5

For starters, I’ll do my man Nate:

IN MY MIND’S EYE I SEE HIM STILL dancing leaf in the rebellion’s gusts. His hair, cut short because of lice during the siege of Boston, would have grown long enough for him to wear it again in a knot at the nape of his neck, which was the style he preferred. He would have been paler than usual, and weaker; he had “taken the smallpox” (as the inoculation was called) three weeks before when he was home on leave and was only just getting back on his feet. One day in mid-August, when the sky over New York had the dull sheen of pewter, Nate and his friend from New London, S. Hempstead, were sent in from Haarlem to see if they could requisition bayonets, which the eighty or so men in Nate’s Company (part of Colonel Webb’s Nineteenth Connecticut Volunteers) desperately needed. Rumor had it that a Dutch ship carrying bullets and bayonets had run the blockade and docked on the North River.

Nate wouldn’t have been in a particularly good mood that day. The girl with whom he had had “polite intercourse” (Nate’s phrase, not mine) while he was teaching at Haddam’s Landing—she had been one of the handful of girls in his early morning Latin class—had written to say that she had gotten engaged to a constable from Hartford. When the cat’s away, mice will play, is what Nate must have thought. (It’s what I would have thought if I had been in his shoes, but that may tell more about me than Nate; it certainly says something about how I reconstruct history.) The sweltering heat was probably accumulating in drifts, and Nate and his friend would have stopped at Cape’s Tavern on the Broad Way for a tankard of cool ale. Later they would have scrambled over the barricades that had been thrown up on the streets sloping down to the river and asked some of Colonel Glover’s Marbleheaders, in their tarred fisherman’s trousers, where they could find the Dutch ship. The Marblehead men would have shrugged; as far as they knew there was no Dutch ship, and no bayonets.

It would have been like Nate to suggest that they take a gander at the enemy before heading back up the Broad Way to Haarlem; he was by nature and instinct an adventurous soul who had the fears any sane man had but constantly tested himself against them. He and his friend would have climbed onto one of the parapets at Old Fort Amsterdam to gaze at the forest of masts off Staten Island. One of General Knox’s gunners, sunning himself next to his cannon, might have noticed Nate was an officer and decided to bait him.

“Count the masts if you got the nerve.”

Nate would have made a stab at it (there was never a challenge he wouldn’t rise to), but soon given up. There were too many.

I can hear the gunner drawling, “How ‘bout you, Sergeant?”

I can see Nate smiling that broad ear-to-ear grin of his and saying, “Go ahead, Stephen.”

Stephen surely shook his head. “A man could lose his taste for rebellion counting the enemy.”

The gunner would have laughed pleasantly. “We been countin’ them out with long glasses. Ten ships of the line, twenty frigates, seventy-three warships all told, another hundred fifty or so transports. Heard General Knox say as how this was the goldurnest force the lobsters ever sent ‘gainst anyone.”

If I know my Nate, he would have remarked on the note of pride in the gunner’s voice. And he would have thought: He’s an optimist because he doesn’t know enough.

It was about then that Nate and his friend Stephen heard the slow mournful beating of the kettledrum. The sound seemed to come from the bowling green, Nate’s old stamping ground; he had kicked around a football on the green when his company had been billeted there.

“What’s that about?” Stephen asked.

The gunner, a burly cordwainer from the Maine Territories, bit off a plug of tobacco and spit some juice onto the parapet. “Ain’t you heard? There’s gonna be a hangin’. Go ahead and watch if you got the stomach for it. There ain’t no charge.”

Nate and Stephen surely exchanged looks here. Stephen, who at twenty-two was a year older than Nate and never let him forget it, said “I’m all for heading back.”

Nate shook his head stubbornly. He had never seen a man executed, but he figured it was something he ought to know about. All the rebel officers fought with halters around their necks. Nate had torn out from the New York Weekly Post Boy the article describing the sentence imposed by a British judge on an Irish rebel. “You are to be hanged by the neck,” the judge had informed the condemned man, “but not until you are dead; for while you are still living your body is to be cut down, your bowels torn out and burned before your face, your head cut off, and your body divided into four quarters, your head and quarters to be at the King’s disposal; and may the Almighty God have mercy on your soul.”

