The Turning of Anne Merrick

by Christine Blevins

  Jack nodded, and pressed Anne’s hand to his heart. “And I to you.”

  A rattle of drums echoed up through the morning mist, and the two of them jumped out of bed like cats out of the woodbox.

  Jack scrambled to pull on his leggings and moccasins. “I was supposed to have you back before reveille beating! Sally’s going to have my hide…”

  Anne struggled out of Jack’s shirt, wriggled into her skirt, and found her shoes. They worked together to fold and roll both blankets into tight sausages. Jack rigged his bedroll with a rope strap and slung it over his back. Pulling on his pouch and haversack he said, “I have your crown piece here.”

  Anne took it from him, dropped it down her shift, and tied her shawl ends into a knot at her breast. “As fond as you are of this breechclout,” she said, tugging on the flap, “you ought change back into breeches before you travel south, lest the Continentals mistake you for one of Burgoyne’s Indians.”

  “I almost forgot…” Jack dove into his pouch. “I made a present for you,” he said, handing her a small packet wrapped in a maple leaf and tied with a scrap of blue grosgrain ribbon.

  Anne undid the wrapping to find a plump heart, carved of wood as smooth as a peach and stained golden brown. Beautiful in its simplicity, the heart fit in the palm of her hand. She was struck dumb.

  “Wood from an oak that was split in two by lightning,” Jack said. “Sanded it for hours on end to get the polish. Go on, turn it over.”

  Anne flipped the heart over, and she lost her breath. Within a hatched border, three words were etched in neat block letters, and carefully stained a deep umber:

  LOVE

  NEVER

  FAILS

  “Oh, Jack!” Anne smiled and blinked back her tears. “This is the most beautiful thing anyone has ever given me. I will cherish it always.” She flung her arms around his neck, and kissed him farewell. “You’ll be back after Stillwater?”

  “I think we’ll be joining the fight at Bennington. I imagine they’ll need every man they can get. I’ll make sure David sends someone to watch for your messages.” Jack shouldered his rifle and pack and, with a jerk of his chin, said, “There’s Neddy now.”

  Discreet in a stance at the edge of the ridge with his back to them, Ned leaned on his rifle, eyeing the horizon. Anne and Jack walked hand in hand the few steps to the parting in the brush and the deer path they had climbed to reach their haven.

  “This path zigs and zags straight down to your camp. It’s not far.”

  Anne nodded. “I’ll be fine.”

  It was clear neither of them wanted to curse their parting with the word “good-bye.” Their lips met in one last, simple kiss, and Jack walked off to join up with Ned. Giving his friend a slap on the shoulder, they took to the trees.

  Anne called out, “Take care…”

  Jack turned to flash a grin and wave. Anne forced a smile and blew him a kiss, and she watched until he and Ned were lost in the rising mist.

  Taking up her blanket, and clutching the wooden heart to her own heart, Anne started down the path. Covered in a veil of morning fog, and cheered by birdsong, the dark and ominous woodland came into enchanted green focus with the onset of dawn. Anne stopped at the rotting tree to see the patch of foxfire fungus transformed by the daylight into a clump of plain, ordinary mushrooms. She smiled and brushed her fingers across the velvety caps.

  Whoever would guess how you glowed in the night?

  FIVE

  I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ’Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.

  THOMAS PAINE, The American Crisis

  SCOUTING THE ENEMY ENCAMPMENT NEAR BENNINGTON

  Jack leaned in to toss another chunk of wood on the fire just when a wayward gust ruffled the smoke to sting his eyes. He took a step back, narrowing his eyes at an opening in the forest canopy overhead and the gray clouds roiling by like turbid river water. A drop of rain landed splat on his forehead.

  “Get ready,” Jack said, swiping the wet from his face with the back of his hand. “It’s about to weather hard.”

  Stretched out along the full length of their lean-to shelter, Titus turned onto his side. Hugging his bedroll like a boon companion, he muttered, “No battle today…”

  Fat summer raindrops began to find their way through the leaves and boughs, driving into the soft duff of the forest floor like miniature cannon shells. Jack ducked under the lean-to and took a tailor-style seat before the fire.

