“’Twas not my intention–” I started.
“Are you feeling well enough, wife?” Curzon asked in a hollow voice. “The intermittent fever had taken such a strong hold of you and Ruth.”
“We are both well,” I said. “Husband.”
That word had never come forth from my mouth that way. It near choked me.
“I told the lads about your delicious way with pies.” He sounded as joyful as a thief on his way to the gallows. This could have been because he had eaten my pies, or rather, tried to eat them. I’d not developed the kitchen skills of most lasses on account of our wanderings. I could cook the most basic of foods, but pies were beyond my reach.
One of his mates draped an arm around Curzon’s shoulders. “I’d give my arm for one of my Phoebe’s peach pies. She uses butter and peaches, but I don’t know what else. Might be an incantation involved too. She’s a magical lass, my Phoebe.” He gave Curzon a hearty slap on the back. “Aren’t you a lucky rogue!”
Ebenezer appeared between the tents, speaking with quiet intent to an officer of his same complexion and build. Curzon stiffened at the sight of the new man. The other fellows quickly turned back to the task of stacking the logs they’d brought.
“Missus Smith,” the new officer said as he approached. It took Ebenezer clearing his throat uncommonly loud to remind me that the new officer truly thought that was my name.
The shock of it caused me to curtsy much lower than I needed to. Ruth imitated me and had the sense to mind her tongue in the presence of a white stranger.
“Sergeant Armstrong,” he introduced himself. “We did not meet when your husband enlisted. A bit out of the ordinary, but Sergeant Woodruff is a man I trust. He assured me that he knew you both at Valley Forge and commended your skills and reputation. Have you fully recovered from your illnesses, you and your sister?”
I fought to make sense of this suddenly strange and swirling world. “Yes, sir,” I answered. “Thank you, sir. We are quite well.”
“I am relieved to have you restored to health and ready for service, ma’am. We sorely need your aid.” He peered over my shoulder at my haversack. “Is that a washing bat I spy?”
“Indeed, sir. My sister has one as well, and we’ve a small crock of soap.”
He chuckled. “That is most welcome. The stink of my men has become the talk of the brigade. Mayhaps you could turn your hand to washing their togs tomorrow. Some of the women of the army have established tents and brush huts at the back of the encampment. Would you care to sort out your sleeping arrangements now?”
“If I may sir,” I said. “I’d rather prepare supper for the lads. They’ll be hungry.”
“Soldiers are always hungry.” Sergeant Armstrong smiled. “A stew that didn’t taste like rotted fish would be a welcome change. Two moments with your lady, Private Smith, then back to work.” He touched his fingertips to the brim of his hat. “A pleasure to have you with us.”
“Thank you, Sergeant, sir.” I curtsied again. “And thank you, Sergeant Woodruff.”
I gave Ruth a little kick. She bobbed and did not say a word, for which I said a short prayer of thanks.
Sergeant Armstrong turned and walked away, followed by his men and Ebenezer, who winked at us before he left. I watched them stride away until they were swallowed up in the hubbub of the growing camp.
Curzon still had not moved.
“Where is the best water found?” I asked him. “That beef wants to be boiled.”
“No good water close by.” He frowned. “You have to wade deep into a frog pond to get some that doesn’t stink of sulfur. I’ll fetch it for you.”
I stepped closer. “It was not my intention for any of this. Ebenezer, this was his doing.”
He ignored my words, pointing at a short stack of crates near the woodpile. “You’ll find dried peas in one of those. Meat needs cutting, but I don’t know where you can find a knife. Everything is still a jumble.”
“My hatchet is plenty sharp,” I said.
He paused, then nodded in a melancholy way. “Always was.”
Two cannons fired in Yorktown. Ruth and I flinched. This part of the American encampment was closer to the British fortifications, and the noise was disturbingly louder.
“Their shots cannot reach this far,” Curzon said. “You are well out of danger here.”
He hesitated. For a moment I thought he’d say something about this strange circumstance we found ourselves in. That he’d explain and then laugh, and then we’d sort out the mess and everything would go back to the way it had been when we were friends.
