To Try Men's Souls - George Washington 1 (33 page)

“He went over to the British,” Rush announced.

“Didn’t he sign the Declaration?”

“He did and now he is with them. I’ve been told he was fearful they would burn his home and hang him. Damn him. The first of the signers to change his coat. So far, the only one.”

As he spoke he lowered his voice, obviously concerned that others in the house might hear.

“Your wife, sir?”

“She is safe here, but too ashamed to appear before others for the moment. But if we are forced to flee, her father’s actions will assure her safety.”

Tom could not reply.

“Now to work!” Rush announced. He pushed his chair back and led Thomas into his office. There, resting on a desk, were the tattered, water-stained pages Thomas had carried across New Jersey. He raced to them to pick them up, almost embracing them like a lover. They were safe.

“You have written with a pen of fire,” Rush announced.

Tom looked back at him gratefully.

“But the scribbling, my man, is hard to read in places.”

“Try writing in the middle of the night in a driving storm with only a candle and a half-frozen bottle of ink.”

Rush gestured toward the desk. “I’ve laid out fresh paper for you. May I suggest you rewrite clearly. If you are too tired, I can call in Michael, and you can dictate.”

Thomas shook his head. “The work is mine.”

“Fine then.”

Feeling uncomfortable when Rush did not continue, Tom sat down in his chair. The desk was neat, an ink pot of silver, quills cut and laid out, paper of good quality. He sat and stared at the tools of his new trade, and was aware that Rush was standing behind him. Watching.

“Go ahead, my friend. Go to work.”

“Not with you here,” Thomas said sharply. “I can’t write with you staring over my shoulder like this. Everyone seems to think they can . . .”

A bit crestfallen, Rush nodded. “I’ll go see to some details. It might take awhile, but I think we can find someone with the courage to print this.”

“And paper. We’ll need paper. McKinney said nearly every printer in Philadelphia is out of stock.”

Rush took the order as if he were the servant. He left the room, closing the door.

Thomas looked down at the fresh sheets of paper, and at the tattered first copy, water stains having blurred some of the words. But he did not need to be reminded.

He began to write.

Styner and Matthews, Philadelphia
December 19, 1776

A printer’s office was familiar territory to Tom. It was where he had first found his new profession in America, as one of the editors of the
Pennsylvania Journal
. It was here that the first copies of
Common Sense
had been printed. Styner and Matthews, at least, still had some nerve left to them, and after days of cajoling by Rush, who had finally sent out Michael and others to scour the city and nearby villages for paper of good stock. Rush had purchased the paper at a fair price with his own money, not with continentals but with silver Dutch dollars.

All was now ready and Thomas felt a quivering inside. He had taken off his fine jacket, put on a printer’s smock, and sat at the proofing table, reading the type as it was set, a rare skill he had mastered, to read the raised letters backward as they were set into the chase, properly blocked and locked in place. To miss a letter or space meant having to take the entire page out, unlock the chase, move type to replace the mistake, and avoid creating new mistakes. A good typesetter and reader was a man worth much, and he had mastered the skill.

Rush stood behind him, and Thomas did not object to his watching him.

There was a feeling of nervous anticipation in the room. Thomas finally leaned back, nodding. “It’s ready.” There was a choke to his voice.

A printer’s apprentice carefully lifted the heavy form, carried it to the press, and set it in place; Chris Matthews, the co-owner of the firm, himself ensuring that it was locked in firmly. With his own hand he ran the ink roller over the type, stepped back while the apprentice placed a sheet of paper atop it and another boy leaned into the lever that lowered the platen. Too light and the imprint would not take. Too hard and the paper would warp, the raised letters punching through.

Tom watched with rapt attention, Rush by his side, as Chris Matthews leaned on the press handle for a moment and then released it, plate with paper atop it sliding out from under the press. Tom stepped forward and peeled the sheet back, lifting it off swiftly but carefully so that the fresh ink would not smear and held it up to the light streaming in through the large windows all printers tried to have in their press room to make reading easier.

The imprint was dark, always the case with the very first sheet. He scanned the lines swiftly. A couple of lines were slightly off, drifting a few fractions of an inch downward, not braced in tight enough, one typo, but not enough to stop now. Rush tried to edge closer in, but Thomas did not release the sheet. For a minute this was his and his alone——the journal of suffering, of agony, of the dying of a cause before it was even properly born. This page spoke of all that, and more: perhaps he could breathe life back into it.

He finished the last line, looked at Chris Matthews, and nodded. “Print it” was all he could say.

He reached up and clipped the sheet to one of dozens of strings that ran the length of the room, from just below the ceiling, drying lines where the fresh sheets would hang until the ink set.

Until this moment he had been consumed with a deep fear that
had been with him since the first night in Newark. That he might be killed. In itself that was almost inconsequential now, for he had seen so much of death these last few months that he had come to reason that if such were his fate, he could not choose better company. His fear was that, if they did roll him into a grave, those precious sheets of paper would molder with him.

Some inner voice told him that maybe this now was truly the one moment in his life that he had lived for. Whatever he had written before, or would ever write, would never match what he had written
here,
the first sheet now hanging on the drying line, a second sheet going up beside the first, and then a third.

