Tall Tail

Tuesday, October 5, 1784

York Square sent roads off in each direction. Well-built houses, many of them brick, lined these roads along with churches and schools.

More shops surrounded the square itself since travelers from each point, north, south, east, and west, passed through it. About three thousand souls lived in a ten-mile area around York. Filling that ten-mile area were stores, taverns, inns, sawmills, hemp mills, grain mills, two oil mills, and an impressive iron forge.

The activity fed growth. Fifteen boardinghouses, all concerned that they be known as God-fearing domiciles, housed newcomers who would soon enough buy farmland or open a business once they acquired enough cash. Indentured servants, some slaves and some freedmen, plumped up the numbers kept by officials. The good soil, the abundant water, and the industriousness of the inhabitants brought people in like iron filings to a magnet.

The houses in town had mews in the back, and behind those tidy places for horses ran straight alleys, some cobbled. The dream of the city fathers and some mothers, although unelected, was to pave all alleyways, all the main streets. Anything to vanquish the mud.

John, Charles, and Moses had been in York for two days. They stayed in a boardinghouse close to Bartholomew and Mary Graves. John and Charles surprised themselves with the flood of emotion that overcame them when they saw fellow ex-soldier Bartholomew. It was mutual.

Bartholomew showed the men St. John’s Episcopal Church, which stood on the ground of York County Academy. Or perhaps the academy was on the church grounds. Built of fieldstone, it was simple but pleasing and it had wonderfully large windows. While Bartholomew taught his classes, the Virginia men walked the town that was truly filled with churches. Christ Lutheran, large, Georgian in design, once a log structure, was harmonious, retrained, beautiful. Charles made drawings of all them.

John would look over Charles’s shoulder while his brother-in-law executed swift strokes, in minutes capturing the subject on paper. Moses said little, but if he saw another person of African descent, they would nod to each other. It wasn’t clear who was free and who was not. In Virginia if a slave rode or walked off the estate, he or she usually carried a small brass square or rectangle, indicating they were on an errand for the master. Often the master’s name was engraved on the chit, sometimes a number. As most people knew one another, it may have seemed unnecessary, but rumors abounded of gangs of white men who would steal slaves and freedmen, only to sell them to plantations farther south or in the opening Delta. Sugarcane broke down bodies, especially from the cutting, but the carting and then the burning proved arduous also. Rice, an easier crop in some ways, grew in terrible summer heat that was harder on human bodies than harvesting wheat, corn, or tobacco. A captured man fetched a good price, and many a slave dealer never asked where they came from. That brass chit might save someone and might not, but if the name on the chit was powerful, a thief would think twice.

John and Charles also noticed the ease with which Africans moved throughout York.

In the mews, Martin the horse won Mary’s heart. Bartholomew hoisted his wife up on the fellow after he had a day’s rest, and Martin, sweet and kind, gave her confidence. She gave him carrots and apples; nothing was too good for Martin. She insisted the farrier see him at once. She raised the ceramic teapot wherein she kept what she called her “mad money,” marched out and bought Martin a blanket for winter.

A gregarious person, Mary not only didn’t mind cooking for four men, Moses ate with them, and she outdid herself. The former combatants would tell stories about the war. Mary and Moses would listen.

As this was to be John and Charles’s last night with the Graveses, Mary wanted it to be especially happy, with food so good the tales would reach Virginia.

The small house had a dining room that barely contained them.

They chattered on that night, and even somber Moses smiled.

“You men,” Mary shook her head in admiration, “how quickly you closed in part of the loft for Moses.” She turned to Moses. “The horsehair in the walls will help keep you warm and you will have heavy blankets but winters are hard here. You’ll be glad to come into the kitchen for breakfast. Sunup.”

“Yes, Miss Graves.” He nodded.

Bartholomew would chide Mary about her soft heart. Yet when he saw her with Martin or when he heard her with Moses he knew he wouldn’t have her any other way. Men could be too harsh. He knew he could.

“Can Virginia pay its bills?” Bartholomew asked John and Charles.

“Our governor says we can’t. They argue all the time and the people resist taxes. The memories of the king’s taxes are too recent,” John replied. “If old King George had sent troops to protect us, engineers to help us, I sometimes think there would have been no rebellion.”

Charles shrugged. “Kings think of power, of strutting across the stage. George thinks of Louis in France and wants to outshine him. He doesn’t think of his subjects, even in England. As for Ireland, Wales, and Scotland,” Charles said, “they exist to send men into troops, to send goods to London.”

“As an Irishman, there’s not much I can say about the king in a beautiful lady’s company,” Bartholomew said.

Mary blushed.