But all he said was, “I’ll fetch that water now.”
CHAPTER XXXIII
Sunday September 30–Saturday, October 6, 1781
A MILITIA MAN THIS DAY, POSSESSED OF MORE BRAVERY [THAN] PRUDENCE, STOOD CONSTANTLY ON THE PARAPET AND D[––]D HIS SOUL IF HE WOULD DODGE FOR THE BUGGERS. HE HAD ESCAPED LONGER THAN COULD HAVE BEEN EXPECTED, AND, GROWING FOOL-HARDY, BRANDISHED HIS SPADE AT EVERY [CANNON]BALL THAT WAS FIRED, TILL, UNFORTUNATELY, A BALL CAME AND PUT AN END TO HIS CAPERS.
–DIARY OF CAPTAIN JAMES DUNCAN, PENNSYLVANIA LINE, OCTOBER 3, 1781
RISE, DEAR.” A WOMAN WITH a kind voice and jolly face shook my shoulder. “The sun will awake soon.”
I sat up reluctantly. “Thank you, Sibby.”
She nodded and crawled backward out of the brush hut. Sibby and a one-eyed white woman called Cristena had helped us construct this brush hut the night before, using poles and hemlock branches.
“Wake up, sister.” I shook Ruth’s arm. “We’re in the army, heaven help us.”
After visiting the women’s privy trench, it took us only a few moments of swift walking to travel from the back of the encampment to the cook fire of our company. The ghostly forms of other lasses moved through the mist with us, everyone slapping at the infernal midges, mosquitoes, fleas, and lice. More tents had been put up in the night. Most could hold six, some bigger, others smaller. A few soldiers slept sprawled on the ground, on account of the heat, mayhaps, or the stench of their tent mates. All of them snored.
To earn our food rations, Ruth and I had to care for a company of forty-five lads. Sibby had given me bushels of advice about how to keep the fellows fed, clean, and fit for duty. “Get the cook fire going first,” she said. “Once you trust that it won’t burn out, hurry to the frog pond for water. Boil that soon as you can, for hot water is always in short supply. Beans take longer than peas to cook, and peas take longer than porridge. Maggots don’t hurt no one, long as they are boiled with the meat.”
When we arrived at the company that first morning, our lads were still asleep. Their snores made me wonder if their tents were inhabited by fat oxen instead of young soldiers. Someone had been kind enough to fill two of the kettles with water. That was a trip saved. But all of the firewood that had been split the night before had burned down to coal and ash.
“Niff-naffy nincompoops,” I muttered.
Ruth sat on an upturned log. “You cursed.”
“Beg pardon,” I said automatically. “But they could have set some wood aside for the breakfast cooking.” I picked up one of the axes that leaned against the woodpile and tested the blade. Not as sharp as I’d like, but it would do the job.
“I can chop,” Ruth said.
She was willing, but I doubted she had the knack of it. At the laundry I’d done all the splitting of logs whilst she was out on her delivery rounds.
“You’re too slender to swing an axe,” I said. “You’ll topple over backward.”
Ruth held out her hand. “Bigger than you.”
Much as it pained me, there was no denying that. And starting the day off with an argument would help no one.
“You can try,” I said. “But that wood’s green. Gonna take strength that you don’t have. Go slow and take care.”
Ruth rolled up her sleeves, muscled a log onto the chopping block, then hefted the axe in her hands, finding its balance. She eyed the log,
stepped back, and swung the axe with skill. The blade cut the log cleanly in two, like it was made of butter, not newly felled pine.
She turned to me, smiling with pride.
“Huzzah indeed,” I said in surprise. “Well done, sister.”
“I’m no nincompoop,” Ruth said.
* * *
The rhythm of our days was driven by the drums. Uniformed drummers gathered at the artillery park, at headquarters, and at the brigade common places to act as clocks of sound for the vast encampment. They drummed at dawn, then later to assemble the men for inspection and orders. They drummed to send them off to their duties of the day–patrolling, doing work details, standing guard, and foraging–and again when it was time to return to camp.
