The Proud and the Free

by Howard Fast

  Who taught me to read? I interrupted.

  I know what you will say, Jamie, but I assure you, Jamie Stuart, that if I had not taught you, another would have, for the desire to learn and know was within you, and this desire to learn and know will never be within all men. Some are wastrels and others are thoughtless, dull people, and that is why even in so just a war as this one, we are forced to open the prisons and poorhouses to find men to serve —so that we come to understand that in the highest cause, the lowest of men will find a place, not because they love liberty more, but because they are fitted to take orders and thereby fitted into the eternal scheme of things. This is a wisdom beyond our understanding, my boy, but we must accept it. And when we accept it, we find that it is the best of ways.

  I see, I said.

  I hope, Jamie, that you do not think I meant any reflection upon your comrades in the foreign brigades.

  What difference does it make, I said slowly and strangely, since I have left them and gone away, but they are dull and thoughtless and see nothing else but to go on serving without pay and without reward? What difference does it make?

  I hope, Jamie, said Pastor Bracken, that you will come to think differently about many of these things …

  I came to think less, perhaps; and I did my work, and the days passed; and April came, with the sweet singing and budding springtime of the Pennsylvania hills. Then I would have been far less than human to remain in the same house as Molly Bracken and remain this cold, aloof and self-sufficient thing that I prided myself on having become; for there was a certain bitter perversity in what I did, as if I took some pleasure in my separation from all the natural things of life. And one evening, when her father sat in his study, writing, I entered the kitchen as Molly Bracken was coming out and went head on into her, and then we were in each other’s arms and I was covering her face with kisses, while she said:

  Jamie, Jamie – how long and how much you hate me!

  I love you the way I’ve never loved anyone.

  And she pulled away and smoothed her hair and said, How you’ve showed me your love, Jamie Stuart!

  I could not.

  And what now, Jamie Stuart? What is different? Is it the springtime that scents a bitch?

  God damn you! I cried. God damn you to hell!

  Why, Jamie? she demanded, standing cool and aloof and apparently undisturbed now. Because a parson’s daughter talks that way? Do you talk to me like I was a whore because you want a whore?

  Shut your mouth! I cried.

  No, that I will not do, Jamie Stuart. For long enough I held my peace, while you lived here, hating us and eating our food and taking our shelter –

  Because you kept me here! And I offered to pay, but you would not take my pay, so that I would be beholden to you!

  And you would not be beholden to anyone, Jamie Stuart? Twenty-two years old you are, and the heart inside of you is like a flint rock that nothing can scrape, and what I said before is true, that wherever you go, the winter cold goes with you! But here I waited five years, dreaming of my fine lad that had gone off to the wars, because whatever you were – and even that first time when I saw you sitting on the cobbler’s bench, your hammer in your hand and your mouth full of tacks – there was a purity and a goodness in you. But there’s no purity and goodness in you now, Jamie Stuart, and the man I waited for died somewhere.

  Then I’ll go! I cried. By God, I’ll go!

  Go on, Jamie Stuart, and see if I keep you here. Go on out and see if you can find the heart and soul of Jamie Stuart wherever you have left it! You should not have come home for somewhere you betrayed yourself and destroyed yourself!

  And wasn’t five years enough?

  She was weeping now as she said, More than enough, more than enough, God help me, if you could have kept your own soul. But this way, Jamie Stuart, you should have stayed where the rest of you is.

  I left her, stormed out and paid no heed to her calling after me, and went straightaway down the street to the inn. It was the first time I had been there in my ten weeks in York village, and this night was the first time I was drunk in my ten weeks at York village. But I knew what I wanted, for once; and when Simon Decorman, who kept the place, began to welcome me with, Well, Jamie, and is it not fine to see you down here with human faces? I cut him short and told him: I have not come here for companionship or gabble, but for a mug and a pitcher of rum!

  Now is that a way, Jamie –

  Damn it to hell, do you serve rum or don’t ye?

  If it’s a drink ye want, with no word of kindness or good cheer, why you can buy it and be damned!

  As to that, I’ll decide, and you can speak to me when you’re asked for it!

  So I got a table in a corner and the rum, and I proceeded to make myself drunk in a right royal fashion. Gradually, as the supper hour passed, the place filled up, with the lads from the farms and the mill coming in to have a pint of beer or something hot, and many of them were surprised to see me and came over to pass a word with me. What I said to them, I don’t remember, but it was not gentle words, and if it had been anyone else but me, there would have been fighting in the inn that night. But there was something in me that made them afraid, and they left me alone.

  Of that night, there is little I remember and less that I desire to recall. Even in so small a place as York, there were the necessary forms and places for a man who desired a little taste of hell, and I had my taste and found shelter, finally, on toward morning, in the barn of Caleb Henry, where I burrowed into the hayloft and slept until the sun was high in the sky. Then I awoke with an aching head and a burning throat and very little desire to live altogether – though the last was diluted somewhat when I got to Caleb Henry’s brook unseen, and soaked my head and drank my fill. Then I quartered across the field away from the village and toward the Philadelphia pike. Thus I would go as I came, with the clothes on my back and nothing in my pockets – and nothing in particular in my heart.