“Quite so.” Charles beamed at Mary, who delighted them all with her cooking and her unforced warmth.

“Well, Bartholomew, can Pennsylvania pay its bills?” John asked.

“No,” came the terse reply.

“Is this not the case with all former colonies?” John posited. “Heavy financial burdens and no effective way to discharge them? Congress is too weak.”

Bartholomew laughed. “We had a visitor in the county, Colonel Hartley, who cautioned us for our ‘lack of political life,’ which is how he put it. We are too busy farming, tending to business, so to speak. But he said something else that struck me. He said that in republics, men ought to think, and we are in the infancy of thought. He’s right, you know. Where else is there a republic?”

“Rome. Cicero’s Rome.” Charles laughed.

“Oh, we’ll bump along,” John added. “We have to, don’t we? If we don’t, ships will come from Europe and try to pick us off. Not just England, either. I suppose it’s like my mother used to say, ‘Sink or swim.’ ”

“Hear, hear,” Bartholomew agreed.

—

The next morning, John and Charles hitched up Castor and Pollux. Moses came to bid them goodbye. “Thank you. Take care of my Ailee.”

“We will,” John promised.

Charles added, “You are free now, Moses. The manumission papers I forged look better than legitimate ones. Let Bartholomew keep them safe. Give them a year of labor. Everything is paid for and then do as you please, but don’t come back to Virginia.”

John put his hands on Moses’s shoulders. “It would be death. Truly it would. Dennis’s pursuit should have told you that, and you can’t expose Ailee to danger.”

“Can she not escape as I have?” Moses almost pleaded.

“Perhaps, but it will take time, and she will be fleeing with a baby,” Charles stated. “So you would be exposing your love and your child to grave danger.”

Tears filled Moses’s eyes. “I know. Look after them.”

John impulsively grabbed Moses’s hand in his. “May God keep you. Trust in Him. He is all we have.”

Martin whinnied when his friends left. They took the steeple with them, dropping it off just south of the town where they noticed a new church being built. No one was there, but they managed to lift it off. Charles left no note. Perhaps it would be considered a miracle.

Back in the wagon, they chattered about what they’d seen, heard, and, of course, Bartholomew and Mary, to whom they said farewell in the house.

They had given the Graveses the horse, a fine gift, but they also left five hundred dollars for the feeding and care of Moses.

October 6 was brisk, promising to be a radiant fall day. York isn’t that far from the Maryland line. The two now hoped they might be miles beyond it by nightfall.

“Well, have you thought about what we do when we arrive home?” Charles asked.

“Yes. We say nothing, we do nothing. If Hiram comes to us, we say we didn’t see Dennis, and we don’t know why he would wish to catch us up.”

“True. We don’t know who McComb told or what he told them if he did. Best not to say he was after us.”

“Do you think Moses will stay in York?” John inquired.

“I don’t know. He knows if found in Virginia, he will die. He might lead an intelligent constable to Ailee. He didn’t strike me as stupid, only as beaten, saddened, lost.”

“Yes.” John nodded, then changed the subject. “It’s different, killing a civilian, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t think about it. Kill or be killed.” Charles considered what he’d just said. “Perhaps we wouldn’t have been killed by McComb, but it would have ruined Ewing and we would have been hauled into court for conveying a murderer and stolen property.”

“True, but I think about the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not kill. But we put on a uniform and we’re told to kill someone in a different uniform, someone who has done nothing to earn our enmity, except to fight for another power, a king. But kill we did and it’s a sin. How do you know what’s right from wrong?”

“You don’t.” Charles said this with finality. “I served the king with pride. Then he abandoned us in the prisoner-of-war camps. You, my enemy, treated me better than my own king and his council. And my countrymen killed American prisoners of war, jamming them in the holds of ships in Boston harbor, starving them, not tending to their wounds. This gnawed at me. An officer of long-standing, Bartholomew paid me to write false discharge papers and then he escaped. He told me this was a land for young men. If it hadn’t been for Piglet”—Charles petted his constant canine friend—“I think I would have felt totally alone. I lived because some of the men under my command were prisoners with me and I was their commanding officer. But in time, John, I questioned everything, and I, too, escaped. So am I traitor to my king?”

“No. Your king abandoned you.” John was sure of this. “You had to fend for yourself.”

Returning to the subject of Dennis McComb, Charles said, “You and I should agree to the same story, which is we don’t know anything.”

“Yes.”

They rode in silence for an hour, the clip-clop of Castor and Pollux soothing. Piglet fell asleep and quietly snored.

John finally spoke. “I never thought life could be so—” He tried to find the word or phrase.

Charles found it for him. “Complicated.”