Stony Point, the Fifteenth of July
The Hudson River, the night of 15–16 July 1779
The order had come down the line in a whisper an hour after dark, passed man to man the way a thing is passed when no one is permitted to say it above the level of breath, and the order was that there would be no firing. The flints were already out. They had come out at the supper of the day before, drawn from the locks and dropped into the cartridge-boxes where they sat now against the paper of the cartridges no one would load, and a musket without its flint was a thing that could be carried and could be leveled and could not be made to go off by a frightened hand in the dark, which was the whole of the reason the flints were out. The muskets were carrying the bayonets and nothing else. Vincent had fixed his at the halt, in the last grey of the light, seating the ring over the muzzle and turning it down onto the stud the way he had done it five hundred times at the drill and a dozen times in the line, and the bayonet had gone on the way it always went on, and his hand had not shaken, and he had noted that his hand had not shaken the way a man notes the weather.
He was sixteen years old. He had been in the Line two years and a half. He was a good way down a column of men he could not see, in a country he could not see, on the west bank of a river he could hear moving somewhere below and to his right, and he was waiting, which was the thing the body learned first and learned hardest and was, by the second summer, the thing it did best.
The waiting had a shape he knew. The afternoon march was in his legs as a kind of standing soreness, the long looping approach through the back country above the bluff that had taken the corps off the road and through the marsh-edge and the laurel so that no farmer’s dog and no Tory’s boy would carry the word down to the river that the light infantry of General Wayne was moving toward the point. The column had halted at the full dark. It had been ordered to lie down, and the men near him had lain down in the wet, and Vincent had lain down with them in the place that was his place, between a Pennsylvania man named Doyle whom he did not much know and a sergeant from the Virginia detachment named Cole whom he knew well enough, and he had put his cheek against the stock of the empty musket and had felt the cold come up out of the ground into the bone of his hip and his shoulder, and he had waited.
It had rained earlier and would not rain again. The ground held the rain. The marsh below the bluff held a great deal more than the rain; the point was nearly an island at the high water, with the river around three sides of it and a flooded morass across the neck, and the corps would have to go through the morass to reach the abatis, and the men in the front of the columns had been told what the water would be and had been told to go through it and not to stop in it and not to call out in it whatever the water did to them. Vincent was not in the front of the column. He had counted, lying in the dark, the men he thought were ahead of him, and had made it something past forty, and had stopped counting, because the count past forty did not change the thing the count was for. The thing the count was for was to know how long he would stand at the edge of the morass before it was his turn to go into it, and forty men going through a flooded neck in the dark was a length of time the body could hold against without the mind having to do anything about it.
He had a square of white paper pinned to the front of his hat. Every man in the corps had one. It was so that in the dark, when the thing began, a man would know the back of the man in front of him for his own and not put the bayonet into him, and it was a poor enough mark — a paper would not show at four feet on a night with no moon — but it was the mark they had, and Vincent had pinned his with the care a man gives to the one small thing he is given to do with his hands while the large thing waits, and had thought, pinning it, that his sister Polly would have made a neater job of the pin.
The thought of his sister came and went the way the cold came and went, around the edges and not at the center. He let it go. There was a discipline to the letting-go that he had also learned in the first year and that he was good at now: a man in the line learned to hold the near thing and let the far thing pass, because the far thing — the house, the people in it, the road home — was the thing that took the steadiness out of the hands, and the hands were what the night was going to want. He held the near thing. The near thing was the cold and the paper and the count past forty and the empty musket and the bayonet on the end of it and the dark.
What he knew of the night he knew the way the men knew it, which was the way it had come down to them at the briefing in the late afternoon at the assembly ground above Sandy Beach, where General Wayne had set it out to the officers and the officers had set it out to the men, plainly, because Wayne was a plain man with the men and because a man who is about to be sent at a fortified point in the dark with an empty musket is owed the plain shape of the thing. The shape of the thing was this. Stony Point was a bluff of rock that stood up out of the river on the west bank above the King’s Ferry crossing, and the King’s Ferry crossing was the lower of the two crossings of the Hudson that the country between the northern army and the southern army turned on, and the British had taken the point at the end of May and had fortified it across June with a garrison of six hundred and some, with the works set in two lines up the slope and the abatis below the works, the felled trees with their cut ends turned out and sharpened, and the guns laid to sweep the neck and the approaches. The British thought the point could not be carried. The point could not be carried in the ordinary way. The ordinary way was the cannon and the column and the firing and the smoke, and the British above on the rock had more guns than the corps below in the marsh and the rock under them besides, and an ordinary attack up that slope would leave the corps in pieces at the foot of the abatis.
So it would not be the ordinary way. It would be the bayonet only, in the silence, in the dark, at the midnight, with the muskets empty so that no man’s fear could break the silence by firing, and the corps would go through the morass and through the cut places in the abatis that the axe-men would open ahead of them, and would go up the slope into the works with the steel and nothing else, and the British above would not know the corps was on them until the corps was on them. The two real columns would go at the two flanks, the one Vincent was in along the south face and the river, the other along the north, and a third party at the center would make a show with the muskets it was permitted to load — would fire, and shout, and draw the British eyes and the British guns to the center while the two silent columns came up the flanks — and the men of the two silent columns were not to fire whatever happened, and the order on that was Wayne’s own and was not a thing a man wondered about twice: any man who fired, or who fell out of the rank, or who called out, in the silent columns, was to be put down by the officer nearest him. Vincent had heard the order at second hand from Cole and had received it the way he received the weather and the count past forty. It was a hard order. It was the order that made the thing possible. A boy of fourteen would have turned it over in the dark and frightened himself with it. Vincent was not fourteen. He turned it over once, found the bottom of it — the silence is the whole attack; break the silence and you have killed the men beside you, not only yourself — and set it down.
Ahead of the two columns went the forlorn hope. Twenty men to a column, chosen, who would go first into the abatis with the axes and open the way for the rest, and who would take, by the plain arithmetic of going first against a fortified slope, the most of what the slope had to give. The men called it the forlorn hope because that was its name and had been its name in the armies of Europe for two hundred years, and the name was not a soldier’s grim joke but a plain old description that had hardened into a term, and the men of the forlorn hope at Stony Point had been asked for by Wayne and had stepped forward and been chosen and were, this night, somewhere up at the head of the two columns in the dark, lying in the wet as Vincent lay, with their axes, waiting as Vincent waited, and the difference between them and Vincent was a count of perhaps thirty men and the order in which they would go into the water. Vincent had thought, when the corps was told of the forlorn hope at the briefing, that he was glad he had not stepped forward, and had then thought that he had not stepped forward because no one in his part of the line had stepped forward and a man does not step forward alone, and had then stopped the thinking there, because the bottom of that one was not a place a man wanted to stand on the night before the thing.
The river moved below. Somewhere across the dark to the south a watch-fire of the British showed and was gone behind the shoulder of the bluff and showed again, small and orange and very far, and a man could not have said from the look of it that there were six hundred men around it who did not know that the marsh below them was full of the light infantry of the Continental Line lying in the wet with the steel fixed and the flints out. The British did not know. That was the whole of the night. The British above had the rock and the guns and the works and the six hundred men and did not have the one thing the corps below had, which was that the corps knew the night was the attack and the British thought the night was a night. Vincent lay in the wet and held the cold and the count and the paper and the dark and waited for the hour, and the hour had not come.
It was in the holding, with the hour not come, that the far thing came around the edge again, and this time he did not entirely let it go, because there was a long stretch of the night still to hold and the mind in the holding will go where it goes and a man learns which goings cost him and which do not, and the going he allowed himself, the going that did not take the steadiness out of the hands, was the going-back. Not the house. The house was the thing that cost. The road to the house — that he could hold and turn, the way a man turns a coin in his pocket in the dark, for the small dumb comfort of the shape of it. He let himself go back along the road. He had come a long way to lie in this marsh. He had come from a county on the Meherrin in the southside of Virginia where his grandfather sat at a long table in a kitchen and read the news of the war aloud in the lamplight to a household that had become, across the four years Vincent had been gone, a household of women — his mother, who did the accounts of a widowhood she had not yet been permitted by the law to call by its name; his sister Polly, who had been a girl of eleven at the long table the August his grandfather read the Declaration aloud and would be a girl of fourteen now, this July, doing he did not know what at the long table in the lamplight; the women, and his grandfather, and the empty place at the table where his father had sat before his father rode south across the Dan in the autumn of 1775 and did not come back across it.
He had been thirteen at the long table the day the Declaration was read. He had turned fourteen at the Christmas after, against a door-jamb in the parlor with a pencil-mark, and in the January he had gone for a soldier in another man’s place, and he had not, in the two years and a half since, stood in his grandfather’s kitchen or seen his sister’s face or heard the news read aloud at the long table; he had been the news. The letters his mother had down at White Plains and Middlebrook and the camps were his, and the news his grandfather read aloud in the lamplight at the long table was, some of it, by now, the news of where Vincent was. He turned that over once in the dark — that he was, this summer, a thing read aloud in his grandfather’s kitchen — and found it strange and did not find the bottom of it, and let it go back into the dark with the rest of the road, because the count of the men ahead of him had not changed and the hour had not come and the muskets were empty and the night, which was the whole of the attack, was still a night the British above did not know they were inside of.
