by Nick Arvin
Henry had such mixed feelings of relief and anger that he could only stare and hold himself still, waiting for the anger to fall. He didn’t realize that he was crying until she reached and touched his face. “Oh dear,” she said. “My temper.” She put down the pot, hugged him, stood him at arm’s length, narrowed an eye. “I know it’s been a hardship of late, but think of your father. He’s in a prison with rats and terrible miasmas and the worst sorts of men. How much worse is it for him? I’ve decided we must go to Baltimore.” She returned to striking the inside of the pot with the hatchet, still talking, almost shouting. “Go get everything you can from the garden! As much as we can carry!”
He set to pulling a row of carrots. The year’s second planting, they weren’t much bigger than his littlest finger. Sweating in the endless heat, he began to seethe. Mother lay abed for two months, no help at all, then she rises up and tells him he’s done a poor job of cleaning and sends him to work the garden! He reared back and kicked his pile of carrots. Then he turned for the woods and ran.
He lazed in the cool damp dark of the cave, daydreaming of Baltimore, where he had never been. He imagined a city of clamorous dazzlement. As evening fell he feared that when he returned Mother would be angry and tell him that he was as bad as all the other Phipps men. Which would be unfair, and thinking of it he became upset, and he resolved to pass the night here in the cave.
In the morning he slept until the sun had gotten well up. The sound of the whippoorwill woke him. It was a signal he shared with Radnor.
Radnor stood outside the cave quiet and grave and would not speak until Henry grew cross and began stamping his feet. Radnor said that Franklin had deserted, had been caught, had been sentenced to the firing squad, and by now Franklin was already dead.
Henry greases the axle of the handcart, pushes it to the cabin door, rolls the pickle barrel over, loads the pickle barrel. Mother mutters, Baltimore. She mutters, Your father, your father, your father.
Henry says, “But, Franklin.”
Mother says, If they did shoot him, heaven forfend, you will need a second barrel. A big one.
In the yard Henry dumps a huge pile of feed for the chickens, then he gathers from off the ground several pickled cucumbers, carrots, beets, eggs. He scuffs off the dirt, drops them into a bag. He adds some of the bread and salted meat that Mother set aside for the trip to Baltimore. He spits on his hands, rubs them, lifts the cart handles, starts for the road.
Baltimore. It will be fine to go to Baltimore. But what he really wants is to help Father out of prison. To do that he will need money.
CHAPTER 2
Franklin Phipps sees three, sometimes four, stars. They twitch and shiver as he gasps. Ordered to keep his arms at his sides, he grinds his fingernails into his palms. His thoughts chase round and round. He’d tried to explain—what he’d done, what was right in the circumstances. But a fat-lipped officer in a smoky office in Alexandria said that he’d deserted, simple as that.
He had wanted to help his father, his brother, his mother, Mary Suthers. He’d helped none of them. To Mary—Miss Mary, little Mary Suthers—he had only brought shame and dishonor.
The Phipps family land had been lost by Franklin’s father on cards staked by Mary’s father—Mr. Jeremiah Suthers. When Franklin was born, the Phippses still owned their land and the house, although the house had become tumbledown and mossy. Franklin has a faint memory of peering out a second floor window at the fields where Father startled flocks of crows with a gravel-loaded blunderbuss.
At that time the cabin in the hillside was abandoned, but the Suthers family had been its last tenants. When Father was a boy, he lived in the house, and the Sutherses lived in the cabin, and Father and Jeremiah knew each other well. But Jeremiah’s mother died of phthisis, and Jeremiah’s father was a violent drunk, and at twelve Jeremiah ran away to Alexandria. Not long after, Jeremiah’s father was trying to shoot a rat, hit himself in the foot, and died of septic. Jeremiah Suthers, now orphaned, worked as a laborer on the Alexandria docks and within a few years had made a place for himself as a small-time merchant and general opportunist. Everyone called him Suthers, and as time went on he grew his wealth and reach to become one of the city’s most powerful men.
After Father had gambled away the Phippses’ estate, Suthers took ownership. He allowed the Phippses to live in the same cabin where he had grown up, and to work as tenant farmers on the same field where he had sweated as a boy.
Why Suthers did this, Franklin was never sure. Father said it was because they had been friends as children, but Suthers didn’t seem very friendly, and it passed Franklin’s mind that the friendship between Father and Suthers might be somewhat imaginary on Father’s side.
Suthers had the estate house fixed up, loaded it with cherry-wood furniture, glass-fronted bookcases, blue and white china, and French silverware, then moved in his family. They had no house slaves because Mrs. Suthers—who was several years older than Suthers and known for her practicality—didn’t want blacks in the house, and anyway said she preferred to do her own chores, perhaps to distract herself from whatever thoughts she might have if she were not doing chores. Suthers, who at heart was rather miserly, approved.
Suthers had no sons but four daughters. Mrs. Suthers died in childbirth with the fourth, Mary, who came some six years after the next youngest daughter. Mary was nearly the same age as Franklin, and she was often out carrying around a frog or a baby squirrel or gosling. Franklin had once watched her climb an oak into the high, thin, swayingest branches, higher than even he himself would have dared, because she wanted to peek into a jay’s nest. The eggs, she told Franklin, were the color of sky.
She had dark hair and narrow-set eyes in a face that tapered forward in an unusual way, somewhat like a badger. This was not pretty in any kind of usual way, yet Franklin was not sure that she was not pretty, or perhaps the question was somehow set aside by the force of her presence. She didn’t seem to care about whether she was pretty, as the other girls did. Often her hair got loose and wild and her clothes dirty while she hunted turtles or caught tadpoles or dug worms to feed a baby bird she had found.
Franklin wooed her in secret. They met nights beneath the old walnuts. Sometimes that fall as Franklin talked with her, a nut dropped straight onto his head. He didn’t notice. Franklin Phipps had always been big—big head and big shoulders and big hands and big belly and big thighs and big feet. If he were made of clay, he might have been divided and made into three of Mary.
The time with her was dizzying and marvelous, and when he received her note he felt as if an axe had struck his heart. She wrote that she was sorry, but she had realized that it could never be right between them, because her family had money, and his did not—he had worried about this, and they had talked about this, and she had said it didn’t matter. Evidently she had changed her mind. It was the most terrible thing that had ever happened to him, and he went the next day to the army office.
For six months the army marched him, sent him to sleep in the mud, dressed him in old boots and too small clothes, fed him badly, didn’t pay him—none of it mattered to Franklin, because he noticed only his heart’s misery.
Then a letter reached him, from Mary.
She wrote that shortly before he had enlisted she had noticed a change in herself of a feminine nature. She did not understand it, and, to her regret, she had spoken to her sisters about it. Her sisters told her it was nothing, and then they wrote to Suthers. So it was that Mary’s father appeared at the house, and he was the one who informed her that she was with child. When she admitted that Franklin was the father, Suthers had a note forged and delivered to Franklin. He had Mary bundled away to Alexandria where she was locked in a house with a nurse. He wanted to keep the matter quiet.
In the months since then Mary had attempted to flee without success, and she wasn’t sure whether she would ever be able to transmit this letter to Fra
nklin, for the nurse was like an owl watching a rabbit den.
The young man who delivered the letter told Franklin the end of the story. He had been in the street at night when he heard a hiss overhead. There, a girl was leaning out a window. She threw down to him a silver candelabrum and a letter. He was to deliver the letter; the candelabrum—which she had torn out of the wall—was his payment. The young man confessed to Franklin that he ordinarily might have kept the silver and thrown away the letter, except that he could not stop thinking of the remarkable vision of Mary’s anguished face bearing down on him in the moonlight.
That night Franklin put on civilian clothing and set out. He walked without rest and arrived in Alexandria in the deep dark of the next night. However, when he located the house that Mary described in her letter, the door hung open, and when he searched the rooms, he found no one.
Confused and distraught, he returned to the street. Wandering on the cobbles, he’d not gone far when Mary herself appeared beside him and tugged him into a side alley.
Uncharacteristically—Mary said—the nurse had gone out in the night, leaving her alone. Perhaps she believed Mary was asleep. Regardless, Mary took the opportunity to slip away. She had hoped that Franklin would arrive soon and stayed nearby to watch.
Then she kissed Franklin, took his hand, and led him on through the night. The kiss made Franklin stupendously happy, and he told Mary they must be married. At the edge of the city they crept into a stable to pass the night.
They had been, however, followed. In the dawn twilight a sergeant and five soldiers arrived to claim Franklin. The soldiers caught Franklin unawares or he might have beaten them off. As it was he fractured one man’s clavicle with a downward blow and threw another man into the neighboring stall where a mule kicked him before the sergeant leveled a loaded pistol in Franklin’s face.
Into the barn came a cadaverous man in civilian garb, taller even than Franklin. This was Lodowicke, Suthers’s principal associate. The soldiers fell back, and Lodowicke crouched before Franklin and Mary. With one hand he removed his hat, showing his bald head, while with the other hand he pulled a knife just far enough from the lapel of his jacket to ensure Franklin and Mary could see it. He spoke in whispers. Suthers himself had alerted the army to Franklin’s presence in Alexandria, Lodowicke said, and Suthers had the connections to ensure that a firing squad was ordered. Once Mary was widowed, Suthers intended to buy the interest and compliance of a young man of proper station to make a respectable husband and claim the baby as his own. Then Lodowicke seized Mary by the arm and pulled her away.
Franklin leaped after them, but the sergeant put a foot out and tripped him flat onto his face. He was tied and taken to the army office in Washington. After a night locked up, he was set atop a donkey and returned to his regiment. That had been the day before.
This morning the regimental doctor gave Franklin a white cap and a white robe with a square of red stitched over the heart. Franklin’s unit sergeant winked at him—this gesture seemed strange and cruel to Franklin—and waved for Franklin to follow. He led Franklin into a field where a grave had been dug beside an open coffin. The sergeant told Franklin to kneel with the grave on his right and the coffin on his left. He pulled down the white cap to cover Franklin’s eyes. “Keep your hands to your sides,” he said. “Or we’ll tie them back.”
Now silence and stillness lie on the field, as if it is enclosed in amber. Until the clatter of a click beetle startles Franklin, and he nearly topples into the grave.
“Open pan!” the colonel calls. “Handle cartridge!” The weapons rasp and rattle. The men spit cartridge paper. “Prime! Shut pan! Charge with cartridge! Draw rammers! Ram cartridge!” Franklin has followed these steps hundreds of times, but now he hears them anew, with dreadful suspense. “Return rammers! Make ready! Take aim!” The men let out long, loud breaths, like sighs. “Fire!”
Muskets explode.
Franklin pitches backward between coffin and grave, convulsing, screaming Mary’s name. His muscles clench; the breath goes from him. The white cap comes off, and he gazes at the sky. He cannot breathe. The sky darkens, comes down with a furious rushing noise that must be the beating of angels to bear him away.
Thinking of Mary he cries, “I’m sorry!”
But it seems he’s not yet died. The hurt in his gut relaxes slightly. Everything appears to have detached from everything else. A warm wet place in his undergarments spreads.
This feeling snags his attention. It comes to him that he’s fully alive. They missed! He breathes shallowly, trying to be quiet, play dead. Will they try to put him in front of the firing squad again, or finish him with a pistol? Hearing the sergeant approach, he holds his breath, but his heart is trying to throw itself out of his chest.
“Phipps,” the sergeant says. “You’re fine, Phipps.”
All of Franklin is tingling and needles, but he doesn’t want to be killed lying down. He flails a little, nearly rolls into the grave, finally sits up. Should he run? He’s not sure that his legs will carry him.
“A reprieve, Phipps!” the colonel calls. “No lead in the muskets! We’re going to need your rifle!”
Franklin looks around, sees afresh the scalding bright green of the world, the depthless sky. The ranked soldiers laugh or smirk or stare at the ground. The sergeant is standing in the coffin, grinning down at Franklin. “Up,” he says. “Let’s change your trousers.”