  “I think this as good a time as any to cast some ball.”

  “Mm-hmm…” Titus grunted. “Lord knows we’ll soon need all we can get.”

  Hinging open his folding knife, Jack shaved the end of a greenwood stick to a taper, and twisted the makeshift extension into the socket end on the handle of his smelting ladle. Nestling the ladle’s shallow bowl in the bed of white-hot coals raked from the fire, he propped the makeshift handle on a rock to extend beyond the fire ring, keeping it cool to the touch and safe from the flames.

  Jack arranged the rest of his bullet-making supplies on the swath of soft buckskin to his left—a cake of beeswax, half a dozen finger-length bars of lead, a pliers-like bullet mold with handles wrapped in leather strapping, a scotch polishing stone, and a battered copper spoon, its shank sharpened to a point. He placed one of the lead bars into the hot ladle and settled deeper under the shelter to wait and watch the metal melt into a blue-gray puddle.

  They began the day’s scout at dawn, but the clear blue skies did not fool Isaac, who soon noted the leaves on the ash tree had turned to show their white undersides. “Bad storm’s on the way,” he predicted. “No battle today.”

  Soon enough, huge thunderheads massed on the eastern horizon as the scouting party hurried through the woods to circle around the high ground occupied by Colonel Baum and his regiment. When they saw the enemy’s contingent included a cohort of Mohawk warriors, Ned and Isaac altered their gustoweh in keeping with the Mohawk style, showing three feathers pointing upright, and broke away to infiltrate the German encampment.

  With an eye on staying dry while they waited for the Oneidans to return, Jack and Titus set about constructing a simple shelter. Harvesting several lengths of spruce root, they lashed a sturdy ridgepole five feet off the ground between a huge pair of red spruce trees. Together, they assembled a square frame braced with a rough gridwork of sapling wood. The completed frame was propped and lashed to the ridgepole at a forty-five-degree angle with the open face away from the wind, providing space enough for four to sit, and plenty of cover to protect a fire.

  Jack and Titus thatched the lean-to with a weaving of spruce boughs and pads of absorbent moss, and used the same to carpet the shelter floor. A small ring of stones was arranged at the open face, and a quantity of firewood was stockpiled. Combined with the natural windbreak afforded by the flanking tree trunks, and the living spruce umbrellas overhead, the hasty bower would provide plenty of shelter from the oncoming tempest.

  A blast of wind whipped through the trees in a skirling rush, broadcasting a spray of mist and setting the shelter to rustle and quake. The pleasant patter of rain instantly shifted in intensity, and the new din was akin to thousands of anxious fingers drumming on hundreds of tabletops. Jack eyed the veracity of the structure.

  Thunder rumbled overhead, sounding all the world like someone dragging a heavy chest across the floorboards of the heavens. Jack screwed a greenwood handle onto the spoon’s pointy shank, setting it and the bullet mold on the coals to heat.

  “D’ you think it’s storming by Annie and Sal?”

  Titus didn’t answer. Jack glanced back to see his friend snoring softly. No matter day or night, wind or rain, thunder or lightning, Titus was a great one for grabbing snatches of sleep whenever and wherever he could—a valuable wartime skill—a skill Jack often wished he could dev
elop. A fretful sleeper, Jack never slept so sound as he did when holding Anne Merrick wrapped in his arms… Was it the way her hair smelled of lavender? Or maybe something to do with the rhythm of her breath…

  He’d bedded more than a fair share of women in his time, and no other but Annie had ever managed to soothe his restless soul. Jack pinched off a bit of beeswax and worried it into a pea-sized ball between thumb and forefinger, the corners of his mouth turning up in a smile. One day, when the war was over, he would sleep to that sound every night.

  One day…

  He dropped the wax pea into the molten lead, and a gray cloudlet puffed up from the ladle like magic smoke from a sorcerer’s cauldron. The bit of beeswax flux brought the metal’s impurities to the surface.

  One day soon… Jack flashed a smile, and just as quickly lost it. It was both naïve and stupid to believe anything but British victory would come soon. Using the spoon, he skimmed the dross from the molten metal, leaving behind a silvery puddle of pure lead.