He lay still and held it. The river moved. The far watch-fire showed and was gone and showed. Somewhere up at the head of the column, ahead of the forty and ahead of the forlorn hope, the hour was coming on, and when it came it would come down the lying column the way the order had come down it, man to man, below the level of breath, and the men would get up out of the wet without a word and go down into the morass toward the abatis and the rock and the works and the six hundred men who did not know, and the steadiness the body had been keeping in the hands all the long cold holding of the night would be, in that hour, the only thing in the dark that was Vincent’s to give. He had it still. He checked it the way he had checked the bayonet, once, without moving — opened and closed the hand on the cold stock and found it steady — and put his cheek back against the empty musket, and waited for the hour, which had not yet come.
January 1777, the Enlistment
Lunenburg County, Virginia, the January of 1777
The road home ran two ways, and the way it ran when he let it run was backward. He had come down it to lie in this marsh, and the coming-down had taken three years and been no road at all but a long unwinding of country he could not have drawn on a paper, north and east by the camps and the crossings and the winter quarters, so that the going-out was a thing too long and too tangled to hold in the dark with the hour not come. But the going-back was short. A man could turn the road the other way, the way a road runs clean when no one is on it, and the turning of it took him off the bank of the Hudson and out of the wet and set him down, between one breath and the next, at a long table in a kitchen on the Meherrin in the January he had gone.
He had been thirteen for most of the year of the deciding and fourteen for three weeks of the going. The record, when there came to be a record, would say fourteen, and the record would be right the way records are right, which is to say it would have the number and not the thing the number stood on. The thing the number stood on was a boy at the long table in the autumn before, listening to the old man read.
His grandfather read the news the way he read everything, which was aloud, in the lamplight, after the supper things were down and the fire built up, with the women at the table and the paper held out at the length of his arm because he would not own to needing it closer. What he read that autumn was the war coming apart. Vincent had not understood it as that at thirteen, sitting at the table; he understood it now, lying in the marsh, the way a man understands a thing once he has been inside the middle of it, but the words he had taken in at thirteen were the same words, and they came back to him in the old man’s voice. The army that had been around New York in the summer had been driven off the island and out of the works above it and down through the Jerseys toward the Delaware in the autumn, losing a fort and the men in it on the way, and the men that were left were men whose time was up at the turn of the year, every one of them, by the arithmetic of how they had been signed in ’75 and ’76; and Congress had called for a new army on a new term, three years of it, or the length of the war, whichever was the longer, because a war could not be fought by men who went home at Christmas. That was the shape of it as it came down the post-road to the long table on the Meherrin and was read aloud in the lamplight. The country needed men who would sign for the long thing. And then, late, in a paper that came after the turn of the year and was read with the same flat care as the rest, there had been the first word of something at a river-town in the Jerseys at the very end of December — a crossing in the dark, a garrison taken, prisoners marched off — and the old man had read it twice, the second time slower, and had not said anything about it, and the not-saying had been the loudest thing the old man did all that winter.
Vincent had heard all of it the way a boy hears the weather of a country he has not yet been sent into. He had not, at thirteen, joined the war in the head to the war on the paper. The war on the paper was the thing the old man read. The war in the head was the empty place at the long table.
The place was his father’s. Baker DeGraffenreid had ridden south across the Dan in the autumn of 1775, in the first of it, when the going-out was a thing men did with their faces still on them, and he had not come back across the Dan, and no word of him had come back across it either. There was no letter. There was no return. There was no man come up the lane in the dusk to say where he was buried, because no one knew that he was buried, or that he was not; there was only the not-knowing, which was a thing that took a place at the table and sat in it. His mother kept the place. She kept it the way she kept the accounts of the farm in the long ledger after the supper things were down — Sarah Vass DeGraffenreid, who did the figuring of a widowhood the law had not yet permitted her to call by its name, because to call it that she would have had to swear to a death she could not swear to, having no body and no grave and no word to swear it on. She kept the accounts in the lamplight at the far end of the table from the old man, and the figures came out the way figures come out for a place with one fewer hand than it was built for and no man’s wage coming in, which is to say they came out short, and she made them come out at all by the only arithmetic a short place has, which is to do the thing herself or have it done by the hands she had. The hands she had were Phillis’s. Phillis was in the kitchen all the hours the family was, banking the fire and bringing the things and taking them down, owned by the place and doing the work of it, and the work of the place that winter was the work of a widowhood that had no man and could not yet be called a widowhood, and that work went through Phillis’s hands as much as through the mother’s, and more.
His sister Polly was twelve. She sat at the table between the old man’s reading and the mother’s figuring, and she was the only one of them who was still a child in the plain way of it, and she did her reckoning out loud sometimes, the way a child does, working the war out into who was where and who would come home, and the old man let her do it and the mother let her do it and Vincent had let her do it, and only afterward, in the marsh, did he come to think that they had all of them let her do it because she was saying out loud the one question none of the grown ones in the kitchen would say, which was and Papa?
That was the kitchen the boy had decided in. He had not decided it out loud. The deciding had been a thing that came up in him across the autumn the way the cold came up out of the ground into the bone, slow, and not announcing itself, and by the turn of the year it was in him to the depth that a thing is in a man when the only deciding left is the saying of it, the body having decided already and the saying being the part the head does last. He knew now, lying in the marsh, that this was how it had gone, because he had since watched it go that way in himself a dozen times in the line, the body knowing the thing and the head coming up after to put its name to what was done. At thirteen he had not known that yet. At thirteen he had only known that he was going, and had been a little frightened of how plainly he knew it.
The way of it was the substitute. He was too young for the draft and too short for the standard and there was no call that could have taken him in his own person; what there was, was a man of the county with a place to fill in the levy and the means to fill it with another’s body in place of his own, and the place came with money, and the money was a thing the short accounts at the far end of the table needed, and the body that could earn it was the one body in the house with years in front of it and no wage on it yet. Vincent had put the two things together in the autumn — the place that wanted a body, the house that wanted the money the place paid — and had seen that he was the join of them, and had carried the seeing around in himself for a month before he took it to the old man, because he had known that the old man was the one it had to be taken to.
It had to be taken to the old man because the old man kept the Bible. That was the thing about the old man that the boy had understood without being told. Anton Tscharner DeGraffenreid had kept the Book since it came to him a generation back, and into the Book went the births and the marriages and the deaths of the line in his own hand, and the place his father had left empty at the table was empty in the Book too, with no date after the dash that the boy had seen the old man not write, more than once, the pen down and the line open and the old man looking at it. A man who kept the Book was a man who knew the difference between a thing recorded and a thing not, and what the not did to a house, and the boy who wanted to go for a soldier was going to be, the moment he went, another open line in the Book, another dash with nothing after it, and he had known it had to be the old man’s to say.
The old man heard him out at the long table after the women were up and gone to the back of the house, and did not say anything for a while, and then did the thing the boy had not looked for, which was that he read aloud again. He had the recruiting standard somewhere among his papers, the height a man was to make to be taken, and he found it and read it out in the same flat care he read the news in, the number of feet and inches a soldier of the Continental establishment was supposed to stand, and then he put the paper down and looked at the boy and said that by the standard he read the boy was no soldier, being short of the number and short of the years besides, and that the standard was the law’s own measure and the law’s own measure said no.
Then he got up, and took the boy by the shoulder, and walked him into the parlor to the door-jamb where the marks were, and stood him against it. There was a mark there three weeks old, the pencil line of the Christmas just past, where the boy had turned fourteen and been measured against the jamb in the old way of the house. The old man laid his hand flat on the boy’s head and made a new mark above it and stepped back and looked, and the new mark and the standard he had read were not the same, the boy being under it by something a hand could span, and the old man saw it and the boy saw him see it, and the old man said that the table that took men did not, in a hard winter with the army falling in, hold a substitute to the standard it held a volunteer, a substitute coming with a place already bought and a man’s money already laid down, and that the recruiter would take him, short as he was, because the recruiter wanted the body and the body would stand the term.
So the no was real and the yes came after it, and the yes came with the one thing the old man would lay on it. He laid it standing in the parlor with his hand still on the boy’s shoulder, and he laid it plainly, the way Wayne would lay the order at Sandy Beach two years and a half on, because a man being sent into a thing is owed the plain shape of what is asked of him. The thing he asked was that the boy would write. He would write when he could and send what he wrote by whatever hand was going, and he would write even when there was nothing to write, a line, the date and the place and the words I am well, so that the Book would never have to carry an open line in his name the way it carried one in his father’s. He had buried no one and could close no entry, the old man said, and he would not put a second son of the house into the same dark his first was in, the dark of a man you cannot grieve because you cannot say he is dead and cannot hope because you cannot say he is living; and the price of the blessing was that the boy would not become that. Write, he said, and I will know where you are, and if it comes that I have to write the date after the dash, I will be able to write it, and that is a mercy you do not understand yet and will. Then he took his hand off the boy’s shoulder and gave him the blessing, and the blessing was the old word for it and was said the old way and is not the boy’s to set down here in the marsh, and it was given.
The going-out, when it came in the cold of the morning, was a short thing and the boy had wanted it short. He had his father’s coat taken in at the shoulders by Phillis’s needle and the mother’s, and a few days’ bread, and the bundle was light because there was little to put in it, and the women came to the door with him and the old man came to the door. Polly cried and was angry at herself for it. The mother did not cry. The mother put her hands to his face once, the way she did the figures, taking the measure of a thing she would have to do without, and then she let him go and stepped back to where Phillis stood, and the two of them stood in the doorway with the heat of the kitchen behind them going out into the cold, and the old man lifted his hand, and Vincent went down the lane.
