Conceived in Liberty (20 page)

The brigades were sympathetic towards Kenton. No one of us had any love for McLane's raiders. They foraged food, but we saw little enough of it. The brigades were muttering and talking among themselves. They remembered the time Kenton had slain the two deer.

I thought of myself up there with Kenton, three gibbets instead of one. What sort of fear was in Kenton's heart? How could he stand like that—and bear it?

I thought he was looking at me. Then I realized that the sun in his eyes would show him only dark figures of men coming out of the glare on the snow.

I thought of Charley, who would have died instead. Only I was always outside of it. Never had it occurred to either of them that I should be the one to die. I had known it. The moment Washington agreed to Hamilton's request, I had known that it would not be I; I had known that I would live.

I thought of how there had been no word of hate out of Kenton's mouth, no word of resentment, only regret for something he had done to me when we were both children, something I had forgotten already. I thought of the Kenton I had always known; this man——

“He's godlike,” I said to Ely.

Ely was crying, unashamed. It was the first time I had ever seen tears in Ely's eyes.

The brigades were muttering with resentment. “Let him live—he's a fair good man—he's guilty of no crime——”

Muller walked up to Kenton, tore a piece of cloth from his ragged coat, turned on his heel and walked away. The act signified the defacing of a uniform. But Kenton wore no uniform. There had never been a uniform for any man in the Continental army. The uniform business was a conceit of the Congress and the officers. Now, for the first time, I took a pride in our rags, a great pride in the fact that we were men together, no soldiers, only men in our own right—beggars with guns.

Watching Kenton, watching Muller striding away smugly, watching the men on either side of me, I had a picture of the revolution as coming from us, part of us, part of the awful resentment against forces that destroyed man's pride in himself. Part of men born into a new world.

It rose like the growl from the brigades, a growl of dumb fury and hate. I wonder whether Muller saw it—saw a new world in us, a world groping blindly to find itself. Kenton saw it; I swear to God that Kenton saw it. I swear to God that Kenton died with that vision in his eyes.

I cried to Ely: “He'll not hang! We'll take him back!”

A moment the brigades surged forward, a moment during which Wayne's ringing voice shouted:

“Brigades attention!”

We fell back, men in arms and in rank. We fell back into the years of war that stretched before us, how many years no man there knew.

They stood him on the scaffold. When they wanted to blindfold him, he shook his head. He stood bareheaded, the rope around his neck, his hair golden with sunlight. Then they shot the trap, and Kenton died.

There was a great sigh from the brigades. Men slumped visibly. Men stood with their heads hanging over, holding their muskets limply.

“He's dead,” I whispered.

The drums beat out into the morning air. The brigades began to move. Wayne had become a figure of stone; he rode ahead and looked at no man.

Jacob's face was grey, his eyes black hollows.

I said: “You bear him no hate, Jacob. Leave the hate for me. Hate me, Jacob—but not Kenton.”

“I bear him no hate——”

Ely muttered: “The love of a man who gives his life for a man——”

We marched back to the dugouts. I went in, and Charley Green was waiting for me, his face flushed hot.

“Kenton's dead,” I told him.

“How?—he wasn't afraid?”

“No. He was smiling.”

Charley cried. He lay with his face in his hands, crying bitterly. I went to the fire, sat down close to the flames, and stared into them. I tried to get back what I had seen when Kenton went to the scaffold.

XVI

I
SHAKE
my head. The hand I hold the cup of water with trembles, spilling some of it. My hand is a frame of bone with yellow skin stretched over it.

“I've seen a lot of fever,” Ely says. “It comes, goes, and leaves you weak. It leaves strange thoughts.”

“How many days have I been here, Ely?”

“Six days——”

I consider it thoughtfully—six days. Six days without food. Yet I'm alive. I say:

“Have you ever thought, Ely, about a man's lot after he's died?”

Ely shook his head. “I'm no religious man, Allen. It's a thing for preachers.”

“Kenton died for me. He'll hold no hate for me?”

“I'm not thinking he'll hold any hate.”

“You'll stay by me, Ely?—When I go, you'll hold me, Ely? I'm afraid.”

