The Proud and the Free

by Howard Fast

  I’ll see you in hell first, said the man.

  I’ll see you there, said Jack Maloney cheerfully and emptied his rum in the man’s face. Now Hegel was thundering across the room and people were rising everywhere, but the man who had gotten the rum was rising to fight, spluttering and swearing, and so were his companions, and he was with his hand in his waistcoat, looking for a weapon of a kind, so I considered it time for me to stop dreaming and do something. They were to crush little Jack Maloney like a cockroach, but they underestimated their man, as the large man usually will the small one, and he tipped the table upon them and crowned one of them with his mug. Another who would have flanked him, I touched gently with the candlestick – not enough to hurt him, but only to deflect him, and then I put the heel of my hand in the face of roaring Josef Hegel, tipping him upon the man who had gone down from the stick.

  It’s time for the door, Jackie! I shouted, and we fought our way across that room in a fine fashion, sowing devastation around us, until at last, and more sober, we were out in the cold wet night and running down the street with a great outcry behind us.

  Now come with me, you crazy damned fool, I told Jack Maloney, grasping his arm and pulling him into a dark little alley, the kind with which Philadelphia abounds; and I dragged him along to an old woodshed, where we crawled in among the shavings and listened to the hue and cry pass.

  What a brave thing you’ve done, I said, for here we are without even our knapsacks.

  Yet better than in jail, Jamie, you will admit, he insisted.

  I will not admit that, you crazy, drunken Lobster, for there is enough dishonor to be made of the Line without you adding to it.

  Did I add to it, Jamie?

  That you did.

  Ah, Jamie, he moaned, putting his arm around me and weeping on my wet sleeve, there you are, a little bit of a lad of twenty-two summers, and I am thirty-six years old and witless, and you will go off and leave me with proper disgust, and here I will be in this strange, wild land of America, a deserter from the King’s army and a renegade to freedom. A renegade, Jamie, do you hear me, for what was our great rising in the end? What was it, Jamie? Naked we came into the world, and naked we lie here, two hunted men. What a kettle of stew the world is for our kind, Jamie – Jamie, my lad, look upon ourselves as those respectable men at the tavern looked upon us, two dirty, wretched soldiers who have turned their backs upon the struggle. I tell you, there was a great and immense rightness in their attitude.

  Shut your mouth, I said angrily. You are drunk, Jack Maloney, and to listen to you turns my stomach.

  Drunk, I am, Jamie, royal drunk, drunk as quality, but there is nevertheless a deep truth in my drunkenness. I see things clearly. I see Handsome Jack Maloney clearly, and it frightens my immortal soul to see him so. I am a little man walking with a heavy burden upon me, and the burden is freedom. What right had I to make a great blather over those citizens in the tavern?

  Every right, I threw at him, for there they sat and swilled while we fought and died.

  Yes, yes, Jamie, he answered me very softly. We fought and died. That was the essential of it. The cross we bear is like the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, when his poor weary feet took him up the hill to Calvary. Did he turn and say, Lessen my burden …? No – no indeed, Jamie, nothing of that he said to the citizens who watched him go past.

  And you are not Jesus Christ, Jack Maloney.

  As you say, Jamie, but did it never occur to you that we share something?

  You talk like a damned parson!

  No, Jamie – God forgive me that I should talk like a parson! Drunk I am, but not that drunk. Not with religion, Jamie, but with a little bit of the truth. A little bit. Did it ever occur to you, Jamie Stuart, to contemplate the truth, the immense awful truth of today and yesterday, of the present and the past and the future too, the way a man lies upon the ground and contemplates the stars in the sky in their vastness? Jamie, you are a young lad, so a, lot that I say you will thread into one ear and out the other, but some years ago I was stationed at a place called Gibraltar where there is a single rock as high as a mountain and the little monkeys clamber all over it, and we in the garrison there made a mutiny and struck for our freedom, and afterwards forty good lads were hanged up by their necks, and then I climbed me the rock and lay on top of it upon my back, looking up at the soft summer sky which is so lovely in those far parts and asking myself, What is the meaning of a man who dies unknown and unsung and unremembered, with a curse upon his soul from all of the gentry and all of the quality, and all of the kings and their grand commanders, and even his own true comrades are questioning themselves to know whether what he did was right or wrong or good or bad – and who keeps a score, Jamie Stuart, of the whiplashes and the canes and the multitude of other sorrows since time began? Who keeps that score, and what is the meaning of all the ranks of men who stand up for freedom and are then struck down? Always, they are like you and me, miserable and lowly men, with no quality to them and no grand manners and not even a decent shirt on their backs; but it is the essence of this thing called freedom that we should have some understanding of it, while those who sit and swill in the taverns look down upon us. Do you know where the score is kept, Jamie Stuart?

