The Proud and the Free (2 page)

So I was an orphan, without father or mother, and all the wealth I got from them you could press into a thimble. Nor had I letters or anything of that kind, for this was before Pastor Bracken took a fancy to me and taught me to read and write.

My father was in the church, so the Presbyterian elders had me before them and they said: Well, Jamie, here you are, alone in the world by God's mercy, without kith of kin to lend you a hand, and what do you think of your future?

I'll be a robber, I answered, which seemed to me to be the only practical way of keeping body and soul together, and already I had had some indication that unless a little thievery was mixed in with an honest man, he did less than well in the world.

The elders, however, were unimpressed. They pointed out to me that this was hardly the attitude for me to take, if I hoped to be adopted into some good, God-fearing home, and they also pointed out that the likelihood of such was not too great, considering how my father had let me grow up. I stood in front of them, my toes coming out of my shoes, my knees coming out of my pants, my elbows coming out of my sleeves – a ragged, bony, unprepossessing little boy, I suppose; and to this day I remember well my bitterness and resentment against them, those pious, hard-jawed, sharp-nosed trustees of the Almighty who were sitting in judgment upon a lad of ten summers. A Scottish pout, they were thinking of me, no doubt, a wild one, an animal like all the young of the miserable Highland beggars and gillies who thought that gold was turned up at every step in the new country. My speech in those times was thick and broad and their own was sharp and narrow. So they looked at me as at some insect, and my own heart was full of repayment in kind.

Do what you will with me, I said to myself, but never will I rest with what my mother and father had, going to their graves in such sorrow! Do it and be damned!

I went home and lay down alone in the little shack my father had rented, with his loom and his bench and the two or three sticks of furniture he had in the world, none of it mine but all of it in pawn for back rent. And the next day I was called to Stephan Dobkin, the church head; and with him was Fritz Tumbrill, the cobbler, a monstrously large and fat man, pig-eyed, with a rolling collar of his own flesh in which his head sat like a pudding in gravy.

Here is good Master Tumbrill, and he has agreed to take you in and keep you for apprenticeship and teach you the trade, said Stephan Dobkin. Such is the charity of Jesus Christ, our own Master, he said, and God help you if you should ever prove ungrateful.

My father's trade was weaving! I cried. I'll be a weaver and no damned shoemaker!

So I learned my first lesson in the weight of Fritz Tumbrill's hand and the nature of his ethics. From the floor where he sent me with his blow, I listened to his instructions on language to be used in his presence and in his household.

Thus I went to serve him and to learn cobbling, and a full sabbatical I served before I threw his leather apron in his face and walked out to join the 1st Regiment of Pennsylvania, then being raised to march north and help the farmers in the siege of Boston town. I mention this because in the narrative I propose to tell, concerning what befell myself and my comrades in the winter of 1781, you may be moved to ask, now and again, How does one account for these men? What made them and what moves them, and why do they endure what they endure?

Also, you may ask, What of this one who writes the narrative? What of Jamie Stuart? He is native born in the American land. What kind of bitter cud does he chew over and over again, retching the acid into his teeth?

But it is not my intention to make such a compilation. If I at twenty-two was no lad, then I was little enough of a lad at ten. Childhood is for those who can afford it, and my own purse was light from the beginning. In the years I sat crouched over the bench in the workshop of Fritz Tumbrill, particularly before that day when Molly Bracken walked into the shop, like sunshine coming into a dark well, in those years I thought often of my father's lean and tired face.

A word about that face before I go into the tale I must tell; for I think that before you are finished you will have some curiosity about my own look, and if you see my father, you will see me too.

I remember him best at the loom. The light was poor in the shack where he worked, so when the weather was good, he took half a dozen shingles out of the roof, and through the opening a broad shaft of light fell upon the loom and upon his face as well. I would play on the floor facing him. Sometimes I would glance up and meet his eyes, and his whole face would smile, for I was all he had in the world. But at other times, he would be unaware that I was watching him, and I would note the incredible sadness of his face. Ah, what a sorrow was there! What grief for the thin crust of bread he handed to his child! A Scotsman is dour, they say, but the quality is not born into a man but comes rather from the soil he scratches.

My father's face was a long one, as mine is too. A narrow one. His brows arched, and on either side his forehead there was a slight indentation of the bone – as there is on mine. The nose was long and well-shaped, the curve of the head high, the hair a tarnished sand-color, and the eyes gray-green. The chin was large yet gentle, long and narrow, and the neck was lean, as the man was, a tall, lean, long-muscled man; and taking away a quarter of a century it is a fit description for myself, Jamie Stuart, when I signed my name to the enlistment papers and became a soldier in the army of the Revolution for the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. An ugly lad I was, to a way of thinking, but I had qualities that I little knew of, myself, until I was rubbed like a sword on a grindstone, and then because of those qualities men gave me a post not without honor for a lad of twenty-two, as you will see.

So I have told you a little of my life in each direction, a little of what was in the old days, when one day was not so different from the other while I learned the best way to ease my back so that Fritz Tumbrill's blows fell as lightly as possible, while I learned how to bevel the leather for the sole and how to sew it for the upper, how to cut, shape, trim and awl, how to drink and coddle and roll – and some of what came after, when I grew old and away from the memories of my youth.

But Fritz Tumbrill never made an animal of me, or I would have become like him. Instead, I hardened and I became something else, and through Molly Bracken – of whom you will hear more – I learned to read and write. So I was able to read in a newspaper of the incident that happened in Massachusetts in April of 1775, and I was able to read as well that they were raising a regiment of Pennsylvania men and all others who would enlist for pay, bounty and glory, to strike down the tyrant. I knew what to do and I did it, because the answers to my questions were written on my back and on my memory too.

That is enough of Jamie Stuart to justify this narration which I will set down. He was like the other men, of whom I will also tell, and he loved them deeply and came to know them.

May they sleep well, do I say, myself. They reached up for the stars and they made a crude key to unlock the gates of heaven. This, other men will do, and the key will become a better one; so I will not weep for them or have you weep, but only give them their due.

PART TWO

Being an account of the death of Tommy Mahoney, and the Congress we held and the pledge we made on the eve of the New Year of 1781.

T
HE FACTS which I am about to set down in a narrative to do honor to my dead comrades – for no other honor has been done to them – had a beginning somewhere; but the more I ponder the interconnection of things, the more I come to understand that the beginning is not traceable – which is all for the best: for then a spark of hope burns in my heart, and I ponder the possibility that the end is as little traceable as the beginning. And if that is the case, then I for one believe that there was a meaning and a purpose and a final chapter still to be written out in life to what we did.

But however that may be, there must be a starting point, and for that I have chosen the death of little Tommy Mahoney, the Protestant drummer boy from Dublin town, who died on the eve of the new year of 1781, in the encampment outside of Morristown, New Jersey. I will also tell you that I choose the death of this poor, damned little lad because our first Congress of the Line followed; but there were other places for the beginning. Even before the war, there was a beginning to what we did, and even before any man there was born, and even maybe so long ago as when Christ led men not so different from ourselves, and no more poorly clothed and fed.

It is something we know and which doctors cannot explain, that a man will not go on living if he has lost the desire to do so; and it was plain to everyone after we had marched from Totowa to Morristown that little Tommy Mahoney was not long for this earth. It was not the cold winds that blew so cruelly from the northern forests; it was not the fact that we lived on a little parched corn with never a taste of meat; it was not our nakedness, our lousiness, our sickness – for all of these things we were used to, and these things we had lived through before and had a ripe belly of, when we lay at Valley Forge. It was because we had stopped hoping, and because we were bereft and betrayed; and the little lad knew better than some of us who were old enough to be his father what the situation was. His beardless face became gray and the sparkle went out of his eyes. When he beat on his drum, it was a new rhythm, a sad and hopeless rhythm.

