From Sea to Shining Sea (38 page)

“L
EFTENANT
J
OHN
C
LARK
!”
SAID
A
VOICE
AT
THE
GRATE
.

“Here,” he replied, startled and curious, rising stiffly from the table. Hoag looked at him across the table and said:

“Here indeed. Where else could y’ be?”

“You’re wanted,” said the voice. A key slid in iron and turned.

The turnkey, with a pistol in his belt, walked him up a gloomy companionway to the door of the British officers’ quarters, and rapped. A voice called, “Enter.” The turnkey opened the door a crack. “I have Clark, sir.”

The door opened. The burly British naval officer studied Johnny for a moment, then reached in and put on a hat. He came out into the corridor, buttoning his tunic. “Follow me,” he said, leading him through the doors and barricades to the maindeck.

“What’s it about, if I may ask?” The officer did not bother to answer, and Johnny wanted to clout the back of his insolent head.

It was another cloudy, raw, bitter-cold day, but even this much gray daylight was enough to make him squint. He took a
deep, grateful breath of the fresh air, but it jolted his befouled lungs and threw him into a fit of coughing. Smart-looking sentries turned and looked at him with disdain.

His buff breeches were dingy with the grease and old food rubbed into the thighs, with the stains of rat-droppings. His tattered hose hung loose on his wasting calves. The dark blue wool of his coat was flecked all over with chaff and straw and lint. His whiskers felt all a-crawl suddenly, as if the lice in it were seeking deeper refuge from the cold wind. He felt he was a disgrace to his uniform, but there had been nothing he could do, down in that waterless, airless dungeon, to keep himself looking smart.

He was led forward the length of the barren, gray deck, and it seemed a mile, with the wind slicing through his clothes. Charcoal smoke and rancid steam billowed over him as he passed the forward hatch.

At the forecastle, a thick-necked, brutal-eyed Tartar of a man, wearing some sort of fleece-lined leather skullcap with earflaps, and apparently two or three American army coats, stood guarding a door, not with a gun but with a two-foot-long cudgel.

“Here’s Clark,” the British officer said to this brute. “You have that Virginian wants to see him.”

The squat doorkeeper nodded. He touched Johnny on the shoulder with the end of his cudgel, as if to impress upon him its weight and hardness, then tilted his head toward the door. He unlocked the door with a huge iron key and pushed it inward. A dense, gagging odor emanated from the darkness inside. “Cla’k f’ Freeman,” he called in, then prodded Johnny to enter.

Freeman? Johnny thought. He did know many Freemans.

Another troll, this one with a shaved skull, three folds of flesh on the back of his neck, and ape arms, beckoned him in with a flick of pig-eyes, and the door closed and the bolt slid behind him.

The stench here was so sharp it stung his nostrils and he had to close his throat to keep from gagging. The troll led him down a ladder into a dark well of murmurings and whisperings, then past the edge of what seemed to be a dark warehouse of stirring forms stacked on wooden shelves. Then they went down another ladder to a deeper well, and, finally, down a third into a confine with slimy floors and an atmosphere so dense and fetid that he was afraid to breathe more than tiny sips of it. Rats twittered in the gloom and moved boldly in dim pools of lantern-light between rows of wooden racks. He was being led aft now, into the bowels of the ship, and it was indeed like a trek through a bowel, rank with the smell of excrement and putridity. Here there was
an oppressive rush of pitiful noises: phlegmatic breathing, groans, explosive coughing, unintelligible talking, tuneless singing, frantic-sounding whispers, the rustle of turning bodies, thump of bone against boards. Bare hands and feet hung into the aisle. It was true what Hoag had said: the prisoners were packed here like mackerel in a barrel.

How can they live? he wondered. He was sickened by this incredible disregard for comfort and dignity.

And what poor Freeman lies here? he wondered. What a mockery that one so named would be locked deep in a stink-hole like this. As his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom he could see half-naked skeletons of men, white and close as maggots on the long racks; they seemed not even to have straw to soften the planks they lay on. Somewhere below and aside, invisible in gloom, was an open space from which came a clammy, cave-like dankness, the chill of cold, wet stone, tricklings, drippings. Was it the bilges and ballast? he wondered. An open latrine? Or both?

Now the troll stopped, and kicked a rack.

“Freeman,” he growled, “’ere’s your bloody officer.”

A matted mass of dark hair turned in the shadow; Johnny’s heart quailed with dread.

A face—rather, a hollow-eyed skull with badly blemished skin stretched over it, protuberant brow, broad cheekbones and a mouth prominent as a monkey’s between sunken cheeks—turned into the feeble lamplight. The lower lip hung slack, revealing gray teeth in rotting gums. Johnny did not recognize this half-living cadaver, though something about the bone structure of the face stirred his memory. Other faces were turning to look at him, too, and he heard voices saying, “Look. It’s an officer.” “An officer?” “I think it’s an officer.”

Now the specter named Freeman groped out into the aisle with a scrawny, long hand. Overcoming revulsion, Johnny took it.

“Thank’ee for comin’, Mister Clark.” The voice was curdled.

“Glad to, Mister Freeman.” Saying this made Johnny break loose in a wet, raking cough and he felt much of the matter loosening in his lungs and felt the point of sharp pain there. The man in the shadows said:

“Y’ know me, then?” The eyes looked radiant for a moment.

“O’ course,” Johnny lied.

“I saw ye one day on deck,” the voice rasped. “I asked … asked ’em weeks ago if I mought talk wi’ ye.”

“They just now fetched me. Took their time, didn’t they?”

He still didn’t know who this was; the face and voice were
ghastly. The way of speaking was plainly the Scotch-Irish of down home. Johnny was sorting in his mind among the many Virginians he’d known named Freeman.

“They know I’m not … I’m not long f’r this life,” the face said. “So reckon they decided t’grant me one boon.”

“You’ll be fine,” Johnny said feebly. Freeman was still holding onto his hand, as if onto life itself. Freeman’s hand was like a fistful of rabbit bones. Johnny saw that the guard troll was standing off in the shadows, listening, digging in his nostril with a dirty digit.

“So I wanted t’ ask’ee,” Freeman went on. He paused, and a tremor vibrated his hand. “Ye do still mean t’ marry Betsy, am I right?”

Betsy!
Now Johnny knew. This, then, was one of the brothers of Betsy Freeman. Which brother he knew not; was it Micajah, the one who liked to be called Mike, or … He couldn’t even remember the other one’s name. Johnny had not seen Betsy since ’75, nor had he intended to. He remembered the day he had ridden toward Williamsburg with Patrick Henry’s militia, remembered Isaiah Freeman, this wretch’s father, walking alongside his horse, asking virtually this same question. God, would they never get over it that a Clark had courted Betsy? He had all but forgotten her. Surely she wasn’t still waiting about for him, not as lusty and comely a wench as she had been. Johnny felt a twinge of poignancy, and at the same moment a flash of bitter humor at the absurdity of it. Had that shrew actually kept up the fiction of this attachment in the minds of her menfolk all these years? Or was this young Freeman here, in his extremity, just out of touch with time, deluded by an echo of long ago?

The gaunt face was still intense, a spark of lanternlight burning in each eye.

“Betsy,” Johnny said. “Why, ah, what does Betsy say on the matter?”

“Oh, sir, why, that y’re betrothed. As it’s so, ain’t it?” Now Johnny fancied he saw a flash of insistence in those sockets: the brotherly protectiveness of a sister’s honor. What was it his father had said?
A lass is likely someone’s sister
.

Johnny flushed with indignation at the thought of her, and wanted to tell this wretch that his sister was a liar. It was all so remote, from a lost time and unreachable place, and seemed so utterly inconsequential anyway; how could the deceits of her heart intrude now on their present misery? And yet, despite all that, he was bemused, and had he not been steeped in war and
horror and the sense of his own decay for so long, he might have been flattered.

Instead, he was indignant, and was about to say so. Another coughing fit racked him first, though, and it was a minute before he could turn back to those anxious eyes in that skull.

And he realized that the matter now was not one to do with his feelings, nor even Betsy’s, really, but the burning question inside this dying young man: his need for one scrap of favorable and hopeful knowledge in his last days. Johnny glanced away from the ravaged face, and saw other faces peering at him, many faces, interested faces, though how much if anything of this they were comprehending he knew not. Some probably were looking at him only because he was a new sight on the edge of their muzzy, limited world. But others might be the brothers of sisters, pretty sisters of precarious reputation, and they might well be comprehending the gist of this conversation; maybe this Freeman lad had told them something of it already. Nobody in this sumphole of death needed to hear a harsh denial made to a dying peer, and Freeman himself least of all should have to hear it. And so Johnny said, in a rush of pity for all people in all hopeless plights:

“God willing, when all this is over, Betsy and I should be together.”

The hand squeezed on his with its tiny bit of strength. “That’s … on y’r word, Mister John Clark?”

Johnny’s scalp prickled. He had not expected to be making promises to a dying man.

But, after all, he had said only “be together.”

Still, as his mother had used to say:
What a body understands your promise to be is the promise you’ve made
.

But he could not deny this brother what he needed to hear.

“On my word, Mister Freeman.”

“God bless ye, Mister John Clark.”

“God bless y’rself, Mister Freeman.”

The next week, Freeman—Johnny had learned from the ship’s officer that it was Mike: Private Micajah Freeman of the Sixth Virginia—left the
Jersey
in a canvas shroud, one of five victims of putrid fever to go ashore that day to wherever it was the British took the hundreds of cadavers from the ship.

He took Johnny Clark’s promise with him.

L
IEUTENANT
H
OAG
,
OF
COURSE
,
FOUND
IT
ALL
DELIGHTFULLY
ironic, the best thing he had heard since he had been confined on the
Jersey
. “The sins and the false vows of your lusty
youth return to haunt you!” he laughed. “Poct, you must do a verse, on the come-uppance justly due such careless swains as leave a trail of light promises and fluttering hearts behind them! Ha, ha!”

“Indeed,” replied the Poet, smiling fondly at Johnny’s gloom, “I am already composing!”

“Compose, please,” chuckled Hoag. “I shall lie here meantime and continue to decompose.”

Johnny would not have told them about the vow that Micajah Freeman had extracted from him, but they had caught him coming in, shaking his head and muttering and looking like one deeply damned, and by cajolery and kindness they had made him tell the tale of his visit down forward. Now their raillery made him wish he had kept it to himself.

“A scold, is she?” Hoag said, shaking his head slowly. “There’s nothing worse than a scold! I suspect that Johnny Clark the Fourth, that erstwhile carefree swain and sower of wild seed in Caroline County, Virginia, may be the first inmate in the
Jersey
’s history ever to choose a permanent berth, rather than go home to the fate that awaits him there!” He lay in his bunk chuckling, asking others what they thought of such a thing, and wasn’t it wonderful that there really is some justice in this unjust world after all, and so on, till some of the wretches were actually enjoying themselves, and looking at Johnny with fondness and archness in their expressions. The Poet sat over his paper and tapped his temple and scribbled.

“Wait,” he would say every minute or so, raising his quill, “I nearly have it here.”

And even Johnny was beginning to laugh at his own plight, at the absurd coincidence of it, by the time the Poet finished his verse and read it aloud.

Johnny laughed feebly, ruefully, at this, at all the attention, but his laughing brought on his coughing, terrible, wet, phlegmmoving coughs. Now the rag he used as a handkerchief was sodden and slimy with mucus, and there was blood in it. He saw blood in it now for the first time, and he sat and looked at it for a while.

Maybe that promise is nothing to worry myself on after all, he thought. Maybe I’ll never get home to face Betsy Freeman at all.

S
IX
THOUSAND
C
ONTINENTAL
SOLDIERS
PARADED
DOWN
THE
long side of the sunny, May-green meadow, in perfect step to the beat of drums. From a distance, with their neat ranks and billowing banners, they looked like a perfect army as they tramped down toward the little hillock on which General Washington stood waiting to review them. From close by, where Jonathan Clark marched, there were pitiful details visible, traces of their poverty and the miseries of winter. Many were still shirtless and hatless and barefooted. The gentle May sun shone on bare shoulders and backs and scalps, healing the boils and ringworms and skin infections that had afflicted them during the long, wretched winter. Most were as skinny as whippets. But their eyes were bright and their steps were light, their muskets and bayonets were polished.