  We are at war with the world’s most formidable foe…

  He’d witnessed the vast British armada crowding New York’s harbor—hundreds of ships armed with enough cannon to flatten any city in their sites. He and Titus had scouted on Long Island to see the first wave of the invasion—thousands of soldiers and massive amounts of artillery and matériel landing ashore. And when they infiltrated the British forces, they saw the Redcoats exact a tour de force in military strategy, outflanking the Continental Army’s fortified position on Brooklyn Heights.

  By all rights the war should have ended right then and there…

  And it would have but not for a fortuitous fog allowing Washington to stage a stealthy nighttime retreat, saving what was left of his army to fight another day.

  Pulling off a miracle to survive the year after the disastrous defeat on Long Island, the American rebel forces were now wedged between Burgoyne’s well-trained army coming from the north, Howe and his army on the move, and Clinton with a sizable force occupying New York town. The unstoppable might of the Empire was on a collision course with a Continental Army desperate to increase ranks decimated by sickness and desertion.

  When Jack and his fellow scouts caught up to the ragtag brigade of New Hampshire militiamen that had been deployed to prevent Burgoyne’s Germans from raiding the stores at Bennington, he could not help but feel his heart sink. Though strong in numbers and spirit, and led by an ardent and experienced commander, the Patriot soldiers rallied to wage war on professional Hessian and Brunswicker troops without a piece of artillery, nor a single bayonet among the lot of them.

  Outgunned, outtrained, without steady support to feed, clothe, and arm those willing to fight… Jack heaved a sigh. “We don’t stand a chance.”

  He poured a thin stream of molten lead into the opening of the bullet mold. The lead hardened in a matter of moments. He swung open the mold, and rapped it with the flat of his knife, knocking the hot bullet out onto the buckskin.

  Staring at the solitary ball, he thought, Like flies on a bull, we are to the British… annoying, but easily banished with the flick of a tail.

  Why the British Army did not flick their tail was the question befuddling the minds of many. Giving his head a shake, Jack turned to his task, developing a rhythm to pouring and knocking the molded pieces out onto the buckskin to cool. The balls rolled to settle in a depression on the leather, and began to look like a bowl of just-picked silver cherries, the flared stems a by-product of the molding process. Jack clipped off these sprues, rubbing each finished sphere against his scotch stone to erase the resulting nub, assuring his ammunition would fly straight and true to the target.

  Waste not, want not… Jack gathered up the severed sprues along with the now-hardened drips and drops of lead that had drizzled onto the ground during the pouring. The tick of the lead bits dropping into his cupped hand recalled his days at Parker’s Press, where he apprenticed and worked as a journeyman printer before the war. He sprinkled the lead bits into the ladle, as if adding pepper to a stew, thinking how he ought to be setting lead type, not making lead bullets. Watching the hardened lead consumed by the molten puddle, he muttered, “I wish the British would just have done with us already. Then Annie and me could…”

  He regretted the awful wish almost as soon as it had coalesced in his brain, and he couldn’t believe he’d let the words escape his lips. Jack glanced back at Titus, worried his sleeping friend might have heard him utter such treason. Surprised and dismayed to find himself gone so out of heart for his cause, Jack ground a knuckled fist at the bridge of his nose, telling himself, “Stop it!”

  Too much in blood and treasure had been sacrificed to give up now. Too much. Throwing back his head, he shouted out to the wind, “Bugger King George’s royal arse, and fuck the British Army as well!”

  Jack snatched up his mold, and returned to the business of making ammunition with methodical frenzy. Pour. Knock. Pour. Knock. Pour. Knock. Pour. Knock. Add more lead. Add the flux. Clip sprues. Pour. Knock. Pour. Knock…

  A blinding flash of lightning split the sky, and almost simultaneous earsplitting thunder cracked so loud as to startle the bullet mold from his hand and roust Titus to snap upright. Jack pulled a deep breath to check his racing heart.

  “How long have I been asleep?” Titus asked, eyeing the large pile of newly minted musket balls.

  “Not long.”