He did not stop at the turn of the lane and he did not look back from it, because he had decided in the autumn that he would not, having seen that the looking-back was the thing that took the steadiness out of a man and that the steadiness was the thing the going wanted, and so he kept his eyes on the road and walked it, and the house went behind him without his watching it go, and that was how he left it. The lane gave onto the county road and the county road ran north, and the cold was in the ruts as ice and the breath stood out in front of him, and he walked into the morning a boy too short for the standard, fourteen by the record and thirteen by the deciding, with his father’s coat on his back and the old man’s one condition laid on him, going for a soldier in another man’s place.
He had kept the condition. He thought of that, in the marsh, with the hour not come. The letters his mother had down at the camps were the keeping of it — the lines that said I am well on the days there was nothing else, the date and the place, so that the old man at the long table could lay his finger on where the second son of the house was and not be in the dark of the first. He had kept it for two years and a half and would keep it as long as there was a hand going and a thing to write with, and the keeping of it was the one piece of the house he had carried the whole way down the road and into the wet, the one piece that did not cost him the steadiness in the hands to hold. He held it now. Then he turned the road forward again, off the Meherrin and back along the long unwinding of it to the bank where he lay, and put his cheek to the cold stock, and counted again the men ahead of him in the dark, and waited for the hour, which had not yet come.
September 1777, Brandywine
Chester County, Pennsylvania, the eleventh of September 1777
The morning came up grey and slow over the country east of the creek, and the army was already on the ground when the light was, posted along the line of the Brandywine on the high east bank above the fords, and Vincent was with his part of the Virginia detachment in the second line above Chads Ford in the middle of the position, in the trees on a slope that looked west and a little south to where the creek ran. He had been up since two hours before the light. He had eaten what there was. He had checked the lock and the flint and the cartridge-box twice, the second time without knowing he was doing it the second time, and had caught himself at it and had stopped, because the men around him had laughed at it, and the laughing of men in the morning before the thing was a kind of news a boy was supposed to take.
He was fourteen. He had been in the Line eight months. The men in his part of the line had taken his measure across the winter quarters and across the spring marches and across the summer of small affairs north of the Delaware, and had taken it kindly enough, because he made no trouble at the drill and made no trouble at the watch and made no trouble in the column, and because his grandfather had laid the one condition on him and the condition had given him a thing to do at the close of every day that the older men, who had no one writing for them, watched him do without remarking on it. He wrote his line. He had written it that morning, before the light, on a scrap kept folded in his cartridge-box for the purpose. The 11th of September. Along a creek in Pennsylvania called the Brandywine. I am well. That was the keeping the old man had asked. He had not yet had to write a date that meant a thing the old man would have to read twice.
The cannon began at Chads Ford a little after the light. They were the British cannon. They came from the woods on the far bank of the creek, the smoke showing first and the sound coming after the way it does at any distance over water, and the sound was steady and not heavy, the way cannon sound when they are at work but are not yet the work, and the men along the line above the ford got up off the ground without being told and stood to. Vincent stood to. He had stood to before. He had stood to at White Plains in the column on the road and at Princeton at the edge of an action that the army had gone past him before he had reached it, and he had stood to twice in the spring at the affairs north of the Delaware. He had not yet stood to at the day’s beginning of a general action with the army drawn up on a posted line and the enemy across the water in the woods. He found that the standing-to was not so different in the body from the standing-to at any of the smaller things. The body did the standing. The head did what it could.
The cannon kept on across the morning. They did not come closer and they did not slacken, and the British across the creek made a show with the muskets at the ford that did not become an attempt at it and did not go away, and the line above the ford stood and watched and did not fire because the order had been not to fire until the British were across, and the British did not come across. Vincent stood in his place between the same two men he had lain down beside on the long approach into the country two days before, an older Virginia man named Wills and a younger one named Banks, and watched the smoke at the ford and tried to read the morning the way the men around him were trying to read it.
The reading of it was hard. The cannon at the ford were not the morning. The morning was somewhere else. He understood that now, lying in the marsh, the way he understood every morning of his war he had not understood at the time — that a general action begins long before the soldier in the second line hears it begin, that the day’s true thing is happening, by the time he is permitted to know of it, an hour off across country he cannot see, and that the work in front of him is a kind of work the country does to him before it lets him do any of his own. At fourteen he had not seen it as that. At fourteen he had seen only that the cannon were at the ford and were not coming closer and the line stood and the line did not fire, and that the morning was a morning that did not become an afternoon the way the morning before a thing was supposed to become its afternoon. The morning kept on. The cannon kept on. He kept his place between Wills and Banks, and the standing-soreness came back in his legs the way it always came back, and the men around him said little, and the little they said was the small currency of standing in a line on a hot morning — water, the heat, the cannon’s count, whether the British meant to come and whether they did not.
It was past the middle of the day when the word began to come up from somewhere on the right. The right was off to the north of where they stood and was the country above the upper fords, where the creek ran into the high broken land and the fords were thinner and farther apart, and the word that came was that there was a column on the right that should not have been there. The word came down the line the way news comes down a line of men, in pieces from the man two places up and then in pieces from the officer who had gone forward and come back, and the pieces did not all fit, and the men with the pieces stopped passing them on when the pieces became unfit. What the pieces said, as best as Vincent could make of it, was that the cannon at Chads Ford were not the British army; the British army was somewhere to the north and had gone around the upper fork of the creek in the night and the morning, and was coming down on the right of the line from the country behind it, and the line at the ford was going to have to face that way, and the second line in the trees, of which Vincent was a part, was going to have to march to it.
It was inside the word — inside the standing-to in the trees with the noon past and the word still unfit — that the thing his grandfather had named at the long table came up in him for the first time as a thing of his own. The country needs men who will sign for the long thing, the old man had read out of a paper in January. The country was needing the men, this hot afternoon, to march to the right of a line that should not have had to be a line on the right, and the men were going to do it because the men had signed for it, and the boy in the second line who had been the youngest in his part of the column for eight months found that his hands had stopped wanting to do the small things they had been doing to keep themselves at the work — the second check of the flint, the rolling of the cartridge-paper between the fingers — and were doing nothing at all, and that the doing of nothing was a thing he had not seen them do before. He looked at the right hand once. It was open at his side. It was not shaking. He put it back to the musket and found the wood under it and held it, and the holding was a thing he had to make the hand do, and the having to make the hand do it was the news of the afternoon.
The march to the right began past two, by what men afterward said. Vincent did not look at the sun. The column went off to the north on a road and then off a road into the woods, the country broken and full of low stone walls and snake-fences and second-growth woods that had been pasture inside a man’s memory, and the going was hot and went fast where the ground let it go fast and slow where it would not, and the men in the column did not talk because the going was hard enough without it. Officers came up the column on horses and went down it and came up again, their faces wet, and the men in front of Vincent kept their place and Vincent kept his, and the country opened ahead of him and closed behind him without his looking at any of it the way a man looks at country he is going to come back through.
They came up to the ground at Birmingham Meeting House in the late afternoon. The meeting house stood on a slight rise in an open field, a plain stone building with the burying-ground walled around it in low fieldstone, and the line was forming in front of it on the rise looking north and east, the first of the men already in position and the rest coming up at the run, and across the open field at perhaps three hundred yards the British were already in the field, in lines, with their cannon up, and the field between the two armies was the kind of open ground that had not been chosen by either side for the fighting of a battle but was the ground both sides had reached at the same hour and would have to use. Vincent’s part of the detachment came up at the run with the rest, and the line was found and the place in the line was found, and the order was given to halt and to face front and to load.
The loading he knew. He had loaded a thousand times at the drill. He loaded now. He bit the cartridge and his teeth went through the paper at the place his teeth had gone through it a thousand times, and the powder went down the barrel and the ball after it and the paper after the ball, and the ramrod came out and went down and seated the load and came back up and went home in the pipes, and the lock was set to half-cock and the priming powder went into the pan and the frizzen was closed, and the musket was loaded, and he had not seen any of this happen because the seeing of it was not the part of him that did it. The hands did it. The hands had done it a thousand times at the drill so that they would do it at this hour without the head, because the head, at this hour, was a head that had stopped being able to be relied on for anything but the holding of the shape of the line, and the hands had been trained for exactly the reason the head had been trained otherwise. The hands did the loading. The head held the place in the rank.
The British line at three hundred yards fired its first volley before the American line was entirely formed. The volley came across the field as one long unbroken rolling sound that was not separable into the firing of muskets at all but was a kind of pressure across the air, and behind it the smoke rose and stood and did not move, because there was no wind that afternoon, and through the smoke the British line was a thing not entirely there, and the balls came through the field on a low flat path that took the heads off the grass and knocked the bark off two of the small trees behind the American line and went into the men in the line ahead of Vincent’s the way a man’s fist goes into wet ground, and the line ahead of Vincent’s gave back a sound that was not one sound but several sounds of men hit and going down, and then the order came down the line that Vincent’s was to fire.
He fired. He brought the musket up the way he had brought it up at the drill, and he found the British line through the front sight, and he pulled, and the lock went off in his face and the powder in the pan flashed and the priming went, and the main charge let go and the musket drove back into his shoulder the way it always drove back into his shoulder at the drill, and the smoke came out of the muzzle and stood in front of him and was added to the smoke that was already standing across the line, and he did not know if the ball had gone where he had pointed it or anywhere near it, and he understood, in the same instant, that no man in any of the lines knew where his ball had gone, because the smoke was the thing now and the lines were the things behind the smoke, and a man fired into the smoke at the line he could not see and trusted that the line he could not see was where it had been the moment before and would not have moved very far in the time it took the ball to cross to it. The drill was the firing into the smoke at the place the line had been. The drill was the standing in the line on his own side of the smoke while the other line did the same.
