Mad Boy

by Nick Arvin

  The fire flickers up, drops, regroups, then curtains upward to blacken the ceiling. Smoke fills the room, and Henry puts his mouth to the gap at the bottom of the door to breathe.

  It grows extremely hot, however, and Henry begins to think he will be cooked through. Someone beats on the door, then runs off. With a clatter, several pair of boots return down the hallway. A key works in the lock. Henry draws back and crouches, holding his breath. The door swings in. When the soldiers fall away from the smoke, coughing, Henry throws himself forward. He crashes into one of the redcoats—knocking him into two others—rights himself, and runs down the hall, away from the billowing smoke and the coughing, flailing soldiers, to the far door, and out.

  He sprints through the dark for the safety of woods, shouts rising behind him. A musket shot follows—the round slaps earth on Henry’s left. But no more follow, and as he gains the trees, he feels the beating of joy, and he laughs.

  He circles to the other side of the fields and lingers to watch the house burn—in a few minutes it is wrapped by an enormous coruscation. A river of rising heat wavers the stars. The redcoats laugh, sing—and try to throw a pig carcass near enough to cook.

  Henry is near the barn, and the redcoats are watching the fire, so Henry slips inside and finds a cart, well crafted, with two spoked wheels rimmed with iron and a open box large enough to hold Mother. The shafts might be harnessed to a small pony or a large dog. Henry pulls it into the night.

  Dragging the cart through the woods he watches for Hollis and Charles, vaguely hoping that he might convince them to help him. To return to the cabin while avoiding the open field he takes a circuitous route, yanking the cart over roots and rocks, through mud and bushes, driven by fuming stubbornness.

  He arrives exhausted and dispirited, and after so much effort to pull the empty cart such a short distance, it seems it will be impossible to haul Mother to the sea. In a fit he runs to grab the shovel. But Mother shouts, No no no! Not the dirt! Henry! Please!

  Henry says, “Damn damn damn!” and beats the ground with the shovel.

  She says, Don’t use that word that way.

  He sits on the ground, tears coming. “Mother, I wish you were alive.”

  She says, I know.

  He says, “I wish Father were not in prison.”

  She says, Your poor father.

  He says, “I don’t want to be like Father.”

  She says, Hush.

  He says, “I’m tired. I hate this. I only want things to be as they were, when we were all together. Why is our luck so bad? Must I go on?”

  She says with immense gentleness, Yes, but not until you are ready.

  He sags, rolls onto his side. Sleep comes as he lies on the bare earth.

  Later he wakes in the dark, lifts up, crawls into the house and onto the bed, beside her. She’s cold, stiff, murmuring. He sleeps.

  In the first ruddy morning light she’s still murmuring, which is pleasant, until he remembers that she is dead. He jumps from the bed. She has a terrible pallor, which is greening. A smell. He runs outside.

  He sits on the tree stump where they slaughter chickens, watches the day gather light. The empty sky mingles orange, pink, and blue into some color that Henry cannot name. Snakes of mist, a couple of feet high, writhe over the rows of the garden, and the beanpoles jut out like spears. On one side of the garden hunches the trellis where scuppernongs grow and will be ripening soon. Mother always gave the first ripe ones to Henry.

  The shovel lies nearby, and when he looks at it, he hears her say, at some distance, Not here, Henry, not in the swamp dirt. Take me with you.

  He says, “I can’t—”

  The cart will move fine on the roads, she says. Don’t be ungrateful.

  He shouts, “You’ll stink and—”

  He stops himself. He doesn’t want the black spirit to take her. In truth he wants her with him.

  He stomps over to the barn, fetches out the pickle barrel. His great-great-grandfather—the last in the family to possess any noteworthy skill in crafting useful objects—had the idea that he would pickle large quantities of cabbage and eggs and take them to town to sell. He sealed a tobacco hogshead watertight and made the barrel’s special lid himself. The lid edge is beveled and held in place by six rotating iron latches. These latches can be cranked down to create a watertight seal. Henry opens the lid, tosses out the cucumbers and eggs and onions in a gleaming pile in the dirt, and rolls the barrel into the house. Mother has stiffened terribly, and the barrel is scarcely large enough—Henry begins gently, but as he grows angry he wrenches her limbs, cracking joints, tearing muscles. Shoving and twisting he works Mother into the barrel with the brine. During this activity she mutters. He twists the latches to close the lid, listens.

  To Baltimore, she says.

  “During the last year, our financial condition has become a little discomposing,” Father said the last time Henry saw him. “But the Phippses’ luck will turn now, sure enough.”

  When Father’s debts mounted in Alexandria, then Washington, then Annapolis, and he could not enter those cities for fear of arrest, he began gambling in Baltimore, a two- or three-day journey by foot.

  When Father lost money in Baltimore, too, he sold the wheelbarrow and a musket for a small stake and departed for Baltimore to win back what he owed. Mother fell into bed with the black spirit, staring at the granite wall. But after only a couple of days she rose, and she began to work day and night with furious agitation. She told Franklin, who was now seventeen years old, that he had reached the age of manhood, and he ought to find a way to earn money to pay off Father’s debts, so that Father could stay home, and they could all be together.

  She was surely aware that she was stoking Franklin’s notions of honor. Franklin avoided drink and games, debts and lassitude. He refrained from talking overmuch and would never, ever, break his word. Henry understood without pausing to contemplate it that Franklin did these things in reaction to Father’s fecklessness, in the same way he understood that only Mother’s efforts held the family together and after straining at this task for years the unity of the family had become her absolute preoccupation.

  When Father returned from Baltimore he had lost even his hat and bore upon his head a sort of floppy mat that he had woven out of cattail leaves. He had been home for a couple of days and was whittling himself a pipe stem and talking about a horse that he would bet on, if only he had money, when Franklin entered the cabin, halted in the center of the room, and announced that he had joined the army.“I have here the fifty dollars bounty that I have been paid,” he said, “and I will be paid eight dollars monthly, and I will receive one hundred sixty acres on discharge at war’s end.”

  Then he stood regarding his feet.

  Henry saw Mother blanch and feared that she would immediately lie down sick.

  “But,” she said, “we need this family together. I have always said so.”

  “We need money,” Franklin said.

  “I’ve said we need money, but, Franklin, not like this! Do you understand how much your father owes? You’ll be in the army for years on years paying his debts. And all that time you’ll be away from us!”

  Franklin cleared his throat. “And, also, there is the national honor,” he said.

  “The what? What? What is that? Did you say national honor?” Mother leaned toward Franklin with her tiny body, and he bent backward as if wasps swarmed before him. “The national honor? Did the national honor give birth to your very enormous self? Will the national honor tend your hurts? Will the national honor be there when you are in a position of need? National honor! As useless as a rock in a field. You will leave us here, and possibly you will be killed, which perhaps you deserve, but we, your family, will be without you, and do you think we deserve that?”

  She talked like this for a while. Franklin peered at his feet, said nothing.<
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  Then Mother said, “And, what of Miss Mary?”

  Franklin seemed dismayed that his feet lay so far down below. “She’s gone,” he said, “to live in Alexandria. She left a note. She says she doesn’t care to see me again.”

  Mother said, “Oh no.”

  Everyone gazed at Franklin. Franklin did not move.

  “Ah, Franklin,” Father said at last. “I am sorry. Of all the aches, heartache is the most terrible ache.”

  Mother said, “But this is no reason to go to the army!”

