Cloudsplitter (51 page)

“What
should
he have done, then?”

“He should have done whatever Wellington least expected him to do. Which is, first of all, to attack. Attack at once.” And not only should he have attacked at once, Father went on, for the mud would have hampered Wellington’s army as much as his own, but he should have split his force into two equal-seeming parts. “Like Joab against the Syrians and the children of Ammon,” he explained. “One part would be made the superior, however, the way Joab secretly placed the best men of Israel under his command and placed the rest, an inferior lot, under his brother, Abishai.” Then Napoleon should have attacked from the two flanks, not to make a pincers, but to make two separate fronts, so as to force Wellington to divide his army into two parts also. Except that in Wellington’s case, the two would not have merely
seemed
equal, like Napoleon’s. They would in fact have been equal. Consequently, Napoleon’s secretly superior half would have quickly overrun the British half opposing it. And his inferior portion over on the other flank would have triumphed also, because Wellington’s side would have broken and run when they saw their opposite flank taken by a force apparently equal to the force facing them. “Just as the children of Ammon, when they saw the Syrians broken by Joab’s army of the best men of Israel, fled from the inferior force under his brother, Abishai. Napoleon’s greater false-half, in defeating Wellington’s actual half, would be handing victory like a gift to his lesser half. Thus his army as a whole would have defeated Wellington’s as a whole, and Blücher, arriving six hours later, would have been obliged to beat a hasty retreat back to Prussia. Napoleon would be emperor once again. He might still be emperor today.”

We turned off the square onto a wide avenue and walked on, and while I pondered Father’s findings and tried to apply them to his own planned campaign against the slaveholders of the American South, he whistled contentedly a favorite hymn and now and then paused to admire and comment upon the grand houses and impressive palaces of the town.

“It’s a valuable lesson, then?” I said.

“What is?”

“Your discoveries concerning Napoleon’s defeat.”

“Yes, of course. We mustn’t ever forget it. There will come a time, Owen, I promise you, when we will be cut down—unless we do the unexpected thing.”

“When will that be? When’s it coming?”

“Soon;’ he said. “Sooner than anyone thinks.” He seemed then to drift off, as if observing future events with as much clarity as earlier today he had viewed the past. But a moment later, he abruptly returned and said, “First, however, we’ve got some business in Liverpool to attend to! We’ve got to sell some Yankee wool to our British cousins, my boy, and at a price that’ll free us of debt, once and for all. I’m sick of living like a toad under a harrow!”

“Right!” I said, and laughed aloud. Not because of his figure of speech, but because it seemed so incongruous to be meditating one moment on warfare, ancient and modern, and the next to be planning strategy for the sale of wool. I could hardly wait for the day when we would no longer have to think about commerce and could bend all our energies and attention to war! War against the slavers! “I wish we could rush straight into battle now!” I exclaimed.

“Ah! So do I, son;’ he said, smiling. “So do I.” And he walked on, hands clasped behind his back, head slightly bowed, as if it were the Sabbath and he were on his way to church.

Two days later, we arrived back in Liverpool and at once made ready to show our wool to the Englishmen. The morning before the auction was to take place, we came down bright and early from our lodgings to the warehouse, so as to be on the scene when the agents for the cloth manufacturers examined all the sheepmen’s stock and set in their own minds how high they would bid later. This practice was a guard against being victimized by puffers, men who were sometimes secretly hired by the sheepmen to bid the prices up, and was, of course, when the prices for the various grades of wool were actually established and agreed upon among the buyers. It was no different here than in the United States, where there was a considerable amount of secret collusion between the buyers, most of whom had elaborate, long-term business dealings with one another, such as previous debts or deals, services owed or promised, goods with liens attached, and so on, often concerning some business quite other than that of purchasing wool and in some other city. Thus the auction itself was more or less a formality; there were seldom any surprises, and prices rarely moved up or down more than a fraction of a cent per pound.