It was on the bowling green that Nate first spotted the Commander-in-Chief. He was chatting with his portly Commander of Artillery, General Knox. Nate had never set eyes on the Commander-in-Chief before, but he recognized him instantly. He was a heavy man, easily a head taller than anyone around him, with thick thighs and meaty hips and high cheekbones and a prominent nose. A black cockade jutted from the brim of his hat, indicating he was a general officer. He wore his hair powdered and tied back at the neck with a red ribbon, indicating he was a gentleman. He sat his horse as if he had been born on one.

The Commander-in-Chief was not someone Nate was predisposed to. He had heard too many unpleasant stories about him: how he had been a land speculator back in Virginia; how he had married a rich widow for her money; how he had advertised in newspapers to recapture a runaway slave but had kept his name off the advertisement; how he had turned up, conspicuous in his officer’s uniform, when Congress was deciding on a Commander-in-Chief even though he hadn’t drilled a militia unit in fifteen years. It was whispered about that the tall Virginian wanted to be an American king, and Nate half believed it. On top of everything, he was clearly an amateur when it came to military matters; faced with an enemy expeditionary force that was said to number thirty-two thousand regulars (if you counted the mercenaries), the Virginian had committed the blunder of dividing his army, which numbered about twenty thousand and included a high percentage of inexperienced militiamen. It didn’t take a genius to understand that the military situation was desperate. But the Virginian, whose only experience came from some skirmishing in the forests of the Ohio during the Seven Years’ War, seemed oblivious to reality.

Now I’ll do the execution:

A NERVOUS CLEARING OF A DRY THROAT here; the author squirms at executions, even when they take place in the imagination.)

A company of black-shirted Pennsylvania riflemen, and another of “shirtmen”—Virginia frontiersmen wearing fringed buckskin shirts and armed with long rifles so accurate it was said they could hit a target that a New England boy had to squint at to see—were drawn up on the green. Those who had hats wore them against the sun. A crude gibbet had been constructed not far from the statue of Farmer George (he normally had a Roman numeral III after his name) on a prancing horse. A thick rope neatly tied into a noose dangled from the gibbet. The muffled beat of the kettledrum faltered as an open-sided dray appeared on the Broad Way end of the green. The drummer boy, staring at the dray, had forgotten what he was there for. An officer kicked him in the ass. The drumbeat started up again.

The dray was pulled onto the green by two beady-eyed oxen that kept their heads down in their yokes and drooled onto the cobblestones. Half a dozen armed shirtmen walked on either side of the dray. Nate noticed their rifles were fitted with bayonets and wondered where they had gotten them. Standing on the dray, his arms tied behind his back at the wrists, was Sergeant T. Hickey, until recently a member of the Commander-in-Chief’s personal bodyguard. He had been convicted, a woman whispered to Nate, of plotting with a group of local Tories to poison the man he was supposed to be guarding. There was talk that some peas the Virginian had by chance not eaten had killed the chickens they were thrown to.

Maybe it was true, Nate reflected. But whose truth? Which truth?

The condemned man, wearing homespun breeches and a dirty white collarless linen shirt open at the neck, struggled to keep his balance on the dray as it was pulled past Nate and Stephen and several hundred civilians who had come to witness the hanging. Next to Nate a man wearing a cooper’s canvas apron hoisted a small boy onto his shoulders so he could get a better view. Nate, in the front rank, studied the condemned man’s face. His cheek muscles twitched, his eyes darted from side to side, spittle dribbled from a quivering lower lip. Nate noticed a stain spreading around the man’s crotch, and I think, I imagine Nate thought: If it ever comes to that, I swear to God I will not lose control of myself.

Nate repeated “I swear” out loud, almost as if he were taking an oath.

The dray drew abreast of the Commander-in-Chief sitting impassively on his white mare, which was pawing playfully at the ground with her right front hoof. A general from central casting on a horse from central casting. (I know a historian is supposed to be above this kind of comment, but history desperately needs a giggle now and then. Humor me while I humor history.) The condemned man’s darting eyes caught a glimpse of a pine box. It dawned on him that he was looking at a coffin—at his coffin—and he spun around toward the Virginian on the white mare and cried out in a brittle voice, “Excellency, Excellency, have mercy on a poor sinner who is not eager to meet his Maker,” or words to that effect.

