Banners Page 10

  “It began as one-thousand-six-hundred in 1750,” John Key told him. “A thousand acres of forest, almost a thousand, were cleared by slaves and hired whites. They built the stables and slave quarters, dug the wells and surveyed the land. Later the property was enlarged to two-thousand-eight-hundred acres and a road was cut from Philadelphia to Williamsburg.”

  “What do you produce here? I smell tobacco.”

  “Tobacco, wheat, buckwheat, corn, and flax.”

  “How many bondsmen have you?”

  “This month I believe it is one hundred seven, a little fewer than usual. I freed a man and his family in the early spring. My wife had taught him to read and do arithmetic and he had become a good ironsmith, thus we let him go so he could work in Philadelphia and support his brood. There’s a teacher there who accepts Negro children. He planned to travel back and forth to see his wife and children, but I saw no advantage in breaking up his family.”

  The general nodded with what seemed to be appreciation. “Marriage between the bonded must be respected. I never disperse families nor separate a man and wife. Billy,” he called then, and turned to the mulatto man who had seized Frank from the saddle.

  “Right here, sir,” the man responded.

  Washington went on without a pause. “Mr. Billy Lee has been with me since he was fifteen. He is my constant companion through many expeditions and through the war as my val de chambre. I appealed to my purchasing agent to have Billy’s wife brought to us in Virginia. It rubs against my nap to hurt anyone’s feelings.”

  “And Neptune’s wife also, sir,” Billy added.

  “Yes, our bricklayer’s wife. The laborers in my family are never made to pine or hunger, though were I to give them too much they would simply sell it. They tend gardens to add to their allotments. I often purchase sweet potatoes from them. I have two baskets in the wagon. I would like to give you one basket.”

  “Thank you,” John Key said. “Do your servants fish? We have a bounty in Big Pipe Creek. Our Maybel makes a mouth-watering chopped trout.”

  Billy, sensing an interruptible moment, raised a shiny brass dial as some sort of illustration. “Sir, the audience is waiting.”

  “What’s that?” Frankie blurted. He was unable to control the child in himself at the sight of the gleaming contraption.

  The slave looked at the general. Mr. Washington nodded.

  Billy turned to Frankie and held the dial in both hands so the boy could see.

  “This is Mr. Washington’s ring dial. The Marquis de Lafayette made it a gift to him.”

  “Is it a sundial?” Frankie nosed his way closer to the dial, which was about the diameter of a grapefruit and possessed two engraved brass rings, one inside the other, the outer engraved with scrolled decorations and a ruled scale of numbers by the tens. The inner circle was engraved with Roman numerals. There was also some kind of brass fitting on the axis that was engraved with letters and lines. The whole thing looked like some kind of circular slide-rule.

  “These leaves are acanthus,” Billy explained, pointing to the scrolled decorations. “This ring is the meridian ring, this the equatorial ring, and this is the central bar. One tells the time by turning the dial until sunlight falls on the hour ring and one peers through this small hole. This is a precisely calibrated timepiece, accurate at any latitude except—”

  “Would you like to try it?” the general offered to the boy.

  “Oh! May I?” Frankie gasped.

  While Billy showed the boy how to work this elegant contraption, all manner of persons crept onto the lawn beneath the portico from where they had camped under the trees over there or waited in their carriages by the meadow. The crowd represented every stripe of American, from the grizzled veterans of the War for Independence to proud ladies from plantations around, to the stately attorneys, thin or round, old and young, of the Key family’s connections in the field of law, since John Key was a judge and his brother an attorney. Some other judges had also come, hoping to be able to say they knew the great general.

  There were no grand reminiscences, no gloried battle tales, no victory whoops, no raucous jokes at the expense of the English, nor even any mention that the Revolution had happened at all. Instead, the men were discussing fertilizer, slaves and sweet potatoes. What was inspiring about that?

