Forge Read online

  After we ate, the news came down the line that the horse that had pulled the supply wagon had died a short ways down the road. It took half the day to remove the harnesses without ruining either the leather or the nag’s body. The wagon was finally pulled away by four fellows from the Eighth Pennsylvania Regiment.

  The horse lay where he dropped.

  The officers’ hut had been finished Christmas Eve, so Sergeant Woodruff could now help fell trees for our use. With three fellows chopping, our pace of work increased. By the end of the day we’d dragged four logs to our hut site, stripped them of their bark, and laid them, one per side, as the ground logs of what would be our walls.

  “It’ll take till summer to finish the poxy thing,” Faulkner said.

  ’Twas hard to argue that.

  We had supper then, the rest of the pea soup, which amounted to a half cup for each one of us. I stuck my piece of pigskin into the bowl for flavor. When I’d licked the bowl clean, the skin went back in my mouth for chewing, but I swallowed it without intending to, and missed it sorely.

  No one wanted to turn in early, for it was Christmas. John Burns disappeared into the dark when a few fellows from Pennsylvania started to sing carols. Silvenus, too, though he returned in short order carrying a handful of long strands of horsehair. Some of the fellows protested this abuse of the horse’s corpse.

  “I just gave the poor beast a haircut of the tail.” He sat close to the fire, perched his spectacles at the end of his nose, and set to braiding the horsehair. “Tho’ if you was to ask me, I’d say that old horse is waste of good soup meat. Poxy sentimental horse notions of the officers kept us hungry in ‘58, too.”

  “You were in the army then?” asked Greenlaw.

  Silvenus nodded, his fingers braiding so fast, they were a blur. “I joined up when we went to war against the French. I learned a few things about fighting, so I signed on again when it was time to fight the British, too.”

  “Did you fight at Breed’s Hill?” I asked.

  Silvenus snorted. “Wish I had. I was in the troops who marched to Quebec that year. You think you’re hungry now? Ha! We were truly starving at one point. Had just the head of a squirrel left to eat.”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  Silvenus plucked a thread from his cuff and tied off the cord he had braided. “We killed one of the dogs, mixed the meat up with the squirrel’s head, added some candle wax, and ate the whole thing.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Benny said.

  “If you ever get that hungry, you will. You whelps is always caterwauling about your bellies and how you’re about to die.” He pulled out the two pieces of his shoe from the bag slung over his shoulder and set them on his foot, then wrapped the cord around the shoe to hold it together. “Long as you gets a smidgen of grub, like firecake or squirrel head, every day, you’ll last for months.”

  CHAPTER XX

  Thursday, December 25–Friday, December 26, 1777

  I AM NOW CONVINCED BEYOND A DOUBT THAT UNLESS SOME GREAT AND CAPITAL CHANGE SUDDENLY TAKES PLACE. . . THE ARMY MUST INEVITABLY BE REDUCED TO ONE OR THE OTHER OF THESE THREE THINGS: STARVE—DISOLVE—OR DISPERSE.

  —GEORGE WASHINGTON WRITING FROM VALLEY FORGE TO HENRY LAURENS OF THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS

  I STILL DO NOT KNOW WHAT WOKE ME in the night. A clumsy footstep at the edge of our kindling pile, perhaps. Or a squirrel, for this was before they’d all been hunted. Whatever the cause, my eyes opened and would not shut. I crawled over my grumbling companions and out the tent flap.

  I was not due to relieve Eben at guard for another hour or so, but as I was fully awake, it seemed foolish to wait. I loaded up my arms with firewood and made my way down the dark path to the guard post. There was supposed to be a sliver of a moon, but clouds had been thrown across the sky like a heavy quilt. I stepped carefully, for the snow hid tree stumps and rocks.

  Halfway there, I slowed, hearing raised voices and the sounds of a struggle.

  “Who’s there?” I called. “Name yourself!”

  Numbskull! The ghost-voice of Isabel in my brain, absent for weeks, scolded me fierce. What if it’s a British patrol? Or a group of desperate banditti? Think, fool!

  Before I could twist my ear, a figure ran toward me, breathing heavy. He veered around me and continued in the direction of camp. It sounded like he stumbled in the snow but then regained his balance and ran on. I waited until the night was again quiet, then walked, cautiously. I had not taken ten steps before I was stopped.

  “Halt!” a voice called. “What’s the countersign?”

  “Eben?” I strained my eyes but could not see anything. “Is that you? What’s going on?”

  “The sign is Windsor,” he said. “Give me the countersign.”

  I stepped closer to him. “It’s me, you ninny. Curzon.”

  The sound of a hammer being pulled to full cock, preparing a musket to fire, froze me in my boots. “The countersign,” he demanded.

  “Hartford!” I shouted. “Don’t shoot me. Hartford, Hartford, Hartford!”

  He sighed and uncocked his gun. “Can’t be too sure. Help me up, will you?”

  I stepped close enough to see his form sitting in the snow. I shifted the wood to one arm and reached out a hand for him to grasp.

  “Were you attacked?” I asked. “Is it the British?”

  “No!” He grabbed my sleeve before I could run back to alert the camp. “It’s not the British.”

  “What’s the matter, then?”

  “We need to build up the fire.” He walked in the direction of the guard post without offering any explanation. I waited, then followed several paces behind him, fighting the temptation to push him back into the snow.

  By the time I reached the post, he was on his knees, blowing on the coals of the near-dead fire.

  “Guards are supposed to guard,” I said, “not wander in the night and let the fire go out.” I picked through the wood for the driest pieces. “I could well freeze to death, thanks to you.”

  “’Pologies,” he said. “Go back to camp. I’ll take your duty.”

