Mad Boy

by Nick Arvin

  “I think you have more of your mother in you.”

  “I am a Phipps.”

  “I know you are alone in the world,” Suthers says. “Phipps in prison. Brother in the army. I have an opportunity for you. I would like for you to work for me. Errands. Messages. Some labor. Certain small tasks. You will be paid fairly. How you spend your money is your own matter, naturally.”

  “Could I buy out Father’s debts, then?”

  “It would take time. You may develop other ideas for your money.”

  “Time,” Henry says, feeling as if they are speaking of several eternities.

  “What do you think?”

  “All right, yes, I will work for you,” he says, with no intention of working for Suthers, thinking that with the first chance to grab the sacks and run, he will do it.

  Suthers nods. “You’re not a good liar, Henry. But I believe you will work for me. You’ll see.”

  They have come out of the orchard, and the scent of moist earth baking rises off the meadow. The dead of the battle at Bladensburg are gone; everything of value is gone; all that remains are damp cartridge papers, cannonball divots, and the black marks where the rockets sputtered around.

  “You’ll be wondering what’s in the sacks,” Suthers says. “It’s money. Silver and gold. It belonged to a merchant and thief and ingrate with a face warty as a toad’s named Delmore. I’ve had intelligence as to the location of Delmore’s funds for some time, but no clean opportunity to access it until the British presented themselves. Delmore foolishly believed his hiding place was secure and did not evacuate the money. I arranged for the location to be mentioned to the British, and they raided Delmore’s little stronghold. My intention was to take the money from the British discreetly, so that Delmore would not connect me with the incident. It was to have been a quieter exit. Delmore is not entirely a fool. He may guess what has happened. He may already have someone tracking us. He’ll likely send someone to watch for us at the estate.”

  “Your house burned,” Henry says.

  “I know.” Suthers glances at him. “How did that happen? Do you know?”

  Henry shrugs. “And Radnor joined the British.”

  “Yes,” Suthers says. “His brothers have also run off, but we’ll find them. The house is of no matter. It had the Phipps smell in it, and I often thought of burning it down myself. Still, if Delmore has men looking for us, that’s where they will go. I have a place where we can spend a day or two, let them exhaust their searching and grow lax.”

  The East Branch chuckles as they pass over the bridge.

  Suthers stops at the tavern in Bladensburg, dismounts, pulls Henry off, ties the horse, says, “Watch the horse.”

  The instant Suthers passes through the doorway, Henry starts on the sacks. He doesn’t have a great deal of experience with horses, and he doesn’t trust this one. He wants to leave the horse. But the sacks are tied to a loop on the saddle with an unusually complicated waterman’s knot, and it takes him a moment to unravel it. Then he heaves the sacks to his shoulder, starts running up the street.

  He’s not crossed thirty feet before Suthers steps from behind the corner of the tavern. In his hand is a rake, which he swings into Henry’s shin, sending him facedown into the mud. Suthers sets a knee in Henry’s back, produces a length of rope, and there in the street binds Henry’s hands behind his back. “You ought to give matters a little more forethought,” he says to Henry, cheerily. “Restrain your impulses a moment.” Suthers pushes his face into the mud, and then it’s all Henry can do to tongue the muck off his teeth and breathe.

  “Believe me,” Suthers adds, yanking Henry to his feet, “I am in fact working to advance your interests.”

  He produces an sack of linsey-woolsey and pulls it over Henry’s head.

  Henry loses any notion of location. It’s exhausting to keep balance on the horse while blind, hands bound. At one point, they enter a wide stream—Henry hears the flow and swirl of the water and the splashing of the hooves, feels droplets thrown up onto his legs. Something causes the horse to buck in the water, and for a moment his blind world tilts far backward. He only stays on the horse because Suthers again reaches back to grab him.

  Eventually they enter a narrow trail—Henry feels leaves and branches on his legs, his shoulders. The horse snorts and sidesteps. By glimpses of light through the weave of the hood Henry guesses that the day is closing.

  Finally they stop.