  One of the house servants appeared with a tray of crystal glasses properly filled with Old Madeira wine and offered a glass to the general first, then John Key, as the gathering of special guests turned toward the manor doors. Other servants floated about with trays of strawberries, crab and oysters. The host led the way, with General Washington by his side, still talking again about agriculture. John made a friendly gesture, as he was inclined, by taking the general by one arm, only to have the famous man step sideways and skillfully pull out of the grip. Frank squinted, wondering whether he interpreted the action correctly. The movement communicated that Mr. Washington did not tolerate being touched.

  After them came the governor; the administrators of Frederick County; Mrs. Washington with Frank’s mother and his elegant blind grandmother; the aides and Billy Lee; more guests of importance who had come along with the general in his entourage; and everyone who would have the honor of standing on the portico with the general, Mrs. Washington, and their hosts.

  Frank watched them go with a quaver in his chest. The general was a very big man … every president from now on would have to be big.

  He almost tagged after them as if drawn by some cosmic magnetism, but was drawn backward by a small set of hands biting into his arm.

  “Frankie!” It was Anne. She was dragging him back, out onto the crowded lawn.

  “Th—thank you,” he gasped and sank to his backside on the cool grass next to a pink-bearded old man in buckskins.

  “You did it!” his sister gasped. “Was it wonderful?”

  Frank had no answer. With Anne sitting beside him in her satin frock, he sat there too and shook.

  The children turned quiet. Their plantation garden between the two bracketing brick walls was now crowded with strangers. Hardly anyone spoke.

  Though the sun shined, there were clouds moving in. Out over the terraced gardens, beyond the paths and shaded lanes, on the tops of the Blue Ridge an electrical storm was growing.

  Above them on the beautiful plastered portico where Frank and Anne had watched so many sunsets and played guessing games, John Key and General Washington appeared first, then their wives and a few of the more highly titled guests. In spite of the dithers caused by his visit, General Washington was steady as Gibraltar, the man who had spent tortured years bending posterity to his will, dominating the scene with the power of his mind and the resonance of his place as consultant to history. Standing with practiced poise, he was nearly a statue of himself.

  How many times had this happened in the past few days, and how many more would it happen before the general and his wife arrived at their destination in New York for his inauguration as president? In how many villages, ports and farmhouses had he looked out over the people of America, who knew him by his reputation better than they knew each other in person? He could be a king if he wanted to, but he didn’t want to.

  “My countrymen,” he began, “I am about to leave your good land, your beautiful valleys, your refreshing streams, and the blue hills of Maryland, which stretch before me. I cannot leave you, fellow citizens, without thanking you again and again for the true and devoted friendship you have shown me. When in the darkest hours of the Revolution, of doubt and gloom, the succor and support I received from the people of Frederick County always cheered me. It always woke a responsive echo in my heart. I feel the emotion of gratitude beating in my heart. My heart is too full to say more … God bless you all.”

  The words did not echo, but they seemed to do so.

  Polite applause began among the ladies and quickly swelled into cheers and whoops. A couple of old soldiers shot their turkey guns into the air. On the portico, General Washington wav
ed and made a flat-lipped smile.

  Frankie Key stared up at the master-hand of history and wondered where the rest of the speech had gone. Where were the retellings of glorious battles and danger? Why wasn’t he recalling his coolheadedness at facing the most skilled fighting force in the world, or his long-sightedness when most men couldn’t see past breakfast? Hadn’t everyone come to hear from his own mouth the resonance of his trials? Where was the jubilation? George Washington was a man to whom the future was a craft to be chiseled and formed by the hand of justice. They would have stood here and listened for hours, yet he spoke only a few seconds. During his progress through town after town, manor after manor, had he used up all his good speeches?