  Henry watched Father. Father, an avowed Federalist, often argued against the Republicans, Madison, and the war. “The Republicans decided to start this war! It’s on their account!” he had cried. “They said Canada would welcome our liberating army! The Southern Republican poltroons who’ve never in their lives met a Canadian. So we marched into Canada, and lo the Canadians smashed us and slaughtered us and threw us out on our ears, and for good measure took our forts along the Lakes and roused the Indians against us, so that we have spent the last two years scrabbling to get back to even, never-you-mind conquering Canada. Because we’re led by Madison’s steaming idiocy and the Republican rabble, promoting incompetent allies in the army, enriching their friends, spending the nation into fathomless debt, propelling our boys into a hell of death and illness and amputations. The papers say that in the encampments around Sacketts Harbor the streets run with human excrement and every hour the bells toll another death. You’ve seen the soldiers who come home from the north—starved, wearing rags, half-mad, begging along the roads, sleeping in mud . . . ”

  Father could go on this way at considerable length. But now—now Father only rubbed his jowls. He, too, studied Franklin’s boots. Mother turned in place, throwing ugly glances between Father and Franklin. Finally she shrieked with frustration.

  “Dear,” Father said, “please.” He held up a hand. “The military duty is, after all, perhaps a thing only a man can understand.”

  Mother’s eyes opened wide, and she looked as if she might pounce on Father and eat him.

  Father hurried on. “Franklin, you are a good son. You are, in inarguable fact, a better son than I deserve. You have a strong sense of duty, as befits a Phipps.” He blinked rapidly, as if thinking of the duty-mindedness of the Phippses made him sentimental. “Your mother raises worthy considerations,” he said, “but another aspect that must be considered is the science of luck. As we all know, I have had a horrible string of bad fortune. But a thing going up must eventually go down, and our luck has gotten as bad as it possibly could.”

  “A thing going up,” Henry said, puzzled, “must return down, but won’t a thing going down stay down?”

  “Ah,” Father said, “yes, it’s an imperfect metaphor, perhaps—well, the science of luck, which I have spent all of my life examining, in one way or another, doesn’t fit any exact analogy. But perhaps, to give it a metaphor that your mother will understand very well, I should say that it is like the tide: what goes out, must come in. Pascal and Fermat and, most importantly, Bernoulli, were in the Phipps family library, before debts forced us to sell the books, and those logicians showed via inviolable reasoning that if you flip a coin many, many times the heads and the tails will balance out. Well, we’ve flipped tails so many times that we’re due for a great long run of heads, and it certainly would be foolish to turn aside when such incredible fortune is due. I’ll take to Baltimore the bounty money paid to Franklin and discharge my debts. It will mark a turning. The Phipps family will rise from this point, and you, Franklin, have created the moment from which we will rise.”

  “No no no,” Mother said. “Not like this. You’ve said yourself, the war is the design of buffoons.”

  But Father smiled as if to himself, swung his arms out wide—he nearly hit Henry in the face—and cried, “Good fortune is before us!”

  Mother collapsed a little, and Henry watched her with dread. But a moment later she lifted and said, “Well, I suppose it must turn, finally. Nothing can go downward forever, can it?” And so on she muttered, which, Henry noted, at least meant that she hadn’t taken sick. Then he slipped out to walk awhile in the night-dark woods.

  Franklin packed a bag and set out the next day to fulfill the terms of his enlistment. Shortly afterward, Father departed for Baltimore to pay his debts.

  In a letter that arrived a week later, Father explained that he had had solemn intentions. But the thirst for drink was a kind of devil in him, and he thought surely it was harmless to stop along the way to purchase a hat and a dram of whiskey. That very afternoon a wind blew his hat away down a fast-moving creek, and nothing went right afterward. He gambled away Franklin’s bounty money, borrowed more with which to win back what he had lost, gambled away what he had borrowed, tried to slip out of Baltimore at night in a cartload of manure, but fell asleep and was betrayed by his own snores. The sheriff pulled him out by one foot and locked him in the debtor’s prison. With this letter came a second letter from a lawyer representing Father’s various creditors, explaining that Father would be held until nine hundred twenty-five dollars of debt and interest were paid.

  The sum was so large as to be absurd, yet Mother did not take sick. “Not like the tide,” she said. “It is like your father is a nail. But no one hammers a nail forever, and fate won’t do it to your father.”

