by Nick Arvin
The horizon glows brighter and brighter, then throws up a flare. Out of the distance rolls a crack, a boom, then another, followed by an uncanny rumble of the earth underfoot. Henry goes on, seeing in his mind great brick houses full to the ceilings with silver platters, gold jewelry, ivory snuff boxes, emerald studded spittoons, gilded clocks, Spanish leather wallpaper, silk carpets, tables laden with suckling pigs and stuffed pheasants, kitchens packed with tubs of sugar, barrels of molasses, slabs of chocolate, maybe even oranges.
But when he enters the city, he finds himself in narrow streets lined with filthy and flimsy wooden structures, built of warped and rotting boards, sinking into the mud, windowless, most of them sorrier-looking than his own cabin. Explosions continue breaking from southeast of the city; great fireballs rise there in a flickering false dawn. Henry runs down a curving alley, becomes turned around amid the small leaning hovels and vast piles of garbage, retraces his path, and finally enters a straight, wide street that rises and offers a vista of buildings near and far. Several are aflame, churning up thick rising columns of smoke and flurries of debris that spiral and flutter on the heat like bats. A quick hunched figure scuttles by with an armful of china. Close behind comes a waddling man bearing a pile of coats and handfuls of tallow candles.
Henry runs past the wooden houses to the first brick house—he associates brick with city finery—and circles to the rear. He tugs the door, and to his surprise it flies open. In the doorway stands a small, well-dressed man holding a cabbage. He draws the cabbage back and hurls it.
The vegetable hits Henry’s forehead, snaps his head back, nearly knocks him off his feet. “Thief! Thief!” the man shrieks. “Horrible boy! Thief!”
Henry flees back to the street, feeling his forehead, fearing it may be split open. It seems only bruised. But it makes him so angry that snot bubbles from his nose. Why should a man beat his face with a cabbage for opening an unlocked door? It should be locked if he didn’t want anyone to open it. Why—Henry thinks bitterly—I might have been attempting to warn of a fire on the roof or a thief in the window. He casts around, and his attention settles on the largest house in sight, a wide brick house with a whitewashed frame around the front door, a row of first floor windows in the brick, and another window eyeing out of the steep roof. Henry circles around trying windows, doors, but nothing gives. Finally he lifts a rock, puts it through a window, turns the latch, clambers in.
He detects the scent of fresh flowers, and it stretches his hopefulness toward happy greed. The fires throw quick, freakish slants of light through the window, showing handsome pieces of furniture. Henry laughs with pleasure, a little quiet hiccup laugh, in deference to the quiet of the house. He drops into an enormous wicker rocking chair with a down-filled cushion on the seat, and he thrusts himself forward, back, forward, back, an indulgent motion that raises in him, as if by the working of a crank, the feeling of a king contemplating the extent and wealth of his realm. He’s never sat in a rocking chair before. Father said that chairs oughtn’t move and anyway were not a proper field for new inventions, but this was probably because if he could get his hands on a rocking chair he would immediately sell it for gambling money. Forward, back, forward, back, Henry’s noble feeling cranks higher and higher. As he rocks, he listens for Mother—maybe that is her voice? Ever so faintly?
The crack of an especially impressive explosion interrupts his thoughts. He goes to the nearest cabinet, swings the carved doors, ready to take wonderful things from their places.
Nothing. He feels along the empty dark shelves, finds only a single shard of broken crockery. He rushes on, to a tall chest of drawers, to a massive oaken desk, to the cupboards, to a wardrobe large enough to make a spacious henhouse—all empty. In the kitchen there are no pots, no pans, no silverware, no cups. Nothing on the mantle, nothing on the table, only heaps of cold ash on the hearth, and something underfoot—Henry bends to feel. Cut roses, dumped wet onto the floor, they prick Henry’s hand. He stomps them.
