Book One: The Olive Branch Part Five: The Peace of Boston Characters
Chapter Forty-two
Same as Any Day
Eli Wheeler. Chester, in the Province of New York. Tuesday, 2 November 1779.
Congress had rapidly demobilised the Continental Army after the Peace, retaining a small caretaker force under Nathanael Greene. Soldiers remained owed substantial arrears of pay, a serious political grievance that was contained without an attempted coup or general mutiny.
The captain came into the hut at eight in the morning with his hands full of papers, and told them to empty their cartridge boxes on to the floor.
They did it. Eli Wheeler unbuckled his and turned it over and shook it, and the cartridges fell out on to the boards with a soft dry sound, eleven of them, and lay there in a heap with everybody else’s, a great many cartridges, more than he had thought there were in the hut; and the captain stood and looked at the heap for a moment as if he were counting it, and then did not, and said that they were to bring their muskets to the door in the order of the roll, and give them up to the sergeant, who would look at the numbers.
“They’re the Congress’s muskets,” the captain said, to nobody in particular. “The Congress gave them, and the Congress will have them back. You’ll understand that.”
Eli understood it. He took his musket off its pegs and carried it to the door when his name was called, and gave it to the sergeant, who looked at the number on the lock and found it in his book and made a mark, and gave the musket to a corporal, who stood it in a rack with the others; and nobody asked him to pay for anything. He thought about that, going back to his place. The last time he had parted from a musket he had left it in a ditch at Kip’s Bay and run, and they had stopped the price of it out of his wages. This one he had carried for two years and a half, through the Jerseys and the Highlands and two winters, and cleaned every day of it, and he had handed it in at a door and had a mark made against his name, and that was all. He found that he minded more than he had expected to. It had been a good musket.
Then the captain gave them the papers.
There were two for each man. The first was the discharge, written out by the regiment’s clerk on a half-sheet in a good round hand, with a blank left for the name, and the name filled in: that the bearer, Eli Wheeler, matross, of Colonel Crane’s regiment of Continental artillery, having served faithfully from the twentieth day of March, 1777, was by order of the Congress honourably discharged from the army of the United Colonies, the cessation of arms having taken place. It was signed by the captain, and under him by Colonel Crane, in a big careless hand that went uphill.
The second was the other paper. It was written out by the paymaster of the regiment, in a smaller and more careful hand; and it said that there was due to the bearer, for pay from the first day of October, 1777, to the second day of November, 1779, the sum of two hundred and eight dollars and one third, which sum the United Colonies would pay to the bearer or his order, with interest, at such time as the Congress should appoint.
Eli read it twice. Then he did the sum, because he could not help it, and because he wanted to see whether the paymaster had done it right.
The paymaster had. Twenty-five months, at eight dollars and a third the month, was two hundred and eight dollars and a third, exactly; and he looked at the figure, and then he did the other sum, the one he had been doing in his head for two years every time a sutler named a price, which was what two hundred and eight dollars and a third would buy. A pair of shoes, at the sutler’s at New Windsor last month, had been eighty dollars. So it was two pairs of shoes, and the half of another. He had carried the guns for two years, and hauled on the drag ropes, and been at Monmouth, and laid a gun there, and wintered in the Jerseys; and the United Colonies owed him for it two pairs and a half of shoes, and would pay him, with interest, at such time as the Congress should appoint.
The old man from the Kennebec, who had the place next to his on the bench, and who had been the old man from the Kennebec in the next hut at Valley Forge and had somehow been in the next hut ever since, read his own paper, very slowly, with his finger under the line. Then he folded it up small and put it in his hat.
“I told you,” he said.
He had. He had said it at Valley Forge, in the dark, when the hut was talking about peace: that it did not matter either way, since they would none of them be paid. Eli had been sixteen and had not known what he thought. He was eighteen now and found that he knew exactly what he thought, and that it was the same as what the old man had thought then, and that it did not help to know it.
The news had come to the park on the Sunday, a week before, by an express rider out of Hartford going to headquarters at West Point.
The rider stopped for a fresh horse and told the guard. Before he left, the whole park was out between the guns asking what it meant. The generals had signed a cessation of arms at Boston, in the State House. Nobody had won; nobody had surrendered. The King’s army would go to its garrisons and the Congress’s would go home; commissioners would meet at Philadelphia. Then somebody said that the General had given up his commission that same night.
