Patrick Henry and the Frigate’s Keel: And Other Stories of a Young Nation (13 page)

Tiny, swarming flies settled on the beans. Ants fought for their share. Jess felt the painful kneading of his stomach.

The shadows were longer when he picked up the cup of water, held it carefully, and slipped over the edge of the rifle pit. He crawled slowly, balancing the water, moving between staked horses and oxen. That way, he made a circuit of six or seven wagons before he saw his father.

Before, always before, his father had been of the brood, part of the brood, a man whose heavy-skinned hands changed slowly from a tight grasp of plow handles, to ax handles, to rake handles, a tired man sitting at a table and eating great quantities of food, not a man for love or violent passions. He had pictures of his father that went far back; but always the pictures were the same—a middle-size man plodding behind a plow, a middle-size man harnessing horses. In the same way that he resented his brothers and sisters, he had resented his father, as if he recognized his father's disappointment in his first-born. His father was a man of few words; but often, very often, Jim had felt his heavy hand on head or body.

So now he puzzled, wondered at himself, carrying a cup of water to his father.

And this father was different, a father braced against a wagon wheel, with a rifle thrust through the spokes. A motionless father, lying in the wagon's shadow.

With the cup of water held in front of him, Jim watched his father, the water so close to his nose that he could smell the warm, soured odor of it. He watched his father, seeking movement, seeking signs that would explain the vague relationship he held to this man, origin of the brood, reasons for their westward passage, reasons for the alien, hateful bits of flesh that were his brothers and sisters.

The sun was hot, but so immersed was he in the new manifestation of his father that he forgot the sun's heat, that he forgot his thirst and hunger, that he forgot his hate and resentment of the world about him. Slowly he was discovering ties that bound him to the man, was reaching back for them.

He watched his father's movement, watched an arm stretch, saw a leg ease itself from a cramped position, saw a ripple of undulation travel through the whole body. The other men talked occasionally, in short, terse sentences; but his father lay there in silence.

He wanted to crawl forward toward his father, yet something held him back, the same thing that kept him wordless when his mother came with water and beans. For the first time in all his life, he felt a sudden, awful pity for his father, for his mother.

Then he saw it, far out on the prairie—dust and through the dust men emerging. And he knew instinctively what it was, what the two days of waiting had been for. Not moving, not afraid, clutching the cup of water in his hand, he lay there and watched the line of dark men on small horses charge the circled wagons. He watched them come out of the dust like bathers breaking from the surf heard their shrill screams, and saw them break against the rifle fire as against a solid wall.

After that, the fight might have been hours or minutes. He didn't know—as if his life had been suspended for that time, to be resumed again. He saw the changing positions of his father's body as he aimed and fired, and he felt with his father for the brood that lay in the shelter pit—fear, anxiety. He aimed with his father, fired with the toilhardened hands, saw the dark riders come to the edge of the wagons again and again, beaten back on their rearing horses, screaming, charging, racing along the wagons, hurling slim lances. Bullets kicked sand into his face, and once an arrow sank quivering into the ground beside him, within an inch of his elbow.

He saw his father struck, saw the arrow quivering up from between his neck and shoulder, felt the rending, hot pain of it, as if it had been in his own flesh.

He crawled forward, still holding the cup of water. The water was dirty and yellow. Sand lay on the bottom of the cup. Dust made a film over the water.

His father had rolled over, lay on his back. Jim's bare foot came in contact with the rifle barrel, and he felt the heat of it. It came as a surprise to him that he should be able to feel anything like that now.

His father looked at him, wide, hurt, surprised eyes. “You—Jim,” he managed to say, “how come you're out here?”

Even now, knowing that death had taken hold of the man, sensing the thousand things left unsaid that should have been said, Jim was unable to bridge the gap with words. “I brung you some water.”

“Out here—it ain' fit for you to be out here.”

Strangely, he had no desire to cry; he knew he would never cry again. “I reckoned you'd be thirsty,” Jim said.

“Thirsty?”

“A little water to drink,” Jim said.

He put down the water, carefully, in his mind a picture of the seven quarts he had spilled that morning. He got an arm under his father's shoulders, and with an effort, raised him a little. He saw the pain cross his father's face.

“Hurts?”

“Maybe a mite, Jim.” He twisted his head, so as to look beyond the wagons, and saw that the fight was over, that the lean riders had gone, leaving behind them a few riderless horses, a few dark, twisted bodies. “Maybe a mite, Jim,” he repeated.

“I brung some water.”

Pain again. “I could stand a little drink of water, Jim.”

He held the cup to his father's lips, feeling the stubble of beard against his fingers, an intimacy strange and wonderful.

“That water tastes good, Jim.”

“Drink it all.”

“A mite more—cold inside.”

“You'll be all right, Pa.”

“Don't go worryin', Jim.”

“I ain' worryin', Pa.”

“A little more water—”

The cup was empty. Jim looked down at his father's face, at the hard lines, at the open eyes that saw nothing. He touched his father's face, the curling hairs of his beard, the dry lips.

“Jim.”

He raised his eyes and saw men standing over him, wondered vaguely how long they had been there, felt resentment at their presence—almost as if they were intruding.