  Where? I asked, caught up, in spite of myself, in his drunken outpouring.

  In your own heart, Jamie Stuart, and in mine too; and with that he rose up to his feet.

  Where are you going? I asked him.

  Back to the Line, Jamie, where I will enlist me. And I hope to God that you will go with me.

  The devil I will! I cried. I will not return and serve under that cursed crew – never! I will lay me down and die first!

  Then I’m sorry, Jamie, because it’s a lonesome thing to travel singly. But I am going.

  But not tonight, I said, grasping his arm. Not tonight, you drunken idiot. Wait until morning.

  He shook off my hand and answered with immense dignity, I will not wait until morning, Jamie, and you can do as you damn please. I will go now while the pride is upon me.

  And with that he went out of the shed and into the rain.

  So Jack Maloney left me, and I did not follow him – and yet I saw him again. I let him go out into the rain and the dark cold night – and for all I knew, out of my life and away from me forever; and there was the last of my good and splendid comrades whom I had lived with and eaten with and by whose side I had fought ever since I was a little lad of seventeen years.

  All alone in the world, you are, Jamie Stuart, I said to myself, as I lay there in that woodshed, all alone with nothing to show for the years you carried a musket and bayonet. Alone and alone.

  And like a child, I put my face in my hands and wept tears of bitterness and self-pity. Then I heard a noise and a scratching, and drew back in fear, but it was only a bedraggled cat seeking the same shelter I had. I purred to him and he came to me, and I gathered him close in my arms, and that way, sleeping sometimes, awake and shivering sometimes, I passed that unhappy night.

  If the commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the Confederation gave me nothing else, I could thank them for a body that was hard as nails and more or less inured to every variety of cold and sickness, and I could thank them that I was able to walk out of Philadelphia the next morning on the turnpike to York village. The clouds had blown away, and it was a clear, cold sunny day, with blue sky and a clean wind from westward. So I said good-by to Philadelphia, which was no town to my liking, and I turned my steps to the only place that had some aspects of home to me. There were my memories and there was sweet Molly Bracken, and there were the old houses, the old church and the old mill – and all the childhood matters that one dreams about.

  So there I went; and because I was young and healthy, my spirits soon picked up, and I strode along the pike with long steps, whistling as I walked.

  PART TEN

  Wherein I tell of my homecoming to York village in Pennsylvania, and of what took place until that day when I heard the bea
ting of the drums again.

  IT IS HARD to imagine today how far away one place was from another in those old times, for as you know there were no railroads then anywhere in the whole land, and no river steam vessels, and no smooth surfaces on the highways for fast stages to dash along, but only the lumpy pikes and post roads, which were for the most part two tracks grooved deep in the mud, soft and slimy in the springtime, dusty in the summertime, but murderously hard with knife edges in the frozen wintertime. The gentry went by horse, but poor folk walked; and I was just about as poor as a lad could be. So it took me four long days to walk the distance to York village, and when I came there, the soles of my boots were worn to nothing; and if I was thin before, I was thinner now, my cheeks sunken, my belly rubbing lovingly against my spine.