He runs upstairs, opens a door, finds a long, dark room. He draws a curtain from the single, small window: the objects of the room disappoint. The furniture is rough cut, and there’s a filthy rug, a bed with greasy bedding in a heap, some scattered bits of food crust, many stains, tobacco shards, and insects that scuttle away from the light. On the wall hangs an oval mirror, its silver blackening as if diseased. A set of drawers beneath the mirror hold patched trousers and shirts, a fieldworker’s smock, a brown hat shaped like the cap of a mushroom. In the corner he finds a horsehair trunk, throws it open, finds neatly folded fabrics. He pulls these out by fistfuls: trimmed with silks, stiffened with starch, heavy with small buttons and knotted lacings, they are women’s things, nicer than anything Mother ever wore. A laced velvet vest, a silk taffeta gown, a whalebone stay, a bright yellow linen dress, a white silk chemise. Why are they here? The dress is a marvelous fine linen. “Mother,” he says, holding it up, “do you like it?” He cannot hear her, but perhaps that is due to all of the noise in the streets. Somewhere a horse is screaming. The dress is cut for someone a little larger than himself—it slides easily over his head and his clothes. He looks in the splotchy mirror, turns left, turns right, reaches behind to fit the waist, straightens his back, sets his shoulders, rolls his eyes. Certainly it is too long, but if it were hemmed—
“Hello, my lady!”
Henry tries to jump, turn, and pull off the dress all at the same time. He briefly glimpses an extraordinarily ugly redcoat leering from the stairs before he becomes hopelessly tangled in the dress. Fumbling, blind, he cries “I’m no girl!” He twists, yanks, drags the length of the dress overhead, casts it aside.
The redcoat stands gazing at Henry with fleshy lips pinched into a bud of disgust. His ugliness is so complete, so magnificent, it makes Henry gape—a large purpling nose, cavernous pox scars in his cheeks, a weak chin that recedes to nothing, hair snowy with dander, small uneven eyes, teeth snaggled to all angles like bits of burnt wood. It is as if someone had composed a face out of butcher’s scraps.
The redcoat snorts. “You do make a miserable sort of maiden. A disappointment, aren’t you?”
“Go away,” Henry says.
“No bosom, no bottom, no girl at all. Quite disillusioning. Are you finding some charming things? All emptied out downstairs. Did you empty it? Doubtful. That way when you arrived, was it?”
“I live here,” Henry says sourly.
The redcoat laughs. “Aye. And my arse lives in a bowl full of daisies.”
“I live here!” Henry cries. It seems true enough, since he arrived first.
“That’s the reason you put a rock through a window.”
“Never liked that window,” Henry mumbles.
“So, playing dress up? What’re these nice things doing in a corner of the servants’ quarters, you suppose? Dead girl, likely. Couldn’t bear to be rid of them, put them here to be out of sight.”
“Dead girl?” Henry looks at the yellow dress on the filthy floor. Already a cockroach is exploring it.
“What’s your age? Nine?”
“I’m sixteen.”
The redcoat grins, showing his horrifying teeth. “If you’re sixteen, then I’m already dead. Which I don’t think I am, although I did think I might die yesterday, when General Ross had us quickstepping for mile after mile through your forsaken countryside.” While he talks, the redcoat examines the chest of clothes that Henry has already explored. “Mosquitoes, flies, miserable heat. Man beside me staggered and dropped right there, dead as a spiked twelve pounder.” The redcoat pulls the drawers and spills their contents to the floor. “This after weeks on weeks inside the holds of swaying vile ships, everyone vomiting. Put us on land and away we go, marching, trotting, bodies falling dead, no pause to help them, no decent burial.” He riffles the bedding. “Meantime, General Ross on his horse like Alexander traipsing over the mountains on an elephant.” He opens the mattress
tick with a knife and shakes out the straw stuffing. “Worthless,” he says, scowling. “People here live like savages.” He looks at Henry. “Now where?”
Henry, who has been watching for an opportunity to dash for the stairway, glares. “Where?”
“Yes, where next?”
“I live here,” Henry says. “This is my house.”
“Dedication to a lie is laudable only to a point, my boy. We have a city before us, spreading her legs. There’s far more to be had than any one of us can carry. Better the two of us together than each alone, am I right? You know the country, and I know what I’m doing. We’ll make a fair split, seventy-thirty, since I am bigger. Yes?” He peers at Henry with his small, misaligned eyes.
Henry looks at the shambles on the floor. Musket shots sound in the distance. He listens for Mother—he hears something, so faint, he can’t be sure . . . Urged by an instinct or feeling—mostly the feeling that dislikes loneliness—he says, “Seventy-thirty?”