  Oh, it was a lovely day, all right, and I will not forget that, nor how the wind blew so warm and softly from the west and how the little white clouds sailed across the blue sky. For all my misery, a taste for life would not be denied, and I felt myself expand and yearn toward this mighty and beautiful and limitless land of mine, with its hills and its valleys and its triumphant and unmeasurable spaces; it sang a song for me as I walked along, unshaven and unwashed, my cotton shirt covered with the filth of the night before, and in that song were the echoes of my own unborn poetry of the good struggle I had fought, side by side with the good and brave companions I had known. I was leaving all that I had, but there was a merciless truth in what Molly Bracken had said to me, and all that I had was nothing and less than nothing. And if I was miserable now, it was that misery of youth that is never complete and never unmixed with something else. So it was in that mood, as I neared the pike, that I heard the beating of the drums, that old, old sound that was as familiar as my own pulse and as native to me – but in the mood I was in, the drums were a part of my thoughts and seemed to come from the inner rather than the outer world.

  That way it seemed to me at first; but then I stiffened; my skin prickled all over, as if a wave of icy air were flowing over me, and my heart beat faster and faster. There were the drums – still far off, but real, and nowhere in the whole world but in the foreign brigades were drums beaten that way, not as the Yankees beat their drums, not as the British beat their drums, but in a cross between the skirling of the pipes and the haunting Slavic rhythms of the Polish men, singing a song of defiant, wild and angry sorrow, telling people who hear to beware of men whose lot cannot be worsened but only bettered, men who go into battle with nothing to lose; and coming as it does from the skinny hands of little children, there is a pathos added that once heard is not forgotten.

  And now I was hearing it, and I began to run. Across the fields I ran, my heart pounding, bursting through a hedge, leaping a brook, panting and sobbing – but then losing all of my courage as I nea
red the road, and finally crawling into a patch of blueberry bushes, where I could see without being seen.

  And there I lay, while the drums beat louder and louder, until finally they came into sight; and then when I saw them, I wept. First came Laurens and Stewart, leading the file and mounted finely, but it was not for them I wept, but for the little column of less than four hundred men, which was all that remained of the brigades. First there were the drummer lads, eight of them, little Tommy Searles and Jonathan Harbecht and Peter O’Conner and the rest, just as small, just as shrunken, just as pinch-faced as ever; and behind them marched Chester Rosenbank with four fifers, and then came the regiments – the two regiments that remained. But there they were and I saw them: Billy Bowzar and Jack Maloney and the Jew Levy and the Great Nayger man, Bora Kabanka, and Danny Connell – alone he was, and I wondered what had become of his fair maid – and Lawrence Scottsboro, older than ever, his back bent as he trudged along, and Angus MacGrath, towering over the others – yes, there they were, but many others were gone, and I wept as the little company marched past toward York village.

  A long time I lay there, part of the time thinking, part of the time with no thought but the sudden peace I knew. And then I rose and walked back to York village, with my purpose clear in my mind.

  PART ELEVEN

  Which is the last part of my narration, and which tells how the foreign brigades gathered again at York village in Pennsylvania and what befell them there.

  SO I come to the last part of my tale of the foreign brigades of Pennsylvania and of their rising against the officer gentry; yet a little more must be told before I can let my memories be and let the dead sleep as they should sleep. Since it is of myself that I write, I must take some time for my own thoughts and my own broodings, which is what I know – and little enough do I know of my comrades. That they were not mean and lowly, I do know, and this I will assert again and again; for they had a store of courage and nobility that was nowhere found in my own soul. This I assert, before I write what became of them and of me.

  Myself, I went back to York village after I had thought about the matter sufficiently and knew what I was going to do; I did not know whether it was right or wrong nor did I greatly care at the time, but I knew that I had to do it, because a man is no good when he is broken into many fragments, a piece here and a piece there, but only when he is whole. And I knew that it would make me whole again in the only way of wholeness I cared for.

  So I walked back to York village after a time, and I walked down the street to Lemuel Simpkins’s cow pasture, where the Pennsylvania Line had encamped. By now, it was late afternoon, and already the tents were raised, the pickets posted, and the men were engaged in clearing the grounds, laying out the parade and gathering wood for their night fires. They had stacked their muskets in the European manner, by fours with one bayonet fixed – which is peculiar to our brigades —and from the look of it you would have thought that there had been an encampment there for many a day past. They had put out sentries, raised up a flagpole, and were beginning to build brushwood shelters, so it was evident that this was no quick bivouac but an encampment of some duration; and everything they did was carried out in the easy, competent manner of men who knew their work well enough.

  Simpkins’s cow pasture rolls down and away from the road and the encampment was set a good quarter of a mile back, with the command tent on a little knoll. Already, half of the townsfolk and just about all of the children had gathered along the road to watch, and already the children had begun their game of hide-and-seek with the sentries. Oh, it was a familiar enough picture: the children and the excited people, and the seemingly bored sentries in their torn and dirty overalls, and the little knot of officers importantly discussing the situation with the town clerk and the town council, and the girls preening themselves and the drummer boys standing back and hooting at them, and the horses clustered near the command tent and the soldiers off duty sprawling gratefully on the grass, and one wretched little captain showing his authority by giving parade drill to a platoon – all of it familiar and terrible and wonderful at the same time.

  For a while, I stood off, looking to see whether Molly Bracken was in the crowd; but she was not there, so I went past them and circled around, to come into the camp from the farther side. I walked up to a sentry, and it was Arnold Gary, and he took a long look and said:

  By all that is holy and critical, is that Jamie Stuart himself and in the flesh?

  It is, I agreed.

  Then he threw down his musket and put his arms around me and rocked me back and forth, and I hugged the smell of him, the sour, rancid smell of the dirty overalls on a man who has marched all day long, the feel of him, of a man of mine own kind who was a brother to me; and he said:

  I knew it, and I told them, You mark me, when we come into York village, there will be Jamie Stuart, fat as a plucked chicken.

  And what are you doing here with the brigades – or what is left of them, God help me —so far south and away from everything? Is the war over?

  This stinking war, said Arnold Gary, is one that will never be over; for if it was, what in hell’s name would our lousy officers do with themselves? And for the sins of my blessed mother – who never teached me the writing or the reading – here I am still, and will be forever most likely. And as for being here in York, well this is a rendezvous, the way they say, to see if we can make a Line out of ourselves, so that we can march off south for a campaign upon which they have set their hearts, there being damned little to squeeze out of the Jerseys any more, while this Pennsylvania country is as fat and tasty as a pig’s ass. Ye can see that I envy you, Jamie Stuart, standing there in them fine shoes and fine breeches with never a care in the world, while my own reward from the damn uprising is special treatment with the cane.

  How is it then?

  It is lousy, Jamie Stuart, if you must know the whole truth.

  How do you mean?

  I mean that they are exacting payment in their own sweet way. For the exact letter of the rising, it is true that they have kept their word and exacted no punishment, but if you break step you get a cane on your back and twenty lashes for just whispering at parade, and for the Jew Gonzales, because he talked back to that dirty little rat Purdy, one hundred lashes, from which he died, just as Jim Holt, the Nayger, died when he talked back to Butler and they ’spontooned him in the belly. Oh, Jesus Christ, that was a thing to see, for he lay there on the ground, twisting and turning and begging us not to pull out the fat spear, but we had to, and then he rolled over and vomited out his lifeblood. And can you imagine that the fools of the Committee remained? Even Jack Maloney, coming back from Philadelphia, where he said he left you.

  I know that, I said.

  And you are free and clear, Jamie – what a blessing!

  Depending on how you look at it, I said, for I have come here to enlist.

  No!

  It’s true, so I’ll thank you, Arnold, to let me go through to their damned command tent.

  Are you crazy, Jamie? Are you clear and raving mad?

  Possibly. What in hell –

  He interrupted by tapping my chest and saying deliberately, Go away from here, Jamie Stuart.

  And why don’t you run away? I demanded. Off across the fields and away, and who would ever find you, Arnold Gary?

  Where would I run to, Jamie? And what do I know except to heft a musket? But yourself –

  Myself is my own conscience, so let me go past.

  All right, he said. All right, Jamie Stuart.

  And then he picked up his gun and went on his round, and I walked along into the encampment; and one after another the men saw me and recognized me, and many of them hugged me close, so I knew how it was to be back with them again.

  Here I met Bowzar and Jack Maloney, who said, Have ye come to look down at us, Jamie Stuart?

  Down or up, I answered; what in hell is the difference? And I walked past him over to the command post, where Butler and La
urens stood talking and then looked up and faced me in silence. But the men, my own old comrades, they kept their distance and stood together, watching quietly.

  Well, here I am, I said, and I’ve come to enlist.

  Laurens smiled in a way that might mean anything at all, and Butler put his hands in his pockets, spread his feet, and looked me all over and up and down.

  Jamie Stuart, he said.

  You have a long memory, I answered calmly enough.

  Longer than you would ever imagine, Mr. Stuart, and when you address me, why you will address me as Colonel Butler, if you please.

  Yes, sir.

  Yes, Colonel Butler!

  Yes, Colonel Butler, I repeated.

  Now in that there is the making of a good soldier, Jamie Stuart, so if you go over to the tent, the Jew will make your papers for you, and then you can draw a pair of overalls from Captain Kennedy at the supply depot over yonder and report back here.

  I answered, Yes, Colonel Butler.