  I ate well on the first day and a little on the third day, and otherwise I ate nothing at all on that trip. The first day, after seven or eight miles of the cold winter morning had made me ravenously hungry, I stopped at a farmhouse gate, with the dogs yapping against it and longing for a chance to try their teeth on me, and with the wonderful smell of frying scrapple coming from within. That was a food I had not smelled or tasted a long, long while now, and I stood against the gate looking longingly at the little house, with its strange yellow and blue decoration – which told me that Bavarians lived within – and its plume of smoke in the chimney. In all the world, there is nothing like smoke out of a chimney to make a homeless man feel his condition. There I stood, until the door opened, and a small, neat, motherly woman appeared, with a veritable horde of children somehow managing to find shelter behind her skirts.

  Her corn-colored hair was bound tightly back, and her tiny blue eyes regarded me shrewdly, as she said, Was willst du, knabe?

  I had little enough German then; I wanted to say something else, something about myself and my homelessness, but I came out with, Kleine Mutter … and then added, Hunger ich.

  The children giggled at this very bad speech, but something touched the lady deep to her heart, and she slapped them into silence, called off the dogs and invited me in. How I did eat that morning! An immense platter of scrapple was put before me, and with it I had three bowls of wheat porridge, good and salty, with lumps of fresh-churned butter melting in it. There was fresh cottage cheese and little yeast rolls that were taken out of the oven as I entered and a big wooden dish of boiled potatoes, with cream for a sauce. And for a side dish, for a nibble as we call it, there was smoked duck, cold and sliced thin with sliced hard-boiled eggs. And up and down the table were earthenware pots of jam, peach and apple and crabapple and the marvelous carrot jam that one finds only in this part of Pennsylvania. And to wash it all down, there were big clay jugs of milk, fresh taken from the cows only a few hours before and hot and sweet-smelling and delicious. It was such a breakfast as I had not eaten for years and years, such a breakfast as one could only find in the South Country of Pennsylvania, and I could have wept for the look and the taste and the smell of that food.

  I sat at the table with the family, a weather-beaten, work-hardened man of fifty or so, his wife, and five children, the oldest about twelve, the youngest just a babe; and since they had no English at all, I tried my best to talk to them in my bad German, and to answer the many questions they threw at me. First, they let me eat, seeing how hungry I was, and enjoying, the way simple people do, the quantity of my appetite. Seeing that they did not hold against me the fact that I wore a soldier’s overalls, I told them what I could about myself in their language, who I was and from where. They listened to every word respectfully and attentively.

  Continental, the children said. They knew that word, and they said, Yankee?

  No, no, I told them. Fremden Brigada – brigada. I spoke with my hands and with English, and the farmer man laid a hand on his wife’s arm.

  Wir haben einen sohn – he said very slowly, so I would be certain to understand. A tall son, a strong son who had worked with him, but then he went off. And the woman asked me to eat, please eat more, eat until all the hunger was gone. But there were hungers that never go, and suddenly I was sorry that I had come in here. But in German words I shaped the question, Who was their son and where was he?

  In dem fremden brigada, said the man.

  Du …126? the wife asked, and the same question was in the children’s eyes. And the man repeated slowly, In dem fremden brigada.

  I was there, I said; but I did not tell them that the foreign brigades were no more, no longer, but dissolved and gone forever. Was the war gone too and dissolved forever? I didn’t know, but I asked them the name of their son.

  Hans Stuttman.

  And I knew. Was there anyone in the brigades I did not know? But it was three whole months since he had run with the bloody dysentery and laid down and died. What was I to tell them?

  Das Kann man nicht wissen?

  No, I answered, so many men in so great an army. I knew him not at all. I thought and thought; what was he like and what had he suffered and what had he dreamed? But he would never come back to this little brightly painted house, never at all. No, I knew him not, I said. I rose to go and, with questions still an ache in their eyes, they filled my pockets with bread and potatoes, so I had supper that night and an empty belly the next day. The second day I had nothing, and two farm doors were closed to me until my pride forbade me to go near any others or to beg at the kitchen of an inn; for while I had been many things, I was never a beggar and would not turn one now. On the third day, I saw a gypsy wagon camped in a little clearing among the trees, and there I went and ate of a rabbit stew the Romany folk were cooking. Though I was welcomed among them, there was precious little of the stew, and I ate only enough to take the edge off my hunger. But I lay by their fire that night, having no flint of my own to make one with, and I listened to their sad Romany music and looked at their fine-featured maidens – but not with wanting now, because I was on my way to see a maid of my own. The yearning to move was more than I could withstand, and though they invited me to wait and ride with them, I was up and afoot before the dawn, and when the sun rose, it shed its cold light on the lovely foothills of my own land. And that evening I arrived at the village of York.

