Banners

by Diane Carey

  The afternoon was brutally hot and clouded over, depriving these sorry people even of a comfort of sunshine. As early as July her husband had begged her to stay at Terra Rubra, but she would have none of it if he were not there. Why?—she knew not even herself. Perhaps it had been the magnetism of her presence that she hoped would hold him at home. They had been here only a day, and thank God the children and most of the servants were still at Terra Rubra, looked after by Frank’s parents.

  Frank was a man of his word. He had enlisted in George Peter’s militia for reason of his own conscience, thought he had no experience with artillery or strategy, and now that the British were taking focus on this area he had insisted upon being here, moving with Peter’s artillery. He had paid for his own uniform and weapons and supplied his own horse, and despite being a superb horseman he had succeeded in being pitched over his horse’s head into a river. Thus were his accomplishments during the one month of militia activity last summer. The Field Artillery had remained on alert, constantly teased and exhausted by the redcoats’ half-hearted taunting with hardly any real attacks to purge the tension, so the tension kept building. The militia, citizens with families and work that needed to be tended, made no real progress toward training or experience, but simply wore themselves down with the burdens of expectation.

  Today, though, the British had finally revealed themselves, gathered thousands of warriors, and begun to move through this countryside.

  Frank had gone off with Brigadier General Walter Smith from the Keys’ church, to act as a civilian aide, whatever that meant. While riding away he had turned and looked back at her with those misty eyes, as did the knights in the olden times stories he read to the children. He tried to be gallant, to be the man of the family and of the nation, not a peacock like so many other militia men pretended to be, but she knew he was ill-fitted to his task. Since that moment, Polly had trembled.

  “Polly!”

  She jumped at the sharp call. Ellen Martin, the choir leader from church, ran toward her, flushed and mussed, her cap entirely missing and her greasy black hair pressed down to the sides, undone. She grasped Polly by both hands and shook her unkindly.

  “Why are you still here? You must go!”

  “Not without Frank. Have you seen him? He was with Walter Smith. Do you know what happened?”

  “There was a battle at Bladensburg,” her friend gasped.

  “Is it over? What happened?”

  “We lost!”

  “Oh, Lord!”

  “There’s nothing to stop them now! For Jesus’ sake, run for your life!”

  And the other woman was gone, racing so passionately that she held her skirts all the way up and showed her knees. Polly let her go and scanned the flowing crowd for more familiar faces.

  “Leonard! Leonard Bates!” Polly called, and rushed out to meet the area’s most successful barrel maker.

  The thickly built Bates’ militia uniform was intact, but dirty from the knees down, and he didn’t seem to be wounded, but he pulled behind him a lame mare that didn’t want to walk anymore. Confused at the sound of his name, he wiped his sweat-caked face with his sleeve and blinked at her.

  “Leonard, have you seen Frank?” Polly rasped. “You were with Peter’s artillery, weren’t you?”

  “Frank? No—”

  “What happened?”

  “I can’t pause, Polly! My shop will be burned! I must empty it!”

  “Please!” Polly shrieked, clawing her hands into the cooper’s clothing. “Tell me!”

  “Somebody named Ross,” he stammered, “Major general commanding Wellington’s Invincibles, battalions of them, hundreds of men, thousands, God save, God save—” As he talked, speaking very quickly, he bent over and tried to do something to his horse’s lame hoof with a small knife. “Stones, damned stones.”

  A loud report of cannon fire in the distance jolted them both. Polly pressed her whitened knuckles together. “Leonard, I beg you!”

  “Winder, you know, General Winder from Baltimore—”

  “Yes, we know him!”

  Bates gasped out the words. “Tried to block the enemy from the way to Washington, so we went to make a battery in Bladensburg. We had six thousand militia and volunteers, cavalry, riflemen, I don’t know what. I saw Frank at the earthworks, only once. Stand still, Aphrodite!” He put his shoulder to the horse and pushed her over a step, fighting to keep a grip on her upturned hoof. “No one thought they would bother with Washington!”