  Titus stretched, sniffing at the sulfurous smell in the air. “Your face is white as gypsum paste.”

  “A close strike, that…” Jack pulled the ladle away from the coals to cool.

  “You know, they say carrying a laurel leaf will keep the lightning away…”

  “Who says? Old wives?” Jack laughed, gathering his bullet-making tools into his haversack. “And how exactly is a leaf in your pocket supposed to stave off a strike like the one we just heard?”

  “I don’t know exactly—but there is a science to dealing with lightning.” Titus would not be swayed. “Mr. Fraunces would have us lay iron bars on the beer barrels stored in the cellar, to keep the beer from turning sour during a thunderstorm.”

  “Pish. Another old wives’ tale.”

  Titus scooted forward, dragging his pack along to sit beside Jack. He untied the camp kettle strung there and handed it to Jack. “Put this out to catch some water. Isaac and Ned will be back soon, and as long as we have fire, I’ll make us some soup for our supper.”

  “Soup? Really?” Jack stretched to set the kettle out beyond the shelter, raindrops beating a bright tune on the hollow brass.

  Titus nodded with a wicked twinkle in his eye as he undid the buckles on his pack. “Back in Stillwater, the quartermaster was distributing officers’ rations. I fell in the queue with the other mess servants and came away with a share for us.” He laid out the bounty gained by clever deception—four turnips, a dozen onions braided together, one thick yellow carrot the size of a baby’s leg, a small sack of oatmeal, and a package wrapped in brown paper and tied with jute string.

  Jack tugged at the string on the package. “Pocket soup?”

  “It is.”

  The package contained eight pieces of “soup.” Able to fit in a soldier’s pocket, each cake of concentrated meat stock was roughly four inches square and one inch thick, and as dense and brown as chewy molasses candy.

  Jack laughed and slapped his friend on the back. “I surely do benefit by your knack for seeing to your belly.”

  Titus grinned. “On rare occasion, this black face comes in handy.”

  Jack set the full kettle to heat on hot embers. Titus dropped in a soup cake and two handfuls of oatmeal into the simmering rainwater. Four onions, two turnips, and a third of the carrot were chopped and added to the pot.

  Waiting on their supper, the pair used the time to see to their weapons. The worst of the thunderstorm blew over, and gradually the rain diminished to a drizzle, and all the while their soup bubbled into a wholesome potage. On hearing a familiar turkey call, Jack and
Titus grabbed their guns and scooted out from under the shelter to see Isaac and Ned trotting through the trees, dressed in naught but breechclouts and bare chests.

  “Shekóli.” The smiling Indians slipped under the shelter, and took seats close to the fire, dark eyes sparkling with pleasure to see supper had been seen to in their absence.

  Jack once again admired the tattoo on Ned’s shoulder. In one talon the spread eagle clutched six arrows—one arrow for every nation in the Iroquois Confederacy. As Isaac had explained, “Many arrows bundled together are stronger than one arrow alone.” On an idle day, bolstered with plenty of pain-numbing rum, Jack had Isaac tattoo a similar design on his shoulder, except the eagle that was pricked into his skin with a needle and rubbed with lampblack was clutching a bundle of thirteen arrows, one for each of the thirteen states in his new nation.

  The men all found their spoons and dipped their cups into the kettle.

  “Mmmm… yawéku ka,” Isaac said, with an appreciative nod.

  Jack waited until both Isaac and Ned finished eating before asking, “Did you get into the German camp?”

  The Indians cast him a look that would curdle sweet milk, and both of them dipped in for another helping without answering his question. After slurping down seconds, Ned was the first to speak. “The German colonel—he chose good ground.”

  Isaac began smoothing the space between himself and Jack. “This is the enemy camp.” Pushing a small pile of spruce needles into a hill at the center, he began illustrating the details of the German encampment on a canvas of dirt and duff. Using a small stick, he drew a sinewy line curving past the hill to indicate the river. Crossing the line with a short stroke he said, “The bridge.” He placed his tin cup within a bend of the river. “The American militia camp is here.” Putting a small stone a ways behind the hill he added, “We are here, on the wooded ridge.”