“I'll stay by you, Allen.”

“You're a great, good man, Ely. You're the best man I've ever known.”

Ely shakes his head. He wets a rag, wipes my face with it. He covers me. He sits by me, washing the heat from my face.

I relapse into a stupor. The cold and heat alternate again. The fire in the dugout fills all the space taken by my eyes, a roaring blaze of fire that consumes me. I cry for Bess. I wake, sweating, and reach out desperately for her. The days and nights blend into the even smoke-filled grey of the dugout. The dugout is eternal; and we are men doomed to it.

The doctor comes once more. The fever has broken itself, and I lie in bed, weak as a baby. Charley is sitting up already, a thin, wasted figure.

The doctor is different, red-eyed, a straggling beard over his chin, thinner. His smock is dirty with blood. His voice has lost its sharp bite. He comes into the dugout, and Jacob helps him out of his coat. He shakes his head.

“I'll climb that damned hill no more. Doctor's no good here. Let me rest.”

He sits down by the fire and stretches his legs. He glances at Charley, then at me.

“Both of you sane again,” he says. “I wouldn't have thought it.”

Charley laughs. “They'll not pile me in the snow.”

“Give them time. I've a thousand men in my hospital. Do you believe me? A thousand men in that shack—a full thousand men between the four walls. No room to walk, and it doesn't matter if you walk on top of them. There's no hell hereafter. Hell's here. Hell's in my hospital. A thousand men and no one of them will walk out of the place. Better that they don't. It's not a thing to remember. But the women live. God knows how, but they live and hold on. They won't put the women in—to hell with the women. But the women live. Look at those two.”

Mary says: “You'll not drag me into your charnel house. You're an evil man.”

“Am I? You'd both make a fortune in Philadelphia whoring for the British.”

“You're a bad man.”

“I'll have a look at those two now. Thought they'd be dead and spare me the trouble.”

He examines us wearily, shakes his head.

“You'll live—it's a wonder.”

Jacob says: “You've news? We march soon?”

“March? Where? How? There's no army left—maybe a thousand men with the strength to walk out of this place. Maybe less. Three thousand deserted. Maybe half the Maryland line, two New York regiments, a Massachusetts regiment. God only knows how many dead. I've cleared a hundred bodies out of my hospital in one day. I can't stand much more. Drives a man mad. I spoke to Washington—a stubborn, ox-like man. I told him, There'll be no man alive in this encampment, come spring. No one man living. You're sitting in a valley of the dead. He said, Doctor, I'll be alive. I asked for medicine—bandages. I said to him, Here's a fair rich country of two million people. A congress sitting. What the hell is the Congress sitting. What the hell is the Congress sitting for? I don't know, he said. They give us nothing. They complain I demand too much. Then he cried like a baby. I said, Your excellency, I've seen a sight of tears—they won't bring us food. He said, I know—I know.”

Jacob shook his head. “No—you're lying.”

“I'm lying. Look at me. I don't give two damns for your suffering here. I don't give two damns for your cause. I'm no patriot. I'm a doctor. In the beginning I took it. I said, let them be damned. I'll do my leeching, and I'll learn. Maybe I'll help a poor damned soul. Well, I'm broken.”

Jacob said, plaintively: “We can't go back—there's no going back now.”

“Why not? General Howe would take his surrender.”

Ely said: “If it's like you say, why don't the English attack and make an end of it?”

“They're noways discontented in Philadelphia. Why should they waste a man? Two months more—there'll be no army for them to attack. They'll win the war by sitting on their behinds in Philadelphia and begetting children on the good Philadelphia women.”

“There'll be men to fight,” Jacob muttered.

“Dead men.”

Then he went out. We heard, a few days later, that he had shot himself. A Pennsylvania man, back from the hospital, brought us the news. He said: “The little doctor's dead now.”

I remember how we stared at him, shook our heads.

“Blew his head open with a pistol.”

Jacob whispered: “He would not do that. He was a good, strong man.”

“Well, he's dead. There's no doctor left to care for Pennsylvania men.”