In Springfield, for number 2 grade wool, before Father had withdrawn his entire stock from the marketplace to ship it abroad, Brown & Perkins had been offered, and had turned down, thirty-five cents a pound. Number I had been going for forty-one cents. The three higher grades, X, XX, and XXX, had been priced proportionally higher. Father’s plan was to obtain in Liverpool a price of forty-five to fifty cents per pound for the number 2, low enough to undercut slightly the current English price, and to scale the other grades accordingly. After subtracting shipping costs and tariffs, he figured that he would still come out ahead by at least ten cents per pound, a net gain of twenty thousand dollars over what he would have gotten for the same wool in Springfield. Furthermore, as he had explained to me numerous times, by withdrawing Brown & Perkins’s one hundred tons of wool from the domestic market, he had created an artificial shortage there, which would force the prices up for a time, and thus he would profit twice, here and now in England and next month in Springfield, when the fall fleeces arrived from the western sheepmen.

Father had me pull half-a-dozen bales of number 2 from different layers of our lot and haul them out onto the floor. This was normally a two-man job, but in those days, despite my crippled left arm, I was strong enough to handle a two-hundred-fifty-pound bale alone by grabbing it on top with my right hand and hooking the bale underneath with my left and slinging it up onto my right shoulder. If it was tied correctly and I had a strap, I could even lug it with one arm, like an enormous burlap-wrapped satchel. “Stack them over here, son,” Father said, pointing to a place a short ways off from the others, so that our wool stood out from theirs.

I think that Father wished to make a bit of a show for the British gentlemen, who lounged about the cavernous space in several small groups, chattering idly amongst themselves, most of them in fine suits and silk cravats, affecting canes and wearing gloves and tall hats. We stood out anyway, due to our rough clothing and Yankee speech and manners, but the image of honest American yeomanry was perhaps what Father wanted to put on display, nearly as much as the wool from Brown & Perkins of Springfield, Massachusetts, and I wasn’t displeased to play my role, the tall, strapping lad who tosses around two-hundred-fifty pound bales by himself.

Our counterparts, the British sheepmen, stood by their sample bales with caps in hand, silent, eyes cast down, as if they believed they were in the presence of lofty personages, feudal lords and squires, instead of scheming merchants. Father, by way of contrast, leaned against his stack of bales almost casually and whittled with his pocketknife on a stick he’d cut from the hedge by our boarding house and had brought along, I now realized, for precisely this somewhat theatrical purpose.

Soon a group of four or five buyers with slight smiles on their faces had gathered near us, examining our persons more than our bales of wool, all the while continuing to talk amongst themselves, in their drawling, nasal, English way, of their club dinner the previous evening. Then several more of the sanguinarians sauntered over, their walking sticks clicking across the warehouse floor, and soon there was a crowd surrounding us, looking bemused and a little bored. If they were impressed by who or what we were, they disguised it.

The clerk of the works, Mr. Pickersgill, a small man with a malmsey nose and Dutch spectacles, whose task it was to organize the sale and with whom Father had dealt on our arrival, came quickly out of his office and joined the group and nervously began to speak for us, as if we were Iroquois Indians and could not speak to these fine gentlemen for ourselves. “This ’ere’s Mister John Brown from the firm of Brown and Perkins. It’s a big lot ’e’s got, sirs. Some seven ’undred bales at various grades. Hammericans he declared, as if it were the name of our tribe.

“Indeed,” said one. “From Pumpkinshire!”

“Extraordinary,” said another.

“I like your cravat,” said a third, a short, platter-faced fellow with an outsized head and a limp blond moustache. He removed one of his fawn-colored gloves and reached forward and tweaked the piece of soft leather that Father customarily wore at his throat, causing Father to cease his whittling at once and pull himself up straight and glare at the man, until he withdrew his hand and delicately wiped it with a handkerchief and replaced the glove.

There were several low har-hars from the group. Father resumed his whittling and said, “When you wish to examine my wool, gentlemen, please inform Mister Pickersgill, and I’ll be glad to show it to you.” He briefly stated that he had brought close to one hundred tons of clean, graded wool, all of it raised by expert sheepmen in the states of Ohio and Pennsylvania, and that his number 2 would prove superior to their X and equal to their XX, although he would price it to compete with their number 2.

