L Neil Smith - [North American Confederacy 06]

by The Gallatin Divergence (epub)

  Gentle reader, there arrives a moment when a discreet curtain must be drawn over ensuing events—in order to keep from throwing up. I never thought sex was a spectator sport, and with that pair, I’d rather have watched a good horror movie. When it was over, they started putting on their clothes, preparing to leave by separate ways, Brackenridge to Braddock’s Field, Edna back to Coal Hill.

  One of the tea-crates splintered, dropping me six inches. Inside, Edna froze, whirled to face the window, metal in her hand. Surprised, I threw my arms up. Energy splashed. Blackness. I wasn’t unconscious. I think it was my suit’s way of dealing with the overload a laser represented. When I got the hood peeled down, the exterior was mirror-silver. Pistol in hand, I peeked back through the window. The room was empty.

  So was the house.

  I wasn’t inclined to confer with anyone until I’d thought it through. Edna might be taken care of on the Coal Hill road—dispatch one of us to dispatch her. But playing bodyguard and playing detective are two different—and mutually exclusive—games. The first calls for sticking to the client, the second for just the opposite. I kept coming back to the same damned conclusions: there weren’t enough of us, even for adequate guard-duty; we couldn’t recruit even the friendliest locals, they wouldn’t be prepared to deal with para-tronic reconnaissance and energy weapons, let alone the fact that we existed; the idea was to keep Gallatin alive, not play cops and dopers; Edna had a way of slipping through your fingers—knowing she’d been seen here, there was no guarantee she’d head back to Coal Hill; but—good news, I think—eventually she’d come to us.

  By the time I staggered back to the clearing, I’d shared these observations with the others. Seated around the rough-plank table where Covenant signers still trickled through, Gallatin conferred with the other leaders. The Committee of Twenty-one had gone home. Now he proposed to send Bradford, along with half a dozen friends of Fort Fayette’s commandant, to assure the old boy that our troops were on the way—but with no intention of disturbing the fort.

  “I would have you request,” he told the overdressed state’s attorney, “that they permit us to march by. The Fort is for protection against Indians. We have no business with it.”

  Despite his fervor, even Bradford was reluctant to precipitate conflict. “There’s a deal of powder and shot inside, from use of which we might benefit. We could take the fort, with casualties, but not without risking their destruction.”

  Gallatin agreed. “It is my desire to prevent any incident that might fulfill Monsieur Brackenridge’s low opinion of us.”

  “Brackenridge didn’t go back with the Committee,” I spoke up. “I think he’s somewhere in camp.”

  He nodded again. “Then we shall ask him to go along. He will be hoping for the worst to happen. You will go, Monsieur Bear, to ensure that it does not?”

  I looked to Ed and Lucy. He shrugged, and she raised her first in a radical salute. Ten minutes later, I was doing Gene Autry imitations.

  In one of those fortunate accidents of history, almost an afterthought, Bradford brought a copy of the Covenant. Fort Fayette was in better condition than Couch’s Fort, but of the same raised earth and palisade. The gate was open. Men wearing random parts of uniforms lounged about.

  Coming to the gate, Butler invited us inside, listened, scanned the document. He was a stout, redfaced man, with round shiny cheeks and steel-wool-colored muttonchops below his white wig. Retaining the parchment, he asked to be excused for half an hour to think. We visitors sat in the dirt-floored yard, surrounded by soldiers, fearing any moment we might be arrested. It was a long half hour.

  Butler returned, in full dress uniform. “Mr. Brackenridge, I am surprised. Are you with these traitorous dogs?” I thought, there goes the ball-game. My rifle was beside me, but other eyes were on it. I laid a hand on my knife.

  Glancing from one of his rebel companions to another—with a look reserved between for the Major’s enormous sword in its polished scabbard—the lawyer sweated. “No, sir, I represent responsible interests whose desire is to limit their seditious and destructive tendencies.”

  He stepped across the yard to seek refuge at the Major’s side.

  “You turncoat!” Bradford leaped to his feet. “You

  Benedict! You Judas! You would betray your own mother to the side that could benefit you most!”

  “I believe I agree with you, Mr. Prosecutor,” said Butler. Pointing first at Brackenridge, then toward a log-end jutting high from the compound wall, he commanded, “Hang me that dog!”