He loaded again. The hands did it. He stood and the line stood and the men beside him stood, Wills to his right and Banks to his left, and the British line fired the second volley and the American line fired back, and the smoke thickened until it was a wall and the wall did not break, and the firing was not separable any longer into volleys but became one continuous thing the line had to stand inside of, and the men ahead and around began to go down in a way that was not one or two at a time but in groups of three and four, and the standing was the thing the line was for, and the line stood.
He understood it now, lying in the marsh — what the drill had been for, what the men who had drilled them in the winter quarters at Morristown had been doing when they had walked the rank and shouted and corrected and made the boys load and load and load until the boys could load with the eyes shut. The drill had been for this. The drill had been so that a fourteen-year-old in a line at three hundred yards from another line could load and fire and load and fire while the men beside him were hit, without thinking and without choosing, because the thinking and the choosing were the parts of a man that the noise and the smoke and the men going down took first, and the loading and the firing were the only parts of a man the country had left for itself, and the country wanted them, and the drill was the country’s hand on the boy’s hand making sure the country would have them when it needed them. At fourteen he had not seen the drill as anything but the long unpleasantness of the winter mornings. At sixteen, in the marsh, with the hour not come, he saw that the drill was the deepest mercy the army had given him, and that the men who had drilled him had known it, and had not said so, because the saying was not a part of what would help.
The line stood for an hour the way the line was meant to stand, and then it began to give. The giving did not come from the men around Vincent. The giving came from somewhere off to the right, the way the morning’s word had come from the right, and the right of the line gave first and the rest came after, and the order to fall back came down the line in pieces the way the morning’s word had come down, and the falling-back was a thing done at the walk because the falling-back at the run was a thing that turned into a rout and the officers along the line knew it and were saying it as they came up and down, at the walk, at the walk, by God at the walk, and the line went back from the field at the walk with the British line coming on behind it across the open ground.
Wills was hit going back. The ball went into him low on the back, below the cartridge-box, and he made a sound that was not a word and went down on one knee and then onto his hands, and Vincent stopped, and Banks stopped, and the two of them got him up between them and got his musket up too and went back with him hanging between them at the walk because the walk was the order. They went perhaps a hundred yards. Wills could carry some of his own weight on the right leg and could not on the left, and the going was slow, and the line above and below them was moving back at the same walk, and the British were coming on across the field but did not press the falling-back as hard as they might have, because the British, having come fifteen miles around the upper fork in the dark and the heat and into the line on the run, were as used up as the men they had broken, and the day was going. They got Wills as far as a stone wall and a Continental surgeon was at the wall with his sleeves up and his hands red to the elbow and a great many men around him on the ground, and they put Wills down with the surgeon’s men and were told to go on, and they went on. Banks said one thing to Vincent on the walk back from the wall, which was we did all right, and Vincent did not answer because the answer would have been the wrong size for the question and he did not yet know what the right size was.
The dusk came down on the road to Chester. The road was full of men going east. The army had not broken; the army was going east in pieces but as itself, and the officers were finding their men along the road and the men were finding their officers, and the country to either side of the road was full of country the army did not know, and the night came on with the men still walking east, and Vincent walked. He walked because Banks walked beside him and because the men ahead of him walked, and the keeping of the place in the column was the thing the day had been for in the end, the same as the keeping of the place in the line, and his hands had finally stopped doing the small things and his head had come back into the front of him a little, and what was in the head was not anything he could have set down on paper for the old man at the long table — not that night, on the road to Chester, and not the next morning, when there would have to be a line written. The line, when he wrote it, said only the date and the place, the 12th of September, near Chester, and the words. I am well. He wrote it by a fire on the ground at three in the morning, with his right hand which would shake now when he asked it to do anything that asked the hand to be steady, and he wrote it in a hand that came out shakier than it had been the morning before, and he watched the hand as he wrote it, and let the hand be what it was, and let the line be the line, and did not write anything more, because the more was not a thing the old man at the long table needed to read and was not a thing the boy at the fire could yet have said.
The marsh came back around him then — the cold of the ground at the Hudson against the heat of the road to Chester, the empty musket against the loaded one, the silence against the noise — and the count of the men ahead of him in the dark started again from where it had stopped, and the hour at Stony Point had not yet come, and the hand at his side, when he checked it, was steady, the way the hand at Brandywine had not been steady, the way the drill at Morristown had meant for it to be at the next thing and the next.
Stony Point, the Assault
The Hudson River, the night of 15–16 July 1779 (continued)
The hour came down the column the way the order had come down it, man to man below the level of breath, and the men got up out of the wet without a word. Vincent got up with them. The cold had gone into the bone of his hip and the bone of his shoulder during the long lying, and the getting up was a thing the body had to be told twice to do at the first asking, and the body did it, and the head took note that the body had done it and put the note down somewhere and gave the body the next thing. The next thing was the place in the rank. He found the place. Doyle was ahead of him to the right and Cole was behind him at his left shoulder where Cole had been all the long lying, and the rank closed up in the dark by the touch and not by the eye, the elbow at the next man’s elbow and the next man at his elbow, and the column was a column again in the dark without anyone having said a word to make it one.
The river still moved below. The watch-fire on the far bluff still showed and was gone behind the shoulder of the bluff and showed. The far watch-fire had not changed at all in the last hour and a half, which was the whole of the night’s news: the British above had not learned anything since the order had come down the corps to get up.
The forlorn hope was already moving. He could not see them. He knew they were moving by the small dense sound of the men ahead going forward through the wet, the sound a column makes when it is not in step and is not allowed to be in step, the small wet sounds of boot-leather lifting and going down again, the small soft sounds of cloth on the laurel, the smaller small sounds of the axe-heads at the side of the men who carried them moving against the cartridge-box. The forlorn hope had thirty yards on the column when the column started, and then forty, and then the count of the men ahead of him began to go down for the first time since he had begun counting at the supper of the day before, because the men ahead of him were now going down into the morass, and the count past forty that had been the shape of his waiting was becoming the count of how many were left between him and the water.
His mouth was dry. The drier of the two drynesses he had learned, the slow one, the one the night made and not the one the firing made — he knew this one from White Plains in the morning of standing-to and from Brandywine in the morning before the cannon began and from Princeton’s edge and from every long approach the army had ever made on a thing it was about to attempt. The body produced the dryness ahead of the thing and not at it. He kept his lips closed against the air and did not lick at them because the licking made it worse, and let the air go in and out of his nose at the speed his ribs wanted it, which was a speed a little faster than his ribs would have wanted at the drill but slower than they had wanted at Brandywine at the standing-to, and he counted at the count he had learned to count the column down to the water by, and the count came down. Thirty. Twenty.
The water came up around him at perhaps the eighth step. He did not know it would be at the eighth. He had thought from the briefing that it might be at twelve or fifteen but he had not pictured the going-in and he understood now that he could not have pictured it, because the picturing was a thing the head did with a picture it had, and the head had never had this. The water was cold and was at the knee at the first step and was past the thigh at the third and was at the breast at the sixth and stopped there. He took the breath the body wanted at the breast-deep and put the musket up over his head with the bayonet pointing at the sky and held it there, the way the men ahead of him were holding theirs, and the cartridge-box he could not hold up went under and stayed under, and the cartridges in it were soaked and would not have fired now even if the flints had been in the locks, and the empty muskets the corps was carrying were as empty as they had been at the supper of the day before and would have been emptier yet if the men had loaded them. He went forward across the morass at the breast-deep with the musket up. The water was full of things the day had put into it, the cut laurel and the trampled grass and the standing water of the marsh that was the morass’s own water, and the bottom under his feet was the bottom of marsh-water, which is not a bottom a man can read with the foot but is a thing a man finds at every step and trusts because the step has nowhere else to go.
No one called out. The order on that had been Wayne’s own, and the order had not needed to be carried into the morass because the order was already in every man at the supper of the day before, and the men who went down at the deep part — there were men who went down; he heard the small sounds of going-under at the right of his column where the morass was deeper — the men who went down went down without calling, and the men beside them got them up by the cartridge-belt and held them up across the deep place without anyone having to be told to, and the column kept its shape because the column knew it was the attack and the attack was the silence.
The water dropped at the far side and then dropped again, and he came up out of it at his waist and then at his knees and then onto the slope, and the slope began going up almost at once, and the abatis was up on the slope above them and a little to the left. He could not see the abatis. He heard it. He heard the axes at it, the sound of an axe-head going into a felled tree and being drawn back and going in again, and the sound was a sound a man could hear in any wood-lot in Virginia in any October of his life, except that this sound was being made in the dark by men under a fort, and the dark on the slope above them was a dark the British above had not yet realized was a dark with anything in it.
He went up. The hands had the musket again at the carry now that the water was off. The bayonet had stayed on. The slope was loose under the feet, marl and old leaf and the small loose stones that come down a hill of that kind in spring, and the going was at the half-step the way a man goes up a slope at night when he cannot see his next foothold and the next man’s back is twelve inches off the front of him and the next man’s bayonet is twelve inches off the back of him and there is nothing under any of it but the slope. He went up at the half-step. The breath was coming up out of him short now and he made the ribs slow it because the breath at the half-step at the slope was loud enough at three feet to be a thing the corps did not want, and the corps was still inside the silence and the silence was still the attack.