“Sixty-five and thirty-five, then!” The redcoat swings around and starts down the stairs. “I like a man who drives his bargains hard!”
Henry grabs up the yellow dress, shakes out the roaches, folds it tight, hides it under his shirt, follows the redcoat down.
The redcoat says his name is Morley, an artillery man. “I didn’t like my orders. So, I gave myself my own orders: go plundering! A man has to know when to seize the initiative, and no man has many chances in life like this one.”
The first house they break into is also emptied, nothing left but the dirt on the floorboards and pig bones on the table. As they push through the back door of a second house, a musket blasts, and Morley and Henry turn and flee. In the street men hurry by with saddles, buckets of nails, an elephant tusk, entire windows. “Soon everything will be gone!” Morley says with anguish. They move in the shadows at the edge of the street under a sky flaring with marigold colors. They pass a corner where a dozen or more black men—freedmen or slaves left behind—stand watching balls of flame shoot into the southeastern sky. British soldiers pass by, and the black men say hello and the soldiers say hello, all polite, all smiling. Morley cowers behind a corner until the British have gone. He and Henry start to bicker about which houses to try—Henry wants only brick houses, but Morley says the brick has served them ill because brick indicates the sort of family with the resources to guard or evacuate their things. He drags Henry to a large wooden house, goes straight through the back door with his shoulder.
They grope forward in the dark, slowly, slowly, until their eyes adjust, and they can see a little, can see flat, empty surfaces. Morley stomps about, pulling out drawers. He finds a single small silver dish, which he shows to Henry, then shoves into the front of his trousers. He pulls a mirror off the wall, drops it to smash. He stops at a door, peers at the gap at the bottom. A trace of light shows there. The door is locked. “What, ho!” Morley cries, bangs on the door. “Come out! Come out!”
Henry comes up as Morley, again, drops his shoulder and crashes through the door, with the skill of a man who has done this many times.
A woman screams—she is crouched on the floor of a small bedroom, shielding a candle with her hands. “A pretty lady!” cries Morley. “Come, share the light. Come, talk with us.”
The woman, heavy, plain, red-faced, recovers her composure and scowls at Morley, saying nothing.
“Such a discourteous reception!” Morley says. “But it is understandable. My entrance was a trifle vigorous.” He moves a half-step nearer, smiling. “Let’s start over, more sociably. You would scarcely believe how long I have been denied any feminine society.”
Henry edges backward. “We might as well go. There’s nothing here.”
“But she wants to get to know us first, yes, my lady?” Morley extends a hand, trembling, very slow, as if she were a skittish animal.
With her right hand the woman lifts something from the floor—a broom. Then she blows on the candle.
The plunge of darkness is followed by the noise of a blow, like a hard struck muskmelon—Henry supposes it is the broom on Morley’s skull. Morley shrieks. Amid the shrieking comes a second, more fleshy thwack. “Damn! Damn woman!” Morley shouts.
Scuffles, grunts, curses, a yelp.
“Bit me!” yells Morley. “Like a mad dog!”
They’ve struggled into the parlor, and by the scant light from the windows Henry can see Morley’s arm around the woman’s neck. With his other hand Morley is trying, with incomplete success, to restrain her arms. “Rope,” Morley calls to Henry, breathing hard. “Find rope.”
“I’ll kill you,” the woman says oddly calm, even as she struggles. “I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you.”
“Where am I going to find rope?” Henry says. “We might as well leave.”
“The lady is a fascinating conversationalist,” Morley says, pushing her hand from his face. “We should all get familiar with one another.”
“I’ll have your eyeballs from their sockets,” she says.
Henry says, “We’re gaining nothing here.”
“I’ll break your neck and send you to hell,” she says and strains to turn her head back, teeth gleaming.
“It seems everyone’s nerves are a little fraught,” Morley says. “Henry, get me a sheet, a curtain, a pair of trousers, anything will do for rope.”
Henry stomps a foot. “Leave her!”
“I’ll take your heart out of your chest with my own hands.”
“Oh, hush! Hush!” Morley begins to force her toward the floor, but she swings a foot up, hard, and Morley screams. He throws her into the wall, and she falls, but stands again.