  “Please!”

  “The president was there and the secretary of state. Joshua Barney came with guns from the Navy yard and some men from the flotilla. George Peter’s gunners, we were to the right of Barney, but we didn’t have enough rounds or charges—the civilians driving the ammunition carts were running off God knows where.”

  “But what happened?”

  “It was chaos! Skirmishes broke everywhere, rockets firing, the Royals surrounding us, men running away. We shot at them and Barney’s boys did, but everybody else was running. We didn’t know which orders were real, what Winder was thinking or anything, whose orders to obey, whether to retreat, take a stand, retreat again—and we didn’t know how to retreat, you know, there was no plan! Were we supposed to meet somewhere and form up again or make a stand at Washington at the federal buildings? Nobody knew what to do, so we just ran, we broke and ran. Heatstroke killed more redcoats than we did!”

  “But where are the artillery men?” Polly demanded. “Where is Frank?”

  “Don’t wait for him. Sorry, Mrs. Key, very sorry. Come on, Aphrodite!” Bates tried to haul the horse into movement, but she only walked a few steps on the cobbled street, clearly in pain. “Damn you beast of hell!”

  “I’ll take her,” Polly offered. “I’ll put her in our stable.”

  The man simply dropped the reins, put the horse in his past, and sprinted away into the rushing throngs more nimbly than she imagined he could. He was in a complete blight of fear, and he left his fear with her.

  She had hoped for some comfort. Instead there was only more dread. She clamped her teeth tightly to hold back her own panic and drew the mare off the cobbled street to the path that led down behind the house to the stable. Able to walk on softer ground, the relieved horse followed her. She made it to the corner of the house, and there saw the Potomac River flowing as it always had past the terraced gardens and old trees.

  There, ominous in its silence, traveled a single two-masted ship with square sails and tall sides, like a ghost under the cloudy sky. It was loaded with British Navy men in their blue and white uniforms, officers wearing those awkward clamshell-shaped hats.

  How had they gotten past the shoals and oyster banks at Kettle Bottoms? Were they miracle workers? Were more warships coming? She had been told they couldn’t possibly attack Washington from the Potomac, yet there they were!

  There was no sound, no talking, not an order, traveling over the water. The men on those vessels were not talking to each other. They were listening to the panic on the Georgetown road. They were all looking at the shoreline, scanning, peering at the houses, the federal buildings, looking at her, stunned as they looked at her, her home, her gardens. Polly gasped out a senseless sound. The mare shook her head, not understanding why they had stopped.

  “Mildred!” she called, her voice a throaty squeal.

  The cook, a slave girl just transferred here from Terra Rubra, appeared magically beside her, and probably had been watching her all this time. She was a good girl with fair skin and a red birthmark across her left eye that made her seem always half in shadow.

  “What’s happening, ma’am?”

  “Take this horse to the stable. Give her water and grain. Then go inside and shut the doors!”

  Mildred, taught to ride by Frank himself, whom she worshipped almost as her own father, was able to swing up into the saddle as fluidly as a nymph and urge the mare along the house to the gardens and down toward the stable. Thankfully she asked no questio
ns about the strange-looking ship moving past their home and spared her mistress from having to explain what a Royal Navy warship could wreak upon them.

  Frantic, Polly rushed back up to the street. She tripped on the steps, jamming her hand hard into a concrete slab and hardly felt it. There was no solace for her from frenzied families and defeated militiamen trying to get away from Washington by retreated past her house. The volcano of war was finally erupting after spitting smoke for so long. The Second War of Independence had come to her doorstep.

  She gave up counting how many of the fleeing citizens she knew personally and stopped trying to run out to meet them, to get answers, but where was he? People rushed by on foot, driving wagons, dragging cattle or goats or children, pushing garden carts or wheelbarrows, and militiamen stumbled past, many without their weapons. Clamping her lips tight, Polly Key summoned all her will to resist calling out to them, “Where are your weapons?”