We worked from the dark before dawn to the dark after sunset. Sometimes we worked in the cool of the night, when the constant sound of British cannons firing hundreds of shots provided a strange rhythm of its own. After those nights we hungered for sleep as if it were bread.
At first Ruth kept close by my side, but as she became acquainted with a few of the camp’s women, she began to venture with them on errands and chores. She smiled easily and enjoyed teasing me, though from time to time I found her staring at the columns of soldiers as they tramped by our cook fire, looking each one in the face. When I asked whom she was seeking, she claimed she was watching for Thomas, the donkey we’d left behind at the laundry. She said this with eyes downcast and her hands twisting at her skirt, both signals that she was lying. We’d discussed Thomas Boon frequently, and she understood that in all likelihood we would not see him again. I was certain that she was keeping an eye out for Aberdeen, but I resolved not to question her about it. I did not want to rob her of her dreams.
The men worked as if their breeches were on fire. Patrols constantly roamed the edges of the encampment, keeping a sharp eye out for sneak attacks of the British. Men rotated duties; one day felling trees, building bridges, and keeping the camp in good order, and the next drilling with muskets and bayonets. The anticipation of the day when they’d finally clash with their enemy built like steam in a lidded pot.
The fellows in our company were high spirited and friendly. Listening to the manner of their Rhode Island–flavored speech gave me comfort. Near half of them had joined the army to earn their freedom, Rhode Island being the only state to offer that opportunity to enslaved men. Black or white, they accorded me the respect due a married woman and teased Ruth as if she were their own sister.
Only one fellow among them kept his distance: Curzon Smith. He’d greet me same as his mates, thank me for the stew, bread, or coffee, then take himself away to eat out of sight of the cook fire. No one mentioned this odd behavior, but everyone noticed it, I was sure. I’d discovered that though he had signed us up when he enlisted himself, it was clear that I ought not read any sort of sentiment, any feeling of his heart, within that gesture. Likely he had not wanted to suffer the discomfort of filthy clothes, or mayhaps he wanted to have me close by in case there was a need to battle snakes or gators.
I was content to care for my fellow statesmen, filling their bellies and tending to washing their shirts. Ruth and I were safe, for the time being, and we had decent work. I decided that this temporary circumstance suited me just fine.
A thin, gray-grizzled soldier in our company named Henry took it upon himself to teach me the army’s intents and purposes. The coming encounter with the British was not to be a great battle, as had been fought in Brooklyn in 1776 or Monmouth in 1778. Nay, this was to be a siege, a long, drawn-out affair that could last weeks or months. We had two soldiers for every one of theirs, so we could afford to move slow and steady.
He used a long stick to draw a map in the dirt for me. The river looked like a snake. He carved the shape of a bread loaf pan to show Yorktown’s position upon the riverbank. Then he drew a vast shape of half of a pie–the straighter edge of it being the river, and the rounded part extending far from Yorktown. At the far edges of the half pie was the entire allied encampment, he said. The French controlled the west portion, and the Patriots controlled the east, though from a goodly distance, on account of the British continuing to shoot cannonballs through the air. In between the encampment and Yorktown the land was in some places dry, in others quite marshy.
Henry drew a circle in the middle of that no-man’s-land. “Lobsterbacks have a redoubt, a small fort filled with sharpshooters, here at Pigeon Hill. We need to take control of that first off, if you ask me. With that in hand, our cannons will determine everything, soon as they arrive.”
“But how?” I asked. “We sit here”–I pointed to the rounded edge of the encampment–“where the cannons cannot harm us. Can our guns shoot farther than theirs?”
“Not at all,” Henry said. “That’s why we’re so busy chopping down every tree in the woods. We’re preparing to open a parallel.”
I’d never heard of such a word, “parallel.” Its true meaning was “trench,” Henry said. The troops were going to dig a dreadful-wide and deep trench that zigged and zagged through the middle of the no-man’s-land. Once it was dug, they’d drag the cannons through the trench, aim them at Yorktown, and start blasting. Our cannons would inflict greater damage on account of being much closer to Yorktown than the British cannons were to us, and the deepness of the trench would help protect the men.