After that, we sat around the fire. Each of us was afraid to speak.

Finally, I asked Ely: “What now?”

“I don't know,” Ely said.

Jacob takes his musket and goes out for relief sentry. But his steps are slow. Charley Green crawls back into bed, his woman with him. She has taken him back as naturally as if he had never gone. Kenton's woman is looking at me. She smiles.

Ely bends over and begins to unbandage his feet. I go to my bed, and Kenton's woman follows me. It doesn't matter—Kenton is dead. Bess is dead.

A long time later—and Ely still sits by the fire. What does he think? Ely Jackson is a farmer man out of the Mohawk Valley. A simple farmer man; there's no great depth to Ely. What drives him?

I turn over—back to the woman, and try to think that she is Bess. I am getting a strange answer to my longing for Bess. More and more often, she will come back to me. I feel her growing inside of me, becoming a woman. I think of the boy Allen who took the woman from the Virginians. That was long ago. She was no fit woman to be a man's wife. She was a camp follower, and a prize for any man who was strong enough to take her. She was a prize for me. She was a rare, good prize, a slim girl with a body to keep a man warm at night. I took from her, and she wanted nothing, and finally, she died.

I lie with Kenton's woman, and I feel a curious grace from Kenton over me. I would have hated the woman, but I don't hate her now. Somehow, hate has gone out of us.

We heal slowly, Charley and I. At first, Kenton's death hangs over us. I can't get out of my mind the picture of Kenton as he stood in the sunlight, in front of the scaffold, Kenton with his bare head golden in the sunlight I am as close to Charley Green as one man can be to another.

Finally, I speak of Kenton. I tell Charley how he died, word by word. I watch Charley cry, unashamed. It is a curious thing how strong men come to find a relief in tears.

One day, I go to my musket. A man from the Rhode Island brigades brought back our muskets, Kenton's and Charley's and mine. I clean it carefully and rub off the rust with sand.

I go out on sentry duty. We must fill a quota from our dugout, and it is too much for Jacob and Ely to do alone. I go out on a cold, clear night, when there is a new moon in the sky. I walk slowly, thinking how many times before I've walked this same beat, looking over the snow-covered meadows and hills.

When I meet the Pennsylvania man whose beat intercepts mine, we stand together for a while, talk a little. I have no hate left for Pennsylvania men.

“A cold night,” he says.

“The back of the winter's broken, I think.”

“It's noways different with the cold.”

We stand and listen to the wolves howling. There are more wolves than ever near the camp now.

“I can't call to mind such a lot of wolves in farm country.”

“They come after the dead. It's said a wolf in winter can scent meat on twenty miles of wind.”

I think of the German boy. I glance down the slope, and in my mind's eye, I can see him crawling up, falling in the snow, stumbling to his feet and crawling on again. A German boy thinking of his home in the Pennsylvania highlands. We are a strange lot, Dutch and German, and Puritan men from the seaboard, and Jews from overseas in Poland, and men from the southland, Scotch and Irish and Swedes, men from the Valley country in the north, black slaves from the Virginias.

I spoke to Ely and Jacob the next night. Jacob had come back from the commissariat with a little rum. We had a gruel of cornmeal. We sat around the fire, eating. Some Pennsylvania men had come in to ask news and to have a little talk.

I said to Ely: “It seemed to me that Kenton knew something when he died ——”

“How was that?”

“He was noways afraid.”

“He was a strong man,” Charley said.

“Not only strength. Why do we go on, Ely? We're not paid. They starve us. We're sick for sight of our homeland.”

“We'll be free men,” Ely said.

“There's nowhere free men in Europe.”

“There'll be free men here,” Jacob muttered.

“But we can't win the war. It's said the British have twenty thousand men in Philadelphia. A thousand men can't fight twenty thousand——”

A Pennsylvania man said: “There's a wilderness road over the mountains into the land of Kentuck. It's said that Washington has sworn to take that road before he lays down his command. Beyond the mountains, he can fight on for years.”

“For years?” we asked incredulously.

“For years,” Jacob muttered, almost to himself. “For years.”