  19

  Roll Out the Barrel

  Brackenridge stood, paralyzed speechless as a pair of ragged bluecoats handed muskets to their comrades, moved to either side of him, and seized his arms. In nominal charge of the expedition, Bradford lunged forward, stopped, then turned to look at me. “If some of you men will help them,” he shrugged, “the deed should have been done ere long ago.”

  Two rebels rose to comply. At a comer of the fort, where a watchtower sat atop the wall, one of the logs had been left three feet longer than the rest. A deep groove was worn across its top. A soldier threw a length of hemp over it, flipping at the rope until it settled in the groove. He made an end fast to a brass cleat that would have looked more at home on the gunwale of a flatboat. The other end he fashioned into a noose. A heavy whiskey keg was rolled out of a storage lean-to, set under the jutting log-end.

  Brackenridge’s wrists had been forced behind his rotund body, bound with a thong. He’d found his voice, and opened up to protest. Bradford seized the opportunity to whip a lace-edged handkerchief from his sleeve and thrust it into the lawyer’s mouth. He turned to me. “You know, I’ve wanted to do that since I was a boy.”

  Leaving heel-ruts in the dirt behind them, an escort of four, two soldiers, two rebels, frog-marched Brack-enridge toward the upended keg. Overhead, the noose swung in the still air. Wondering what to do—or whether I should do anything—I laughed, then put a hand on Butler’s shoulder, whispering in his hairy ear. He nodded. “Holdl” cried the major, striding across the yard. With a middle-aged grunt, he bent and tipped the keg on its side.

  Brackenridge refused to step up on the liquor barrel. I had my own doubts whether it would support him. At the major’s order, the soldiers drew spike bayonets from their belt-hangers, fixed them to their muskets, upended the weapons, began stabbing the soil millimeters from the lawyer’s toes. Still he refused to budge. Frustrated, Butler drew his pistol, levering back the flint. “Now climb up, sir! Climb up or I shall shoot you where you stand!”

  Shoulders drooping, Brackenridge climbed up on the keg. It rocked, end-to-end, threatening to roll out from under him. The noose was slipped around his neck. The slack was taken up.

  “A capital idea, Mr. Bear!” said Bradford. He shouted across the yard. “Counselor, you’re a man who believes in moderation and balance, you’ve told me so a thousand times. See if you can balance there awhile.” The men laughed, soldiers and rebels alike.

  The lawyer’s eyes showed white around the irises above the kerchief sticking out of his mouth. He twisted and dodged, trying to stay atop the keg.

  “That,” announced Major Thomas Butler, indicating Brackenridge with a back-tossed thumb, “was my last act as a Federalist.” The Pittsburgher almost lost it then, feet rolling out from under him. A groan escaped through the yardgoods. He hopped and jerked, somehow bringing the barrel to rest again under his heels.

  Ignoring the life-and-death struggle behind him, the commandant unfurled a familiar roll of parchment, seized me by a shoulder, and turned me around. I felt him scrawl something, using my back for a clipboard. “That,” announced Citizen Thomas Butler, “constitutes my first act as a Gallatinist!”

  He handed the paper to Bradford, becoming, in that moment, the first to employ a political label which, over the next two centuries, would sweep the world clean of established authority. To his second-in-com-mand, he delivered the resignation he’d written during his half ho
ur of meditation. At the gate, he paused, drew his officer’s-issue wrist-breaker from its steel scabbard. With a grunt, he snapped the blade over one knee, threw the pieces to one side. “Mr. Bradford, I would request permission to enlist at once, as a private soldier, in Mr. Gallatin’s Army of Rebellion. Can this be accomplished?”

  Bradford looked down at the parchment, as if it had turned out to be a treasure-map. He looked back at the major. “It can, sir, and it has!”

  Behind them, there was a cheer. The top edge of the wall was lined with soldiers, waving their hats. A few discharged their muskets into the air. We rebels, with our VIP recruit, waved back and began to mount our horses as Butler’s men, his former command, continued watching. There was an excited shout: “Stay a moment, sir. We beg you, stay!”