  The cheering was still going on. More than just a response to a speech, this was something else. Frankie looked out among the visitors. They had come, many of them, from far away, or had given up this day at their ploughshares or offices just to be here, he thought, to hear heart-swelling descriptions of eight years of war and final victory. Instead, they were smiling, cheering and clapping tirelessly. Their smiles were poignant, their applause without eddy. General Washington bowed his head and waved solemnly to them again. The audience’s effervescence didn’t diminish. The other people on the portico actually stepped back, sensing something, and gave the general his moment in the sun. He had come, it seemed, not to impress these common people, but to thank them. They had come, it seemed, to thank him. The boy with the wide poetic eyes and the caramel curls sat humbled in the puddle of his own assumptions, and in this void something else rushed in—an adult thought, perhaps, an idea completely new to him after his twelve years of experience.

  He would think about this. He would walk the paths and ride the red lands of Frederick County and whenever he was alone, he vowed to himself, he would think about this moment and try to understand it. He sensed there was more than he was able to digest, something these men and women around him already knew, but if he asked them they would scowl at him and shake their heads. He felt his natural shyness creep up. Instinctively, he stayed quiet.

  The cheering continued. The general—President Washington—oversaw the crowd’s felicity, somehow completely at ease in the eye of the world. There might have been a hundred people here or a hundred thousand, and he would command them. All day he would shake their hands and talk to them about farming, rifles, yams, timber, and mundane things that mattered. This evening he would leave, once again on the progress to New York, with his battle steed beneath him and Mrs. Washington in her coach, their servants and footmen and grooms and escorts, and Terra Rubra would return to its eternal springtime where never a harsh word would be spoken nor a heart hurt. There would be only the lingering echo, like something out of a myth, of the general, two children, and this idyllic place.

  1812

  Tug of War

  “America certainly cannot pretend to wage war with us;

  she simply has no navy to do it with.”

  THE LONDON STATESMAN

  NEW YORK HARBOR

  MAY 1812

  “SOMEONE’S BUBBLING A CAULDRON of pig fat.”

  “It’s Congress, back in session. Throw yourself in, John.”

  On this sparkling day, New York Harbor was spindled with topmasts. The usual bustle of seagoing ships laden with goods and passengers was overcrowded today by hundreds more vessels and thousands more people flanking the channels. From barges to pilot boats to Indian birchbark canoes, every possible floating platform was crammed with spectators, every deck and patch of wharf a rental space. Today was the first Parade of the Fleet of the United States’ Navy.

  A Marine of nineteen years heard the voices of men conversing as he climbed a questionable ladder to the top of a chandlery, clumsily balancing his musket on his two arms as he made his way up. Wouldn’t be seemly to drop the thing, would it? He had been ordered to the roof as a guard. To guard what? Seagulls?

  Orders were that he climb, and repel anyone else from climbing. By gosh a’mighty, I’ll blow the hair off anybody coming to my roof. Orders were orders. He liked orders. Made life clear.

  As he nosed his way to the top, he saw three men, elders, standing at the roof’s north edge, looking out at the harborscape, while behind them three empty rocking chairs nodded in the sea breeze. Odd … only three men? Many dozens of citizens coveted this high vantage, to view the Parade of the Fleet. Were these men aristocrats who had paid dearly for this privacy?

  The Marine surveyed the rest of the wide roof, where a long table with a bright white draping displayed plates of biscuits and cheese, strawberries, apple wedges, fried chicken legs, finger-cakes, and a pitcher of lemonade surrounded by crystal cups. Three men and a maid tended the food tables while a servant boy with wide shoulders, Negro or possibly mixed, with pleasant features and strong black brows. He wore a red brocade jacket, and batted an ostrich feather at springtime’s opportunistic flies. Behind the three aristocrats were three sturdy-looking rocking chairs, wagging a bit in the breeze.

  The servant boy waved to the Marine to come forward. Moving quietly, the Marine shifted this way and that to gain footing on the roof without fumbling his musket again. If these were newspaper owners, perhaps they would have a good word for a young soldier.

  His name in a newspaper? Famous!

  At this moment of heady self-delusion, the Marine tripped. The musket went clattering onto the roof before him. He landed on his chest, with his legs splayed out behind him, legs wagging in mid-air.

  The servant boy winced in empathy, but didn’t move away from his post.