I beat because my heart is breaking, his drum said.

There was a time when such a drumbeat with such a sad and frightened rhythm would have angered us, and then some of us would have said, Twelve on his backside, that drummer lad needs. And others of us would have said, Stop your chopping dirty sticks, if that is all the kind of a tune you can beat out. And there would have been many a clip alongside the head and chin for little Tommy Mahoney as a reward for the devilish and persistent means he took of beating that drum.

But we were changed too, along with the lad, and nobody clipped Tommy Mahoney and nobody shouted at him; for inside of us we knew that the tune he played was the truth and nothing but the truth. We had all of us, all of the men of the ten infantry regiments and one artillery regiment of the Pennsylvania Line who were marched from Totowa to Morristown to go into winter encampment, become gentle. We were soft-spoken; we were quiet; we were sad. And as we set to work to repair the little log huts that stood in various stages of decay from the encampment of the year before, it seemed to many of us that there was never a time but when we were what we were now, such homeless, lonely, lost men as the world had not seen before. The heart had left us; we did not fight; we did not beat our women; we did not sing – and one time when big Angus MacGrath strode forth to play on his pipes, the music that came forth in spite of himself was such cursed and lonely music that he laid his pipes away and vowed never to play upon them again, so long as he lived.

For that reason, we did not clip Tommy Mahoney when he beat his crying rhythms. The lad is not for this world, we said. He is making a requiem for himself, and who will deny him that privilege?

He was undersized, the way most of us in the Line were, coming as we had from foreign soil, or out of bondage and poverty. When Massachusetts or Connecticut had first marched alongside us, they made many a joke of it, shouting things like, Ho for the dirty little runts! Ho for the little men! Are you going to war now, little men? But the Yankees sang another song when the grape opened up, hissing like a great kettle boiled over, and when the muskets balls whistled from the British volleys. Then they ran away but we stood and died, even as we stood and died on every field, New York, White Plains, Trenton, Monmouth, Stony Point – how many there were, and we in our line stood with our Irish and Scotch and Germans and Poles and French and Portuguese, our black men and our Jews and our Romans – we stood and they stopped calling us little men!

Yet Tommy Mahoney was smaller than most. His arms and legs were like sticks; he had a pinched face, pocked and tired and sad, but for all that a little boy's face. He had sandy hair, close-cropped, that stood straight up from his head, and he had a dainty alto voice that was the sweetest thing men ever heard. How he loved to sing once! But he sang no more now. We urged him and urged him, thinking that music would be like medicine, but only when Christmas time approached did he lift up his head and sing,
On the first day of Christmas, my truelove sent to me, a partridge in a pear tree. On the second day of Christmas, my truelove sent to me, two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree.
…

And then he sang on and on and we joined in the round, and made a real ringing roundelay out of it; and that was the only real roundelay we sang in all that Christmas time. The women kissed him and petted him; and Handsome Jack Maloney, of whom you will hear much more, beat time with the tears streaming down his face and said:

Sing more and more, my lad, with old tunes of the old country, so you will make my rotten old heart crack with the joy of it all.

I can sing no more, the drummer boy answered, for I remember the beauty of Dublin city, before me uncle sold me to go overseas into bondage.

But ye're not in bondage now, me lad, the girls pleaded.

I can sing no more, he said, for me heart is breaking, and I want to lay me down and die.

They went on with their persuasion until big Angus MacGrath roared, Now let the lad be, for will ye make music out of a broken lute, like the officers make war out of our own lifeblood?

He withered, did little Tommy Mahoney, like the apple that is picked too soon and then goes uneaten, and when the last day of the year 1780 came, he laid himself down and he died.

We were hutted up then with our own bitterness, and because you should know to understand what followed, I will tell you what our huts were like. This one of mine will serve, for I was sergeant over the drummer boy, and apart from myself, fifteen men were hutted there in my house. Also, in this same house, the first Congress of the Line was held, and also in this same house there came into being the Committee of Sergeants.