They cannot kill me now, he thought. One can throw a single sheet into a flame and it is lost. In the days when he and Rush had wandered the streets, arguing with printers, struggling to find paper, he would obsessively dwell on the only two copies extant, the original stained sheets and the more neatly printed version resting on the typesetter’s table.

Philadelphia had turned. Men like those who had tried to lure Putnam into a dark corner and murder him now openly wandered the streets, taunting and spreading rumors and threats. Houses were shuttered, shops closed. There was the inexpressible sense, like the feeling one had on a hot summer day, of a storm approaching. But which way would this storm break?

Might he and Rush have returned to find the house looted, the papers gone? That had so haunted him, when at night he retired to the room Rush had given him, he took the original with him, rolled up in his pack, ready at hand if he needed to flee.

Sleep had come hard. When it did, again the nightmares, the mud, snow, and staggering forward, step by step, as if in hell, and this was his fate forever, with his mouth sealed, his hands gone, unable to write and then speak aloud what he had written.

Now the nightmare was dissolving into print before his eyes.

Ten sheets now hung from the drying line, then fifteen and twenty.

Chris Matthews, unable to contain himself any longer, went to
the first sheet and reached up to unclip it from the line. He looked over at Thomas as if seeking permission.

It no longer belongs to me, Thomas realized. I did not write it for me. I must let it go.

He nodded approval.

Matthews took the page down and walked over the window and held it up to the light. His eyes scanned back and forth, and Thomas could see a brightness to them.

Matthews cleared his throat: “
The American Crisis
,” he announced.

“These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it
NOW
, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

Matthews’s voice began to rise. The workers in the room fell silent, looking over at him. Matthews holding the sheet up high, cleared his voice and spoke as if delivering an oration.

“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly:——’Tis dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to set a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as F
REEDOM
should not be highly rated.”

He looked over at Thomas, eyes wet. Thomas stood silent.

“Merciful God,” Matthews whispered. “We’ll hang for this, but the hell with the bloody bastards.”

Thomas looked over at the printer, who gazed at him fiercely for an instant, and turned back to his typesetting. Printer’s assistants at the press were rolling on ink, laying down paper, sliding the form under the press, printed sheet emerging, an apprentice peeling the sheet off and taking it to a drying line, passing it to another boy on a ladder who clipped it up.

Twenty sheets had doubled, and were doubling again.

Rush, silent, scanned down through the rest of the chapter, lips moving silently.

Another sheet was taken down, and then another, Matthews looking over his work, commenting on the need to reset because several of the lines were slipping, but not to do it until the next form was ready to be printed.

At a break in his work, he came over to Thomas and clasped his hand, both of them with hands blackened by printer’s ink.

“Thank you,” Matthews said softly. “See you in hell once those bloody lobsterbacks march in. If they’re going to burn this shop, they’ll have to kill me first.”

“I’ll stand with you when the time comes, my friend.”

Matthews shook his head. “I just print this. You’re the one who thinks it out, Tom Paine. No, I want you out of this city so you can keep on writing.”

He saw the others were looking at him, nodding. He swallowed his emotions. He couldn’t speak.

Rush went over to the drying lines and pulled down a dozen copies and rolled them up.

“I’m going north to inspect the army,” Rush announced. “I’m taking these with me.”

He looked around the room.

“The first copy goes directly into the hands of General Washington. I want it read to every man who is under arms and enduring hell this day. I want it read. Keep at it, Matthews. Keep at it.”

He reached into his pocket and drew out a small purse.

“When you run out of paper, use this to buy more. I don’t care how much. Just find the paper and keep at it.”

Matthews took the purse but seemed almost reluctant to do so. He tossed it onto a table and returned to supervising the press as another sheet came off, and then another and another.

Rush came up close to Paine and extended his hand. Thomas looked down at his own blackened fingers and palm. Rush laughed and grasped it anyhow.

“Thomas Paine. I think your words just might save a country,” Rush announced, and, turning, he left the shop. As he departed Thomas noticed Michael standing in the corner, opening the door for Rush as he left. Their gazes locked for a moment. Michael nodded, as if in salute as he followed Rush out the door.

The printers hardly noticed Rush’s departure. A hundred or more sheets were now up, one of the apprentices beginning to take the first ones down, stacking them up, ready to be bundled and carted out to street corners to be sold for a penny . . . or for five dollars continental.

Paine took one of the sheets and wandered to a far corner of the room, placing the sheet on a table. He knew Matthews’s habits and went into a storage room, moved a few crates, found what he wanted and came out. He sat down at the table, gazing at the sheet of paper.

Matthews looked over at him, and for once did not complain as Thomas Paine uncorked the bottle of rum, held it up, and took several long swallows.

He looked down at his words. No, not his words, the words of the men he had marched with, the words of men he had seen die, the words of a few, a gallant few who still believed.

He drained the bottle in minutes, lowered his head onto the sheet of paper, rich with the scent of fresh ink, filled with the dreams of his soul, and went to sleep.

Thomas Paine slept through the day, while a hundred sheets became a thousand, and then a thousand more. Boys raced out of the shop shouting that they carried Paine’s new work, as crowds gathered together at street corners to read his words aloud, and men looked one to another, men who but days before felt defeated and beaten, and asked within their hearts, What shall I do now?

What must I do now that I have read these truths?