From Sea to Shining Sea (42 page)

And after the assault was repulsed, Jonathan as usual was sunk almost unbearably in remorse and pity, exhausted, miserable as a child, smoke-choked and fatigued almost to the point of collapse.

The Battle of Monmouth was ending. Washington tried to form a counterattack with his spent forces. But he simply ran out of daylight. In the dusk the armies disengaged and gathered up those who had fallen victim to wounds and heat. Sometime in the middle of the night Clinton’s army crept away. It reminded Jonathan of Charles Town, when this same General Clinton had taken his soldiers off the island and the fleet had cut its cables and sailed off in darkness.

In the morning when the Americans awoke, sleeping with their muskets on the sandy ground, there was no British army.

The day after the battle, a woman camp-follower named Mary Hayes, smeared with mud and blood, was brought before General Washington and her story was told. She had been a water carrier for her husband’s crew of cannoneers. When her husband was shot down before her eyes, she had taken his place as loader for the duration of the battle. Washington named the sturdy Irishwoman a sergeant on the spot; the cannoneers nicknamed her Moll Pitcher and spread her fame throughout the army.

And thus on that day Jonathan saw a widow in triumph and a general in disgrace. General Charles Lee was relieved of command and returned to the dumb companionship of his trusted hounds. He had fought his last battle. Rumor was that he would be court-martialed for cowardice—or even treason.

L
UCY BOUNDED INTO THE HOUSE FROM THE YARD, YELLING
, “Mama! Papa! Come see!” Then, as if remembering suddenly the new ladylike demeanor she was trying to attain, she slowed to a walk in the hallway, straightened her posture, and carried herself quietly into the study looking, except for a slight swagger in
the attitude of the shoulders, quite feminine. All the windows were open to admit some breeze into the high-ceilinged room where her parents sat. John Clark was at his writing desk and Mrs. Clark was on a settee with a letter-box on her knees. They were looking up at Lucy and starting to set aside their papers. “Come see,” she said in a quiet voice now. “Edmund’s done something for the Fourth of July. Come, please.”

They followed her out across the driveway and into the shade of the big trees in the yard. Edmund and Billy were standing at attention under a huge oak. Behind them stood Elizabeth and Fanny, squirming with excitement. York stood behind a tree behind the girls. Edmund held a sword, his father’s old militia saber, upright against his right shoulder. Billy stood holding up Edmund’s flintlock long rifle, which was gleaming in the sun-dappled light. It was several inches taller than he was. In front of Billy, stuck in the ground, was a forked stick. “Stand there, please,” Edmund told them, turning his head stiffly. Then he looked severely at Billy and said, “Load.”

Billy, his heels together and back stiff, lifted the powder horn that hung around his neck and poured a charge down the barrel. Swiftly, then, as if he had been doing this all his life, he pulled a ball and patch from his shot bag, reached high to push them into the muzzle with his thumb, and then whisked the ramrod out from under the rifle barrel and slid it down the muzzle in one sure, straight motion, then tamped twice, whisked it out, and replaced it. Then he lifted the rifle to his waist and poured priming powder into the pan. All this had taken but twenty seconds and he had not left his posture of attention. His parents looked at the two boys with some wonderment, and apprehension, as Billy had never used a loaded firearm before, to their knowledge.

“Now, ready and aim,” Edmund commanded, and as Billy strained with a contorted mouth to swing the heavy gun up and settle it in the fork of the stick, Edmund pointed the sword toward a distant elm. Upon its trunk, some twenty-five yards away, they now saw a pinkish speck: a tiny square of paper fixed to the tree trunk. John Clark’s mouth dropped open and he started to say something, because beyond that tree lay a fenced pasture full of his precious army beef cattle. York, behind his own tree, had his hands over his ears. But Edmund was saying now as Billy cocked the gun with his small hand and squinted down the long barrel:

“In celebration of the second anniversary of our independence, and in the honor of our brothers Jonathan and George and John Clark:
Fire!
”

The powder flared and puffed, then the rifle crashed and its recoil shoved Billy’s upper body back five inches.

Immediately, then, Dickie stepped out from behind the distant elm and came around it to look at the little target pinned to it. And even as the acrid smoke drifted away from the rifle, they heard Dickie yelp:

“Great Haunt! You won’t believe your eyes!” And he came running to them. His mother rolled her eyes and touched her throat, gasping:

“He was right behind that tree … He …”

“Lookahere!” Dickie cried, and thrust his hand under their noses. In his palm lay the paper, a rectangle of about four by five inches, with the Union Jack of Great Britain drawn on it with red and blue paints.

And in the very center, at the junction of the crosses, gaped a ragged-edged bullet hole.

The girls had come close to look. York had crept out from behind his tree, and was coming forth with his face full of curiosity. Edmund and Billy still stood by their posts, beaming, and the parents looked at them aghast.

“I been teachin’ him in the woods,” Edmund said. “Give him a few years till he can lift that thing without busting his guts, and he’ll be good as me.”

B
EHIND
J
OHNNY’S CLOSED EYELIDS BLAZED AN ORANGE
glow, swimming with white specks. The sun baked his chest. His breeches were soaked with sweat. The planks of the
Jersey
’s decks were hard under his bony rump and elbows. His chin was sunk on his chest and he breathed through his mouth, both to shut out the stink of decay and disease and to inhale as much sunny air as possible into his lungs.

Johnny believed his lungs were improving because of these sunny days on deck; he believed it even though one damp night of cold harbor air would make his lungs tickle and hurt and fill up with bloody mucus again. This summer, he thought, I will become well in the lungs. I have to do that or the next winter will kill me.

The deck of the prison ship was like an anvil and the sun was like a hammer, and he lay between them, suffering the full weight of the sun instead of seeking shade, because sunlight, he believed, was his only cure. It’ll cure me or kill me, that’s all right either way, he thought. I had rather be dead o’ parching right now than drown in my own snot come winter.

He would think like that for a while, then he would find himself
beside the Brandywine with his soul full of bittersweetness, the sunlight through willow-leaves dappling and dancing on his thighs, while a thousand voices droned like bumblebees. Then he would open his eyes to the glare of the sun again and there would be the gray, splitting, weathered wood of the old ship’s oaken taffrail a few feet above; the murmur of voices would still be around his swimming head, and he would know where he was for a while, and would consciously gasp the hot air for a while longer until he would drowse again and the dream of Brandywine would come. It was as if he had been born at Brandywine and there were no dreams from any earlier time.

“Ahhhh,” said a mournful voice nearby, “here they come, God rest their souls.”

“Aye,” said someone else with equal mournfulness. “God rest.”

Johnny did not have to look; he knew they were talking about the corpses. In this July heat, the enlisted men in the holds were dying of a dozen diseases, or simply from heat and suffocation. The dead-boat was making three or four trips a day now. Even in the less crowded gun room, two Yankee officers had died in their bunks the last week.

Despite himself, Johnny opened his eyes and took a sidelong look forward to the gangway where prisoners, two by two, were carrying shrouded corpses to take them down the ladder to the docking raft off the starboard side. The soldiers were half-naked, bearded, their scrawny bodies so gray with filth and slick with sweat they looked like field slaves or coal diggers as they carried their pitiful burdens through the gangway and toiled down out of sight over the side with them.

Johnny was drifting in the river of heat behind his closed eyelids again when he was jerked into wakefulness by shouts coming from somewhere and clattering sounds like wood against wood. “
Guards!
” someone was shouting. “
Guards!
” There were footsteps thundering on the deck and Johnny opened his eyes to see a red blur go between himself and the taffrail: a running Redcoat with his musket. “To the gangway!” cried a voice. The thumping sounds continued and then, through his confused stupor, Johnny heard the
pam
of a pistol shot, more scuffling, and a strange, rising growl of savage voices, hundreds of voices. A British officer of guards ran by, sword in hand. “
He-hey! He-hey!
” came a distant voice, as if from down on the water. A musket banged then, followed by a louder mob-growl. Johnny was trying to get the strength to rise.

Then there were Redcoats running in the other direction,
clambering up ladders onto the quarterdeck. The ragged figures of Yankee prisoners ran and shuffled and leaped among them, getting in their way, it seemed, deliberately, yelping and laughing and cursing. Twice Johnny tried to rise, his heart thumping; twice he was tripped over by running legs and knocked flat on the hot deck, while those who had tripped over him thumped to the deck and were trampled and stumbled over by others. At last Johnny got to all fours and climbed through limbs and torsos to the taffrail, where he pulled himself up to look over the side.

At first it made no sense, what he saw: there was the dead-boat being rowed away, as it was every day; it was about forty feet out, pulling steadily away on the sun-blazing blue-gray water.

And then, while the commotion continued around him on the quarterdeck, Johnny began to comprehend.

The men in the boat, rowing, were not the dead-boat crew, they were prisoners—the same filthy scarecrows who, minutes earlier, had been carrying corpses down the gangplank. Johnny’s heart leaped. Somehow they had got the boat; they were escaping! Down forward on the docking raft at the foot of the gangplank lay six or seven bodies, but only four of them were in shrouds. The others were the crew of the boat, hurt or dead; one was propped on an elbow with his hand over his eyes.

Escaping! A wave of joy surged in Johnny’s breast—but then a prickling of dread helplessness. The fugitives were still within musket range, and so plain and vulnerable in the slow, open boat. He expected any moment to hear gunfire, to see those brave desperadoes crumple up, stopped by musketballs.

The rowers pulled with a dreamlike slowness; the boat seemed to be almost standing still, holding them there as perfect targets, giving the Redcoat guards all the time in the world to take aim.

But moment after moment went by, dip after dip of the oars, while the mob-shouting everywhere on the deck began to turn more and more to cheering.

Johnny turned from the rail and looked up. And at last he saw why the guards were not shooting at the boat.

They were surrounded by prisoners, by unarmed but jeering, cheering, taunting prisoners.

Some of the British guards and crew were hemmed in up on the quarterdeck by Rebel officers; another group of Redcoats stood at bay on the maindeck, bayonets leveled at the horde of gaunt, dirty, grinning, furiously happy American prisoners of war, who surrounded them, taunting and spitting.

It was obvious now why the guards dared not discharge their guns at the escaping boat. If they emptied them, they would be
mobbed and torn apart by a hundred bare hands before they could reload.

The guards stood, sweating, back to back. Even their officers were at a loss how to command them.

For a taut minute Johnny felt that anything might erupt—that the mob might rush the guards in a general mutiny, or that the guards, in their tense state, might shoot into the mob or charge them with steel. It was a moment exactly like this, on King Street in Boston eight years ago, which had exploded into a fracas killing five citizens and had come to be known as the Boston Massacre. It would be bloody pandemonium if either faction moved first, Johnny realized. And now some voices up on the quarterdeck were beginning to debate the possibilities, to make suggestions.

“Kill the God-dang gaolers!” sang out a voice twangy with Virginian accent.

“Aye!” shouted another.

“That lieutenant there, with a face like a turd-pie! I want to put his head in th’ swill-pot!” There was a wave of jeers and whistling. Johnny balled his fists, his soul screaming for that kind of revenge. But his reason prayed nothing would happen. A riot would be a waste of blood, even if it succeeded. Even if the prisoners killed their keepers and took over the ship, they would still be prisoners. The vessel could go nowhere. There were no smallboats to go ashore in. More likely the Royal Navy would just sail a warship up alongside and sink us, Johnny thought. Or just let us starve.

But the hubbub on deck was subsiding now. Johnny turned to look after the fugitives, whom he’d almost forgotten in the tension.

The boat was more than a hundred yards away now, and the escapees within it were going easy on the oars, gazing back apparently for a farewell look at the dungeon-ship. One of them stood up in the stern and waved. Many voices cheered from the ship, many arms were waved in reply, and there were more smiles than Johnny had ever seen on the
Jersey.
It was obvious now that the mob on the ship was not going to riot, but had only been buying time for the men in the boat. Now the boat was safe out of musket range and the event was nearly over, and every American still aboard the
Jersey
was a bit more free, in his spirit, because of them.

The man standing in the boat was yelling something through cupped hands. His voice came faint into the wind, but Johnny heard the words: