by P.L. Yizzi
yet here, live with them in that cage they call a city and drink ale and strong waters beside them and bow their heads to the Christian God, all the while dressing themselves like fancy pigeons and pretending my way was not theirs. They don’t want to remember.”
He stops his handiwork, moving his lips as if tallying what more needs to be done, and eyes what more I need to cut away, directing me thus. Finally, he recommences.
“When I was a boy, the pale eyes came to my father—two fat men smelling of horse and self. Eh, they wanted beaver skins. My father say, “No, farther up creek, raccoon and otter here.’ Eh, then they wanted a boat to go up creek. My father said, ‘Yuh.’ He had three, so he made the trade.” He tugs at the length in his hand with a grunt. “A good trade. My father gave them an old canoe for this net, and this.” Grandfather pulls a handsome gold timepiece from his waistcoat pocket and opens it with the push of a button on its side. I’ve never seen such a thing.
“It’s wonderful nice, Grandfather.”
He issues a hint of a smile, gone as soon as came, as if trying to cover over the tracks of his modest pride, then he returns the watch to his pocket. Before I can ask to see it again, our attention draws to a figure emerging from the trees across the creek, clothed in a uniform neither redcoat nor rebel. I tense at the only other possibility, the one my schoolmaster spoke of. The man approaching us is a Hessian.
Another man comes from behind the first, an old man, regal as any battle-worn king I can imagine. What business do they have here with us? Should we run back to the house? I look to Grandfather. He is not a man I’ve ever known to run from anything, and judging by his expression, he is not about to raise a streak of cowardice now.
His hands let go of the net on his lap and his fingers curl under in a fist. As I rise, he tells me to sit.
“Halloo there, we have only come for das wasser,” says the elder of the two soldiers, pointing toward the creek.
Grandfather acknowledges his words with a curt nod.
“You are fishermen, ja?” the eldest asks, poised in sustained genuflection as he splashes the briskly running water upon his face.
“We fish for our house, sir,” I reply.
“Ah, good eating fish are plentiful in these waters?”
“No. Work here, fish down there.” Grandfather points toward the city, the overly stolid look of a lie upon his face, a guise perhaps no other than I could have detected. If the foreigner is able to follow Grandfather’s crooked finger and is possessed of an appetite mild enough to endure the short travel, he will soon discover fish from city waters give a body the gripe.
“Ah, danke,” the old Hessian replies. This is all too polite, which under the circumstances make the man’s amiability seem downright menacing, and so convinced am I that at any moment he or his subordinate might send a report of lead heading our way, I stand. For all I’ve heard and known from the schoolhouse, Hessians are wicked tough, ruthless soldiers, or rather, that is what the British want us to believe, and for all my schoolmaster’s professed loyalty to the Glorious Cause, his loyalty is suspect as lying closer to the crown.
“A man never knows what he will catch in his net when first it is cast,” says Grandfather as he and the old Hessian stare at one another. Their protracted silence serves to further unnerve me, but then I learn what can be expected in a game of silence between a German and an Indian—the German will give way first.
“Fortune and bounty are so very difficult to predict, ja?” the old Hessian says as he stands, shaking the water from his hands. The lower-ranking soldier takes up three buckets full from the creek and turns toward the path in a full stop. His arms are quivering with exhaustion and weight as he awaits his next command.
“It is my hope the Good Lord soon favors us all with better days.”
“Eh, perhaps, soldier, He shall,” Grandfather replies.
The old Hessian is overcome with a curious look of amusement. “Forgive my manners, dear man, I am General Wilhelm von Knyphausen.”
Grandfather stares back impassively. The man’s rank clearly means nothing to him, much the way the name Joshua means nothing.
The general bids us, “Good day,” with the tight-lipped smile of a diplomat before turning away.
It isn’t always true what they say about generals leading, for it is his subordinate that walks on ahead back toward their presumed encampment.