The cut place in the abatis was a thing he came on suddenly and went through. The forlorn hope had opened it. The forlorn hope had opened it in two places that he could see in the dark by the shape of the felled trees pulled aside, the cut ends of them showing pale in what little light the night had, and the column went through one of the cut places at the half-step still, the cut sharpened ends of the laurel and the chestnut catching at the trouser and the sleeve as the column came past, and the column was through and was past, and the slope above was the last of the slope and the works were at the head of it. He could see the line of the works now against what was a little less dark than the rest of the dark — a line of the parapet showing as a higher straighter dark against the sky-dark — and he was inside fifty feet of it and the British above did not know.
It was at the works that the silence broke. Not at his column. The break came from somewhere up to the right, off where the north column was up at its own abatis, a single shout from above the parapet there, a British voice that said one word he could not make out, and then a musket went off somewhere up there, a single shot, the flash showing on the rim of the parapet for an instant and then nothing, and then the night that had been a silence above them all the long going-up became the night that was a fortified place coming awake — voices on the parapet, more voices, the sound of men running on a board floor inside the works, an officer’s voice not understanding and then an officer’s voice understanding, and then a drum starting to beat the alarm and stopping at the second beat because there was no time now for a drum, and then the muskets above began to come off the parapet down the slope at the columns, the flashes showing and showing along the line of the works and the balls going overhead and into the men of the columns at the rate the British above could get them loaded and out, which was not at a rate. The British had been sleeping at half their posts and the half that were not sleeping were not loaded and the loading was happening now in the dark on the parapet of a place that had not believed it was about to be attacked.
He did not stop. The order had been not to stop. The order had been not to fire — the muskets were empty in any case, but the order had been not to fire even at the works once the silence broke, because the silence had done what it had been kept for and what was wanted now was the steel into the works before the British above could load, and the column went up the last of the slope at the run for the first time that night, the rank breaking a little under the running and reforming at the parapet, and the men of his column were going up at the parapet now with the bayonet, and he was going up with them.
He went over the works. He did not stop at them and did not pause and did not, going over, take any account of the going-over: the body did it, the foot finding the cut edge of the timber at the top and going across and finding the platform on the far side and coming down on it, and he was on the platform with the bayonet, and the men around him were coming down onto it with theirs, and the British on the platform were turning to face the column that had come up onto the works among them and were trying to bring the muskets to bear that had not been loaded.
What happened inside the works happened in the dark and is not a thing he could have set down on paper afterward if the old man at the long table had asked him for it, and the old man did not ask. The men of the silent columns had been told and had told themselves all night long that the attack was the silence and the silence was the steel, and the steel was what was inside the works now, and the steel does not write itself down. The British above were turning in the dark to muskets that would not fire, and the men of the columns were going through the works at the bayonet, and the British were going down, and the British who could see what was inside the works were calling for quarter, and the order had been to give quarter to any man who asked for it, and the corps was giving it. Quarter, the British were calling on the platform around him, and the men of the corps were taking the muskets out of their hands and putting them on the platform and putting the men down on the platform beside the muskets without striking them, and the parts of the works where the British had not yet asked for quarter were being gone through with the steel, and the parts where the British had asked were being kept, and Vincent was going through the works the way the men around him were going through, and the bayonet had been used, and would not be a thing he would set down to the old man, and was not a thing he would yet set down to himself, and was a thing inside the going.
He did not see Wayne. Wayne went up with the south column at the abatis and was hit there — he learned it later — by a musket-ball at the side of the head that did not go in but cut a furrow along the scalp and put him on one knee for a moment, and Wayne, on the one knee, ordered the men around him to carry him up into the works because he meant to be carried into the works if he could not walk into them, and the men carried him up and into them, and he was up in the works giving orders before the half-hour was out. Vincent did not see any of this. What Vincent saw was the platform and the parapet and the men around him and the British going down or asking for quarter or both, and then, at some count of minutes he could not afterward give, the British inside the works were not firing or fighting any longer and were sitting on the platform with their hands at their sides and the corps was holding the works.
The center column had been called up. He could hear it now, the firing at the gate where the third party had been making its show with the loaded muskets, a different firing from the firing on the parapets because the third party had been firing to be heard, and the firing had brought the British attention to the gate while the columns at the flanks were on the slope and past the abatis, and the third party was now coming up to take its share of the works at the center. The firing slackened. It went out. The works were holding.
He stood on the platform inside the works. The musket was at the carry. The bayonet was still on the end of it. The bayonet had been used. He did not look at it. He looked instead out across the parapet to the east, where the river was somewhere below in the dark, and could not see the river, and looked back along the platform to where the British prisoners were sitting in a long line with the corps’s men over them, and saw that the line was a long line — many more men than he would have thought were still alive on the rock — and saw that the corps was holding the rock, and that the thing had come on and gone past and was now a thing already behind him.
His hands shook. He noted it the way a man notes the weather. He had been steady at the bayonet for the cold stock at the long lying and steady at the going through the morass and steady at the half-step up the slope and steady at the going-over and steady at the work in the works, and now that the work was done and there was no thing for the hands to be doing, they shook, and the shaking was the country’s tax on having had them steady when it had needed them, and he set the musket-butt on the platform and let the hands shake against the small of the stock and did not try to stop them, because the trying was a thing he had learned at Brandywine that did not work and that made the shaking worse. He let them.
The dawn came up slow over the country east of the river. He saw it on the parapet first, the eastern dark going to a grey, and then the grey opening enough to show the river below and the bend of it and the country on the far bank, and the river was not what he had thought it would be — wider and slower and more full of light than any river had a business being on a morning the night before of which men had been going down into a morass to climb a rock — and the country east of the river was a country going off into a long grey haze that was the country of the lower Hudson and not, in any direction he could see from the platform, the country that ran back toward Lunenburg, but he looked west all the same, where the country that ran back toward Lunenburg was on the far side of a great deal of ground he had not yet covered going back, and he looked once and then turned to where Doyle and Cole were on the platform alive and Cole was sitting against the parapet with his head down between his knees not from any hurt but from the down-come of the night, and Vincent went and sat down beside him on the platform, and put his back against the British timber, and watched the dawn come up over the rock and over the river and over the country, and felt the breath go in and out of him at the speed it wanted to go in and out, which was now the speed of a man who had come up out of a thing he did not yet know he had come up out of.
He took the scrap of paper out of the cartridge-box. The cartridge-box was wet through and the scrap was wet through with it, but the pencil-mark would still take to wet paper as the pencil-mark always would, and he found the place along the parapet where there was room and a flat surface, and he wrote, in the wet on the wet paper, the line for the day. The 16th of July. At a place on the Hudson called Stony Point. I am well. That was all. The hand was steadier writing the line than it had been writing the line at Chester after Brandywine two summers before, which was the only measure he had for it, and he put the line by, and put the scrap back where it lived, and sat on the platform beside Cole, and watched the river.
March 1781, Guilford
Guilford Court House, North Carolina, the fifteenth of March 1781
The morning was warm for March and the country was full of the smell of new pine. The army had come up to the ground at the courthouse the day before, by Greene’s order, and the line was forming on the road as the light came up — the North Carolina militia in the first line along a snake-fence at the edge of an open field of last year’s stubble, the Virginia militia in the second line a quarter-mile back in the woods, and the Continentals in the third line on a low rise behind the second, where the road came up out of the woods and bent past the courthouse itself. Vincent was with his part of the Virginia detachment in the third line, on the right of the road by perhaps fifty yards, in among second-growth oak and hickory on ground that fell off behind them to the east. He was eighteen and three months. He had been in the Line four years and two months and had been at three general actions and a dozen lesser ones, and had stopped being the youngest in his part of the column some time the summer before, when a Hanover boy of sixteen had come up to the company at the camp on the Pee Dee and Vincent had found himself, without having looked for it, on the older side of the rank.
The haversack was at his right hip on the strap. It had been the haversack of a man named Howard who had gone home at the end of the winter quarters of 1777–78 with his term out and his right arm not what it had been, and who had given Vincent the haversack at the parting because Vincent had been carrying his rations in a piece of folded ticking from his blanket and Howard had said a boy in the Line wanted a haversack to be a man in the Line and not a boy. The haversack was canvas, oiled, the strap worn to the color of the canvas, and inside it Vincent kept the day’s bread and what cheese there was and the small kit of a soldier and, in a folded square of oilcloth at the bottom under the bread, the letter from his sister Mary that had come up to him in August of 1778 at the camp at White Plains and that he had been carrying since. He did not need to take it out to know where it was in the haversack. The hand found it through the canvas the way the hand finds a coin in a coat pocket without the looking.