Nate saw the Virginian’s patrician eyes narrow into slits and being not far away, he heard him comment to General Knox, “My tenderness has been often abused. Matters are too far advanced to sacrifice anything to punctilios.”

(Punctilio/pΛnk’tiliaU:n. [pl. punctilios] a delicate point of ceremony; etiquette of such point; petty formality. The Virginian had a curious sense of punctilios!)

The dray reached the gibbet. Hickey became aware of the dangling noose and sagged to his knees. Tears streamed down his cheeks and he started breathlessly hiccuping the way a child does when he cries too hard. Two shirtmen, tough cookies who looked as if they had seen their share of scalped corpses during the Indian Wars, climbed onto the dray. They grabbed Hickey under his armpits and hauled him, still hiccuping, to his feet. One of the shirtmen fitted the noose over the condemned man’s head and tightened it around his neck.

Stephen tugged at Nate’s sleeve. “Come away,” he whispered, but Nate didn’t move.

The crowd grew deathly quiet. The Virginian’s central casting horse snorted. General Knox, his maimed hand concealed in a silk scarf, nodded. An officer elbowed the drummer boy. The beat of the kettledrum quickened. The two shirtmen jumped down from the dray. Another shirtman whipped the flank of one of the oxen with a long white birch branch. The beast blew air through his lips and stood his ground. The shirtman cocked the branch. Hickey, watching from the dray, the noose tight around his neck, managed to scream “Mother!” between his hiccups. The branch swatted down across the oxen’s flank. The animal started forward, dragging the other oxen with him. Hickey tiptoed along the floorboards of the dray to keep his footing. Then he ran out of dray and dangled from the noose. A muted sigh, an exhaling of many breaths, came from the crowd. The hanging man developed an enormous bulge in his crotch, the result of an involuntary erection. The women present averted their eyes.

The child on his father’s shoulders laughed nervously; he wasn’t at all sure what he was seeing.

Nate felt an icy hand caress his spine. He raised his eyes to the pewter sky, to the pewter God, then obliged himself to look back at the hanged man. Still hiccuping, he was jerking at the end of the rope, which was slowly strangling him. The Virginian on his white mare made an impatient gesture with his hand. General Knox signaled to the shirtmen with a crisp nod of his head. One of them strolled over to Hickey. He wrapped his arms around the jerking knees of the executed man and pulled himself up until his weight was hanging from Hickey’s body.

The hiccuping stopped. Then the jerking.

Nate saw the shadows of birds racing across the ground and looked up, but there were no birds, there was just Hickey dangling from the bitter end of the rope, and the shirtman dangling from him in an erotic embrace.

Nate and Stephen caught their horses, which were grazing in a fenced-in field behind Cape’s Tavern, and saddled them and started them walking up the Broad Way in the direction of the old Dutch village of Haarlem. They passed a fat woman rooting in garbage. They passed a company of John Haslet’s Delaware Continentals, whom everyone called the Blue Hen Chickens, heading on foot for Kipp’s farmhouse and the cove under it; some carried muskets, some carried pitchforks. The Chickens were handing around a transparent green jug and taking healthy swigs from it as they marched. Nate and Stephen passed a deserted farmhouse that had gotten a “Hillsborough treat”—thinking Tories lived in the house, rebels had smeared it with excrement.

The day grew heavier. A pall of dust kicked up by horses ahead of them on the Broad Way hung in the air, obliging Nate and Stephen to mask their noses and mouths with bandannas. For a long time neither man said anything. The silence turned awkward. Eventually Stephen broke it. “That was a god-awful thing we saw today.”

Nate fingered the hair mole on his neck. When he was a boy his friends had teased him about it, telling him it meant he would one day be hanged. “A long life has a lingering death,” Nate replied through his bandanna, quoting the English version of a Latin maxim he had memorized at Yale.

As near as I can figure, all this took place three weeks before Nate got involved in whipping the cat.