The True Account

by Howard Frank Mosher

  The fact that we received not a single word in reply to these missives did not deter or discourage Private True Teague Kinneson in the least. Indeed, I must say that my uncle seemed impervious to discouragement. When he rose in the morning, he never once, so far as I knew, doubted that his commission and summons to Washington would be coming through that very day; throughout the summer and fall of 1803 we made trial runs with my raft on the Kingdom River and compiled lengthy lists of what we would need to take with us.

  Vermont’s red and yellow autumn gave way to winter. At Christmas, from his hemp income my uncle presented me with a new muzzle-loading flintlock rifle, my mother with a brindled cow for her dairy, and my father with a padded vise of his own invention, in which to clamp his head when the world was too much with him.

  One day in March, when the sap had just started to flow in our maple-sugar orchard, my uncle strapped on his snowshoes and said he planned to go to the top of Kingdom Mountain and reconnoiter our route to the Pacific. It seemed safe enough to let him conduct this reconnaissance on his own, so I went to work with my father, the Monitor being due out the next day. That evening, however, we were met at the door by my most anxious mother, who had just discovered a note from the private informing us that he had left for Boston to raise money for our trip.

  My father’s hands were already fluttering upward, like two large moths toward a candle. Pressing his head down from the top, as if to prevent himself from taking flight, he said, “Fetch me my clamp, Ti.”

  I ran for the Christmas vise. After my mother and I had affixed this apparatus to his head, screwing it down very tightly, he seemed to experience some relief.

  “What, sir,” I inquired, “are we to do?”

  “Why, Ti, I suppose that we must wait a day or two and see if your uncle comes back. If he does not, we will have to go after him and run him to ground. Else I fear greatly for his sake and, frankly, for the sake of Louisiana and the Republic.”

  In truth, my uncle had run off two or three times before, once to the neighboring village of Pond in the Sky, which he had mistaken for Dover, on the English Channel, to assist Lord Nelson against Napoleon; and again over the border into Canada, to escape the blandishments of a determined local widow-woman named Goody Kittredge, who had set her cap for him and his hemp income. In both instances he had been home by nightfall.

  Now, as evening came and my uncle did not, my father had us ratchet the head vise ever tighter, until his kindly gray eyes began to start out of their sockets; my mother continued to go to the window and look out into the blue twilight creeping over our mountain; and I began to feel dreadfully remiss that I had not kept better track of my ward. The night wore on, and eventually my mother coaxed my father, still wearing the vise, to bed. But by then I was more alarmed than I could ever recall being.

  The idea occurred to me sometime after midnight. I would, I resolved, run my uncle to ground myself, even if I had to follow him to the Pacific to do so. Before I could lose my nerve, I began to pack my watercolors, a cylindrical metal tube of blank canvases, my gun, and other possibles. Around two A.M., having stocked up with a good supply of my mother’s cartwheel cookies, I stole out of our farmhouse and made my way down to the village, where I spent another two hours at my father’s newspaper office, printing several dozen handbills that I believed would be useful in my search. Just as the sunrise struck the soaring peaks of the Green Mountains, turning them as pink as one of my mother’s sugar-glazed apples, I boarded the southbound mail.

  “Gone to find uncle. Much love, Ticonderoga,” read the note I’d left on the kitchen table. Yet despite the confident tone of my message, I had the strongest feeling, as the stage jolted down the line toward Boston, that even if I were fortunate enough to locate Private True Teague Kinneson, persuading him to come home again might well prove impossible.

  BOSTON

  6

  RUNAWAY UNCLE. Run off from Kingdom Common, Vermont, an UNCLE, Private True Teague Kinneson, about 50 years of age. His stature is tall, his countenance fierce, his clothes and gear those of a knight-errant, consisting of chain mail, a belled night-stocking over a copper plate in his head, a red sash, and galoshes worn high or low as the occasion requires. A former soldier with the Continental Army, a playwright, and a classical scholar, this UNCLE imagines himself to have explored from the Pacific up the Columbia River, across the Rocky Mountains, and thence overland to St. Louis and the United States. Whoever conveys him safely home, or into the care of his nephew, Ticonderoga Kinneson, shall have 5 dollars from

  THE KINNESON FAMILY

  KINGDOM COMMON, VERMONT

  SO READ the fifty handbills I had printed up the night before to distribute in the way stations between Vermont and Boston and, should I not overtake my uncle sooner, in the principal places of that city.