The British came on at the first line at perhaps half past one in the afternoon by what the men afterward said. Vincent did not look at the sun. The North Carolina militia in the first line fired their two rounds as the order had been given to them and then went back through the woods on either side of the road, and the firing came up the field to the second line, and the Virginia militia in the second line stood and fired and were broken and the firing came up through the second-growth toward the third, and somewhere ahead and to the left there was a heavier firing that was the part of the army that had taken the British coming in close where the road bent. The order in the third line was to hold. The order was to fire by ranks at the British when the British came up out of the woods onto the open ground in front of the rise, and to hold the line as long as the line could be held. The line held. The British came up out of the woods on the road and to either side of it at perhaps thirty yards, and the third line fired its first volley and the British line behind it, and the volleys went on as the volleys had gone on at Brandywine and at Monmouth, and the smoke stood in the woods because the woods would not let it move, and the men in the line on Vincent’s left and on Vincent’s right loaded and fired and loaded and fired the way the drill had made them load and fire, and Vincent did with them. He was older now in the body and the hands were not the hands of Birmingham Meeting House — the hands set the cartridge on the second motion of the teeth and the ramrod was already coming back up before the eye had caught it gone down — and the head was the head of a man who had been at the work long enough to know how the work went, and the line stood, and the men around him stood, and the British line at thirty yards stood, and the firing was the day’s work.
The day broke up on the right. It was not on Vincent’s right. It was the right of the army as a whole, off to the south where Lee’s legion and Campbell’s riflemen were in the woods and where the British had got around the flank, and the breaking came back up the line in pieces the way breaking came back up a line. The order to fall back came down from the courthouse some time after, and the third line went back at the walk by ranks the way Steuben had drilled it to go back, and the British came on but not at the speed they had had at the start of the day, because the British, Vincent could see by the line as it came forward, were a line that had paid for the ground it had taken and had not many more lines in it. He went back at the walk with the rank. Banks was on his left. Banks had been at Guilford in the rank from the start of the morning and was still on his left at the going back. They went back perhaps a quarter-mile to the road and another half-mile up the road and then the road bent east and they went east on it, and the army was going east on it with them, and the British did not press.
The night came down on the road north of Guilford toward the iron-works at Speedwell’s. The army made what camp it could in the woods along the road. Vincent’s part of the detachment was on the south side of the road in a stand of small pine where the needles were dry and the ground was good, and there were fires by then, the British not being close enough to come on in the dark, and the men of his rank were down around the fires with what rations they had, which was the day’s bread out of the haversack and what was left of the cheese.
· · ·
He understood that now, lying in the marsh — that the country a man carries through a war is not the country on the maps the officers have on the road behind the line. The country a man carries is what the haversack carries for him. He had been sixteen in the marsh and had been carrying the haversack at his hip on the cold ground at the Hudson the way he had been carrying it at the standing-to at Monmouth and the way he would be carrying it on the rise at Guilford, and the country in the haversack — the bread, the cheese, the kit, the letter at the bottom in the oilcloth — was the country he had taken away from the lane out of Lunenburg in January of 1777 and would take back to the lane in some month and year he did not yet know. He had not understood that, at sixteen in the marsh, the way he would come to understand it. At sixteen he had understood only that the haversack was on his hip and that the letter was in it, and that the letter had been in it since the August of the year before, and that the letter would be in it the next morning if there was a next morning for him after the hour. The country in the haversack was the country he kept.
· · ·
He had found the place against a pine in the dark away from the nearest fire, where the needles were thick on the ground and the trunk gave the back something to rest against, and had sat down with his back against the pine and had set the musket between his knees with the lock up, and had taken the haversack off the shoulder and put it on the ground beside him. He had eaten the bread. He took the letter out then. He did it the way he always did it, which was without thinking about doing it: the hand into the haversack past the bread-end and down to the bottom and onto the oilcloth, and the oilcloth out, and the letter unfolded out of the oilcloth onto his thigh.
The letter was not what it had been in August of 1778. The paper was thinner where the folds had been folded and unfolded across the carrying. The ink had darkened in two places where the haversack had been wet through in the rains north of the Dan in February, and had lightened in one place at the corner where the hand had held the corner most. The hand on the letter was his sister Mary’s hand. It was the hand of a girl of thirteen, which his sister had been in the August of 1778, with the loops on the ls and the hs drawn the way a girl in the country drew them when she had been taught by a mother who had been taught by a mother. He read the letter. He read it without reading it, because the eye on the paper at this hour and on this night was not reading the words for the first time but was reading them the way a man reads a thing he has read so often that the reading of it is a kind of remembering of what the reading had been the first time and the second and the twelfth and the hundredth.
· · ·
He had been at the camp at White Plains in the August of 1778. He had been fifteen years and eight months and had had the haversack from Howard for the spring and the summer, and had had the carrying of the haversack at the long marches through the Jerseys after Monmouth and into New York, and had not yet known what the haversack was for, beyond the carrying of what a haversack carried. The letter came up to the camp in a packet brought by a Lunenburg man, a wagoner named Eppes who had come up to the army with a wagon of meal out of the lower country and who had been told by Vincent’s mother that her son was with the Virginia detachment somewhere about White Plains and to find him if he could. Eppes had found him. He had stood Vincent up by the wagon and had looked at him without saying anything for the space of three breaths the way a man looks at a boy he has known since the boy was a child and is now seeing as a soldier, and had then put the packet into Vincent’s hands and had gone on to his unloading.
Vincent had taken the packet off into the trees at the edge of the camp where the noon-light came down at an angle through the leaves. There had been three things in the packet. One was from his mother and was the news of the household and the news that his grandfather was at the long table every morning still, and the news that the corn was in and that Polly was well. One was from his grandfather and was the short kind of letter the old man wrote, which said only that the country was the long thing and the boy was its instrument and the boy would write his line. The third was from Mary. He had opened the third last because he had not known what was in the third and had wanted to put off the not-knowing for the few breaths it took to read the other two, and when he had unfolded the third the hand of it had stopped him at the unfolding, because the hand was a hand he had not seen put to paper before. Mary had not written to him at the camp. The mother wrote for the household. The grandfather wrote what the grandfather wrote. Mary at thirteen, in the August of 1778, had written to him in her own hand, and the hand was a hand she had had to teach herself, because the grandfather had taught the boys at the table and had not taught the girls, and Mary had taught herself by watching the grandfather teach the boys and by going at it after on her own.
What she had written was not long. She had written that the harvest was in and the corn was good. She had written that their mother was well and was tired in the evenings the way she had been tired since the father had gone. She had written that the grandfather had read out at the table that morning the line from the Bible that said they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength and that she had thought of him when the grandfather had read it. She had written that she had begun to read at the long table when the grandfather was at it. She had written, at the end, that she had begun to write because the writing was a thing a person had to do for herself and not be done for by another, and that she hoped he was well. She had signed it your sister Mary Baker.
His body had read the letter at the camp at White Plains before his head had finished reading it. The hand on the paper at his thigh had begun to shake at the third line, where she had written about their mother being tired, and the throat had closed at the line about the grandfather’s reading from the Bible, and the eyes had gone past the line about her teaching herself to read and had had to come back to it because the eyes had not been able to take it the first time. He had read it through three times in the trees at the edge of the camp. He had folded it back along the folds it had come folded in. He had put it inside his shirt against his ribs because he had not yet had the oilcloth for it — the oilcloth came later, off a tarred bundle that a teamster from the lower country threw out at Middlebrook — and the paper had been against his ribs the rest of that afternoon and into the watch that night, and he had not understood, that afternoon, that the letter had given him a thing his sister at thirteen had not known she was giving him to carry. The thing she had given him to carry was that she had begun. She had begun to read and she had begun to write and she had begun to be the keeper of a thing the household had not yet known it would need her to keep. The boy at fifteen under the trees at White Plains had not seen that. He had seen only that his sister Mary had written to him in her own hand, and that the hand had said the things she had been able to say at thirteen, and that the saying of them had been her own.
· · ·
He folded the letter back into the oilcloth on his thigh by the pine on the road north of Guilford. The hand at the folding was a hand that had been steady at the rank that morning and was now a hand that was not asking to be looked at. He put the oilcloth back into the bottom of the haversack under the bread-end. He sat against the pine. The fire some yards off threw a little light onto the ground around him but did not reach the pine, and the country around the army on the road back from Guilford was the country of the night after a day at which he had been at the work as long as he could remember being at it. What he did not yet know, sitting against the pine on the road back from Guilford, was that the letter had another summer and another autumn still to be in the haversack with him, and one more piece of country between him and the lane home, and that the thing his sister at thirteen had given him to carry in the August of 1778 was a thing she had also given herself to keep, and that the keeping at the parlor desk in Lunenburg with the Bible open and the hand at the page was a keeping he would walk up the lane to in autumn.
October 1781, Yorktown
Yorktown, Virginia, the nineteenth of October 1781
The morning came up clear and cool over the works the allied army had drawn around the British position on the river, and the corps was up in the rank well before the hour. The Continentals stood along the road on the American side, two ranks deep, the muskets at the order with the butts at the feet and the bayonets fixed and pointing at the sky, and the line of them ran along the road for what looked from where Vincent stood to be most of a mile. Across the road the French stood the same way, two ranks deep, in their white coats with the facings of every regiment a color of its own, and the line of the French ran the mile back the other way. The road between the two lines was empty. The British were to come out and ground their arms in the field beyond the lines at one o’clock by the order come down the night before.
Vincent was eighteen and ten months. He had been in the Line four years and nine months. He had been with the part that went in at the second parallel three nights ago when the redoubts above it had gone in by the bayonet, and had been at the river end of the parallel four days before that when the British had come out at dawn against the works and had been driven back, and the day after that the firing from the British had begun to slacken on the parapet, and the day after that the firing had stopped, and the white had gone up over the British, and the officers had gone in and the officers had come out, and the order for the surrender field had come down the corps that night. The corps had not known, when it came down to Williamsburg out of the heat of late summer marching through Virginia, that the work it was doing was the last of the work. It had not known any such thing on any of the campaigns. It had come down with what it had carried and had done what the work asked for. Now the work was over.
