Conceived in Liberty (2 page)

The officer groaned and stumbled to his feet. He mounted and rode off. The Boston men left us, and Eagen sat down and put his head in his arms.

We had the fire going. We tore down most of the fruit tree to feed it. Fires were springing up now, gleams that mingled with the twilight. The staff officers rode past, the big form of Washington bulking above the rest. We saw them ride across the fields to the house and hammer at the door. Then the door opened. The shutters were flung back and lights appeared inside.

“A house like that,” Moss whispered.

“Quakers. By God, they're warm in their houses,” Jacob muttered.

Ely Jackson laughed. We had some potatoes in our packs. We laid them out and roasted them on the points of our bayonets. Ed Flagg had stolen the potatoes the day before. They were a rare thing for men on a diet of corn.

We heard singing. Charley Green walked up to the fire with a woman on his arm. She was a stout, blonde woman, wrapped in a dirty blanket. Her feet were in sacking. She had a broad smile. We watched her hungrily; you watched any fat person with fascination.

“This is Jenny Carter,” Charley said. “She's a fine fat piece of woman.” Then he began to sing again.

She dropped down by the fire, her fat legs spread toward it. She moved her hands, anxiously fixing her hair. We began to laugh.

“Where did you find her, Charley?”

“I took her from the Pennsylvania men. A sight of women, too many for stinking Dutch farmers. I reckon they have a hundred women there. I took Jenny and told her we were from the Mohawk. I told her a fine, tall lot of men from the Mohawk. I told her men to love a woman, eh, Jenny?”

He sat down next to her and put an arm around her shoulders.

“A filthy lot of beggars,” she said, and spat.

“You won't mind a little dirt.”

“I won't mind a little bit of money.”

Jacob took a fistful of Continental paper out of his sack. He dropped it into her lap. She scattered it and the hot flame of the fire drew it in.

“None of that!”

“Ye're a haggling Dutch skinner,” Jacob said.

I tossed her a shilling and she thrust it into the sacking that covered her feet. We broke the potatoes and added a few shreds of salt meat. We ate slowly, hoarding the food. It was quite dark now. Against the western sky, the dull mass of the brigades was still visible. But in the east, all had blended into the forest and only the fires made spots of light.

North of us, where the fields sloped to a hill, the fires were a pattern, haphazard. As if fireflies had settled themselves in the field and would soon lift away. The glow in the west died out. The wind rose to a whine.

“A cold, bitter night,” said Clark Vandeer.

“A night for a woman—— ”

“For a fat, round woman.”

Jenny was giggling and stuffing a piece of potato into her mouth. Then she rolled back in the arms of Charley Green. Some of us watched, but not with too much interest. We spoke in low tones when we spoke at all, but we could hear the woman heaving and sighing. Far over, from where the New Jersey troops were, there came a confused roar of sound.

Ely Jackson fussed with the bindings on his feet. Sometimes I suspected that there was little feeling left in his feet. But no more than that. I couldn't associate death with Ely. I remembered a time, perhaps ten years ago, when the Hurons came down to the Mohawk. They burnt and killed. Ely came to our house. Then we went with him, from house to house, gathering families. We went to the Patroons' fort, an old rotten place, and Ely and six men fought a hundred Indians for two days. He was a great, strong man, Ely.

“They say there'll be shoes along with the army in a time of days,” Ely said wistfully.

“The lies of fatback swine in the Congress.”

“There's no hate in me for the British as for the Congress,” Clark said.

“There's hate in me for both,” Jacob said. “For the rotten, guzzling liars who call themselves our Congress—” He stared into the fire a moment, then went on, “Time for Congress—understand me, Clark—time enough for Congress—after the British. After the British,” he repeated. His eyes travelled over the sparks that marked the position of the sprawling, defeated army.

“After the British,” he said dully.

“They say we'll be going home,” Moss Fuller muttered plaintively.

But there was nothing to go to. The Indians had burnt out the Mohawk. If my people lived, God only knew where they were.

“I'll not go back to the Mohawk,” Jacob nodded. “There'll be no safe living in the New York Valleys. They'll fight us from Canada for a hundred years.