  Suthers dismounts, pulls Henry off the horse, sets him on his feet, pushes him ahead. Henry’s shoulder jars off a door frame. The light here is very dim. A door closes behind. Suthers takes the bag off Henry’s head, unties his hands.

  They are inside a small log cabin, light admitted by two openings chiseled high in the wall. It is a single room, rank with scents of mildew, moss, and mouse droppings. The only furnishings are a shabby corn tick mattress, a stone bench set into one wall, and a small charred hearth under a stone chimney. Suthers nods to the mattress. “You can have the bed.”

  Then Suthers goes out. Henry hears a bar slide into place across the door.

  Intensely aggravated, Henry immediately resolves to burn every structure Suthers owns if necessary, and he begins searching in a frenzy for a flint. Soon he finds in the chinking between logs the sharp half of a broken nail, which he tucks in his trouser waist at the back.

  He finds nothing more between the logs, along the rafters, or at the corners of the floor. The logs are set directly on hard earth, and he might dig out, but it would take a considerable while. He hits the door, but it seems solid. He feels through the mattress. He searches the hearth, then peers up the chimney, built of river rock and daub.

  The chimney is narrow, and he is doubtful. He goes around the cabin again, but he can find no other possibilities. He returns to the chimney, puts his arms into the chimney, shimmies his torso up, gets his feet underneath himself, pushes up, straightens his legs, lifts on his toes, moves wormlike upward.

  After gaining a foot or so, his shoulders become jammed at a painful angle.

  He tries to wriggle back down, but it seems he will tear his shoulder out of its joint. He attempts upward again and gains a few inches, but now he is only more completely trapped than before. He cannot force himself either way.

  He writhes and squirms. But he is stuck fast.

  Perhaps an hour passes. The door opens and closes. Henry is still in the chimney, arms numb.

  Suthers laughs a long while, which makes Henry angry, and he kicks uselessly. Suthers grabs him, yanks him down.

  “Sit,” he says, gesturing to the mattress. Henry reluctantly sits, arms hanging at his sides like sausages. He cannot lift them, and as the blood returns spears of pain follow. Henry does notice that Suthers’s sleeves are wet, as are the bottoms of his trousers. He’s been in the water.

  Suthers lifts a stone from the base of the chimney—underneath is a small space that holds candles and flints and a tin of dried meat. Henry scowls and feels bitter; he’d been dangling right above it.

  It has grown dark. Suthers lights a candle. When Henry is able to work his arms again, Suthers hands him some meat. They eat. “You’ll work for me,” Suthers says.

  “No,” Henry says.

  Suthers continues as if Henry had not spoken. “—but for now I’ll keep to myself the privilege of knowing where we are, and where the money is located. I used to come here to hunt, sometimes, when I was younger. Raccoon, possum. No one knew of this place, and I could be alone. Eventually I acquired a deed to the land. Not that it matters really, since still no one comes here or cares.”

  When he finishes eating, Suthers takes a small leather-bound account book from his jacket pocket and bends over its pages to study the figures. He glances up, catches Henry watching. “Sleep,” he says. “You had precious little last night.”

  Henry lies on the mattress. Somethi
ng bites into his ribs. Searching with his fingers, he finds a small stick. When he searched the mattress before he didn’t notice it, and now he nearly casts it aside before he finds a pattern of notches and scratches worked into it. For a moment he thinks it is the same stick that Radnor gave him in Washington—no, that’s still in his pocket. He takes out Radnor’s stick. The two are very similar. Could this new stick have been stuffed into the mattress before it was carried here? Or did Suthers lie when he said no one else had been here? Perhaps a slave didn’t count, in Suthers’s mind.

  Henry closes his eyes, thinking he’ll pretend to sleep. In the quiet, the noise of a stream can be faintly heard. He rubs his thumb back and forth over the notches on the stick, wondering what they mean. He’ll pretend to sleep, and when Suthers sleeps, he can escape.

  But with his eyes closed he quickly drops deep into sleep.

  He wakes once in the night.