I thought it would take months to dig a trench that large, but I kept that opinion to myself. I stirred the barley soup that bubbled over the fire and asked Henry why the lads were so busy flattening the forest when their true aim was to dig a trench and blow up the town.
He laughed at that, but it was a kind laugh, not intended to make me feel like an ignorant looby. “The wood serves many purposes to protect the diggers. It helps hold the walls of the trench in place. From its branches we fashion large baskets that will be filled with the dirt dug from the trench. These will then be set as a protective wall at the front edge of the parallel.”
“When you’re in the woods,” I said, lowering my voice, “have you seen fugitives out there, our people? The British drove them from Yorktown without food or aid. I’ve heard many died of smallpox.”
“Aye,” Henry said somberly. “We bury the bodies that we find. The officers don’t like us taking the time to do it, so we don’t burden them with the information. I’m a preacher of sorts, did the lads tell you that? I pray over each grave. I hope that gives those poor souls some comfort.”
* * *
Loud cries of “Huzzah!” spread through the camp one morning shortly after sunrise. Under the cover of night the British had abandoned the Pigeon Hill redoubt and retreated to Yorktown. Our lads had taken control of the little fort, and we all celebrated. The army now controlled the middle of the no-man’s-land. Better still, we controlled the stream of clean water that ran along the bottom of the hill; water the camp desperately needed. Our soup and coffee no longer tasted of frog, rotted eggs, and copper. We used the pond water only for washing after that. This must have surely distressed the poor fish, for the clothes of soldiers are the nastiest imaginable.
Sibby took Ruth with her to fetch potatoes and corn from the provision wagons, then to the new bake ovens established by Mister Ludwig, the Baker-General. Fresh-baked bread cheered the entire camp, but our lads most of all. I’d tried to bake a loaf in a small kettle and produced a hard lump of coal for my troubles. Took me most of the night to chip out the burnt bits with my hatchet.
The complications of a siege seemed endless.
CHAPTER XXXIV
Saturday, October 6, 1781
IT IS JUSTIFIABLE THAT NEGROES SHOULD HAVE THEIR FREEDOM, AND NONE AMONGST US HELD AS SLAVES, AS FREEDOM AND LIBERTY IS THE GRAND CONTROVERSY THAT WE ARE CONTENDING FOR.
–MASSACHUSETTS LIEUTENANT THOMAS KENCH, WRITING TO THE MASSACHUSETTS LEGISLATURE, 1778
SATURDAY DAWNED RAINY AND COOL. I kept a rag tucked in my pocket for the momentous sneezes that exploded from my snout at the worst times. Ruth had a cough,
but at least her nose did not resemble a dripping spring.
We executed our daily maneuvers: cooking breakfast, washing up after the cooking, fetching the rations for the next three meals, preparing the lunch and starting on the supper, more washing up. We had a brief respite between lunch and supper, as the sergeant explained that our fellows would be late returning from fatigue duty. To take advantage of this break in our action, Ruth went with Sibby and the other women to the stream. I’d been tasked with convincing the brigade armorer to repair our smallest cook kettle, which now leaked, thanks to my chipping efforts with the hatchet.
The poor fellow was so busy hammering, he scarce had time to listen to my request. “Nay, lass,” he said, sparks flying in the air. “Only allowed to repair digging tools today.” He jerked his head toward the mound of axe heads, shovel blades, and billhooks behind him. “Yer welcome to leave it, if ye please.”
Kettles and pans tended to go missing from the blacksmith’s, Sibby had told me.
“I’ll bring it on the morrow, thank you, sir.”
I worked my way through the crowd, wondering if burning porridge to the bottom of the kettle would fashion a patch that would stop up the leak, when someone called out to me.
“Isabel!”
I turned to see Curzon running. I could scarce believe my eyes. He’d barely spoken to me since our arrival. Oh, he’d been polite enough when I served him roasted meat or coffee, but he never lingered for conversating or joked with me like the other lads did. Once his tin mug and wooden bowl were filled, off he went, his face cloudy and unreadable.
“Do you need something?” I asked, puzzled by this sudden change in his habits. “Lose a button from your breeches?”