“Jim, better come along.”

He shook his head. More than anything, he felt that he must stay there beside his father.

“Come along, Jim.”

“I'll stay here. You get Maw.”

Their eyes held his. He rose slowly, shaking his head, and old Captain Brady took his arm and guided him along.

His mother lay outside the shelter pit, and a blanket covered her. They drew back the blanket, so he could see her face. Her face was peaceful, not like his father's, but with closed eyes, with some of the lines erased from the skin. The lips were not hard, and he tried to remember if they had ever been hard. He wanted to touch the lips, just to lay the tips of his fingers against them. They were cold; the rush of fear was like ice over his body. He wasn't afraid because she was dead; he was afraid because he understood for the first time how it was with them, with the brood, because he knew instinctively with what passion they were conceived, with what suffering.

“She come outta the pit after me,” Jim muttered.

“There ain' no use cryin', Jim,” Captain Brady told him.

Vaguely conscious that they were there—his sister Jenny, his brother Ben, Cal, Lizzie—all the brood, all the bits of flesh from the same tree, jealous, squabbling, he said, “I ain' cryin',” his voice hoarse and too old for him. He pointed to his brothers and sisters. “Get outta here.”

Evening almost by now, and long shadows from the wagons, and a wind out of the sunburnt stretches of the plains.

He saw the brood staring at him, wondering. Then he saw them stumbling away, Jenny crying, Ben frightened, Cal glancing back at his mother's still face.

“No use stayin' here, Jim,” Captain Brady said gently. “You gotta take things like a man, Jim. That's how it is. All this—well, maybe none of us reckoned on all this. We set out to make new homes somewhere, and that's about all we thought of. I guess none of us reckoned on this. But it come, an' that's all. When somethin' comes, you take it, else it crumples you up.”

“She come outta the pit after me,” Jim mumbled. “She knowed I was out here, so she come after me. Seven quart a water I spilled this morn. And still she got me a cup a water somehow.” He took a deep breath, remembering his father. “I went to take him a cup a water. I got to thinkin' there wasn't one thing all my life I done for him that way, like takin' him a cup a water to drink out of. All my life long, not one thing. And then I took the water to bring along to him, an' right there I couldn't give it to him. Maybe I was afraid he'd lick me for comin' outta the pit—”

“Mind me now, Jim,” Captain Brady said. “They're sleepin' peaceful-like, an' can't harm or trouble come to them any more. But we got to move on. We're low on water an' low on food. Maybe they'll attack again an' maybe they won't, but we got to move on. They had enough to last them now till morn, I reckon. It's forty mile to Fort Smith, an' we reckon to travel all night. Maybe we'll hit it by dawn, maybe not; but we'll push on. You got to think about that. We're set to split you up, you an' your brothers an' sisters, maybe one or two to a wagon—”

“We got a wagon,” Jim said.

“All right, Jim. But it's a long way West.”

“Not so long now.”

“If you're gonna act pigheaded, Jim—”

“Maybe I am. You ain't splittin' us up, Captain. We gotta wagon, an' got horses. We'll get along.”

“What about the baby?”

“I guess Jenny'll mind the baby.”

“Jim, you poor little damn fool, you're just a kid. You—”

“Maybe so. She come outta the pit to get me, an' she was shot. But she come outta the pit to get me.”

“You poor little damn fool.”

“You ain' splittin' us up.”

“You poor little damn fool. Go harness up your horses.”

It was dark when the eighteen wagons moved away from the shelter pit. Jim was sixth in line, holding reins to four horses. He was tall, sun-splotched, ugly, and awkward even in the dark. He sat there conscious of the brood in the wagon behind him, five bits of frightened, jealous life.

As he stirred the horses, he tried to separate himself from grief, from fear, from all fear of the future, from everything but the brood that was his and part of him. He pursed his lips and whistled: “Oh! Susanna, oh don't you cry for me—”

7

The Day of Victory

 

THE DAY OF VICTORY

W
HEN
he awoke on the cool brisk morning of the twenty-fifth of November, in that gray time between the dawn and the sunrise, it was with the partly conscious realization that today was different from other days.

Today was a part of November in the year 1783, yet today was marked indelibly. At first he didn't know how that should be, or why, sensing only vaguely that he was here in his headquarters on Manhattan Island, half asleep, half awake, trying to find himself. He was tired, as he had been so often of late; a man grows tired as the years bind him and add up. He would have liked to lie in bed for a few hours more but he knew that to be quite impossible.

He had been dreaming and had awakened from the dream, and he knew it was quite wrong—what so many people said, that you couldn't dream the same thing twice; he knew you could, not twice but a hundred times, and the dream was always the same.

In the dream he came home. In the morning he came home, riding up through the fields while they were still wet with dew. He would go through a field of rye so that the dew would put a polish on his boot tops, and the horse would stamp and dance, the way they do in a field of wet grass. The smells would be sweet, the magnolia blossoms like a thousand lanterns; and he rode right up to the house.

He rode up and old Jackson took his horse. He kissed Martha and it was as if he hadn't been away at all, except perhaps down the road to see a neighbor about selling a newly weaned colt. That was the way in the dream.