That was the part they talked about most. They did not understand it, most of them. They stood about between the guns and asked each other why he would do that, and somebody said it was because he was sick, and somebody said it was because the Congress had made him, and somebody said it was because he was tired, which was nearer; and a sergeant of the park who had been a schoolmaster in Dedham said that it was because he did not want to be a king, and some of them laughed, and then stopped laughing, and looked at each other.
Eli listened. He had seen the General four times: on the parade below New York, from a long way off, looking like a man on a coin; at Kip’s Bay, striking at the running men with a cane, with his eyes going over Eli and not seeing him; by the guns at Valley Forge; and on the ridge at Monmouth. The last time the men had cheered, and he had cheered with them, his mouth full of dust. The General had never seen him, as far as he knew.
He thought that if the General had gone home, then it was over, whatever they called it; because the General was not a man who went home from anything that was not over.
And they had told him, the express rider had told the guard, that at Boston they had rung a bell for it. One bell, in the North End, in the steeple where the lanterns had been hung, the night the regulars went out to Lexington; and nobody knew who had given the word to ring it.
The captain had made him a gunner in July after Monmouth. Nobody had told the paymaster. The papers still called him a matross, and the paymaster still owed him as one.
He had wintered at Pluckemin, in the Jerseys, in a hut by the artillery park, a better hut than the one at Valley Forge, and with meat in it, most weeks. In the spring they had gone up into the Highlands, to the forts on the river above West Point, and since July they had been here, at the park near Chester, in the hills west of the river, doing nothing in particular, waiting, with the guns in their rows in a field and the leaves turning on the hills round them, and then falling.
And now it was November, and he had a paper in his coat that said he was discharged, and another that said what he was owed, and no musket; and the old man from the Kennebec was standing at the door of the hut with his blanket rolled and his hat on, with his own paper in it, saying that if they were going to walk to the Massachusetts Bay they had better begin, since it would not come to them.
They crossed the river at Newburgh on the second morning, in the ferry, to Fishkill Landing, with a dozen other men of the park who were going the same way, and a good many more who were not.
There were men on every road. Eli had not thought about that, and he saw it on the first day. The army was going home, all of it, at once, as fast as the paymasters could write the papers, and every road out of the Highlands was full of men in blue coats and brown coats and hunting shirts and no coats at all, going east and north and south, in twos and threes and dozens, with their blankets on their backs and nothing in their hands. They did not march. Nobody told them to. They walked, as men walk who have a long way to go and nobody to keep the step for, at whatever pace their legs would bear, and stopped when they liked, and went on when they liked, and spread themselves out along the roads for miles; and the people in the towns stood in their doorways and watched them go by, as they had watched the army go by in the other direction in seventy-six, with much the same faces.
He walked with the old man. They went east from Fishkill into the hills, by a road the old man knew, through Pawling and over the line into Connecticut, and down to New Milford, and across to Litchfield, and Farmington, and so to Hartford; about ninety miles, the old man said, and it was very near that. They did it in five days. It rained on two of them. On the third it froze in the night, and in the morning the puddles in the road were white and rang when you stepped on them, and the hills were grey and bare, with the leaves all down, and the smoke going straight up from every chimney.
They had nothing to eat but what they could get. They had been given two days’ bread at the park, and it lasted two days. After that they worked for it: they split wood for a Dutch farmer near Pawling, all one afternoon, for their supper and a place in his barn, and he gave them the supper and watched them eat it and said nothing at all the whole evening, in English or in Dutch; and they dug potatoes for a widow at New Milford who gave them the potatoes, and some bacon, and told them to take as much of the cabbage as they wanted, which was a great deal. At Litchfield a tavern keeper would not take their paper, and said so, and said a good deal more besides, about the army and about men who went about the country eating other people’s dinners; and the old man looked at him for a while without saying anything, and then said, quite mildly, that he had been eating other people’s dinners for three years and would be glad to stop, and they went on. A woman in Farmington came out into the road after them with a whole loaf, and would not take anything for it, and would not say why; and Eli thought that her son had very likely not come home, and did not ask.
Everywhere they stopped, people asked them about the peace. They asked it in every kitchen and every barn and every tavern doorway, and they all asked the same thing, in different words, which was who had won; and Eli found that he did not know what to tell them. He told them that nobody had won, which was what the rider had said. Some of them did not believe him. A man at a forge in New Milford said that he had heard that the General had given up his sword to the King’s general at Boston, on his knees, and that the Congress had sold the country to the English for a Parliament; and the old man asked him where he had heard it, and the man said that everybody knew it; and the old man said that everybody had known a great many things in the last four years, and that he had been in the army for three of them, and had never once met anybody who had seen any of them happen.