  The candle is still burning. Slitting his eyes, Henry turns his head. Suthers sits with his book open in his lap but ignored. He is looking straight at Henry.

  This frightens Henry, and he doesn’t care to think on why Suthers would sit in the night looking at him. He tightens his eyes shut and presently sleep overwhelms him again.

  “Henry,” Suthers says.

  Henry lurches up, looking round for Suthers, seeing no one.

  Suthers is behind him—the bag comes down over Henry’s head, and Suthers grabs his hands and binds them.

  “Time to go,” Suthers says.

  He pulls Henry along by his shoulder, lifts him, sets him onto the horse, climbs up in front. He spurs the horse into a trot.

  Hungry, furious, sore—Henry sets to work freeing the piece of nail from the waist of his trousers without at first any clear idea of what he will do with it.

  It’s snagged in the cloth, and fearing to drop it he works slowly. By the time it comes free, they have exited a narrow trail of brushing leaves and branches and are moving on some open road. He tries to scrape the nail through the rope on his wrists, but finds that he cannot bend his fingers far enough. He sits a while in despair, until another idea strikes him. It also passes his mind that perhaps it is not exactly a good idea. But he has no other.

  Awkwardly, leaning until he feels he may tumble backward onto the crown of his head, he works the nail under the saddle, point downward. He raises his weight off the saddle, then sits down, hard.

  The horse, for a moment, only shudders. Then it screams and rears so violently that Henry is flung as if from a catapult. He crosses the air with his clothes flapping, and he supposes, indignantly, that he will die now.

  He strikes soft earth, however, on his side. The breath goes out of him, but after a moment he is able to sit up. He feels very pleased with himself.

  Still, however, the sack is on his head: he cannot see. The horse is well away, the sound of its gallop vanishing into the distance. Nearer, Suthers groans.

  Henry works at getting his feet under him, to stand and flee, though blind and bound. He can find a tree, he thinks, and scrape the rope off.

  “Stay there,” Suthers says. “I’ll untie you.”

  Henry saws himself forward and back until he is standing. “I’m going.”

  “Really? You’re going to run? Like that?”

  “I think so,” Henry says, feeling around himself with a toe.

  “Wait there, God damn you. I need your help. My leg is broken. I’ll untie you.”

  Henry hears Suthers drag over the ground, groaning as he goes. He feels fingers working the knot. It slips open. Henry pulls the bag off.

  Suthers sits with his legs stretched. “Look.” He pulls up the left trouser leg—between knee and ankle, bone bulges against the skin. “You’re going to have to help me.”

  Henry backs away.

  Wincing, Suthers says, “You can’t leave me here, Henry.”

  “I can’t leave Father in prison,” Henry says.

  Suthers shakes his head. “Henry, you have to understand something. You’re not a Phipps.”

  Henry laughs at this absurdity.

  “You’re not.”

  Henry considers kicking Suthers in the nose. But curiosity restrains him. “What else would I be?”

  “You can’t leave me here with this leg.”

  “I can, I think.”

  “You can’t leave your blood, Henry. You can’t escape it.”

  Henry stares. “Blood.”

  “Son,” Suthers says.

  Henry slowly, slowly, steps backward.

  Suthers shakes his head. “Can’t ever escape your own blood.”

  “You’re not my father,” Henry says, backing away more quickly now.

  Suthers nods. “Henry—”

  Henry turns, runs hard.

  “Henry!”

  He is on a narrow road, running, with no notion of where he is or where he is going, shouting, “Mother? Mother?”

  She’s silent, however, or he cannot hear her over his breath and the sound in his ears of his blood beating.

  CHAPTER 5

  Henry sits at the sandy edge of a pond, watching a half-dozen newts sun themselves in a few inches of water. When Henry shifts, the newts dart and vanish: a mist of silt rises where they were. A minute or two later they glide back, small, eerie creatures. When he was littler Henry would catch them with his bare hand. But now he only watches. The water lies still and smooth, and the trees open above the pond and funnel the sky down to be held on the water’s surface. A crawfish extends two claws from a hole, then retreats. A few minnows move by languidly.