He stood in the rank with the musket at the order. The haversack was on his hip on the strap, the strap worn now to the color of the canvas, the letter in the bottom of the haversack in the oilcloth where it had been since Middlebrook three years before. Banks was on his left. Banks had come down with him through Virginia from the camp on the Pamunkey in August, and was on his left in the rank along the road the way he had been on his left on the road back from Guilford and on the standing-to at the second parallel and going through the abatis at the redoubt three nights ago. On the right was a Continental man named Briggs out of Hanover County who had come up to the part of the company in the spring; Doyle and Cole, who had been with him on the platform on the rock at the river in the dawn of the sixteenth of July two summers and three months before, were further up the line where the rank had put them in the forming. He did not see them down the line from where he was. He knew they were there.
The hour was long. The standing was longer than the standing at the assault had been short. The body that had been at the work for four years and nine months stood in the rank along the road in the cool light of an October morning and had nothing in particular to do, and the absence of the thing to do was a thing the body did not know what to make of. The hands holding the musket up at the order were the hands that had been at the cartridge and the bayonet at Brandywine and Monmouth and on the rock at the river and on the rise at Guilford and on a dozen smaller affairs, and now the hands were at the carry and the carry was holding the musket up for a thing that was not the next thing the musket had been carried for. The hands shook a little after a while. He noted it. He did not try to stop it. He let the hands be what they were.
The British came out a little after one. He heard them before he saw them — the drums first, coming up the road from the direction of the river-works, a slow march beat such as a corps beats coming up a road that is not a road it has wanted to be coming up, and then the column itself came up the road into view at the far end where the road bent, the British regiments coming up two abreast in the road in the order they had been told to come up in, and the colors of each regiment up front were cased. He saw the casings on the staves as the head of the column came past — the cloth bound around each color and tied off, the stave still upright but the color not flown — and the casings were the thing that told the day what the day was. A corps did not case its colors except going to a surrender field. The corps coming up the road past the lines was a corps coming up to ground its arms.
The column passed him at perhaps fifty feet. The British men coming past in the rank did not look at the American line. Some looked at the French line. Some looked at the road in front of them. Some looked at no place at all that he could read. The faces were the faces of men who had been a corps as long as the corps standing in the road had been a corps, and who had been at the work as long, and whose work had come out the other way. He did not look long at any one face. He held his place in the rank with the musket at the order and let the column pass.
Somewhere down the line a band was playing. He could hear it under the drums. The tune was a tune he did not know, a country tune by the sound of it, a thing in three with a turn before each end, played slow. The men in the rank afterward said the tune had been The World Turned Upside Down, and it might have been; he could not have said so on the road that day with the column passing. The tune ran on under the drums while the British came past, and the field beyond the lines where the arms were to be grounded began to fill with the men of the head of the column laying their muskets down in the piles the order had named, butt to butt with the bayonets crossed, the way the order had named them to be laid.
The grounding went on a long time. He stood in the rank and watched the regiments come past and the men of each go out into the field beyond and lay the muskets down, and the regiments coming up out of the road behind kept coming, and the field filled, and the field filled further. The body in the rank knew before the head did that the thing the body had been at was over. The hands holding the musket were the hands that had had a thing to be doing for four years and nine months, and the thing was now a thing the British were laying down in piles in the field, and the hands were not doing it. The breath in the ribs went in and out the way the breath goes in a man standing in the cool air with nothing to load. The head, which had been the head of a soldier inside the work since the fourteen-year-old at the courthouse in Lunenburg in January of 1777 had stood up by the table and put his hand to the paper, was the head of a soldier come out the other side of the work, and the head did not yet know what to be the head of next.
What he did not know, standing in the rank along the road at Yorktown on the nineteenth of October 1781, was that the corps would let him out of the Line before the year was out, and that the lane up to the house at Lunenburg was inside the next two months and was the next country he would walk into. He stood in the rank and watched the British come out and ground their arms in the field, and the day went on through the afternoon at the long passing.
· · ·
That night by a fire on the ground inside the allied works he took the scrap of paper out of the cartridge-box. The scrap was dry. The October air had been dry and the cartridge-box dry on his hip through the dry day, and the pencil-mark would take to the paper clean. He found the flat top of a small chest a French sergeant down the line had let him have for the writing, and he set the scrap on it, and he wrote the line for the day. The 19th of October. At a place on the York River called Yorktown. I am well. That was all. The hand was steady. He looked at the line a moment after he had written it. He did not write anything more. He put the scrap back where it lived in the cartridge-box, and put the cartridge-box back on its strap on his hip, and ate the bread the haversack had under the letter, and sat by the fire with Banks and Briggs and the men of the rank around it, and the talk around the fire was the talk of men who had stood the long passing and did not yet know what to say of it. He did not say much. He sat by the fire and looked at the fire. He thought of the lane.
Autumn 1781, the Lane Home
The lane up to the house at Lunenburg, the first week of December 1781
The Continental Line had let him out at Williamsburg in the third week of November with his pay in paper that was not paper a man would have wanted to be paid in, and a discharge in writing folded into three, and the country to walk back into; and Vincent had folded the paper into the haversack with the letter under the bread-end and had walked it in days, up through Petersburg in the last days of November and across the Nottoway at a ford he knew the look of from the going down four years and nine months before, and on into Brunswick County in the first days of December. He was eighteen and eleven months. He had been gone four years and ten months and three weeks. He had the haversack on the strap with the letter and the discharge in it and the cartridge-box on his hip with the writing-scrap, and the brown coat the Line had given him at Yorktown, patched at the elbow, and the shoes the Line had given him with it.
The road came up onto the ground he knew at the corner of Lunenburg County a little before noon. He knew it by the slope of the country — the way it tilted south toward the Meherrin at one shoulder and east toward the Nottoway at the other — and by a stand of three big white oaks at the corner of a tobacco field where Old Hetty’s brother had cleared the corner the summer Vincent had been twelve. The field was in winter stubble. The oaks stood the way they had stood. He had not meant to stop at them. The body stopped before the head named what the body had seen, and the head came up after a breath and saw the oaks.
He went on. The road bent west past the oaks and came down a slow grade through a stand of second-growth that had not been second-growth when he left, and up the other side onto the ground where the lane to the house came off the road to the right. The lane came off at a place a stranger would not have seen as a lane. The country knew it. He knew it. He turned in onto the lane at the walk he had come up the road with, without changing it.
The lane ran a half-mile north between two fields the household had cleared in his father’s time, and the fields on either side were in winter stubble. The lane itself had been kept — the rut not deep, the verge cut back in the summer last — and he saw the keeping of the lane and saw whose keeping it was. It was not his father’s. It was the household’s. He went up the lane.
The hands had not had a thing to do since the surrender field at Yorktown six weeks before. They had carried the haversack and they had held the bread when he stopped to eat the bread, and these had been the things the hands had been at. They were not at the cartridge. They were not at the bayonet. They were not at the load. He noted it. The feet went up the lane.
At a hundred yards the standing oak at the head of the lane came into view above the rise. It had been the oak the day he had gone down in January of 1777 with the wagoner’s boy from Eppes’s place and had not known whether to look back at it and had not looked. The body knew the oak before the head named it.
The house came into view at two hundred yards under the oak. The chimney on the north end put up a thin straight line of smoke into the cold midday air. The window on the parlor end was shuttered against the cold but one shutter was set ajar to let the noon light into the room. The door at the front was closed. There was no one in the yard. The chickens were under the corner of the smokehouse out of the wind. The dog the household had had when he left was not in the yard, and the only sound was the wind in the standing oak and a thin sound of someone at the iron a long way off down at the smith’s place south on the road.
He stopped at perhaps fifty feet from the house. He had not meant to stop. The body stopped without the head’s having asked it to, and stood in the lane with the breath in the ribs going slow. The body had walked four years and ten months back into a place the body had been carrying with it the whole way, and was at the place now, and was not asking the head what to do next. He let the body do what it was doing.
He went on. The yard had been swept some time in the past day or two; the broom-marks were still in the dust by the door. He went up the three steps and stood at the door. He did not knock. He had not knocked at this door in his life. He laid his hand to the latch and pressed it down and pushed the door open into the hall.
The smell of the hall — of cured oak and of woodsmoke off the parlor fire and of bread that had been at the bake some hours before and was no longer — was the smell of the hall. He had carried it in the haversack the way he had carried the letter, without having known he had been carrying it. It came up at him at the threshold, and the body knew it before the head named what it was.
· · ·
The voice from the kitchen at the back of the hall was his mother’s. Sarah, is that Hetty come back? — the voice of a woman who had been the head of the household of women for going on seven years and who had heard the door open in the middle of the day and asked the question into the hall without coming out to see. He did not answer. He could not have got the throat to make a word at that moment. He heard the step in the kitchen — heavier than he had remembered and slower — and he saw her come into the hall at the kitchen end.
She stopped at the kitchen door. She had a piece of cloth in her hand she had been wiping the kitchen table with, and the cloth went down. She did not say anything for the space of two breaths. She said his name. Vincent. She did not say it loud. She said it the way a woman says a word she has been carrying the saying of for four years and ten months in the throat without knowing she had been carrying it. Then she came down the hall.