  Ours was a quiet, out-of-the-way little village, with nothing in particular to distinguish it until the Congress was driven out of Philadelphia in 1777 and came there to sit; but long before I returned now, the Congress had gone away and back to Philadelphia, and the one simple straight street of York village and the two simple cross streets that divided it were very much as I had known them in 1775, when first I marched away. I came walking along the pike as the sun was setting, onto what we had called the Deeley Street when I was a boy, but which even then had lost that early name, and there was the house of the master cobbler where I had been apprenticed, and as I passed by I glanced in and saw Fritz Tumbrill, seemingly not one whit changed, even though I had lived lifetimes since I saw him last; and here across the street was the feed store, the chemist’s shop, and the Halfway Inn, called that, I think, because it was roughly halfway between Philadelphia and the Virginias. So I moved down the street in the twilight, seeing this and that which was the same and seeing this one and that one, whom I knew very well indeed; but I lacked the courage to speak even one hello, and no one at all knew me, who had gone away a stripling boy with a downy face and came back a tall man with a week’s growth of beard upon him.

  Not that they didn’t look at me, for a soldier of the Line was no common sight in York village, and if nothing else, my big, dirty, canvas overalls marked me surely for what I was; but there were other things too: the beard on my face, the slow aimlessness of my steps – for who else is so adrift as a soldier discharged? – the cut of one shoulder above the other from the weight of twenty pounds of musket I had grown to manhood with, and that wary walk of the man who has learned to use the bayonet. Every face was turned toward me, but none saw in me Jamie Stuart who had gone away once, and none addressed me as I moved down the street to the old church an
d the ivy-covered manse. For where else would I go but there, and what other friends in the world had I but Jacob Bracken and his daughter Molly? You would think, wouldn’t you, that there would be a lot from York village in the foreign brigades? But though once there had been nine from this place, there was only myself, Jamie Stuart, left from them. One of them, Frank Califf, had come home; two others in the 1st Regiment had died at Monmouth, and a fourth at York city a long time back. Three had been taken by sickness, and the last had disappeared, as soldiers do, gone away and no one knew to where. But here I was back, and I could imagine these quiet and home-kept citizens whispering:

  Look how he goes to the church, and is it not a sorrowful thing what comes of a soldier!

  There walked by me Brenton, the tanner, who had once hided me well for stealing his apples, and though he looked me full in my face, he knew me not, nor did Mrs. Swinson, nor Grandmother Sturtz, who did my mother’s wifery, as I have heard said, when I came into the world. So I walked on, my heart filled with wonder and terror that I would see Molly Bracken as I saw them, and that she, as they, would see nothing of the lad she loved; but I did not see her, and presently I came to the manse and knocked at the door.

  Himself, Jacob Bracken answered the door in the color-run twilight of that evening when I came home, with the sun setting in the winter west, with one paintbrush of violet across the sky and with the red glow of eventide lighting that wise and gentle man who opened the door to me. But even his eyes were not discerning enough, and he looked upon me gravely, standing there tall and unafraid, his long, narrow face seriously inquisitive of a travel-worn soldier who knocked upon his door, his side-whiskers grayer than I remembered them, but otherwise no different – and all of that was immensely reassuring, for one who is marked and branded with revolution is apt to consider that all the world turns over with his own adventures; and here was this little village and the folk in it fairly much the same as when I had left them. His broad mouth held that slight, ready smile, which told you that here was a man of God not wholly unconcerned with the brown dirt and the folk who stood upon it, and he said to me quietly: