The Proud and the Free (3 page)

The hut was twenty feet long and sixteen deep, fronting on the parade – which made it somewhat bigger than most of the others. It was made of logs, and chinked with clay, and had a dirt floor and a bark roof, no windows and a clay and log hearth. We bedded in threes, one atop the other, and there was a sawbuck table and two benches down the middle, at which we ate when there was anything for eating. The bunks were split logs with straw bolsters, only it was years since we had sewn the last of the bolsters into shirts and the last of our blankets into coats, so that now we slept on the straw and under it too. Such were our hutments.

In this hut of mine, Tommy Mahoney breathed out his last; and we laid the little lad out on the table, and Katy Waggoner and Olive Lutz came in to wash him and make him ready for the ground. We took off all his clothes and washed his poor skinny body clean, and then we washed the few rags he wore, dried them by the fire, and dressed him over again. Katy Waggoner went to the quartermaster general to beg a winding sheet, but for her pains all she got was a curse and a slap in the face – which was no way to treat her, for all that she was a loose and slatternly woman. But even if she had gotten a winding sheet of the purest linen, I do not think that what followed would have been noticeably altered. I start this narrative from the death of Tommy Mahoney, only because I must have a starting point somewhere and not because I believe it was the death of the drummer boy, from sadness, starvation and bleeding lungs, that caused what followed. Nor do I believe that the beating of the two Kelly brothers, John and Dobie, made any decisive difference. The two of them were Romans who had come to us as replacements, signing in for what they and theirs had suffered in the old country from the British and from their own tyrants; and not knowing that the boy was a Protestant lad, and not knowing that in such a village as Morristown there could be no Roman priest, they now set off, without leave, to fetch one.

They were men out of the 2nd Pennsylvania, in which there were many Polish and Irish, and particularly eleven Jews, which gave the officers a singular reason for hatred. It is such a long time back that I may have a name twisted here and there, but I think it was Captain Sudburry and four or five of his fellows who stopped the Kelly brothers, demanding of them:

Now where are you going, my lads?

We're off to Morristown to fetch a father for a little lad who died unshriven, John Kelly replied.

The hell you are! And where are your papers for leave? the officers said ungraciously.

We have no papers, John Kelly answered, courteously enough as we heard of it, but his brother spoke up and asked, Now would ye want papers to enter into the gates of heaven, or hell also? Here is a little lad from the old country, from Dublin town, from which me blessed mother came, and he wasted away into his death all unshriven, and we only seek a holy father to give him a little unction.

Whether they knew what either Kelly brother spoke of, I know not; but they fell into a fury and cursed them out.

Now to hell with ye, for ye talk like a damned Englishman, said one of the Kelly brothers.

That was all that was needed. The officers, of whom there were at least four or five, drew their swords and set about to belabor the two boys with the flats and backs. One of the officers was armed with an espontoon, a weapon like a pike and much in favor by officers in those critical days, and this he drove into the stomach of Dobie Kelly, while the other was bruised and cut all over the face and head. Then both of them were taken under guard, and when we heard about it, early on the eve of New Year, Dobie Kelly was already dead.

You can imagine how it was. We were sitting in a wake around the body of the little drummer lad, and the word came to us, brought by Stanislaus Prukish, sergeant in the 2nd. Already, there were grouped around the boy, in the flickering firelight, small delegations of one or two sergeants or corporals who had come from each of the ten infantry regiments and from the artillery company too, for the lad had been much considered for his singing and the good spirits he once owned. Prukish told us what he knew of the incident of the Kelly brothers.

There it is, he said, in his thick Polish accent, which I cannot reproduce. We are not fast enough dying, so they have begun the killing. We are the enemy instead of the Lobsters.

If there was a drop of rum in this cursed encampment, I would be howling drunk this evening, said Sean O'Toole of the 4th Regiment. I would spin my head like a top and go out into the white snow and howl like the devil at the stars. But there is no rum, and here we are sitting at the wake of two good lads, with never a little bit of a drop to wet our throats.

Be damned with it! I have not been paid these eleven months, not even in the lousy Yankee paper; I have not been clothed; I have not been fed. The cold is in me bones.

Silence fell, and in the next half-hour it was only interrupted when someone said to throw another handful of faggots on the fire. I don't know what would have been that evening had we been drunk, the way soldiers have a right to be on the eve of the New Year; but apart from the officers' quarters in the fine and genteel houses, there was not a dram of spirits in the camp. Sober we were, sober and moody and angry. Nor were we cold, for one by one, men entered to pay their respects, and women too, until more than fifty of us were packed into the one cabin, on the floor, on the bunks, sprawled, squatting, standing; and those who came stayed. Sergeant Billy Bowzar of the 10th came in, and with him Jim Holt, the black man who was corporal in the 2nd. The two Jews, brothers in the 2nd, Aaron and Moses Gonzales, entered, and with them was Danny Connell of my own 11th. Connell had been a minstrel in the old country, and when I saw him first, in 1776, he was as fair a lad to look upon as you would find in all the tidewater countries, twenty-three years old then with black hair and black eyes and a swagger and a dash, and as ready for a fight as a cock with spurs. But now, in his rags, he looked fifty if he looked a day; his hair was gray, as was his big, bushy beard, and his eyes were deep-sunk into his head, and he was as dirty as we all were, and as smelly and as lousy. He had his lass, Mathilda, with him, a mountain girl from the buckskin folk over westward; she was faithful to him and stayed with him from year to year, so thin a breath of wind could blow her away, yet with spirit in her. To look at her made my heart yearn for my own sweet Molly Bracken in York village, but I would not want her here to share my own misery and dirt.

Connell had been to look at the Kellys, and he said as he entered:

It was a wanton thing they did to the boy, and if I had ever raised my voice, they would have done as much to me. For it is in me head that they are stricken mad and that this is the end of everything.

If it's the end of everything, said Freddy Goulay, a black man and corporal in the 6th Regiment, it's an end they made. The only gift they got is to lead us to slaughter. They are whipping men, like overseers, and each of them would be a king. They fill their cup with hate, they do. The people hate them and the land hate them, and we hate them too. Now they don't come near us, they don't touch us, they afraid.

Each had something to say of that sort, but it was surprising with what little anger they said it, and how slowly and regretfully. Our tone was gentler than our appearance, for crammed into the hut, sitting almost one on top of the other, with the little lad's mortal remains stretched out on the table square in the center of us, we looked like something that man had never made of himself before. It was a long, long time, yes many, many months since we had been given money or clothes or a blanket to shelter us from the cold. Put a man in rags, feed him on cornmeal until his teeth are all loose in the sockets, and he will not look after his body as if it were a thing to be precious about; we had stopped shaving because we had stopped caring, and our hair was long and wild and knotted. When we had fought, we were taken into battle like cattle into a slaughter pen, and when the battles were lost, as almost every one was, we were left to hold the field while the Yankees fled.

… So I went into the fine house of Thomas Hardwick, continued Danny Connell, still telling of his journeys to know why and how the Kelly boy had died … and the officers of the 9th Pennsylvania Regiment – may it be glorious in battle, this heart and soul of the Revolution – they sat at dinner. And on the eve of this New Year, when there is no eating or drinking or dancing or singing, would you like me to spin you a tale of the officers at dinner?

You should be sitting with respect at a wake, with respect and sober sorrow, said Olive Lutz.

And have I no respect in me voice? And is my heart not breaking with sober sorrow – me, Danny Connell, who sang such songs of gladness when he was a lad? If ye don't recognize that, you dirty bitch, it's because you got the soul of a slattern!

To hell with that, I told him. If it's the Roman way to have foul talk over the dead, you swallow your tongue, Danny Connell. For this is a Protestant lad laid out on the table.

Then would ye have a theological discussion? asked Connell, combing his beard with his fingers and looking at the ceiling. Here we are Jew and Protestant and Roman and heathen too, but I do not find discrimination among our officers. They hold with equality, me dear Jamie Stuart …

I was on a top bunk, perched with my head against the roof beams; I was bent over – a taller man than the foreigners – chin on knees, and staring with smarting, watering eyes.

