Letters (103 page)

By that same light the captain is just now seeing what’s what and clapping his brow. The shore gunners see too, from the ramparts of Babcock and Covington, and open fire. Napier gives the signal to do what they’re there for; the nine boats let go with all they’ve got. Fort McHenry responds; the bomb and rocket ships intensify their barrage. For an hour the din and fireworks are beyond belief; if Brooke’s army needs a diversion, they’ve got it!

And the Ferry Branch is no place to be. Andrew sits in the gig’s stern sheets, stunned by the barrage. 18-pounders roar past to send up geysers all around; they will all die any moment. He has hoped the diversion would include a landing, so that (his credibility with Cochrane gone) he might slip away in the dark and commence the long trek back to Castines Hundred; now he considers whether swimming to shore is more dangerous than staying where he is. At 3:00 A.M., by some miracle, Napier has yet to lose a boat or a man. But their position is suicidal, and there is no sign of Brooke’s expected attack over beyond the city:
those
earthworks are deathly quiet. The captain cannot see that three miles away Brooke’s sleeping army has been bugled up and fallen in, not to assault the city but—to their own astonishment and the chagrin of their officers—to begin their two-day withdrawal to North Point, minus three dozen prisoners and 200 deserters. Napier has done all he can. He gives the signal (by hooded lantern) to retire.

They proceed back down the Ferry Branch as they came, along the farther shore from McHenry, whose gunners now lose them in the darkness and cease their fire. It looks as though Captain Napier, against all probability, will complete his assignment without casualties. Andrew tests the water with his hand: very warm in the cool night air. “We must signal the fleet we’re coming,” he whispers to the lieutenant, “or they’ll take us for Yankees,” and without asking permission he snatches up the launcher and fires a rocket to the
Surprize.
As he intends, it is seen at once by the Fort McHenry gunners as well as by the fleet. The lieutenant wrestles him down; the world explodes; the boat beside them goes up in shouts and splinters. All the batteries of Fort McHenry let loose, and flights of British rockets and bombshells respond. Andrew gets to his knees in the bilges among the straining, swearing oarsmen. His last sights are of the lieutenant scrambling for a pistol to shoot him with; of Major Armistead’s cannon-riddled storm flag—sodden and limp, but lit by the shellbursts over the McHenry ramparts—and of a misaimed Congreve whizzing their way, some piece of which (or of oar, or of gunwale) strikes him smartly abaft the right temple, just over the ear, as he dives into the bath-warm river.

He will wake half tranced some days or hours later, knowing neither where he is nor how he came there (Marvelous to relate, by a series of
bonnes chances
he is in the house of none other than the merchant William Patterson. Betsy’s elsewhere, avoiding Baltimore and making ready to return with nine-year-old Jérôme Junior to Europe, now
that
war’s done. Her father, after making a tour of his beloved city on the morning of the 15th, has volunteered his house to shelter the wounded defenders, for one of whom, by reason of his civilian clothes, Andrew was mistaken by the Fort McHenry garrison when they found him on the shore that same dull dawn). As he can neither say nor see now what he will piece together in the days to come,
you
sing it, Muse, if you can reach that high: how F. S. Key, that leaden A.M., has glassed Mary Pickersgill’s 17-by-25-foot $168.54 auxiliary stars and bars, standing out now in a rising easterly, and has shared the good news with his companions. How their joy increases through the morning at the retirement of the bomb ships and frigates downriver to the main anchorage, and at the obvious preparations on North Point for the army’s return. How in his elevation Key hums the English drinking tune he’d used for his ode to the Tripoli chaps, and searches vainly for something stirring to rhyme with
stripes
—or for that matter with
flag, McHenry, Armistead,
or
Sam Smith.
Not Cook’s
graven/raven,
certainly: he will entertain that word no more. He slaps about his person for paper to make a list on, and fishes forth the turncoat’s letter; is at first repelled by the notion of employing such compromised foolscap to so patriotic a purpose, stars wars bars, fight night sight, but comes soon to savor the paradox, Baltimore evermore nevermore? Dum dee dum dum dum
dum:
anapestic tetrameters actually, one quatrain and a pair of couplets,
abab cc dd,
feminine endings on the
b
lines, plus an
in
ternal
rhyme
to perk
up
the fifth
line,
he unfolds the sheet to see what the rascal wrote after all and reads