“You won't hold a musket a hundred years, Jacob,” Kenton laughed.

“I hear of a rare beautiful land in Transylvania, a place they call the Kentuck. A Virginian named Boone sought it out——”

Jacob cried: “Ye're fools—all o' ye. The British way is to play the red men against us. Where is the power of the Six Nations but in Joseph Brant? An' Brant's their tool. Didn' they have him in England, making him into what he is? Mark me—I'll tell you the power an' scheme of the British, to play one force against another. But we're a free people an' no plaything for a King's hand. There'll be peace in the west—when we drive the last King's man back to his dirty hole!”

From where he was with his woman, Charley groaned: “Peace here, Jacob. Let be and damn the British.”

Jenny had rolled over. She lay flat on her back, and Charley Green sat up, shaking his head wearily.

“You've used her up,” Kenton said.

Jacob's mood changed. He got up and went over to her. He slapped her back and pinched her cheeks. “Look at a real man.”

“You'll kill her,” Moss Fuller complained. He wanted his turn. He wanted the little pleasure he could squeeze from her. He was trembling and anxious, with the fear of death in him.

Jacob lay down next to her. We crouched close to the fire. From the New Jersey troops there came a great uproar, shots fired. We stayed close to the fire, hardly moving. With the heat, inertia had come over us.

“Attack?” Ely asked.

No more shots now. It didn't matter whether we were being attacked. Two officers galloped past, their sabres bare and glistening in the firelight.

“More hell to pay.”

Silence and Jacob's hoarse breathing. I glanced at them, the man and the woman together. Only a glance. Moss Fuller had buried his head in his arms. He was coughing softly. Ely hummed a lonely French tune of the Valleys.

I tried to think of a time when it had been different. I tried to think of a time when there had been shame and humility. I tried to think of the fire in our hearts that had sent us out to fight in the beginning.

I speak my name. My name is Allen Hale. I am twenty-one years old. I am a soldier with the Continental army of America. I have come great distances to fight for freedom.

The fire burns low, and Kenton rises to hack at the fruit tree. He comes back and drops the wood on the fire. He says:

“I wouldn't think to destroy a fruit tree. For a matter of ten years I saved the seed of cherry and plum. We thought to make a great planting in the Lake country when we moved westward. After the war we'll move westward—I'll save the seeds again.”

The fire burns up. The brigades are quiet; perhaps they sleep. Moss lies with the woman, and his deep, regular breathing tells us that he sleeps. We none of us would take the woman now and rouse Moss from his sleep.

Some Massachusetts men come and stand about the fire. Most of their brigades are without fire. They crowd close to the fire and break the wind from us. One is an officer, a bearded boy in a tattered field dress of grey homespun, carrying a rusty sword at his belt.

The talk is soft, because some of the men sleep.

A Massachusetts man says: “I hear the retreat will be in a great circle. I hear the General has in mind to strike south around Philadelphia and march across the mountains. They tell of a rare fair land there in Transylvania, a land surveyed by a man called Boone. We can live there and take our food from the ground and defend the land.”

“And our wives—children?”

“A man with bonds is no man for an army.”

“There's no army now,” Kenton muttered.

“If there are five thousand men here with bonds, will they lay down their arms and go back for hanging?”

“There won't be hanging after peace.”

“There'll be no peace so long as George Washington lives. And there's a hell's broth in Wayne and his Pennsylvania brigades.”

Vandeer said, softly: “At Haarlem, we held while Wayne's men ran.”

“The ground's fallow two years now. When the army's gone, they'll take the ground. If there were women in this land of Kentuck——”

“Where do we march tomorrow?” Eagen asked.

The Massachusetts officer answered: “A place to the north and east called the Valley Forge.”

“We camp there?”

Later, the Massachusetts men went back. The fire burnt down. There were sparks of dying fires all over the fields.

I tried to sleep. Ely Jackson rose and took his musket.

“Ely?”

“I'll stand guard awhile,” he said.

Green began to laugh. It was that strange for a man to stand guard. For what was the point in guarding? Any blow would crumple us. We were no army. Once we had been an army—but not now.