… Me dear Jamie Stuart, ye are not the only lad in the regiment can read and write, and I got in me head here four hundred songs. Tell me I'm lying, ye scut.

When our anger rises, we fight each other, said the Jew Aaron Gonzales, so sadly that the tears ran down my cheeks; and Connell cried too, and said more gently:

I got in me head many things, and I don't know how to use them, like ye take me who was a minstrel and set me to coopering. Me father was struck down by the tyrant's hand when he led the march of the starving folk on Dublin town, and I was just a lad when he lay there, with a bullet in his chest and dying in me arms. Danny, he said to me, ye must not take it amiss that a bullet strikes down yer father and lose yer taste for freedom. We are a downtrodden folk, Danny, me lad, and we got no taste for the finer things; but we got a taste for music and a taste for freedom, and these are from the olden times. So he died out his life there, and for the sake of me poor mother, for ten pounds in her hand and passage for me, I bind out to Pennsylvania for two years. But I got this in me head:
We hold these truths to be self-evident – that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
In me head is all this, when I come into the Hardwick House tonight to see if I can find a smell of justice for the Kelly boy. I am a free man. I am no peasant sod, but a free man in the army of the Revolution, in which I enlisted of me own free will out of hatred for the Union Jack and for the rich tyrant who murders the poor. So I come into the Hardwick House, pushing aside Frank Meyers, the stinking orderly who is lapdog there, and there are the gentlemen of the 9th, fifteen of them sitting at this long table, with white linen and candles as bright as the sun, and all of them in their finest buff and blue, and all of them shaven clean, and all of them wigged, and all of them with lace at the cuff and lace at the throat, and all of them with wine in the glass and wine in the bottle, and I am standing there when in there comes a roast of mutton with the very smell enough to break me poor heart. But not even to smell it am I permitted, for I am rushed out of there like I am the plague, which maybe I am from the look of me, and as for Kelly, they said to me that the dirty dog got what he deserved.… So there it is, Jamie Stuart, who is not like myself, a dirty foreigner, but native born out of Pennsylvania. Where have we been and where are we going?…

They looked at me, all of them fanciful people – some good, some bad, some bright and some dull – but all of them fanciful folk or they would not have been there, and I looked back at the thick of their upturned faces, half seen in the dim firelight, with passion and anger wiped out through the mood of Danny Connell's tale, and only a question left. But the question was not new. With high hope and high heart, we answered the call to come to Boston in 1776 where the Yankees had hemmed the British tyrant into the tidewater town; and each and every one of us came with that curious, unspoken, unformed dream that is in the heart of every man with a foot on his neck. They were farmers around Boston town, but we were a different crew, and I came with a dream that no more would an apprentice work for grits and beatings; the sailors came with the dream that free men would sail ships with no lashes on their backs; and the Scottish buckskin men came with a dream of land, so that they would no longer hire out as hunters and pack animals, and so that some day they would wear woven Christian cloth instead of animal skin. The Jews came with a dream of standing up as men free, and so did the black men; and in the bellies of the Irish estevars and ropewalkers was a hunger ache a thousand years old and a hate almost as ancient. And the Poles and the Germans came with their heads bowed, but they would hold them upright now, and all of it because the British were hemmed in Boston town. We did not reason it out. Here was talk of freedom and we knew what side we were on, and we had nothing to lose. But then the years went by, and the question began to burn in us; still we were the poor led by the rich, the disinherited led by those who did inherit, and here were curses and whiplashes and blows from those who spoke the pretty words of freedom. Here was worse hunger, and we knew hunger; here was worse cold, and we knew cold.

The others went home; they came and they went, did the Yankees, which is something that is forgotten now, but the Pennsylvania Line stayed: the foreigns stayed. They had no place to go, and now the foreigns looked at me out of the shadows and out of bloodshot eyes, and I looked at Handsome Jack Maloney, who sat as I did on an uppermost bunk, his small, sharp face the only clean-shaven one among us, his little black eyes observing me narrowly, his mouth twitching a little, as it did in the excitement of an engagement – he who had been a master sergeant in a British regiment, and had deserted and had come to us and our hell with the cold logic of a man who chooses between two sides. That he was, cold and logical and hard as rock.