He went to meet her at the middle of the hall. She put her hands on his shoulders — not pulling him to her, holding him an arm’s length away so that she could look at the face — and she looked at the face. He stood and let her look. He was a head and a half taller than she was now. He had not been the last time she had stood in front of him in this hall. The face she was looking at was not the face she had sent down the lane in January of 1777. She looked as long as she needed to. Then she put her arms around him and her face into the front of his coat and held on. She did not cry. He put his arms around her back the way he had not put his arms around the back of anyone for four years and ten months, and held on.
After a while she stepped back. Your grandfather is in the parlor, she said. Your sister is with him. The child is asleep upstairs. She said it telling him so that he had it. The child, he said. It was the first word he had said in the house. Mary’s, she said. A girl. She was a year old in October. She looked at him while she said it and let him take the second piece in. He had thought of a child on the road up from Williamsburg in the way a man thinks of what might be at the end of a road he is walking, but he had not thought of a girl a year old asleep upstairs in the house he was now standing in the hall of. He took it in. I’ll go in to my grandfather, he said. She nodded and stepped aside.
· · ·
The parlor door was the parlor door. He put his hand to the latch and lifted it and pushed it open at the slow speed at which a door wants to be pushed when the room behind it is a room being worked in.
The fire on the north wall was at a low burn, the way the fire was kept of an afternoon when the work in the parlor wanted not heat but light. The noon light came in at the ajar shutter and fell across the long desk under the window where the Bible was open. His grandfather was at the desk the way the grandfather had been every morning he could remember — the back not as straight as it had been when Vincent had gone away but straight, the hands flat at either side of the open Bible, the head down at the page. The old man was getting on for sixty. The hair at the back of his head was thinner than it had been and was wholly white where it had been white-and-gray.
His sister Mary was on the grandfather’s right, seated on a low stool. She had a piece of paper on a small board on her knees and a quill in her right hand and the ink-pot on a stand at her elbow, and she was at the writing of something on the paper. Her head was down. She was seventeen, and had been married, when Vincent did the arithmetic at the parlor door, almost exactly two years to the day. She was bigger in the shoulders than she had been at thirteen. The hair at the back of her head was the hair she had had then, brown going to the dark, drawn back at the nape into the kind of plain knot a young married woman wore at the day’s work. She wore a dress of the same brown wool the household had spun and woven the last winter he had been at home.
The grandfather looked up first. The old man did not get up out of the chair. He looked up from the Bible and at the door and saw his grandson Vincent in it with the haversack on the strap and the brown coat of the Line on the body and the face of a man on the face of the boy who had gone down the lane in January of 1777 with his hand to the paper at the substitute enlistment. The old man’s mouth went open a little and then closed and then opened again, and he said: Vincent. Mary’s head came up at her grandfather’s saying it. The quill in her hand stopped at the page. She set the board on the floor at the side of the stool and stood up and stood looking at him.
She did not come across the room. He did not go across the room. He stood in the door and looked at her, and she stood at the desk and looked at him, and the room was the room with the fire on the hearth and the noon light coming in at the ajar shutter and the Bible open under the light on the desk’s slope and the old man between the two of them. The keeping that had been at the parlor desk in this house since before Vincent had been born was at the desk in the room he was standing in the door of. The keeper at thirteen who had begun to be a keeper in the August of 1778 at the camp at White Plains was the woman of seventeen who had been a keeper for two years now and who sat in the chair beside the old man with a quill in her hand.
· · ·
What he understood, standing at the parlor door in the autumn of 1781, was the thing the boy at sixteen in the marsh at the Hudson had not been able to understand and the boy at fifteen under the trees at White Plains had been given to begin to understand and had not. The keeping was one keeping. The keeping his grandfather had done at the long table since before the boy had been born, and the keeping Mary at thirteen had begun in the August of 1778 by teaching herself to read at the long table when the grandfather was at it, and the keeping he himself had done at every scrap of paper in every cartridge-box on every campaign — The 11th of September. Brandywine. I am well. and The 19th of October. At a place on the York River called Yorktown. I am well. — were the same keeping done in three places by three of one household, the writing-line in the field a piece of the same keeping as the line his sister was at on the paper on the board at the stool and as the line the old man had read out at the long table in the August of 1778 about waiting upon the Lord, and the line was not three lines but one line, and the household had been at the keeping of it the whole time.
· · ·
He came into the parlor. He set the haversack on the floor by the door — the first time it had been off his shoulder in the daylight in the country since he had come up the lane — and he went across the room to the desk. His grandfather had got up out of the chair by then, slowly, with the right hand on the desk’s edge for the rising, and was standing waiting for him. He took the old man’s right hand in his right and held it. The old man’s hand was smaller in his than it had been in the hand of the boy at fourteen on the night before the going down to the courthouse, because the boy’s hand was now a man’s hand and not a boy’s. The old man did not say anything. He held the hand. Then he let it go and put both hands on Vincent’s shoulders the way Vincent’s mother had in the hall a quarter-hour ago, and looked at his grandson’s face, and said: You wrote the line. He said it the way a man says a thing he has been waiting to say for four years and ten months and has had the saying of it ready in him the whole time.
I wrote the line, Vincent said. The old man nodded. He took his hands off Vincent’s shoulders and sat back down, slowly, with the right hand on the desk’s edge for the sitting, and put his hands flat at either side of the open Bible. The light from the ajar shutter fell across the page where the old man’s hands lay.
Vincent turned to his sister. Mary was where she had been on the stool, her face wet at the cheeks, the quill still in her right hand though she had not been at the writing for some minutes. She set it down on the board at her feet. He came around the desk to her. She put her arms around his waist the way she had put them around his waist the morning he had gone down the lane in January of 1777, when she had been twelve and had stood in the yard with her face against the front of his coat, and she had her face into the front of his coat now the way she had had it then. He put his arms around her back. She was bigger in the shoulders than she had been. He held on. After a while she stepped back and looked up at him. I’ll get her, she said. The voice was the voice of a woman of seventeen who had been a mother for a year and more. He nodded. She went out by the door to the back hall and up the stairs.
He stood by the desk with the grandfather. The old man did not look up. He was at the page. Vincent looked down at the page. The page was an old page. The hand at the top was a hand Vincent did not know — the hand of the great-grandfather Christopher, who had carried the Bible over from Worb and written the first names on the page at his marriage in Charleston — and below it was the hand of the grandfather, who had been the keeper of the page for near forty years, and who had set down on it in his own hand the births and the deaths the page had been the keeper of, and the deaths were not many and the births were many. At the bottom of the page in a hand Vincent had not seen on this page before was a line in his sister Mary’s hand. Sarah Johnson, born the ninth of October 1780, daughter of Mary Baker DeGraffenreid Johnson and Gideon Johnson. The hand was the hand he had read on the letter at the camp at White Plains and had been carrying in the haversack three years.
The old man’s right hand came up off the desk and pointed at the line in Mary’s hand. She wrote it, he said. He did not say it loud. He said it the way a man names a fact in front of him.
She wrote it, Vincent said. The line was below where the line of his own birth had been set down by the grandfather eighteen years and eleven months before, and the writing of the child’s name on the page in Mary’s hand was the thing the old man had wanted Vincent to see before any other thing was said in the room, and Vincent saw it.
· · ·
Mary came back down the stairs with the child in her arms. She was asleep against her shoulder with her face turned in toward the side of her neck, heavy the way a child of a year is heavy when she has gone to sleep, wrapped in the wool of a blanket the household had woven the spring before. Mary came to the desk and stood at Vincent’s elbow. This is your niece, she said. Her name is Sarah. We named her for our mother. She did not say for the one who had kept them all. She did not have to.
Vincent put his hand on the back of the child’s head. The hair was soft under his palm. He had not had his hand on the head of a child in four years and ten months. She did not wake. She went on sleeping at her mother’s shoulder with her face turned in toward the side of her neck. Sarah, Vincent said. He said the name the way a man says the name of a person who has been added to a room that has been a room he has known.
He did not say anything else for a while. He stood by the desk with his hand on the back of the child’s head and his sister at his elbow and his grandfather in the chair and the page open under the noon light on the desk’s slope. The fire gave out the small sound a fire gives out at a low burn. Somewhere in the back of the house his mother had gone to the kitchen, and the sound of the kettle going on at the hearth at the kitchen came up the back hall to the parlor. The shutter was at the ajar. The light through it had moved a little along the page in the time since he had come into the room.
He had not thought, walking down through Virginia from Williamsburg, of a child. He had not thought of his sister in her own hand. He had not thought of his name and the name of the child set down on the page of the Bible by the same hand. He had thought of coming home. He had not thought of what he was coming home to. He stood by the desk with his hand on the back of the child’s head, and what he was coming home to was by the desk and at his elbow and in the chair, and the keeping of it was on the page under the light.
The wind outside the parlor window was the wind the standing oak at the head of the lane had stood in for two hundred years and would stand in for two hundred more. The road at the foot of the lane went on east toward Brunswick and west toward Lunenburg Court House the way the road had gone on for as long as it had been a road. The names on the page on the desk were the names the household had been the keeper of since the marriage at Charleston the great-grandfather had set at its head, four generations on this side of the water, and the latest of them was in his sister Mary’s hand and was the name of a girl a year old asleep at her mother’s shoulder against the side of her neck.
He stood by the desk and did not say anything for a while. The grandfather did not say anything. Mary did not say anything. The fire went on at its low burn, and the light through the ajar shutter went on falling across the page, and the household was the household, and the country at the foot of the lane was the country, and the war was the thing that had been and was no longer the thing that was, and the keeping at the desk was the thing that was.