  The row of heads disappeared from the serried wall-top. Where we stood, we could hear a buzz of conversation, some of it pretty loud. Then another cheer. Then silence. Within five minutes the entire structure had emptied itself of humanity, some six or seven Federalists dissenters hitching their muskets over their blue-coated shoulders and dispersing into the countryside. The rest, eighteen or nineteen in all, came through the gate, queued up to sign the Covenant below the name of their former commander, and surrendered the fort to Bradford in the name of Gallatin. Our strength now tripled, those with horses saddled up and began the march along Braddock’s Field Road to join the main body of rebels.

  Even counting those who’d accepted the Swiss philosopher’s guarantee and decamped, that body would be thousands strong. The addition we’d accomplished wasn’t impressive in terms of numbers, yet we knew— whether we were living through it for the first time like Butler and Bradford, or had read about it in history books—that Gallatin had won his first real victory.

  And Brackenridge? For all I know he’s still there, the solitary occupant of Fort Fayette, teetering on his whiskey keg.

  I rode toward the rear of the column, risking a moment’s communion with my suit to catch up on events. The disguise I’d programmed onto the hood happened to be my own face, complete with an authentically dumb expression.

  "That’s good news,” Ed enthused by, “though we knew, of course, that that’s what was going to happen."

  Ignoring the debate between determinism and free will that kicked off in my head, I watched Lucy shake hers—through her husband’s eyes. “/ ain’t too sanguine about that whiskey-barrel bit, Winnie." Within the privacy of my hood, I grinned. She was under a strain, torn between the ethics of time-travel and the fact that she thought what had happened was funny. ‘7 don’t remember nothin’ about no hangin’.”

  Ed laughed. “If Win’s destroyed the universe, it was worth it! I wish I could have been there!"

  “Stand by for transmission, then,” I said. “I recorded everything.” I keyed the information-transfer. While they watched the necktie party, I sneaked a look at my real surroundings. The column plodded on as before. My short-subject received rave reviews. I’d never known they had a taste for snuff-films. Probably the arty way I’d left things hanging at the end.

  In Braddock’s Field, fife and drum bleating and beating, the anti-tax militia had begun its eight-mile march to Pittsburgh. In good order, for a bunch of anarchists. Arrayed in a line stretching two and a half miles, armed and dangerous men took their places. Before Gallatin, they’d merely been armed. We were supposed to catch up where Braddock’s Field Road intersected Fourth Street, joining the march through the rest of the city, back to the Monongahela—where all available marine transport was being collected by a Committee we had no reason to trust—over the river, and on to Philadelphia. If we were late, we’d miss the boat.

  “There’ve been more politics, however,” Ed warned. He was riding alongside Lucy and Ochskahrt, enjoying the excursion.

  “Oh?” I peeked out to make sure I wasn’t being observed by my own companions.

  “Yes, the conscientious nonsigners—a minority numbering well into the hundreds—have announced, for various reasons, an intention to remain neutral in the coming struggle—”

  Lucy, indignant, interrupted: “There’s even a minority of the minority, Winnie, Federalists, threatenin’ to oppose the Rebellion—”

  “After a decent interval,” Ed finished for her. “In all truth, their parting with the rest of us was more than cordial.”

  I shook my head. “Like the last day at West Point, just before the Civil War. Beginning things like gentlemen didn’t make it a single drop less bloody.”

  “Gallatin’s promised them safe-passage,” Ed persisted, “and they’ve dispersed.”

  “Lotsa luck to ’em,” Lucy sneered. “None of it good!”

  The day wore on. We were late hooking up with the rest, but not fatally, catching up in the middle of Pittsburgh on Market Street. We weren’t much to look at. About a third of what Butler had called “Gallatin’s Army” were mounted—we’d never claimed to be the Cavalry of Rebellion. Fewer than that had guns, and a healthy percentage weren’t even wearing shoes. They’d have to follow Napoleon’s advice (still a few more years in the future) and march on their stomachs. Perennial chairman-of-everything Edward Cook, along with David Hamilton, had been appointed overall commanders, Gabriel Blakeney officer of day. Sounded to me like the work of some committee. Gallatin rode up and down the line pleading with the men not to call him “General.” Andrew McFarlane took the point— pardon me, “commanded the advance guard.” He still had blood in his eye and wanted to be first to spot Kirkpatrick. No one could talk him out of it.