  As matters turned out, I had no trouble tracing my quarry over the White Mountains into New Hampshire, and then on to Boston, since he had made a highly favorable impression in all the taverns, post offices, and inns where his coach had stopped, because of his freehanded generosity and his general good-humoredness. For as he had often told me, citing Homer, a “cheerful man does best in every enterprise.” And my uncle maintained the most cheerful demeanor at all times.

  By traveling day and night and sleeping in the coach, I arrived in Boston just three days after leaving Vermont. After distributing a few of my remaining handbills around the harbor, which delighted me with its forest of ships’ masts, penetrating odors of tar, salt, and fish, and sailors of every hue speaking all kinds of lingos, I started up into the city proper. On the way I came upon a general hubbub, in which I found my uncle himself, in all his outlandish regalia, directing a gang of street urchins in the defense of a knoll he imagined to be Bunker Hill and pelting with snowballs anyone who attempted to come up the street.

  “Good morning, Ti!” said the private, tossing me two or three snowballs as though we were at home in our dooryard and he had never run away at all. “For the love of freedom and your nation, take the east flank and don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.”

  Until now, I had supposed that my uncle might curb his little ways and stays once he was away from Vermont. Indeed, the opposite appeared to be true. “Attack, boys,” he roared. “For Vermont and Ethan Allen!” I attempted to hustle him away into a tangle of steep little side streets, on the pretext of reinforcing a badly outmanned American garrison. But he instantly smoked out my ruse and took to his heels, calling, “Hi! Hi! Catch me if you can,” with the tail of his jingling stocking cap, like the belled tail of a kite, flying out of sight around corners. Suddenly I thought of my stash of cartwheel cookies. Rummaging in my bag, I held one up. “Private Kinneson,” I shouted, “the British have been driven back into the sea. It’s mess time.”

  He stopped and whirled around atop a snowy rise on the city common, above a frozen pond; and I sailed the big ginger cookie toward him like a twirling plate. To my amazement, he raised his arquebus and, training the muzzle on the flying confection as if it were a flushing partridge, blew it into a thousand pieces.

  Immediately following this exhibition, my uncle and I had a long laugh that cleared the air between us. Then we sat on a bench near the pond, sharing my mother’s cookies with some mangy-looking doves and some young skaters; and my uncle said that he was glad to see me, heartily glad, for he had missed me terribly over the past several days, adding that he had already hired the Beacon Street Lyceum for a lecture he would give that very night on our trip from the Pacific, as a means of raising a stake for our upcoming expedition.

  He then rented a pair of wooden skates from a Dutchman in a little covered cart pulled by a blind pony and ventured out onto the ice to play at snap-the-whip with the children. It seemed to me that until I could contrive some stratagem to get him home, the better part of wisdom might be to join him in this exhilarating activity. So we spent the next two or three hours whooping and chasing each other across the ice and collaps
ing in gales of laughter. Then he and the skate man shared half a pipeful of hemp, a large supply of which my uncle had brought in his Dutch clock, along with a sack of the tiny hemp seeds to trade with the Indians of Louisiana. I sketched them puffing away together, as companionable as two old schoolfellows, and sold the drawing to the skate man for three shillings. This was my first sale. Upon which my mellow uncle congratulated me on “turning professional,” and repeatedly shook my hand, and laughed long and loud as if we had no cares in the world. Which, for his part at least, seemed to be the case.

