Patrick Henry and the Frigate’s Keel: And Other Stories of a Young Nation (10 page)

“What, Pa?”

“Jess, I aim to get drunk—rolling, snorting drunk. Jess, I been a family man twenty-two year. Ain't tasted hard liquor in twelve, since they gave me the judgeship. But, Jess, I ain't a judge no more, and I aim to get rolling, wild drunk. I always been a good family man, a good provider, but now I aim to get rolling drunk.”

“I reckon it helps,” I said.

“It's a sinful thing for you to see, Jess,” Pa said. “But it seems to me I'm down and along the road to becoming a sinful man. It'll be a thing to remember and make you humble.”

Pa had a jug of corn standing down the cellar for as long as I remember. When someone came who liked corn, Pa would pour out a glass or two, but it was a big jug, and there was plenty left. Now he fetched it up and set himself to drinking.

“Pa,” I warned him, “better take it slow. Old Casper always said that, and he ought to know. I reckon Casper put away more corn than anyone hereabouts.”

“I reckon he did,” Pa said. “I reckon to overshoot his mark.”

It was late afternoon now. Pa was tilting the jug on his shoulder and beginning to feel pretty good. He was singing, “Little brown jug, how I love thee—”

I went to the door and saw something, and slammed the door and barred it. I ran around the house, flinging the window shutters to and barring them.

“What's that, Jess?” Pa demanded.

I pointed toward a loophole in one of the shuttered windows. Pa rose, stumbled over, and looked. Then he staggered back, rubbing his face and pulling at his beard. Then he grabbed the jug of corn and shattered it against the hearth floor.

“The punishment of a sinful man! Mark me, Jess; sinful eyes seeing what ain't there.”

“There's Shawnees there, all right,” I said. I was beginning to feel good and scared now.

“Jess, I drank the corn, and you, in your innocence, smelled the vapors. There ain't been Shawnees in this part of the country for twelve years.” He went to the window, looked, rubbed his eyes, and stared again. Then he came back slowly and sat down.

“Shawnees,” he said. “Shawnees in war paint, Jess. And there ain't a firearm here—” He shook his head.

There was a hammering on the door. I began to sniffle, but Pa said, “Stop that, Jess.”

One of them poked a musket into a loophole and fired; smoke and flame darted into the room, but we were out of the line. Another fired through a loophole. Both the rooms of the house were laced with smoke and pungent with the smell of gunpowder.

“Your ma, she always knew best,” Pa said. “Twenty-two years she was always right, Jess, but this time she had no call taking away the guns.”

They were hammering on the door again. The shutters were thick, of oak; and the door was thicker.

The room got heavier with smoke, hotter, closer. Then I heard a crackling, like a heavy man walking on dry brush in the forest.

“Jess,” Pa said uncertainly, “Jess, they're burning down the house. We'd better go down in the cellar and pray to God he sent us Injuns so damn' ignorant they don't know what a cellar is.”

The cellar was not built under the house, but off to one side. You went in a trap in the floor and then through a slanting shaft. It was unusually cold and wet, because a spring oozed up out of it and ran off through a wooden drain. Most everyone had a cold cellar like that to keep roots and milk in, but it was hot in that cellar then. It had always been the coolest place in the world, but now it was as hot as if the devil were sitting in there with Pa and me.

Pa sat with his arm around me, muttering to himself. Like this: “First that crazy weather, rain, shine, rain, then the wolf, then the well goes dry, then I ain't a judge, then my wife and daughter, and now—now they burn down the house over my head.”

I don't know how long we stayed in that cellar, but Pa wanted to give the house plenty of time to burn out and the Shawnees plenty of time to go away. Finally, when it got so we could barely breathe, Pa pushed up the trap and we came out.

The house was down, and we hopped over the black, smoldering logs. It was night, and the Shawnees had gone.

Pa looked at what had been his house, and then at what had been the barn. Then he looked at me and shook his head. “Jess, Parson Jackson would say I ought to give thanks, but I'm afraid I'm turning into a mean man, a mean man.”

I said, “Pa, what about other folks hereabouts?”

Pa jumped like he had been hit. “Jess, I'm a fool. I got a lot to hold against Lancy Jones, but I won't see his house burn over his head.”

It was eight miles to Lancy Jones's place, but we made it in less than two hours, on foot. I could see that Pa was steamed up, and when Lancy put an old musket into his hands, Pa seemed to have forgotten all about the house burning down.

From Lancy's place we went down the valley, pulling in men left and right. I don't know what had happened to the Shawnees, but Pa said that after all the work of burning down a house, they were like to throw themselves into the grass and sleep it off, like some men do a corn-whisky jag.

Pa took charge of everything, and in no time at all he had it in hand. Women and children in carts and wagons and headed down to the village, which was no more than a blockhouse and half a dozen shacks, men to guard them, men to ride up and down the valley and warn outlying farms.

I guess it was the same as it had been twelve years past, when the Shawnees came the first time. Everybody “Squired” Pa to death, and nobody seemed willing to do anything without asking him first. And by midnight he had them all down in the village. And nobody ever said a word about the lawman.…

Pa and I were among the last to get into the village. Pa kept pestering me to go, but I stuck by him, both of us riding Lancy's big, white work horse. And when we got into the village Ma and Jenny were almost frantic. I guess Ma had repented plenty about walking off with all the firearms.

Ma tried to get around Pa and kiss him and hug him, so she could show him how sorry she felt; but Pa was busy and he couldn't have any truck with women.

