Mad Boy

by Nick Arvin

  “Oh,” Henry says. “I’m white.”

  The little group chuckles, a thin vibration, nearly not a sound. The one from Alexandria says, “Yes sir, personally, I had no doubt.” He dips his head in a grave nod. Then, as if on a signal unknown to Henry, they turn and move down the street.

  Alexandria. Henry has been in Alexandria before, with Father, when Father had a little money. He remembers the wonderful cobblestone streets and the craftmen’s shops—baker, tailor, harnessmaker, cordwainer, sailmaker, locksmith, china mender, glover, barber, perukemaker, cobbler—and the docks and the tall sails, and the taverns where Father drank, and the warehouse space where Suthers ran his card game.

  It grows dark while Henry lingers near the British camp, watching for Morley. A redcoat tells him to go home, gesturing vaguely with his musket. Henry finds a place where he can sit hidden by bushes. The redcoats are hauling timbers from the Capitol and nearby buildings to build large fires. Henry rests his forehead on his knees.

  When he wakes at dawn, the British army has vanished.

  People are already scouring the abandoned encampment for valuables, but there is only garbage. Henry watches and contemplates his prospects briefly, then turns and sets out for the Potomac, to cross to Alexandria.

  The bridge has been burned to black sticks extending from either bank, skeleton hands reaching but unable to grasp each other. Several watermen with skiffs and shallops tied at the foot of the bridge offer to ferry passengers. Henry pays his only half-dollar.

  As they cross, the current sweeps them well downstream. Setting Henry ashore, the waterman says he is less than five miles from Alexandria.

  Is Mother angry? Henry can only hear her so terribly faintly that it’s impossible to say. But he’s glad to hear her.

  It strikes him suddenly that he has forgotten the yellow dress, in the chicken hutch. He stops in the road, and he thinks of going back for it. But he hasn’t any money for the ferry. He sighs and goes on.

  Again he encounters refugees, loaded carts and wagons, strings of livestock. The rain begins again, softly. But a sparkle of sun catches his eye: on his left, the sun shines in clear sky.

  “A rainbow,” he whispers. “Make a rainbow.”

  Soon it’s there, dim colors in the shining rain against dark clouds.

  “Brighter,” he says. “Brighter, brighter, brighter.”

  To his delight the clouds open around the sun, and the rainbow glows brighter, and yet brighter. Soon it is complete from end to end. It spans the sky like an immense and solid thing, and very nearby, so that he might run to the foot of it in a minute or two. But he has tried this before; he knows it will move away from him exactly as he moves toward it. Still, it makes him happy.

  CHAPTER 4

  Morley moans, rolls, spits, beats his head once on the ground, rises. He’s only rested ten minutes, but if he lies here any longer he will fall asleep, and miss his chance.

  The soldiers of the British army lie on the road, the grass, and an adjoining rye field—thousands of redcoats sprawled out as if ruthlessly slaughtered. Morley threads a path between them, toward a wood at the rear of the column.

  None of them have slept since the hurricane yesterday. Morley helped to build the campfires high at twilight, to give the impression of an occupied camp for as long as possible. Then, shortly after nightfall, the army formed a column and marched away in silence—horses muzzled, ironwork wrapped with rags. A curfew had been announced, enforceable by death, and the dark streets lay deserted.

  They marched to Bladensburg and halted in the meadow only to collect such wounded and belongings as they could locate by torchlight in fifteen minutes. The officers rallied the men into column again, and they crossed the river and passed through the town and continued on, returning as they had come two days earlier. Blacks appeared out of the night and begged to join them, but the officers were twitchy and anxious at the prospect of becoming trapped inland, and all were sent away. They quick marched for hours, and the effect of this after the marching and battling and commotion of the last days pressed the limits of endurance. When they halted briefly to await the report of scouts, men dropped to the ground and had to be kicked awake again. Morley marched in a wretched daze, exhaustion like a fat man hanging from his shoulders. Sweat soaked his hair under his cap and ran down his neck to burn in the wounds from the whip. The chafe of the straps of his knapsack gradually turned into a cold, prickly sensation. At times he seemed to doze even as he marched. He fell to his knees, rose, stumbled on.

  They marched onward as dawn came. The sun added heat to the awful humidity; the insects swarmed to life. When they finally stopped, men collapsed where they stood or stumbled a dozen feet to find shade. The drummer boys came through with canvas buckets of water, and the men put their faces in to drink like goats. “At noon,” the officers said, “we march again.”

  Morley steps over a soldier sleeping with his face in the mud. Morley’s back is pierced by dozens of splinters of pain. He can recall every one of the forty-four lashes he took. The colonel won’t forget the count. After this rest they will complete their march to the ships, sail to the outpost on Tangier Island, and go straight back to flogging. Morley figures he will have to suffer another hundred or hundred and fifty to satisfy the colonel. He doesn’t intend to be available to suffer it.

  He passes the Colonial Marines, and among them the black American that the boy dallied with the night previous in Washington—the black, curiously, sits awake and watches Morley as he comes up the road. Morley supposes that the man recognizes him. Morley grins. The black man gazes back with no reaction.

  He reaches the trees, starts wending through. In a moment he is out of sight in the dense wood. Pleased, he whistles a few notes, his mood only constrained by the trafficking of mosquitoes on his face and hands. He supposes he will join the Ameri­can army. He knows of others who have walked away to offer their services. The Americans pay twice as much as the King.

  He reaches the far corner of the field that borders the road, and from cover he watches the column rise, assemble, set into motion. A pair of drummers trail behind; the crack of the beat reaches him a little delayed behind the flash of the drumsticks.

  The column vanishes around a bend. Presently the sound of the drums disappears, too.

  Morley sets out northward, not sure where he is headed, but sure that he will find something, something to lead him to the next thing, and on.

  But as the day passes he begins to doubt himself. He walks wreathed in biting flies and mosquitoes and God knows what other dreadful tiny monsters. Every direction brings him to fetid swamp. He sweats so much that he is as sodden as if he had just finished a swim in the sea.

  But—he tells himself—the cork is pulled, and he must drink the wine. He takes off his jacket, casts it aside. He soaks his forage cap in a trickle of water and sets it on his head.

  He comes to another reedy, stagnant marsh. He doubles back.

  Perhaps he should have stayed nearer the road, but there would have been British troops straggling along it to avoid. He assures himself that he will find it again eventually. Anyway, things certainly will be better here in America. There are opportunities all about for one who sees them. Money flows in great rivers to those who earn it. He’s tired of serving under officers who bought their positions and sneer at the commoners they command. American officers, he’s heard, treat soldiers with more respect and less of the lash, due to all men being equal—excepting, Morley notes, the slaves.

  The bird calls here are strange, harsh splinters of sound. He worries about snakes. He trudges through a meadow full of little golden flowers, strikes swamp again, curses, turns aside.

  A human sound reaches him, so faint that he considers the possibility that he’s imagining it. He tracks toward it as best he can—a woman’s voice, singing, away somewhere through the trees. He hears also a chuckling of water. />
  A young woman in a bonnet stands in a creek, the hem of her dress pulled to her waist. She’s been washing—laundry is piled in a basket—but just now something has distracted her. She stops singing and digs with her hands in the mud. She’s roundly formed, wet legs gleaming smooth and delicious.

  Indeed, this is a land of happy chances, Morley thinks, as he tiptoes along the creek bank.

  She pulls from the earth a series of small white shapes—turtle eggs.

  Morley reaches a place opposite her. The moving water covers any small noise he makes, and he feels quite fortunate indeed—until a man appears on the other side of the creek and calls, “Hello!” He carries a musket. He says something to the woman, and she turns to look at Morley.

  Morley straightens. “Forgive my interruption!” Morley smiles big, waves both hands. “I have departed King George’s Royal Foot Artillery, and I want to join the freemen of the American army! Can you help?”

  Morley crosses over and approaches to shake the man’s hand. He has a scarred hole in one cheek, big enough to put a thumb in. It whistles as he breathes, and he looks suspicious, but Morley talks fast about sneaking from the British column and wandering lost with the insects and the snakes. “Why,” he says, “I’ve traveled the earth and fought Napoleon’s armies, but seeing one of your colossal frogs, well, I thought it some unholy devil spawn. I nearly swooned.”

  The man barks a laugh. He relaxes. He and his wife lead Morley to their encampment—they are peddlers, with a horse and a peddler’s wagon with many drawers built into the sides, like an enormous piece of furniture on wheels. Some of the drawers are missing. The peddler explains that his wagon overturned in a rain-swollen river, sweeping away nearly all of his merchandise. His words sibilate through the hole in his cheek. He has hardly a thing to peddle, he says, except his wagon and his horse, and if he sells those, then what is he? A peddler with nothing to sell is not even a peddler.

  While they talk, the wife cooks rice, greens, and turtle eggs. They eat, and Morley praises the food lavishly, kisses the lady’s hand to watch the color rise in her neck, offers elaborate gratitude for the hospitality, asks again the direction to the road to Baltimore, which is where, the peddler says, the American army will be.

  Morley sets out with regret in his heart. During the Peninsular War, his wife Mercedes had traveled behind the army with the other women and children and sutlers and such. Every woman he sees reminds him of his sweet Mercedes in Spain—marvelous Mercedes of the dark eyes, delightful dimples, and—well, he’s more or less forgotten the other features of her face, and due to the problem of language they could only exchange a few words, but he remembers her high, loud, long laugh, which, granted, wasn’t so different from her shriek of fury when she was angry, usually when she felt he was withholding money from her. But her laugh was glorious. He saunters on the road, full of belly and free.

  A half mile outside Alexandria a dozen redcoats stand around two wagons positioned crosswise in the road. Henry slips into a cornfield, circles the checkpoint, and enters the city through the beaten earth yards of small whitewashed houses. He peeks into a window, and a stern-faced man stares out. Henry smiles. The man stares. Henry thumbs his nose and flees. He starts toward another house, but someone he cannot see shouts, “Go away! Go on!”

  Wandering the city streets, he begins to feel downhearted: it is not like it was in Washington. Here men watch from windows, sit in open doorways. When Henry spies a house that seems promising, someone across the street yells at him. He comes to a row of shops, but there are people here, too—men at the door of the chandler’s, in the windows of the silversmith, at the rail of the notions shop, gazing at Henry with mistrust. This mistrust makes him cross. He has done nothing to them, and it is unfair and an aggravation.

  He stomps downhill to the warehouses and docks, and here is some noise—the British are emptying the warehouses of bolts of cloth, crates of glassware and crockery, barrels of tobacco, tea, coffee, and black pepper, casks of molasses, whale oil, and whiskey, bales of cotton, piles of beaver pelts and uncut leather, and dropping these load by load into boats and rowing them to tall ships flying the Union Jack.

  Henry comes to a place he recognizes—Suthers’s four-story warehouse, stone-walled on the first floor and brick above, with an office in the corner. Henry backs into the shadows across the street. He feels a kind of relief, as if, perhaps, he traveled here not for looting after all, but to come to this warehouse, to Suthers.

  What Henry knows of Suthers is what Father has told him, that Suthers ran away at twelve years old—away from the hillside cabin where he and his father lived in poverty—and came to Alexandria. He started as a laborer on the docks, but soon became involved in buying and selling goods and running card games. “Now,” Father said, “he also runs horse races, cockfights, boxing matches, and God knows how many other things.” When Henry was at the warehouse with Father, he watched how the men came to whisper with Suthers where he sat beside the card games. Suthers was a small, wiry man with thick uncombed hair and the intense gaze of a weasel surveilling a henhouse. At Suthers’s side sat a tall bald man with hollow cheeks and deep-set eyes—Henry found the bald man staring at him, and then he saw that the bald man settled his gaze this way on everyone in the room, one by one, excepting Suthers. Father said that the bald man’s name was Lodowicke, and according to popular estimation, Lodowicke had killed enough men to fill a potter’s field.