At Hartford they lost a day to the rain, and lay up in a barn. That night a man of a Massachusetts regiment who was walking to Worcester told them that there would be land in it. A hundred acres a man, he said, for every man that had enlisted for the war, as the Congress had promised; and he said that the land would be out west, in the Seneca country, where General Sullivan had been in the summer. He had been with Sullivan. He talked about it half the night. He said it was the best land he had ever seen, flat and deep and black along the rivers, with the grass up to a man’s waist; and that the Indians had been burned off it, and their towns, and their corn, and that it was all open now and good, and the orchards girdled already, some of it, and only wanting a man to come and plough.
The old man listened to all of it, and said at the end that he had a farm on the Kennebec that he had not seen in three years and that he expected was in a very poor way, and that one farm was as many as he wanted. Eli did not say anything. He had a farm too. He lay in the straw and thought about the Seneca country, which he had never seen, and could not picture, except as a great many trees in a row with a ring cut round each of them; and he did not know why that should trouble him, and it did, and he went to sleep.
They went up the west side of the river from Hartford to Springfield, and crossed the Connecticut there in the scow, and went out along the Post Road into the Massachusetts Bay: Palmer, and Brookfield, and Spencer, and Worcester, and Marlborough, and Sudbury. He knew the road after Worcester. He had marched it in seventy-six, going to New York with the levy, in the summer, with the dust white on everybody and the farmers’ wives bringing out cider to the gate. It was November now and there was no cider. The road was mud in the day and iron in the night, and the wind came across the bare fields with nothing to stop it, and it was a very long road; and he walked it at the common step, without meaning to, for days at a time, because his legs had learned it at Valley Forge and would not unlearn it, seventy-five to the minute and two feet to the step; and he counted the miles as he went, and the mileposts, and the days.
The old man left him at Sudbury. He was going north from there, to Concord and on through the New Hampshire towns to the coast, and up the coast to the Kennebec, near two hundred miles more; and they stood in the road outside the Sudbury tavern in the cold morning and did not know what to say to each other, having walked two hundred miles together and said most of it.
“You’ll be home tonight,” said the old man.
“If I keep up.”
“You’ll keep up.” The old man looked at him, with his old brown face screwed up against the wind. “You were a pretty poor thing at Valley Forge. I didn’t think much of you. You sewed a fair shoe.” He put out his hand, and Eli took it. “Mind you get that paper paid.”
“Will you?”
“No,” said the old man. “But you might. You’re young. You’ll last longer than the Congress.” And he turned and went off up the Concord road, by himself, with his blanket on his back, at a pace that was nothing like the common step, and did not look round.
He came on to the Lexington road at Lincoln in the middle of the afternoon.
It was the road. He had known it would be, and he had not thought about it until he was on it, and then he could not think about anything else. It was the road the regulars had come back along that day in seventy-five, black in the face and staggering, with the country firing into them from every wall; and here was the bend where the head of the column had come round, and here were the rocks on the hillside, short of the Lincoln bounds, where the company had lain and waited, and where he had lain behind his father with the spare horn and passed it forward when his father held out his hand. He stopped in the road and looked at the rocks. There was nothing there. There were a few dead leaves, and a crow, and the stone walls going up the hill, and a cart track. He had thought there would be something. He did not know what. Jedediah Munroe had been killed on that hillside, and there was nothing to say so; there was only the hill, which was a hill, as it had been before, as it would be after.
He walked on, faster.
The road came down past the houses at the edge of the town, which he knew, every one, and had known all his life: the Munroes’, the Harringtons’, the Mullikens’, rebuilt now, where the regulars had burned it; and then the road turned, and there was the Common, a triangle of rough grass where the roads to Bedford and to Concord came apart, with the meeting house standing at the end of it like a ship aground, and Buckman’s on the east side, and a little smoke going up from Buckman’s chimney into the cold air.
There was nobody on it. There was a cow at the far end, and a boy with a stick minding her, who looked up at the soldier in the road and then went back to the cow. The grass was brown and short and wet. The meeting house had new boards in its side, paler than the old ones, where the ball had gone through. There was nothing else. There was no stone and no post and no mark of any kind on the Common to say what had happened on it; there was only the grass, and the cow, and the long grave in the burying ground behind the meeting house, where the eight were, in the order they had been found; and Eli stood at the edge of the Common in his blue coat with his blanket on his back, and found that he was counting them, and stopped.