  The weeks ground on through spring into summer. Franklin wrote that he trooped here and there to fight British raiders, arriving every time to news that the redcoats had already departed. Father wrote from prison to say that he had befriended an amiable mouse. “We’ll keep our spirits,” Mother said to Henry, “and all will come out right.” She worked relentlessly, in the garden and the field, cleaning, cooking, into the night at the table making embroidery to sell, all the time muttering.

  Until one day when Suthers, who spent most of his time at his office in Alexandria, came to the big house to visit with his daughters. On a gleaming morning near the end of June, Henry was engaged in his own private peregrinations when he came to Suthers’s fields and saw Mother and Suthers standing in the long double track from the road to the house, talking. Henry stepped back to watch. He couldn’t hear what they said, but Mother clasped her hands and leaned forward as she spoke, plainly pleading.

  Suthers shook his head.

  As Mother turned away, she clutched her right temple. Henry moaned. For the rest of the day he cursed and ran around kicking mushrooms, throwing rocks at frogs, smashing flowers, unwilling to return to the cabin. When he drifted back at twilight, exhausted, he found her as he feared: silent, elbows on the table, face in her hands. She whispered of a pain on one side of her head like a hole through her skull, and a scraping on the other side like a spoon inside a melon. Soon she lay abed, her right thumb in her opposite hand, her left eye open, her face to the granite wall. She asked Henry to snuff the lantern. The light, she whispered, plunged spikes into her eyes.

  Henry feared—as he did every time—that this time she might never rise again. The sickness had always passed before, but when, how, and why were mysteries. Once, when Mother lay abed with her black mood, Father had come with a shovel and tried to pry her out. “Am I not master in my home!” he roared. Mother moaned piteously. But, when Father nearly had her tipped out of the bed, she sprang up and punched him in the neck. Father dropped to the floor in a faint. Mother lay down and did not rise again for a week.

  The days dragged, on and on. Henry fed Mother a little, when she would eat. Otherwise, he had no guidance beyond his own impulses. He worked the garden and fields haphazardly, ate wrinkled dry little potatoes from the cellar, caught catfish and frogs from the river. At times he grew suddenly, terribly vexed, his entire body hot in an instant, as if a musket charge had gone off, and he threw down his work and ran away to a narrow limestone cave he knew.

  Well hidden by brambles on the steep bank of a muddy creek, the cave was like a big open mout
h, tapering to a blocked throat at the back, where a crack in the stone rose to make a natural chimney. He brought in hay to lie on, and sometimes he made a fire and spent a night. He liked lying in the complete dark at night, listening to the slop of the creek and the scuffle of the brambles working against one another when the air moved. Henry had never told anyone about the cave, but Radnor and his brothers knew—the slaves seemed to know about every kind of place like this. “You can’t tell Mother about the secret cave,” Henry would say. Radnor pursed his lips as if irritated to have to state the obvious and said, “Of course. It’s a secret cave.”

  Through July Henry spent several nights in the cave. Returning to the cabin he felt guilty for leaving Mother. But she said nothing, lay in the same place she always did, face to the wall. August came in like the hot breath of a dog, and day followed day, and the best part was sitting in the cooling of first dark to watch the fireflies rise from the fields, as if the earth were burning with cold fire. Except for his worries about Mother, Henry’s days were rather fine. Sometimes he went to the edge of Suthers’s fields to watch the slaves work and the comings and goings at the house. He laid rabbit snares of a design that Franklin had taught him, with considerable success, except the foxes often found the rabbits before he could recover them, leaving a scatter of fur and one snared foot. He passed entire afternoons by the creeks fishing with a string and hook. He saw how Suthers’s pigs evaded the heat and mosquitoes and biting flies by covering themselves with mud, and he undressed and did the same.

  He came home one day to find the cabin door open, rags and broken things thrown into the yard. Mother appeared in the doorway with a pot under one arm, chiseling the char with a hatchet. “Henry! Look at you!” He looked down. He had attempted to rinse off the mud, but he had missed some places. “And what have you been doing with this pot while I rested?” She struck it with the hatchet. “You couldn’t keep a slab of soap clean!”