  But we didn’t see Kirkpatrick. It was one of those good-news/bad-news things. When the column clip-clopped into Pittsburgh, its commanders, officer of the day, advance guard, and reluctant generalissimo were provided with graphic evidence of genuine urban sentiment. Between late morning and mid-afternoon, the people had risen against the Committee and taken back their town. They hadn’t been as charitable as Thomas Butler—Market Street was lined with the bodies of Committee members, swinging from their broken necks. As we rode through, and off on the long trail to the capital, the repeated cry was “On to Philadelphia— that’s where they said they wanted us! Now they shall have us there!”

  Gallatin had more problems. At the last minute, just before the first relay of boats was launched, he learned of a plot to fire the town houses of the Nevilles, Edward Day, John Gibson, and James Brison. Headquartered in Wilkins’ General Store, Gallatin handled it well. He had the conspirators in for a chat, and that was that.

  No fire, at least not then. A Captain Maximillian Riddle, however, elected leader of the yellow hunting-shirted “Riddle’s Raiders,” considered the most “active” of the insurgents, set fire to Kirkpatrick’s town house at 9 p.m. It wasn’t the only incident of its kind. Word came that a revenue collector named Reagan had been tarred and feathered in Westmoreland County. The house of his colleague-in-crime, Benjamin Wells, had been burned to the ground. Collector John Webster was attacked in Bedford County.

  By dawn, Gallatin had a couple of other items on his hands. The men had stopped with “General” and had begun calling him “Mr. President.” Also, Andrew McFarlane couldn’t be found anywhere. He caught up as the last of us climbed out of our boats on the other side of the river, covered with sweat and soot and smelling of whale oil. The last we saw of Pittsburgh was a column of smoke from the burning of Kirkpatrick’s barn across the river.

  20

  Let George Do It

  MORRIS HOUSE, PHILADELPHIA, PA.

  SUNDAY, AUGUST 3, 1794

  DRAMATIS

  GEORGE WASHINGTON,

  PERSONAE: PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

  ALEXANDER HAMILTON,

  SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY

  THOMAS MIFFLIN,

  GOVERNOR OF PENNSYLVANIA UNITED STATES ATTORNEY

  GENERAL WILLIAM BRADFORD

  ALEXANDER JAMES

  DALLAS, SECRETARY OF THE COMMONWEALTH PENNSYLVANIA

  CHIEF JUSTICE THOMAS McKEAN

>   WASHINGTON: “Friends, I wish to open this meeting by calling attention to the gravity of the present crisis. We in the east watch developments in the Monongahela country with increasing

  anxiety. I must assert that the most spirited and firm measures are necessary to prevent the overthrow of the Constitution and of the

  Laws.”

  HAMILTON: “My dear friends, Set there be no illusion within

  the official circles as to the importance of this crisis. What lovelier, what more defensible opportunity could be presented, in the attempt to build the power and prestige of our government, than this heaven-sent rebellion in the west? If we are to survive, the democrats must be scotched. As for effective scotching, we are offered an enforcement of the funding system.”

  WASHINGTON: “Quite so. You well express my determination to go to every length the Constitution and Laws will permit. For the present, no further. But here: the actions of the general government will necessarily be slow, since it must wait for certification that the disorders are beyond control by judicial authority. I inquire if there is not some way the Commonwealth could cooperate by adopting preliminary measures.”

  MIFFLIN: (Uncomfortably) “Sir, I am reminded... of the

  prophecy that the federal government would ultimately swallow up the states. I cannot help interpreting this proposal as a step in that direction.”

  BRADFORD: “See here, Mifflin, this is nonsense! We are

  all aware, are we not, of the law of 1783 which authorizes the governor of this commonwealth to call out the militia in sudden emergencies?”

  DALLAS: “Ha. And I would point out to you, Mr. Brad

  ford, that this law, in which you seek such grateful refuge, was in its tenure much overused, and has long since been repealed!” (Turning to the president) “In answer to Mr. Bradford’s questioning, Your Excellency, I am compelled to tender it as my earnest opinion that our governor, precisely like yourself, is obliged to await upon a judicial certificate before he can be authorized to call out the militia. I am sorry, sir, but there it is.”