Jonathan Harrington’s house was across the road, facing the Common, with its step. There was smoke from that chimney too. Somebody was living there.
He went on up the Bedford road, towards home. It was getting dark. He did not think it was much past four.
The lane was the same. He had thought it would be shorter, and it was not; it was exactly as long as it had always been, with the stone wall on the left and the pasture on the right and the big chestnut at the turn, bare now, and the house at the end of it, with a light in the kitchen and smoke going straight up, and the barn behind it, with a light in the barn.
It was five o’clock. He knew without looking at anything. The milking was at five, same as any day.
He did not go to the house. He went to the barn, because the light was there, and stood in the door, and his father was on the stool at the far end, by the lantern, with his forehead against the flank of a red cow, and the milk going into the pail with the sound it had always made; and his father did not look round at once. He finished the stroke he was on. Then he looked round.
He looked at Eli for a long time, in the lantern light, as he had looked at him on the Common that morning in seventy-five, and in the yard when he came home from New York; at the blue coat and the blanket and the boots, and the face, which Eli supposed was a good deal changed, since everybody said so; and Eli stood in the doorway and let him look.
“Is it done, then?” his father said.
“It’s stopped,” said Eli. “They signed it at Boston. They’ve let us go home.”
His father thought about that. He thought about things for a long time, always; Eli had forgotten how long, and remembered now, standing there, and found that he did not mind the wait.
“I had it from the Boston paper,” his father said at last. “They said it there. And in Philadelphia, I expect, by now, and in London. I said they would.” He looked at the cow. “I don’t know that I’m any the wiser.”
“No, sir.”
“Well.” His father got up off the stool, slowly, because he was older than he had been, and stood aside from it, and held out the pail. “You can finish her.”
Eli came down the barn and took the pail and sat down on the stool, and put his forehead against the warm flank of the cow. It was not the same cow. It was her daughter, the red heifer that had been a calf the year he went, and she shifted her feet and looked round at him with her great wet eye to see who it was, and decided that it would do. He began to milk. His hands had forgotten nothing. The milk rang in the pail, and then it did not ring, as the pail filled, and went on with the softer sound; and his father stood behind him in the lantern light and watched him do it, and did not say anything, and did not go away.
His mother did not cry this time. She was at the door of the house when they came across the yard with the pails, with the light behind her, and she looked at him, and put her hand on his face for a moment, very hard, as though to make sure of the shape of it, and said that he would want his supper; and then she went back in ahead of them and was very busy at the fire for some time with her back to the room, and he did not look at her back, because he could see that she did not want him to.
Nathan came in from the woodlot at dark and stopped in the doorway with an armful of wood and looked at him, and said, “Well, God help us,” and dropped the wood, and came across the room and took hold of him, and did not let go for so long that their mother told them both to sit down before the supper spoiled. Nathan was twenty-two now, and bigger, and had a beard he was very proud of, and was walking out, their mother said, with the eldest Bowman girl, and had been since the spring; and Nathan said that he was not, and went red to the beard, and their father said grace.
It was a long grace. It was the longest Eli had ever heard his father say, and he said it in his ordinary voice, looking at the table, and gave thanks for the peace, and for the safe return of this house’s son, and for the harvest, which had been poor; and in the middle of it Nathan kicked him under the table, as he had kicked him at every grace for as long as Eli could remember, to make him laugh. Eli laughed. He laughed out loud, in the middle of his father’s grace, with his head bowed over the plate, and could not stop; and his father went on praying, in the same voice, to the end, and said amen, and looked at him across the table, and Eli saw that his father’s eyes were wet.
There were beans, and pork, and bread, and pie, pumpkin, the last of the autumn’s; and his mother had put the vinegar out for the beans, as she always did. He looked at the cruet for a moment. Then he took it and put a spoonful of the vinegar on the side of his plate, by itself, and did not eat it; and nobody asked him why, which was as well, because he could not have told them.
His mother said that the Council had appointed a Thanksgiving for the peace, the second Thursday in December, all over the province, and that there would be pies, all of them, every kind, the same as always, and the goose.
“Keep some vinegar back,” said Eli.
She looked at him. Then she said that she would, and did not ask that either.
After supper he took out the paper and put it on the table, and his father read it.
He read it slowly, holding it to the candle, with one finger going down the figures. Then he put it down and looked at it.
“Two hundred and eight dollars,” he said.
“And a third.”
“And a third.” His father almost smiled. “And interest. At such time as the Congress shall appoint.” He turned the paper round with one finger, so that it faced Eli. “When’ll that be, do you think?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“I’ll tell you when,” said his father. “When there’s a Parliament to vote it. That’s what they’ve made the peace for, the paper says, to have a Parliament. And when they’ve got it, the first thing it’ll want is money, and the first thing it’ll do is tax us for it, and then it’ll pay us back what it owes us out of what it’s taxed us.” He sat back. “You might see it. I don’t expect I shall.”
Nathan laughed. Eli did not. He was doing the sum.
“Put it in the Bible,” said his father. “With the others.”
There were others. Eli had not known that. His mother got the Bible down from the shelf, and opened it at the back, where the births and the deaths were written, and there were papers folded in there already: his father’s, for the Lexington alarm; and Nathan’s, for the alarm and the march to Charlestown and the weeks at Cambridge after; and a paper of the town’s, for a horse it had taken in seventy-seven and not paid for. Eli put his on top of them. His mother shut the Bible and put it back on the shelf; and there it stayed.
The bell woke him in the morning, and for a moment he lay under the eaves, in his old place in the loft, with the hams hung up in the cold end and Nathan breathing across the room, and did not know where he was.
Then he knew. It was the Sabbath bell. It went slowly, as though it had the whole morning, and stopped to breathe between the strokes, and there was nothing under it at all: no drum on the Common, and no feet on the stairs, and no candle coming round the turn of the stair. There was only the bell, going slowly over the town in the cold, and the light coming grey through the little window at the end of the loft, and the cow in the barn below wanting to be milked, which Nathan would do, since it was his turn. It was the right bell. He lay and listened to it until it stopped.
They went to meeting, all four of them, down the Bedford road in the cold, and up the steps of the meeting house, and in. It was full. It was always full; but there were men in it now who had not been in it for three years, and their wives beside them, and they kept looking along the pews at each other, as people look who have counted on finding somebody and found them. Eli went up into the gallery with Nathan, because he always had, and sat where he had sat the Sabbath after the alarm, and looked down.
Mr Clarke preached on the text that the Lord maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; and he did it well, at length, for an hour and a half, and Eli heard about one word in ten. He was looking at the pews. He was looking at the places where men had sat in seventy-five who were in the long grave now, and at the men sitting in them, their sons, some of them. He was looking at Captain Parker’s place, where the captain had sat that last Sabbath, coughing into his sleeve; he had died that first September, of the cough, and somebody else sat there now. And he was looking at the back gallery, across the meeting house from his own, where Prince Estabrook sat.
Prince was home. He had come in from West Point the week before, people said, with a paper like Eli’s; and he was sitting in the back gallery where he had sat on every Sabbath of his life, among the others who sat there, in a clean shirt, with his hands on his knees, listening to Mr Clarke; and Eli, who was eighteen now, looked across the meeting house at him for longer than was polite, as he had once looked at him in Buckman’s taproom on the night of the alarm. He had not known then what to do with the thought he was having, and he had put it away. He did not know now. But he found, looking across at the back gallery, that he did not put it away this time. He kept it. He thought that he would very likely be keeping it for a long while.
At the end Mr Clarke prayed for the King, as he did every Sabbath, and had done every Sabbath of the war. He prayed for His Majesty King George, and for the Queen and the royal family, and that God would give the King wise counsellors and turn his heart towards his people. Then he prayed for the Congress, and for the commissioners who were to meet at Philadelphia, that they might be given wisdom, and patience, which he said they would need more; and he gave thanks for the peace, and for those who had come home, and he named those who had not, from that town, one after another, slowly, all of them, from the eight in the long grave to the last, who had died of the fever at West Point in August. It took a long time. Nobody moved.
Then they all said amen. Eli said it with them.
He walked home up the Bedford road behind the others, after, in the thin cold sun, with his hands in his pockets.
His father and his mother went ahead, arm in arm, slowly, and Nathan behind them, looking back now and then over his shoulder at the Bowman girl’s people going the other way and pretending that he was not. Eli came last. He walked at no particular pace. He found, after a while, that he was out of step with all of them, and with himself; that his feet had stopped keeping time, somewhere between the meeting house and the turn of the road, and were going along any way they liked, long and short, the way a man’s feet go on his own road on a Sabbath morning when there is nobody to keep the step for.
He did not try to get it back. He did not count anything. He walked home.