  7

  “FAIR LADIES and fine gentlemen of Boston,” my uncle announced from the stage of the Beacon Street Lyceum with the greatest assurance in the world. “It is my pleasure to make you acquainted with myself, the renowned explorer and playwright, Private True Teague Kinneson. I now present, for your entertainment and edification, a dramatized lecture on my recent journey overland to the United States from the River Columbia and the Ocean Pacific. Act I. The Shipwreck.”

  With his chain mail gleaming, he rushed offstage and, to a smattering of bewildered applause, returned in the skate man’s cart, representing our ship the Samuel de Champlain, which he made go across the boards with his great galoshed feet like a child’s scoot-toy. “Beware the perils of a lee shore,” he shouted. “The breakers! The breakers! We are all lost.”

  With this alarming declaration, he deliberately tipped over the peddler’s cart in simulation of a terrible shipwreck and, flailing his arms like a drowning man, sprawled his full six-and-a-half-foot length on the stage, where he continued to thrash and writhe.

  “The explorer is washed ashore at the mouth of the noble Columbia,” he at length explained. Getting to his feet, he rolled up his galoshes and made as if he were wading through crashing surf, swinging his elbows in time with his strides. Shading his brow with his hand, peering first in one direction, then another, rocking up on his toes, and dropping into a low crouch, he roared out through his tin ear trumpet, “Cast away on the far side of Continent North America, the undaunted explorer bethinks himself to journey overland, by canoe and on foot, to the United States.”

  The audience seemed puzzled. But as my uncle continued to charge about, now paddling the skate man’s cart up the Columbia, now climbing a ladder propped against some flats at the rear of the stage to represent the Rockies, now harrying offstage several street urchins from the Battle of Bunker Hill, whom he had engaged to represent the “all-puissant Blackfeet”—the playgoers began to laugh.

  A wag sitting beside me in the front row, wearing an academical cap and gown and no doubt from Harvard College, stood up. “I see Don Quixote,” he called out. “But where’s Sancho Panza?”

  Another Harvardite inquired if we had met the Lost Tribe of Israel in our travels. A third augmented the attack of the Blackfeet with an egg rather past its prime, which splattered on the good ship Samuel de Champlain.

  The climax of the reenactment came when my uncle declared, “Hark, do I hear the thunder of ten thousand bison approaching?” At this cue, the skate man led his blind cart-pony out onto the stage, caparisoned in a moth-eaten buffalo robe. Which sight produced, I am afraid, unrestrained peals of laughter.

  Unabashed, the private stepped forward and made several flourishing bows, insisting that the urchins, the skate peddler, and the pony do the same. He then asked for subscriptions for his trip back to the Pacific. But so far from offering handsome investments in our project, the citizens of Boston, led by the Harvards, presented him with a barrage of spoiled oranges, eggs, cabbages, and dead rats, accompanied by jeers and catcalls.

  Astonished and enraged, my uncle whipped out his wooden sword. Turning to his cast, he shouted, “Beleaguered comrades, let us show these self-anointed cognoscenti of Boston what Green Mountain lads are made of!”

  I truly believe he would have charged the audience had not five or six uniformed bailiffs just then burst into the hall, shouting, “There he is. The runaway uncle.”

  At this point, though frightened half out of my wits, I seized the academical cap of my seatmate and clapped it on my head as if I were one of their rank, then sprang to my feet and cried, “Fellow Harvards, six on one is foul play.”

  Pointing at the bailiffs, I shouted, “Down with the treacherous Sioux. Let us rally to the cause of the noble Vermont explorer and see him through!”

  The laughing Harvardites and their confederates were more than willing to come to my uncle’s rescue. On the pretext of assisting the bailiffs, they began to trip them up and block their way. In the excitement, my uncle touched off his arquebus. Out of its huge belled mouth came an orange tongue of fire a good two feet long, at which the startled pony bounded over the foot-candles, landing with its four legs splayed out in the midst of the affray and scattering bailiffs and Harvards and urchins alike galley-west.

  “You have quite put the Sioux to rout, sir,” I cried to my uncle. “My congratulations. President Jefferson awaits you in Washington with your commission. Shall we go?”