Surprised to find it an apparently earnest, unironic exhortation (he has thought only to write some local sort of ode, for the Baltimore press perhaps), Key rereads the letter, Anacreon dum-dee-dumming in his head—
et voilà.
By the time Andrew is enough himself to leave Baltimore, the lyrics of
Defense of Fort M’Henry
have been run off in handbill form, rerun by the Baltimore
Patriot & Evening Advertiser,
re-rerun by presses in other towns, taken up by the tavern crowd; by the time he reaches New Orleans, Americans from Castine (Maine) to Barataria are straining their high registers for the rockets’
red glare
and the la-and of the
free,
and have given Key’s anthem a different title.

Andrew goes, then, after all, not home to Castines Hundred, but to Louisiana. The reason he gives, here at the end of this second posthumous letter, is that, his patriotism having been both excited and gratified by the McHenry episode, he hopes to forestall the battle he knows is to come. That New Orleans will be Admiral Cochrane’s next objective he is certain, and that to atone for the inglorious retreat from Baltimore—as well as for Prevost’s retreat from Plattsburgh—the British will commit their forces to a major assault. But it is the opinion of William Patterson, whose judgment our ancestor respects, that the British economy, drained by the long campaign against Napoleon, cannot sustain the war into 1815. Patterson believes, and Andrew concurs, that when the news of Baltimore and Plattsburgh reaches London, the prince regent’s cabinet will settle a treaty at Ghent before the year ends, with or without their Indian buffer state and Mississippi navigation rights. Andrew fears that a decisive victory by either side at this point will upset the stalemate he and Andrée have been working for, and which despite his new feeling for the U.S.A. he still believes to be in the Indians’ best interest. Inasmuch as the Niagara Frontier is quiet (on Guy Fawkes Day 1814 General Izard will blow up Fort Erie and withdraw across the river to Buffalo, the last military action in the north), and Andrew Jackson has been authorized by Secretary Monroe to raise and command another army for defense of the Gulf Coast, the danger is clearly from that quarter.

But we do not forget, Henry, that our ancestor, no homebody at best, has been struck a severe blow to the head (the lieutenant of that gig has happily reported him killed; John Skinner and Dr. Beanes are not sorry to hear it; but Francis Key, less certain that the fellow was a turncoat, dutifully reports the news to “Mrs. Cook, Castines Hundred, Canada,” and somehow the letter reaches her despite the war and the vague address). Even as he closes this letter, two years later, Andrew is subject to spells of giddiness, occasional blackouts, from each of which he awakes momentarily believing himself to be on Bloodsworth Island, 36 years old, and the War of 1812 not yet begun. Though he never loses sight of his larger end—“the rectification, in [his] life’s 2nd cycle, of its 1st”—his conception of means, never very consistent, grows more and more attenuated. We remind ourselves that he is completing this letter in France, from
Bellerophon,
Napoleon a prisoner on board, himself about to set out on an urgent errand in that connection, and yet nowhere in these pages explains how he got there, and what business it is of his to get the fallen emperor a passport to America! No wonder Andrée was skeptical, if she read these
lettres posthumes
at all.

There was also talk at Mr. Patterson’s of the Baratarians
[Andrew concludes his letter glibly],
a band of freebooters led by the brothers Lafitte, of whom the younger, Jean, had been a captain with Napoleon. When the British in the Gulf solicited their services against New Orleans, Jean Lafitte sent their letters to his friend (and mine) Jean Blanque in the Louisiana legislature, hoping to raise his stock in New Orleans, where his brother Pierre had been jail’d as a pirate. But the Governor’s Council declared the letters forgeries, sent a Navy force to destroy Barataria, and jail’d Lafitte’s band. Thot I: Here is a man after my own heart, who might serve as a go-between to mislead both Admiral Cochrane & General Jackson into avoiding a disastrous battle. Thus I determin’d to seek out this Jean Lafitte at once, and solicit him to this end, before rejoining you & our children.

Incredibly, Henry, here his letter ends!

But for its postscript.
In this mission
[he writes under his signature],
I both succeeded and fail’d. I did not prevent the bloodiest battle of the war (fought after the Peace had been sign’d in December) & the most decisive of American victories on land. But in Jean Lafitte, I who have never known a father found a true brother, with whom I fought on the American side in that battle, and whom one day I hope to include in the happiest of all reunions, yours & mine!