Morley snuffles. “She kicked my pego.”
“We’ll be on our way,” Henry says.
“Sinners,” she says. She crosses to the fireplace and lifts an iron poker.
“We’re departing,” Henrys says, pulling Morley—who is bent and groaning—toward the door. “This isn’t the house we thought it was,” Henry says. “We apologize.”
“You are an absurd liar,” she says.
In a fit of dread Henry jerks Morley outside and drags him to the street, not looking back. She calls, “You’ll blaze like torches in hell.”
“What a bitch,” Morley says to the ground, still bent, hands on crotch, moving with fast shuffling steps. “And you were no help at all.”
“I need money. I don’t need to waste time with women.”
Morley sighs. “It is a weakness of mine,” he says. “I have a poverty of will against the tender sex.”
Henry says nothing.
“A tuberous, mean, ill-bred thing, that one,” Morley starts to straighten a little. “Bah. Do you know that I’m a married man? Aye, that woman is as the dirt on my boot when compared to my wife. But, alas, I was forced to leave my poor, dimpled Spanish love at the docks when we finished off Napoleon’s mollies in Iberia.” They stand at the edge of a wide dirt street, flames eating buildings in either direction. Morley takes in the view with disgust. “A muddy, malarial village dressed up with a couple of fancy government offices. The fire is a spectacle, but it is nothing compared to when we put St. Sebastian to the torch.” They start down the street, keeping close to the houses. “Burned the city entire. And we had all the women we wanted.” Morley looks around as he walks. “If an officer objected, we turned our muskets on him. We had fires and pillaging and women night and day for a week. Say—” Morley stops. “What is that building? Is that the Patent Office?”
“Patent Office?” Henry halts, bewildered.
“The houses are no good. We’ve seen that. Let’s gather some useful inventions out of the Patent Office.” Morley’s little eyes shine. “A good invention will make us a lifetime of treasure. We’ll take the best and burn the place. Then who’s to say they aren’t our inventions?”
Henry says, “That’s the strangest idea of pl
undering I ever heard.”
“We’ll be scientists and businessmen, like true Yankees. It’s not the usual way, but great men must think extraordinary thoughts and take unusual action. Why, it may be the finest idea I ever had,” Morley says, growing rapturous. He hurries on, leading Henry around a row of shops. Henry is doubtful. But he also feels reluctant to try another house; the houses have turned out so poorly. In the light of a lantern held by a redcoat in the middle of the street, a British officer stands in discussion with a civilian. Several more redcoats have gathered to watch. “They’ll burn it soon. We must hurry. You go over there on the left,” Morley whispers, “and I’ll be over there to the right. You make a little noise, to draw their attention, and I’ll slip across.”
Radnor holds close his red-painted musket—last night he held it even while he slept. On Capitol Hill, the Capitol burns. Nearby, the White House burns. Down the street, the Treasury burns. Around the corner, the War Department burns. Here and there other smaller buildings burn, shops and houses set afire by looters or by sparks blown in shining streaks overhead. The heat raises gossamer purls of steam from the muddy streets, and the air stinks of burned wood, burned paint, burned corn, burned leather, burned gunpowder. There is also, Radnor notes, a faint dewy scent of rain. Clouds cover the stars and reflect back the city’s fires with a dim infernal light.
A disheveled white man is pleading with the lieutenant to spare the Patent Office. His argument runs like so: the British have said they will only burn government property; the paperwork and models inside the Patent Office are the property of the private citizens who own the patents; ergo, the contents of the Patent Office must be spared.
The lieutenant listens with his head cocked, as if bent by oblique reasoning.
Radnor likes the lieutenant all right. “A free man,” he said to Radnor the day before, “with all the rights and obligations of a subject of His Royal Majesty King George III, and the full honors of a Colonial Marine in His Majesty’s Navy.” As he spoke the lieutenant stood in more or less the same spot where Radnor had come every day, year after year, to toss the dinner leavings to the pigs. He handed Radnor a musket. “Now let’s humiliate some Americans, so that we can leave this dreadful, immoral continent.” Donning his redcoat, Radnor silently pledged that he would never again feed another man’s pigs. The uniform fitted poorly, but he hardly cared. For years he had worn nothing but a rough linsey-woolsey smock.