It began to snow, large, dry white flakes. Ely stood there, holding his musket with bare hands. He became a lump of white, motionless, the flakes floating past him.

II

I
SAY
to myself, oh, give me a long sleep with an end in the hot sun of the long morning. I yearn for a fire, all of my body stretching toward where the fire had been. There is no fire. I realize that my sleep has been broken, on and off through the night. A bugle is trilling. I sit up and the snow falls from me, two or three inches of snow on the ground, Green and Lane and Brenner and Eagen—piles of snow.

I stand up, trembling with cold, my body half numb. The men are dead. I glance around. The brigades are covered with snow. Ely Jackson stirs and Jacob Eagen climbs to his feet, trembling with cold. We blow on our hands, slap them against our sides, dance up and down.

“I had a wild, terrible fancy,” I say, “that all the brigades are dead.”

Ely smiles. His beard is all white with ice and snow.

“Ye're a strange being for thinking such thoughts,” Jacob tells me.

The rest of us wake. We've slept close together, yearning toward each other for the body's heat. Only Moss Fuller still sleeps, the fat woman clutching him close.

“A woman's a good thing for a sleeping man,” Edward nods.

Figures of ice and snow: we try to build a fire, but it's a hopeless task. We give it up and crunch the dry corn, chew on the salt meat enough so that we can swallow it. All the time, we move for warmth. The brigades are up, and the broken sound of voices carries over the fields. Officers canter by. Everywhere men are stamping for warmth. Here and there, a fire that was nursed through the night is built up.

“We'll go into camp soon, or we'll die,” Vandeer says.

I nod, trying to rub the chill out of my arms and legs. One or two nights like this can be endured, but no more than that. I have never wanted anything so much as I desire heat now.

Ely points to a fire over among the Pennsylvania brigades. “I can get a brand,” he suggests. The bugle blows, to arms.

“We march soon.”

“To hell with that!”

“I am thinking hell's a rare cold place,” Kenton Brenner smiles. His face is blue and purple with frost, the dead flesh breaking on his nose. I wonder how men endure it, how I endure it. But I keep stamping round. Only get warm, I think. The idea of warmth, any warmth, possesses me.

“Wake Moss.”

With the toe of his boot, Jacob prods the woman. He says: “High time to be moving, Jenny.”

Charley Green grins, standing feet apart, his face dull with sleep, his hands in his armpits for warmth. Ely walks toward the Pennsylvania men, slowly, stiltedly, as if each step pained the bottom of his feet. I can understand how his mind is set only on fire; he'll bring back the fire. He'll talk to them gently; he has a way with him.

We stand round Moss and Jenny. The woman moves and stretches her arms. The cold bites, and her hands seek out Moss. Then she screams and sits up.

“He's cold,” she whimpered.

Vandeer laughed. Her nose had turned bright red during the night and her hair had spread all over her face. She was an ugly, fat, gross creature. We were all of us filthy and ugly, broken in one way or another. But I hated her because she reminded me of things that had once been and brought them back to me, because she was a mocking caricature of a woman. The kind of woman I had known, once.

I dragged her to her feet. I held her, her dirty blanket clutched in my hands, shaking her back and forth. The others watched me. Henry Lane was smiling stupidly, but the others didn't move. They just watched.

“You'll kill me!” she cried.

Then I let go of her. “Get out of here,” I whispered.

She arranged her blanket, turning round and round, patting the loose strands of her yellow hair into place. “I'm a good woman, I want you to know,” she said. “I'm a good, respectable woman.”

Vandeer was laughing again. He was a little man; he had been a minister before the war. He had had two brothers who were killed at White Plains. Lately he had been like this. I could understand that. He was forty years old, yet he had become as lightheaded as a boy.

“Better go,” Jacob Eagen told her.

She stumbled away, turning every now and then to swear at us and to scream at us that she was a good woman. Jacob bent down next to Moss, shaking him gently. Jacob was hard and bitter, but now with Moss he was gentle as a woman. He took the hair away from Moss' face, and we saw blood clotted and frozen above his thin beard.