Defeated again, Admiral Cochrane seizes Fort Bowyer in Mobile Bay as a sort of consolation prize, and Andrew (inexplicably back with the fleet again) mails his
first
“posthumous letter.” Cochrane is still hopeful of a fresh expedition in the Chesapeake come spring, to destroy Baltimore, perhaps Washington again as well. He and Admiral Cockburn (who, operating off Georgia for the winter, has been spared the New Orleans fiasco) will mend their differences, go on to greater glory! News of the peace treaty thwarts that plan. Leaving Rear Admiral Malcolm the disagreeable chore of disposing of the blacks and Indians recruited to their cause, Cochrane retires to England to litigate with Cockburn over prize money.

The Ghent Treaty is bad news for Indians. Sobered by their losses at Baltimore and Plattsburgh, by rising marine insurance rates and falling export trade, by the uncertain peace in Europe and the rallying even of dissident New Englanders to Key’s new national song, the British have abandoned, on no less grave advice than Wellington’s own, their demand for the Great Lakes, half of Maine, and the rest—including the Indian state. There seems nothing now to prevent American expansion right across the Mississippi to the Pacific!

Unless (here the postscript closes)…

He it was
[Jean Lafitte]
who re-excited my interest in Napoleon, many of whose followers had fled to Louisiana after his 1st abdication. As Emperor of the French, Bonaparte was the curse of Europe. But suppose (as Jean was fond of supposing, whose loyalty was less to America than to France & freebootery) a new Napoleon were to govern a French-American territory from the Mississippi to the Rio Grande? Lafitte wisht to rescue the man from Elba & fetch him to New Orleans or Galvez-Town. I scoft at that idea—till Napoleon himself show’d me in March of 1815 it could be done, by escaping from that island & returning to France for his 100 Days. The news reacht us at sea, where (with other activities) Jean was planning a reconnaissance of Elba. He shrugg’d & return’d to Galvez-Town to try a 2nd Barataria, as his hero was trying a 2nd Empire in Europe. But I went on, by another vessel, with another plan in mind, the likelihood of which, events have conspired extraordinarily to advance. But that, dear wife, must await another letter!

As, dear son, it must likewise with us. A week has passed since this commenced! Americans on the moon! Senator Kennedy disgraced! Where are you?

ABC/ss
cc: JB

7/8/69

“John Barth,” “Author”
Dept. English, Annex 2
State Univ. of N.Y. at Buffalo
Buffalo, N.Y. 14214

“Dear” “Sir”:

Aha ha REStop You have taken the bait stepped into our parlor; there’s punctuation for you: your
letter
to us of 7/6 received! Hee RESET Gotcha! Hum!

Mars stationary in Right Ascension. Moon and Saturn in conjunction. Stock market hit by heavy losses. 1st U.S. troops head home from Viet Nam. Astromonkey dies after retrieval.

“Sir”: (Oh that’s good, LILYVAC, a hit, a palpable RESET Your letter of July 6, 6th Sunday after Pentecost, 555 die in weekend traffic accidents—same # as height in feet of Washington Monument, Washington, 4.3. Oh that’s sly LILYVAC thats RESET Dont forget punctuation. ¶Right. Resume.

In the lull between the end of our Spring Work Period (and of Year 3, a.k.a.
T,
a.k.a.
V
of our 5-Year Plan) and the Mating Season which will commence Year 4 (a.k.a.
E
etc.); in the afterglow of the
“Gadfly
(whoops) Illuminations” of July 4; in the pause at the Phi-point 6 1 8
(e.g.
⅗ths, ⅝ths, 54/88ths)—your
letter
reaches us proposing that
we
participate in
your
fiction! Oh ha phi on you! (Tell him, LIL.)

Had that missive hit but a week before, when in despair at our scrambled NOTES we wandered like downed Bellerophon devouring our own soul food hee it might have done its fatal work, last knife in bleeding Caesar. Keyless in the presence of our enemies, we could not unlock the leafy anagram; betrayed by Margana y Flea whoops advised by Bea Golden to booger off, we wondered why our parents never gave us a buzz, and whether LILYVAC had their signals crossed. But ha you missed, good old P.O., your letter finds us flying like a butterfloat, being like a sting (O LIL); in a word we’ve been reset. Repeat. We said in a word we’ve been RESET Gotcha Hum.