  Henry is hungry, and he doesn’t know where he is, but he sits, wanting only to watch, to be absorbed somehow into this place. He’s tired and feels useless and unworthy.

  He lifts his head. “Mother!” he shouts. “Is it true?”

  Across the pond a frog splashes into the water.

  Suddenly, he can’t bear the quiet. He jumps up and sets out.

  Suthers is far behind now. Henry continues on the narrow road, and he knows by the sun that it goes generally eastward. He runs wildly, making his lungs and limbs burn. From among all the dead bodies and abandoned buildings of Bladensburg, Washington, and Alexandria, he has gained not one thing.

  Finally he slows. His legs are sore and he’s limping a little when he comes to a swaybacked old horse and a peddler’s wagon with drawers on both sides.

  The peddler and his wife tend a fire, and above it simmers a supper of rice and fish. It smells marvelous. Henry stops and asks if he might have a plate in trade for gathering firewood or catching fish or some other service. The woman asks if he is alone. Henry says he is traveling to see his father in Baltimore. She says, “Sit with us.”

  She gives Henry a bowl of food, steaming and too hot, but Henry pushes handfuls into his mouth anyway, with a feeling of boundless gratitude. He lets her refill the bowl and watches her energetic waddle around the fire, listens to her bicker with her husband, the peddler. She’s thick-waisted, smiles with her eyes. The peddler has a hole in his cheek as if a hot poker had been stuck through it.

  “Eat more, eat more,” the peddler says, the words whistling through his cheek. “I always wanted a boy myself, but we have had no children, despite bountiful efforts.”

  The peddler explains that he has recently lost his merchandise in a flooded river. He says they have been at this encampment for days. He doesn’t know what to do. At least here they can catch fish and find turtle eggs, although the flavor of fish and turtle eggs is starting to make him feel ill. They press more fish on Henry.

  Their names are Hy and Dosia. “It is a hardship,” Hy says, “but it brings us closer to the Lord’s command to live in poverty, to abandon worldly things.”

  Dosia rolls her eyes. “I’m sure it is all for the better,” Dosia says. “But if circumstances take a turn for muc
h better than this, I don’t know what we’ll do.”

  They tell Henry that he must sleep the night here, that he oughtn’t be alone on the road at night. They give him a blanket, and he rolls up in it beside the fire while Hy and Dosia bed down under a piece of canvas that stretches from the back of the wagon.

  The frogs and crickets and cicadas sound like the chattering of a loud, shrill crowd. Hy’s breath whistles and catches in the hole in his cheek. Henry closes his eyes and tries to listen through or between the noises for Mother’s voice, but there’s nothing.

  In the dark of the night, the peddler’s horse shrieks, moans, then a moment later falls over dead. Henry stands with Hy and Dosia looking at it in candlelight. “She was old,” Hy says.

  “Worn heart, maybe,” Dosia says.

  “She was a good horse,” Hy says, lip trembling, “but the Lord’s ways are not our ways.”

  “I’m sure this is a blessing, really,” Dosia says, and attempts to roll her eyes, but she is weeping.

  “I’ve brought bad luck,” Henry says, feeling dreadful.

  “No,” Dosia says, “we brought our own.” She pulls Henry into an embrace. She is warm and soft, and Henry too weeps a little.

  They do not sleep more that night, but build the fire high and sit with their backs to the wagon, watching the darkness. The conversation drifts. Sometime near dawn Hy says, “Might have been the ugly look of that fellow that killed her, slow.” He describes to Henry the man he discovered moving toward his wife in a manner that had alarmed him, although after Hy flushed him out, the man said he was a redcoat deserter and seemed neighborly enough. “But what a face the man had,” Hy says, “as if some hairless rat bred with a bowl of porridge.”

  In the morning they eat a little cornbread and greens with horse steaks. Dosia turns to Henry. “Stay with us a while.”

  Henry is stilled by this idea, pleased, the food swelling in his stomach.

  “Yes!” Hy says. “Stay until your brother is out of the army.”