  While Father played faro, Suthers seemed to ignore Henry, but late in the evening Suthers left the room for a while, and when he returned, he handed Henry an orange.

  The faro players stopped in surprise. It surprised Henry especially; he had never held an orange before. Everyone was looking at him, so he raised the orange to his mouth and bit into it like an apple—the bitterness of the rind made his eyes bulge and sucked his lips around his teeth.

  The faro players risked falling from their chairs laughing. Suthers smiled a little and returned to his seat. Henry nearly cast the orange to the ground, but the novelty of it stopped him, and soon he was glad—when he worked out how to peel the rind from the meat, the orange seemed the most delicious thing he had ever tasted.

  A bucktoothed man on a little, tottering mule comes up the street, stops, ties the mule, opens a door, disappears into Suthers’s warehouse.

  Henry steps into the street, toward the door, thinking that when the man comes out he might gain a glimpse inside, or possibly even somehow slip through the door to take what he wants—if the redcoats haven’t already taken everything of value.

  He stops beside the doorway and waits. In a moment the door opens. The bucktooth comes out carrying a wooden box drilled with holes big enough to push plums in. Henry stands off to the side, but the bucktooth sees him immediately.

  So Henry steps forward, right into the man, knocking the box to the ground.

  As the box crashes, something inside yowls. A cat. The bucktooth yells, “Goddamn you, boy!” He’s blocking Henry’s view of the doorway, and then he shoves Henry back and bends to pick up the box. Painted on the lid is “402 Ann.”

  Henry retreats to watch the bucktooth tie the box to the back of his mule, mount, and go. Then he returns to the office door, but it is locked.

  Between Suthers’s warehouse and the next warehouse runs a weedy alley; the far end opens toward the harbor, and two horses are there, harnessed to a wagon. Henry enters the alley looking for another door, a window. There are none. So he continues to the horses, then creeps around the horses to peer over the wagon.

  Three redcoats stand along the wharf beside the water. They hold muskets with bayonets and seem to be waiting. They mutter among themselves, and the two taller soldiers twist to stare around. The third soldier seems familiar, and then Henry recognizes the way he stands small and still with an intense gaze—Suthers. Did Suthers join the British? It seems strange. Then Henry realizes that one of the other
redcoats is the tall bald man, Lodowicke, his baldness disguised by a British shako, face pale and gaunt.

  For a time nothing happens. Redcoats at work looting the warehouses call and shout on the docks and from the boats in the water, but Suthers, Lodowicke, and the third man stand silent. Henry’s attention wanders—to the hovering specks of the gulls over the harbor, to thin clouds like gatherings of cottonwood seed, to an eye-shaped knot in the wood of the wagon before him. He hears, it seems, a trace of Mother’s voice, thin and stretched as smoke on a wind. As if she were shouting far, far away. She seems perhaps alarmed.

  The three on the wharf turn to look at something away to their left, where Henry can’t see. He slithers into the wagon—it’s empty and smells of goat piss—to peer through a gap in the boards. He wants to see Suthers more clearly.

  “Help with that?” Suthers asks.

  Two redcoats, sweating, come along the wharf carrying a chest between them. “No,” one says. Behind these two come three more redcoats, muskets hung at their shoulders, walking at ease, laughing about something.

  Suthers attends to their passing, glances up and down the wharf.

  Clicks his tongue.

  Then things happen quickly, things that Henry can only watch in horror.

  Suthers and the two with him step forward and drive their bayonets into the backs of the three guards. The two that Suthers and Lodowicke strike startle and crumple like shreds of paper in a flame. But the third cries out, wrenches himself off the bayonet, falls to one knee. He gropes for his musket on the planks of the wharf. Ahead of him, the two with the chest drop it and turn. One backs away, lifting his hands. The other pulls a pistol from his belt and raises it, shaking.

  A musket blasts, and the one with the pistol is knocked forward as if someone had swung a log into his back.

  Lodowicke slips his bayonet between the ribs of the man on one knee: he falls with a sigh.