  The bleak swelter of afternoon blended into sunset. Watching the street became more and more difficult, the people harder to identify.

  She never recognized her husband even as he rode toward her. He was almost to her when she recognized the horse. Her husband was a changed man from the tidy patriot who had left this morning. This flying waif was plastered with dirt and streaked with sweat, his hair the same color as his dirty face and clothing. The black horse, painted with foam and filth, was almost as disguised, but Polly knew that gait and the arch of those withers.

  “Oh! Frank! Frank!” She waved as if he wouldn’t know to stop at his own door.

  Frank Key galloped to her and swung off the horse without even bothering to stop the animal, which immediately trotted on down the path to the back of the house and the stable where he would find his own stall.

  “Go in!” Her husband seized her arm and together they rushed into the house, their refuge, which today might mean nothing at all.

  Frank slammed the door and rushed into the kitchen, where he terrorized the slaves who were cooking bread and cakes. He found a dishcloth and soaked it, then peeled off his jacket and began to rub the dust from his face and hair.

  “Are you hurt?” Polly begged. “Are you wounded?”

  “I’m not.”

  “We’ve heard the cannons firing all day.” She tried to control her tone. “Bladensburg … tell me.”

  “The town was almost abandoned,” he said through the muffling washcloth. “Smith and I scouted for places to station the artillery. We chose a high place and I stayed to direct the militia. I tried to help, Polly, I made suggestions. I know the land at Bladensburg—I thought I could help. The excitement caught me up in its spell. I tried to decide the position of the artillery, but Smith and George Peter argued about the position I chose. General Winder came and chastised me for trying to arrange his men. I must’ve been wasting his time, but the commanders couldn’t decide on positions. They disapproved of each other’s deployments. They were moving each other’s men around as if there were time to play. Laval’s cavalry ended up in a ravine where they couldn’t see anything!”

  “Were you the only one—doing that?”

  “I wasn’t. Others tried to find good positions, other gentlemen of the militia, Madison, Monroe, some of the cabinet. Suggestions everywhere, confusion—communications broke down completely—lock that window.”

  Though it was a distraction, Polly rushed to the kitchen window, pulled it shut and turned the latch.

  “They were shooting,” Frank went on, words pouring out like grain, “so we opened a six-pounder barrage. Our aim was off half the time. Joshua Barney’s sixes were firing away too. He was the only one whose men seemed to know what they were doing. When British soldiers fell, the others kept marching forward, right over the bodies of their own, wheeling—” He threw his hands in the air, a gesture of tragic appreciation. “—wheeling with glorious perfection and forming new lines without even having to look at each other. We tried to keep shooting, but shot right over their heads. Our shots and rockets fired on them, and sometimes whole platoons were cut down, but the holes fill up with men from the rear like water draining into empty spaces. They were impervious to fear! They couldn’t be confused! Wellington’s Invincibles—hardened soldiers. The discipline—it was … it was …” He paused, fell back against the sideboard and grasped the edge. His eyes glazed. “It was beautiful. Terrifying.”

  Polly saw it in her mind as if she had been there. “Frank—”

  But he was in his own world. “Rockets screamed every which-way. Congreve rockets. They aimed right at us, at the militia instead of the regular army. They knew we were untried. They were right; we cracked. Whole regiments dropped their weapons and ran. Poor Winder tried to hail them to take a stand, but the British had everyone consumed with blind terror. Our front lines disintegrated. The carnage was sinful … more and more of them came. Battalions of them! They marched after us in columns so steady that the very sight of them was a weapon. They seemed to be growing out of the grass like poppies. With bayonets!”

  “Bayonets!” she echoed.

  “One English officer’s horse was cut down under him. The man got up, drew his saber and charged us, just like that, as if he never gave it a thought. Nothing stopped them, Pol. They just kept re-forming their lines until we were overwhelmed. We broke, abandoned our guns. Our regiments cracked. It was a rout.”

  Lacking even a groan of empathy, Polly lowered herself to sit on one of the three-legged stools near the oven.