I watch them go, finding it a sight most pleasant. I look to Grandfather for his reaction, some hint of mimed opinion, but what I find is more alarming than our harrowing encounter. Unblinking and still, Grandfather seems entranced by the waters as they course over the rocks, moving faster and faster as the bed slopes toward the bend, where beyond it crashes down into the gorge. At his advanced age, such expressions are not to be taken lightly. Has he died of fright as I thought I was going to?
“Grandfather!”
“Only the trees will remember me, Nunshetu.” Grandfather bids me brief regard, then retreats to the study of his brown knobby hands.
The Continental Army suffered the winter at Valley Forge. Many died, and the men that remained lived near death. James had come with updates throughout the next few months. He and his woman ran supplies from Carlton to the Upper Ferry, where they were collected and passed along the supply line until they reached the troops. It wasn’t much. No one had much to spare, but those who could gave well.
Make no mistake, as I have not, for as much as I think of their Christian hearts, James and Louise are not as much obeying their master as they are obeying their God-given instincts to breathe the breath of freedom. Grandfather enlivens whenever they speak of such.
“Freedom is not born of one war but from unending battle,” he tells James this February evening. He and Louise have dropped by to see Mina. The lot of us are gathered around the work table and all a bit up in our cups, including me, for which, to the exclusion of Grandfather, we all stand a good ear boxing if caught by parent or master. Grandfather belligerently points a finger at James. “You put your dreams in the hands of men who cannot be who they wish to become if you do not stay who you are.”
I look between the two men. Yes, the evening’s games have begun.
James, only slightly to the more or less learned than Grandfather depending on the subject, like Grandfather, also takes his news of the day from eavesdropped conversations, which have proved historically good resources, and occasionally over a snort or two of ale, they work these secondhand ramblings into a heated game. Such is this evening. Their game of verbal lunges, parries, and ensuing ripostes—they use every argument they have—until it progresses to the threat of blows, and Louise feels it requisite to drag James home.
Is this evening to be different? I wonder as James’s face flashes with a degree of anger I didn’t known him capable of. “You shall see, old man, this will be a country for every man. All equal and free to live and prosper without the King’s boot on our throats.”
“Carlton’s boot is finer?” Grandfather fires back.
“He supports abolition.”
“Then why has he not freed you?”
“In time,” James replies with an undeniable flavor of doubt haunting his husky voice.
“Yes, in time they might just risk running all the lower colonies into the arms of the enemy to conjure their property into citizens. You think too highly of these men. Remember they are just that—men. And many of these good things you talk of may all come to be, in some other time, but not in our time. Money cries louder than justice. Eh, that will never change.”
“Men are men,” James acquiesces.
“Knowing so, if all this comes to be, how many men will you have to answer to? I cannot understand this thing. Why should it be wanted? With a chief, overseer, or king, you have but one to slay. With this democracy thing they talk of, I ask you, how many will a man have to defend himself against?”
James shakes his head in frustration. “Only the men the peoples elect, is all. Our votes will be our swords
, our voices our cannon. The reins will belong to the many.”
“No, the reins will belong to the few who hide behind the many. Eh, I think I prefer just the one.”
“Do you?”
“It is what man knows.”
James recoils in anger. “This man wishes to know another way.”
Absently sucking his cheek, Grandfather peers at James. I don’t know if he is surrendering or about to spit. Then, ending all speculation, he says, “Rightly so. Eh, but say now, tell me has the common man you speak of, the simple man who lives and dies by his good word and strong hands, taken it upon himself to raise his old rifle against an empire for a few coins? Or have the ones who stand to gain the most coin convinced the common man what his fight be?”
Grandfather smiled a self-serving smile with that one accusing brown tooth poking intrusively from behind his top lip, and James glares at it as though he’s just come about another old man to debate.
“It is the people, old man—rich, poor, free, slaved—what want this fight, and I am one of those fools! The people want freedom from tyranny, all tyranny, and so we shall have it!
“Eh, you listen too much to the parlor talk of Carlton and his friends.”
I take a long drink from my bowl of ale to disguise my amusement. Aren’t Grandfather and James more the same than they know? Is that what both attracts them to and aggravates them so much about each other?
“Pretty