  The tallest of the aristocrats turned to look. In a moment the other two also looked.

  “Oh,” expressed the shortest of the three men. “A visitor.”

  “No need to genuflect, soldier,” said the rosy-cheeked man of middle height, who appeared younger than the other two, though all were clearly senior. This man was dressed entirely in black, except for a white collar. Probably a minister.

  “This Marine must be a fan of yours, Jemmy,” the tallest man remarked in a quiet voice, speaking to the man in black clothes.

  The middle one was fairer of face than the others, with a complexion that still clung to youth despite his platinum hair, and he was slight of body. But there was something in his eyes that caught the Marine by surprise … amusement, intelligence. Something.

  The three men were rather an unlikely trio, seeming to have nothing in common. “Jemmy” was frail-looking, with nothing adventurous about him as he stood there in a long black velvet jacket offset by a white shirt. The next man was the shortest, but also portly and solid, leaning on a cane to relieve what appeared a sore left leg. His jacket was dark blue. They looked like … barristers. Or professors.

  Jemmy … Jimmy? James? The Marine squinted at the short man who was younger than the other two and suddenly added up his situation. He knew who that man was! His head swam at the realization. He felt both inadequate to his assigned task and thrilled at the privilege. He would be able to tell his older brothers, “I was there that day for the Parade of Sail and I guarded the president of the United States!”

  And two of his friends.

  For the first time in his life, he would have a tale to tell! A reason to speak … a reason for folk to listen to me!

  He shouldered his musket and scanned the scene on the roof, and well beyond to the harbor. He would have to plumb every detail, remember everything, and tell it right. Today’s was a gathering of modern Americans, and from the roof of this three-story chandlery the privileged trio before him seemed to be the winged side of a coin struck a generation ago. In those days, there would’ve been thousands of powdered heads bobbing about, but white wigs had fallen out of fashion. His uncle had been a wigmaker, but now told him that wigs were “too derivative of Europe” and had changed to making wool-felt hats for frontiersmen. Not fashion but finance had caused that change. American craftsmen like his uncle were busy making field weapons and deerskin coats for adventure in the untamed-
wilderness territories of Michigan, Indiana, and the Niagara frontier, not threading and powdering faux coifs for parlor intrigue.

  The stout and solidly built man named John leaned on his cane and wrinkled his nose at the odor of potato skins, meal leavings, cabbage hearts, and turnip flakes burping in a pot somewhere on the street below. “Seems the Irish can’t leave the Ould Sod behind even in the city,” he said.

  The Marine tucked his chin, aware of himself. He had taken a dipper of that soup from the vendor on his way to the ladder. He’d thought it earthy and good.

  The pleasant scent—pleasant to him—mingled with that of molten bee’s wax from the shop below, where a display of candle-dipping stood in the front window. The display had begun a few days ago, he recalled, with strips of dried rushes tied to a pole on a rack, hanging above a long trough of melted tallow kept hot by a bed of coals. Each morning and each afternoon the rushes were dipped, showing a method of candle-dipping used since feudal times.

  “Witness this metropolis of New York,” the president said. “Nearly doubled in population since the Revolution. We were four millions of Americans then. Now we are nearly eight millions. I’m heartened to see what the spirit of free enterprise has done in thirty-five years.”

  “It’s thirty-four years,” the man named John said. “Can you count ships any better?”

  The president—James Madison —smiled. “Well enough to see six strong frigates and a corvette, and a worthy-looking fleet of sloops, brigs, and gunboats. What do you see?”

  “American ships built with American timber,” John said. “Three-thousand trees for each frigate.”

  They paused from their conversation and looked out on the harbor as the Frigates USS Chesapeake and President passed under lower sails in the favorable breezes.

  The tallest of the dignitaries tamed a flip of pale hair that still held its tint of red. “There’s the Constitution,” he said in his delicate voice. “I’ve toured her. The architecture is inspiring. And it was brilliant to build each of the frigates in a different port.”