There were a few snuffles of disbelief, and one of the Englishmen asked him who had graded his wool. “More to the point,” he said, “who
cleaned
it?” and the company laughed, for it was unfortunately true that American wool was notorious in those days for not being clean, and a hundredweight of fleece might have as much as twenty pounds of dirt and feces stuck in it. This had been one of Father’s ongoing concerns, making sure that Brown & Perkins wool was clean, even for the domestic market, where the practice of folding trash in with the fleeces was all too common. From the beginning of his and Mr. Perkins’s Springfield enterprise, Father, although only a middleman, had made a great effort when purchasing the wool in the west to teach his shepherds how to wash their sheep thoroughly before shearing and how to pick the wool clean before shipping their clips to him in Springfield. His lectures on the subject at fairs and shows where he demonstrated his methods were famous among the sheepmen from New England to Ohio.

“Gentlemen, I have purchased every clip of this wool from shepherds I’ve trained personally. It’s been sheared from sheep whose stock I’ve improved with my own purebred merinos and Saxonys. And I myself am the man who has graded this wool. I’ve graded it, and my own sons and I have examined it before shipping for cleanliness.” This was not exactly true, for it was impossible to examine closely two hundred thousand pounds of wool. One graded it by taking a single handful of fleece from each shepherd’s clip, and one sampled clips at random to check for dirt and hoped that the shepherds were as good as their promise to deliver clean wool. Which, for the most part, they were. Besides, Father could generally estimate two hundred fifty pounds of clean wool by casting his eye over its volume.

“An expert, then,” said one of the Englishmen, a tub-bellied fellow with a yellow waistcoat stretched to its limits. “We have us an expert. He grades his own wool!” he said, turning to his fellows and smiling like a catfish.

“I
am
an expert, when it comes to grading wool. I’ve made it my business for nearly forty years, man and boy. Too many cunning shavers out there, gentlemen. Too many trimmers. Not enough honest men, like yourselves. But even so, a sheepman would be a fool not to know how to grade his own wool.”

“And you’re no fool, eh, Yank?” called one.

“Gentlemen,” Father said, heating up, “I can grade wool in the dark.”

“Indeed?”

“Aye. Blindfolded.”

“Extraordinary!”

“I can read a clip blind, from a single tuft,” Father declared, truthfully, for I had seen him do it hundreds of times.

The short man with the broad face and blond moustache then stepped forward and removed his own necktie, a blousy piece of fawncolored silk that matched his gloves, and held it out to Father. “Perhaps you’d like to demonstrate, Mister... ?”

“Brown. Be glad to,” he said, and he passed me his knife and stick, removed his hat, and tied the scarf around his head, blocking his sigh t.

“No help from you now, my fine golumpus,” the man said to me, and he departed from the group and exited quickly from the warehouse, returning after a few seconds bearing a reddish tuft of hair in his gloved hand. “Now, Mister Brown, here’s your sample,” he said, and gave Father the tuft.

Father rubbed it between his fingers and dropped it at once to the floor. “Gentlemen,” he pronounced, “if you have any machinery that will spin the hairs of a dog, one of those large, wire-haired red dogs, I believe, then I would advise you to put this into it,” and with a flourish, he pulled off the blindfold.

After that, the Englishmen seemed more respectful of Father and more openly curious about our wool. We might be a couple of rustics from the republic of Pumpkinshire, but we were not fools.

Nor were they. After some pleasantries—during which the rotund man in the yellow waistcoat took a drink from a silver flask and extended it to Father, who naturally declined, suffering himself to be called, quite good-naturedly, a bloody parson—Father began once again to praise the quality of Brown & Perkins wool.

In the midst of his discourse, one of the more sober-visaged buyers, a man who up to now had been silent, interrupted him and said, “Mister Brown, I saw your son there setting out these bales. He’s a stout lumper, I must say, especially with his dumb arm and all, my compliments, but really, sir, since it was so easy for him to heft these bales, perhaps you could have him replace them and pull from your stock a few that we ourselves might choose for appraisal. I’m sure you understand, sir.” This man was tall and distinguished-looking, with a narrow gray beard. He was somewhat older than the others, and they seemed to defer to him—even Mr. Pickersgill, I noticed, whose interests were supposed to be the seller’s, not the buyer’s—for they all punctuated his statement with wise nods and pursed lips, as if for his approval.