Then Ma and Jenny took to kissing me, but Pa said, “The place for women and kids is over there in church, singing hymns with Parson Jackson.”

Ma was close to tears, but she nodded and started to walk away. Jenny said, “Come along, Jess.”

“The devil I will,” I said.

Pa fetched me a wallop. “Jess,” he said, “for a boy who's seen the rewards of sin, you sure talk awful loud.”

Ma came back. “Sam Burton,” she snorted, “that's a fine way—to hit a boy who's been through all he's been through.”

“I might have known,” Pa said. “Everything else, and now Jess.”

“Don't you talk like the fool you are, Sam Burton,” Ma cried. Then she bent her head, so that he wouldn't see her tears.

“Sarah,” Pa said, “you ain't never been in tears before—and we been married twenty-two years, come summer.”

“There's a start for everything.”

“I had justice on my side,” Pa said.

“Maybe you did. But I had the same kind of justice on mine.”

Then they stood there, just looking at each other. Then, who should come walking up but the lawman. Pa saw him, out of the corner of his eye, and I looked for fireworks to start. But Pa never moved, and Ma never took her eyes off his face.

“Squire Burton,” the lawman said, like he had practiced the speech over and over, “I feel there's a lot to explain and a lot to apologize for.”

“Ain't nothing to explain,” Pa said, “except why you're here instead of up there in the blockhouse, sitting over your gun. For a man who's done fighting back East, you're sure mighty slow in covering orders.”

And Jenny said, “Elmer, you do what Pa says.…”

Well, the Shawnees didn't come that night. I went to the church to do hymn singing, but I didn't sing much. I fell asleep, and slept right through until almost noon the next day. Then I learned that Pa and Lancy and others had been back to our place, picked up the Shawnee track, discovered there weren't more than five or six of them. They had gone back across the river.

Pa said he reckoned it was safe enough now, and folks were beginning to load up to go back to their farms. But before any of them left they gathered around Pa to shake his hand and show him how sorry they were for voting against him.

“Well,” Pa said, “it looks like I got to go back and build up again, and that's a tiresome thing for a man at my age.”

Everyone nodded, but Lancy said, “Listen here, Squire; we been talking things over last night about how you served the public twelve years. Young Elmer here, he said as how they're going to make a state out of the section hereabouts and up and down two, three hundred miles. Well, when you got a state, you got to have a man to send to Congress, and it seemed to us there wasn't no better man to have sitting in Congress for us than Squire Sam Burton.”

Pa stared at them, then looked all around the crowd, from face to face. Everyone was nodding.

“Never had but one lawbook,” Pa mumbled. “Up there in Congress—”

“A man who could read law to a whole district out of one book wouldn't have any trouble in Congress,” Parson Jackson said.

Ma was wiping her eyes. She went over to Pa and put her head against his shoulder. He ran his hands through his beard.

“You'll have to stump the district,” Elmer said.

Pa grinned and put an arm tight around Ma. “Don't you worry about that, youngster. I'm an old hand at stumping.”

5

Conyngham

 

CONYNGHAM

I
T WAS
a young, blue-eyed Irish-American with the curious name of Gustavus Conyngham, who in the latter part of 1777 decided to become a navy, became one, and made himself and his crew the terror of the North Sea, the English Channel, the Bay of Biscay, and the Eastern Atlantic. You won't find his story in the histories, not even his name. He sewed his own Stars and Stripes out of petticoats and shirts, while a harried, frantic Congress wrangled about the creation of a navy, while Washington's army starved and froze in Valley Forge, and while the American Revolution appeared about to flicker out, stillborn.

And then he appointed himself a navy, and calmly went about the task of wiping enemy shipping from the seas.

It's not quite certain where Conyngham came from, but in America in those times it didn't matter a great deal. A man was measured by what he was; Conyngham was young, handsome, reckless, and in a quiet way, a patriot—which meant he believed in freedom and hated oppression. He didn't talk about it too much, but when the thirteen colonies declared for Independence, he picked his side and looked around for a way to make himself useful. Knowing something about sailing a boat, he decided he'd be more useful in the navy than in the army—only the navy, for the most part, was still on the drawing boards. And the captains' list was a scramble of ambitious and none too competent men, with the best of the lot, John Paul Jones, almost at the bottom.

Conyngham didn't complain. He kept looking around, and when he had exhausted all possibilities, he sailed for Holland in the supply ship
Charming Betty
. Holland was friendly toward the American colonies, and there were plenty of boats in Holland; he trusted he'd pick up something to serve his purpose. However, Holland suddenly remembered that she was a neutral, and not only clamped down on her own vessels, but held the
Charming Betty
from returning to America. Stranded and with no prospect of obtaining a ship, Conyngham wandered down into France. His money was running out, but he had heard that in France an old gentleman by the name of Ben Franklin was getting things done. If he could have a word with Franklin—

The French were nice; they were lovely people and they liked Americans, but they succeeded in keeping him away from Franklin. They explained that Dr. Franklin was a very important man, very busy; and Conyngham's money was gone. He was on short rations and his clothes were becoming frayed, his nerves too. He tossed his last franc, on whether to return to America as a seaman or stay in France. France won, and he went into a tavern for a bottle of wine. As the last franc went across the counter, Conyngham heard a voice speaking English, and a moment later he was shaking hands with an American and inviting the other to share his bottle. And then, when they sat down at a table Conyngham was informed that the man opposite him was one of Dr. Franklin's agents.