're not—you're not,” I said.

“Allen—I'll sleep no more. Even if I die, I'll not sleep in peace.”

Bending over, I tried to kiss her. She pushed me away. “Don't kiss me, Allen.”

Charley Green's woman cried: “Who's he to curse me? Who is he, the rotten mock of a man?”

“Ah—be quiet, Annie,” Charley groaned. I took Bess' hand. I turned it over, put it to my lips. “You sleep,” I said, “sleep.”

I turned to Clark. Jacob had dropped onto his bunk, a mass of helpless bones. Ely stood by Vandeer's bed. The Jew stood just behind him, a bent figure for the ages, as filthy and ragged as any of us—but different.

Ely said: “I'm afraid for him, Allen. We need a doctor.”

I looked at Clark. He lay in bed, breathing hoarsely, sweating, his eyes wide open.

“There's no doctor in the Pennsylvania huts. A leech won't come here from the hospital.”

“We'll bear him down there,” Ely said.

I shook my head. “I can't, Ely. There's no strength left in me.”

I watched Ely's eyes pass round the dugout. His shaggy, bearded head turned slowly: Jacob of no use, Charley Green sick and unable to move, Henry Lane with great festering sores on his feet, Kenton by the fire, as if he heard nothing of Clark Vandeer's raving.

“You'll come?” Ely asked the Jew.

“I'll come,” I said. “Christ, I'll come, Ely.”

We took clothes wherever we could find them. Charley's woman gave a blanket, a petticoat. She lay in bed half-naked, clinging close to him. She called me over.

“If he comes to his senses—plead him to take back the curse.”

“There's no curse,” Ely said uncertainly.

We picked up Clark, the three of us. Ely, myself, and the Jew. He was skin and bones and he couldn't have weighed more than ninety or a hundred pounds, but he was more than enough for us. We could barely hold his weight.

We went outside and tried to go through the snow. There was a sleet blowing; it was like moving through a morass that sucked in our legs. Sometimes we couldn't move, had to stand still waiting for our bodies to gather the strength to go on. I tried to picture Ely going through this for two miles, to the commissary and back. Coming back empty-handed. Now going out with us again. What is it in Ely? I look at him sometimes, and try to understand. Where is the strength? All of us are thin, but Ely is thinner. Our feet are wretched, but Ely's feet are stumps of mangled flesh. Yet Ely walks without showing the pain. When there is work to be done, Ely does it. When a strong man is needed, Ely draws strength from somewhere. Yet he isn't like Jacob. Jacob is fire, but Ely is spirit. Jacob is hate, but Ely is love. I think, sometimes, that when this is over, Ely will endure. Jacob will burn out, but Ely will endure.

It is about three-quarters of a mile to the hospital, around the shoulder of the hill and down into the valley. Where we stand now, on the top of the hill, we are unprotected, open to every blast of wind that crosses the countryside. I look back and see the dugouts as heaps of snow. No life. Even the smoke is torn from the chimneys and dissipated. I think of how it would be if the British attacked us now, marched from Philadelphia and walked into our dugouts. No one to stop them or challenge them, only half-naked beggars who would sacrifice pride and honour for a bowl of stew. There would be no shots fired. We would be fed. Then we would go back home.

I look down the white slope, half-imagine it. Why don't they come and make an end?

We went on slowly. It was on to late afternoon now, growing dark already. I kept my head down, but Ely led us; and whenever I glanced at him, his head was up, seeking the way. The Jew was a white, inscrutable figure. I had a feeling that I was walking into darkness—made up of white snow, buried deep in white snow. A sense of lightness overcame me, and I no longer felt my feet or the weight of Vandeer.

We stopped once again, taking strength. Across the road, on the slope of Mount Joy, I saw a sentry. He stood in a lunette, a white cannon showing its head beside him. He stood without moving.

“A short way,” Ely said.

We pushed up the winding path that led to the hospital. It was a long log building. The sentry by the door scarcely glanced at us. I guess he was used to parties carrying men.

Ely pounded at the door. An officer opened it, a tall, shaven man who wore epaulettes. I didn't know him.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

“We're of a Pennsylvania brigade. We have a sick man.”

“You've a doctor there, haven't you?”

“You know damn well we haven't!” I cried.

“Use a little respect when you speak, sir—or that tongue'll be whipped out of you.”

“You can go to hell,” I said. “By God, you can go to hell, mister!”

“Take no offense,” Ely begged him. “We're half-starved We're not fit to walk.”

I could see the officer calculating how far he could go with us. Lately, they were beginning to wonder about the half-beasts they led.

There had been no parades, just a few inspections by lieutenants and captains, and long days between inspections. A sentry on a hill, huddled over his musket, wrapped in all the clothes his comrades could spare him. They were beginning to have strange doubts when they saw us come out of our holes, like beasts. Only a sense of fear of the greater cold outside kept the beasts together. That and their weakness; their weakness made them afraid of the great distances between this place and their homes. But they had their guns. If they turned the guns on the officers and went off together, that would be the end of it.

He measured us, saw we were unarmed. “The hospital's full,” he said. “No beds are left. Try Varnum's hospital at the redoubt.” Varnum's hospital was a good mile away.

Ely said nothing; the breath came in thin steam from between his lips. The Jew said, in his curious Amsterdam Dutch: “Give a comrade a place to die. We gave our enemies that. Put a little warm food between his lips.”

The officer didn't understand Dutch. “Speak English,” he snapped. “The army's too full of your kind.”

“We can't walk a mile to the redoubt,” I pleaded, hating myself for pleading. “We can't walk that far——”

The two sentries were looking on, dulled by cold, their beards full of the froth of their breath. I wondered whether they would make any move; I wondered how long it would be before each of us in turn came there, like Clark. Clark was groaning now, talking. His words didn't make sense.

“We can't walk a mile now,” I said. “We can't walk that far.”

“Give him space on your floor,” Ely said. “Give him six feet of your floor. The man'll freeze to death if you keep him here.”

“Six feet on a gibbet would do the lot of you.” He was a New York City man—or English-born; he had the whining, rising inflection.

“We're going in,” Ely said. I caught Ely's eyes; I had a rush of sickening fear. I knew that when anger came on Ely, it would destroy him and whoever stood in his way.

I cried: “Ely, damn the swine, and we'll go to the redoubt!”

Ely started forward, bearing Vandeer and the two of us with him. I tried to hold back. The officer wore a sword, and his hand was on the hilt now.