  In the confusion I managed to hurry him out the stage door and down the slippery hill into the early spring night. But now, supposing himself back at Fort Ticonderoga and me to be Colonel Allen, he called, “I must take care, my commander, not to slip and strike my head again.”

  “There is no danger of that, private,” I said, hustling him along lest the bailiffs spot us. “Quick. Jingle your bell.”

  He did so. But sometimes one jingle was not enough, and he now seemed to mistake himself for Colonel Allen, exclaiming, “But where is Private True, subaltern? We can’t leave him in the hands of the British and their pitiless Iroquois allies.” And stopping in his tracks and digging in his feet like a mule in galoshes, he declared, “We must go back.”

  “Private,” I said, “your colonel commands you to ring your bell.”

  He did, then said, “Here comes True. I spy him. He’s coming again.”

  “He is,” I said, looking out around him and up the hill. “Here he is now. Here you are, uncle.”

  “Here I am, Ti,” he said, taking my hand and dashing off again toward the harbor, “back in Boston. Did we put my detractors to rout or did we not?”

  “We did. Ethan would have been very proud. He could not have done more himself. Boston will never forget your skit.”

  “We acquitted ourselves as well as any good soldiers could,” my uncle said modestly, as we reached the wharves. Adding that he was astonished that the city fabled as the Athens of America should contribute so little to our project, and that he believed we would do better to seek assistance for our expedition from the good people and public-minded merchants of Manhattan and leave the blue-blooded patricians of Boston to their own devices. Despite all my protests, he immediately arranged for us to take passage on a packet just departing for Baltimore, with a stop on the way at New York.

  “What could the treacherous Sioux have meant by ‘runaway uncle,’ I wonder?” he mused half an hour later, as we glided out of the harbor with the ocean breeze in our faces.

  Even if I had been disposed to answer him, I could not have. By then I was at the packet rail, overcome by seasickness, and sick at heart, too, that I had so miserably failed in my mission to bring the private safely home to Vermont, whose green mountains and comfortable little farms now seemed as far away as Louisiana and the Pacific.

  NEW YORK

  8

  THE LORD BALTIMORE arrived in Manhatten early on the second morning of our voyage, with me much the worse for wear. My uncle, however, who had never been sick a day in his life, had sat up all night and all day and all night again, yarning with the captain and crew, lending a hand with a rope or a navigational measurement and even taking a turn at the wheel, where he demonstrated a very nice touch. He was so popular that the captain urged us to continue on to Baltimore with them the following morning. True allowed that we might avail ourselves of his offer, but first we would try once more to raise a stake for our expedition. Just how we would do this he di
d not say, and I could only hope that he did not have in mind another lecture. Also, he confided to me just before we docked that in New York he hoped to locate the “Gentleman from Vermont”—“whose hash he would settle once and for all” by stuffing him into his carpetbag and heaving him into the ocean.

  Once ashore, we had a breakfast of bacon and eggs, which was just the right tonic for me, at a little inn called the Sign of the Tipsy Argonaut, where we also secured a room for that night. Then we struck off up lower Broadway. It was a fine sunny morning, with a scattering of high white clouds and a touch of spring in the air. The street teemed with horses pulling beer wagons, lumber wagons, fruit wagons, vegetable wagons. On the corners evangelists preached, fishwives shrieked their briny wares, sailors lurched, boys hawked newspapers and blacked boots. My uncle was in his element, gleefully prying under flounders and cabbage leaves at an out-of-doors market and even popping into shops and offices and shouting “I spy!”—in an attempt to “flush out” or “start” the Gentleman. “Aye,” he said, “I’m sure he’s nearby, Ti, for I smell sulphur.” As indeed he did, there being a little paper mill just across the street, where the newsprint for the Times of New York was manufactured. Which quite persuaded my uncle that somehow his friend was connected with the Times itself.

  A lady approached my uncle, tweaked at his chain mail, and tickled his scarlet codpiece. “Anyone home?” she said.

  “Nay, nay, madam,” he cried, leaping back. “We shall have none of that.”