  “They’re already calling it ‘the Bladensbug Races,’” he went on. “Disgraceful. The day the Americans ran like rats. Even the president ran.”

  She looked up. “Did you run?”

  “What? Barney’s men and Peter’s? … We held out, or at least tried. But at a certain point, we were forced to break. I heard that Barney fell.”

  She couldn’t help a gasp at the thought of having lost their greatest and steadiest commander. “Killed?”

  “I don’t know. Our defeat left the Bladensburg road completely open. The road to Washington open. They’re on their way here.”

  She rose and fetched him a cup of water, then dried his face with a fresh cloth.

  Staring at a crack in the stone floor, Frank made a forlorn sound. “I made egregious mistakes. I was unqualified, untrained. I’m no tactician. What business did I have directing the placement of troops? Acting the part of an officer? I let my ego carry me away.”

  “Oh, Frank!”

  “It’s true, Pol. A good horse and a uniform are not the ingredients of a good soldier. It’s all façade—without substance. Useless.”

  This was too much for her. She pressed her hand to his cheek. “But remember, and promise me that you will never forget for the rest of our lives—”

  She stopped. Frank was forced to look up, seek out the end of that sentence, that vow. “What?”

  “Never forget,” she said solidly, “that you stood your ground with your comrades. You did not run in the Bladensburg races.”

  Those gentle eyes, so angelic in church, so striking in the courtroom, stinging from the dust and disarray of humiliation, squeezed shut briefly, then fluttered open. He wiped his hand across them as if to clear away the fog of so much unfamiliar action.

  “Oh, well, thank you for that,” he murmured. But he could not be comforted. He had seen something this day that no one trying to be a patriot should ever have to see. His inconsolable eyes moistened. Tears broke on his cheeks. “I know one thing for certain now. Tom Boyle was right about me. The battlefield is no place for me. I am no warrior.”

  She was about to argue with him, to say he was the best kind of warrior in God’s kingdom, a warrior of the heart, of morals and right, of the law, but the opportunity was crushed by a shriek from outside—a woman screaming in the street.

  Frank bolted for the front door. Polly followed.

  Darkness had fallen completely now. The dreadful day had turned to night, pretending everything was normal. There were no stars, no m
oon, nothing but clouds horizon to horizon. Reflected upon the low-lying clouds were colors of a false sunset—orange colors, yellow, white—moving constantly as if to display their primitive power.

  Other people in the street had stopped running, some of them. Droplets of rain had begun to fall upon their faces. They stared back the way they had come, to the place only a mile from here that held such important symbolic meaning for them, the swamp of only nine hundred houses and a cluster of buildings, a place so strategically unimportant that no one thought it held any attraction for the enemy.

  “It’s Washington.” Frank’s voice was scratchy, raw, as he spoke to his wife, to God or anyone. “They’re burning Washington.”

  “Don’t stop me.”

  “No! Please, Frank!”

  Even the beseeching of his beloved wife could not dislodge Frank Key from the sudden and irrepressible urge that rose in him.

  “Stay here!” Polly locked her hands around his arm. “Don’t leave again!”

  Drawing his arm back, he clasped her by both shoulders in the fiercest message he had ever given her.

  “I have to see!” he blurted.

  Without jacket or horse, he sprinted through the gathered people, his long legs stretching with every stride, toward the glow of flames beyond the shadowed tree-line. Just as she lost sight of him and the anguish of separation crushed her again, she heard his voice like an echo in a cave.

  “I have to see!”

  Red Heaven

  WASHINGTON, DC

  EVENING, AUGUST 24

  FIRE AT NIGHT. FRANK Key entertained no satisfaction of having been right as he stood a mile away from his Georgetown home and, like the last lingering Americans standing around him, here to witness the face of hell. He had been against the war and still was, but when the invaders came he had taken arms in defense of his country, however clumsily, and the taste of utter defeat was bitter even for a staunch pacifist. He had predicted disaster and divine punishment, and there it was.