Franklin moves his hands weakly against the earth.
The sergeant takes him under the shoulder, pulls him up, helps him stumble toward the camp. “Bit a of a shock?” he asks. “Colonel had strict orders from the army office in Washington to put you before the firing squad. He says to me, ‘That Phipps, how old is he?’ I tell him you’re a big one, but only seventeen. I tell him you follow orders well, and you never give no trouble, but this one thing, which was because you had a girl, and she’s in a womanly way. Not like some of these men we’ve dragged back from their homes three or four times. Then I tell him you’re as good a shot with a rifle as I ever saw. Colonel says, ‘By God!’ And he thinks a little. Then he says, ‘Someone at the army office doesn’t like this man, but I can’t understand it. The order says to put him before the firing squad, and so we will. But we’ll do it like this—’ He’s a lawyer, you know. And you see how he did it. Clever, wasn’t he? How did you like it?”
No answer rises to mind.
An hour later the colonel assembles the regiment, Franklin among them. The colonel climbs onto a rail fence, looks down, wavers, steps down a rail. The colonel served in the War of Independence, but he has been writing property contracts for thirty years, and he has grown bald, fat, and nearsighted. His most impressive feature is his educated tone. He tells the men that the British have landed a force of several thousand men at Benedict. They are marching on Baltimore. Or maybe Washington. No one knows yet.
“You men,” he says, then stops, takes a piece of paper from his pocket, peers at it. “You men,” he says again, reading, “will need all of your strength and conviction. These British troops are experienced, hardened soldiers. These are the same troops who fought under Wellington at Badajoz, and at Salamanca. They have defeated the finest who carried Napoleon’s eagles, and they are by legend the finest soldiers in the world.” He pauses, and the men look at one another, wondering, perhaps, how far the colonel plans to go down this rhetorical pathway.
“But,” the colonel says. “Be not afraid. For we have the advantage of knowledge of the land. We have the support of our families, friends, and neighbors on all sides. And, most important, we possess the advantages of American courage and fortitude, shaped in the colonies, tempered on the frontier. These British have never encountered American soldiers on American soil, and when they do, if we fight as we can, then I assure you, they will rue the day they set foot on this continent.”
The words seem well considered and fine enough, yet the
colonel delivers them flat. He puts away the piece of paper, takes out a handkerchief, blows his nose. Everyone is silent. He seems to be done speaking. A few of the men cheer, perhaps sardonically. Dismissed, they break up and scatter. Except Franklin, who stands trying to think of what to think, of whether to think, terror still warm in his veins. The instant when he had been dead yet not dead, and the rush of wings, returns to him with awful disorientation.
Henry walks between the shafts of the cart. Sometimes grief squeezes his throat, and he can scarcely breathe. Mother says things, but he isn’t listening just now.
In time he becomes aware of footsteps behind him. He scowls, pulls harder. He doesn’t care to address questions about his situation. But the steps draw up and then keep pace with him, and finally with a feeling of loathing, he glances over.
He’s surprised to see a girl. She’s perhaps two or three years older than himself, with skin the color of mushrooms and bruises under her eyes. She gazes at him.
Henry says, “What?”
“Do you have any money?”
“No.”
“You’re pretty small to be dragging barrels around like a donkey.”
“I’m not small. And it’s just one barrel.”
She laughs. “The big donkey is all alone and has no money. It’s too bad.”
“I’m fine!” he says. “I don’t need help!”
“I don’t need help!” she mocks. She walks with speed, easily outpacing him. Soon she disappears around a bend.
As the day advances, he sees others on the road: a group of a half-dozen men in fine black frock coats trotting their horses, a whistling slave leading an enormous pig, a fast-moving carriage with shrouded windows, a wagon loaded with beehives. None of the travelers speak to Henry. Wet all over with sweat, occasionally raising a shoulder to brush at the mosquitoes on his neck and face, Henry trudges past fields of corn and tobacco in long curving rows, past the deep old forest, past a cabin with a half-dozen barking dogs, past a long pond that ripples with the movements of water striders. Mother whispers, “Baltimore. Baltimore.”