  No fellow in his right mind would say such a thing. I did not know what to reply, so I fussed with the twigs and blew and blew until the flames caught and kindled the wood. We both leaned toward the fire to warm our hands and faces.

  I gasped. Eben’s left eye was puffy and darkened with blood. His mouth was swollen too, and bleeding, as was his nose and the knuckles on his right hand.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Do you know how to cook a pumpkin?” he asked.

  CHAPTER XXI

  Thursday, December 25–Friday, December 26, 1777

  I LAY HERE TWO NIGHTS AND ONE DAY, AND HAD NOT A MORSEL OF ANYTHING TO EAT ALL THE TIME, SAVE HALF A PUMPKIN, WHICH I COOKED BY PLACING IT UPON A ROCK, THE SKIN SIDE UPPERMOST, AND MAKING A FIRE UPON IT. BY THE TIME IT WAS HEATED THROUGH I DEVOURED IT WITH AS KEEN AN APPETITE AS I SHOULD A PIE MADE OF IT AT SOME OTHER TIME.

  —JOURNAL OF JOSEPH PLUMB MARTIN, SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD PRIVATE IN FIFTEENTH MASSACHUSETTS REGIMENT, VALLEY FORGE

  HIS STRANGE REQUEST BEFUDDLED me. “Have you gone funny in the head?”

  “Mayhaps.” Eben opened his sack and pulled out a muddied pumpkin that was just a bit bigger than a cannonball. “I stole this tonight, but I’m not certain how to cook it.”

  “You fought with the farmer? He caught you in his field?” I packed some snow into a ball and handed it to him. “Put that on your eye, clodpate.”

  He winced as the snow touched his skin. “It wasn’t the farmer who hit me, it was John Burns.”

  “Burns caught you scavenging?”

  “No,” Eben groaned. “Burns and me, we went stealing together.”

  “You cannot be serious.”

  “Aye,” he said with a groan. “My belly was a giant empty pit, Curzon. Tasting those little bites of real food today just made it worse. I was gonna die, no matter what Silvenus said. Burns saw how hungry I was. He was
waiting when I came on duty. Told me he’d feed me good after I helped carry some provisions. He’s been sneaking off every night to rob fields and root cellars. Never goes hungry. That fit he threw after missing out on the rice was just for show.”

  “John Burns deserves to be flogged.” I cleaned off the pumpkin with another handful of snow.

  “It took us four trips to move all the pumpkins and cabbage he’d stolen. I chewed on cabbage leaves the whole time, scared as the dickens that we’d be caught. I thought he was going to share the food with the regiment, but no.” He spat and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Not him. He sells the food to them for coin.”

  “He should be flogged to death,” I said. “Then brought back to life and flogged all over again.”

  “Surely so.” Eben moved the snow away from his eye. “I told him we had to share with the other fellows, that we had to be honorable. When he laughed at the notion, I hit him.”

  “And he hit you back, by the looks of it,” I said.

  “Coward kicked me between the legs. Once I was on the ground, he gave me more kicks, grabbed the bag I was carrying, and ran off.”

  “How did you get the pumpkin, then?”

  “I stole it on the last trip; put it in my own sack when he wasn’t looking.” Eben put the snow back on his eye. “My aunt Patience would beat the skin off my backside if she knew that I have fallen so low that I steal from a thief.”

  I poked at the burning twigs and added more wood. “Aunt Patience wouldn’t beat you,” I ventured. “Stealing from a thief is justice.”

  “Honest?”

  “I swear.”

  From the fire I pulled a branch that was burning at one end. I told Eben how to prepare the fire and went off in search of the perfect rock. It took a good while, but by the time I returned, he had the fire blazing, with two logs the thickness of my leg lying next to each other, two hands of space between them filled with flame. We laid the rock over the logs, split the pumpkin with the bayonet, and set the pumpkin halves, cut side down, on the rock.

  The wet seeds sizzled and smoked.

  We stood in silence a good while, both of us swallowing waves of spit conjured by the smell of cooking pumpkin. The temptation to snatch it from the fire and eat it raw was hard to fight.

  I ate a handful of snow. “You don’t have any more of that cabbage, do you?”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s just as well. Cabbage was never a favorite of mine.”

  Eben poked at the pumpkin with a stick. “Are you going to tell my uncle about this?”

  “Aren’t you? He should know about Burns.”

  He shook his head. “Burns will point the finger back at me. Uncle would never forgive me for breaking the army’s rules.”

  “Then I won’t breathe a word of it.”

  “Thank you.” He poked the pumpkin shell again. “Does that mean you’re not sore at me anymore?”

  Instead of answering, I handed him another snowball. “Your lip.”

  “I do apologize, Curzon Smith.” He put the snow on his lip, winced, and removed it. “I’ve been pondering the matter ever since we quarreled. You were right. If we’re gonna fight a war, it should make everybody free, not just some.”

  The compass needle inside me whirled. I could not trust him; he was only being nice so I wouldn’t get him in trouble. I should trust him; his apology was heartfelt. I dared not be his friend, or the friend of any person. But I wanted to be his friend again.

  “I can’t accept your apology if you’re going to be an associate of John Burns,” I finally said.

  “That poxy scoundrel can hang himself!” Eben punched my shoulder so hard, I lost my seat on the log. “How much longer until that pumpkin is ready?”

  When the pumpkin shell had blackened and cracked, I slid my knife under each half and flipped them into the snow, steaming and hissing. It smelled better than gingercake and honey together.

  “We really have to share it with the others, don’t we?” Eben asked in a whisper.

  I sighed. “We do.”

  “Plaguey fopdoodles.” He tossed his poking stick into the flames. “It might be the death of me, you know. If it is, make sure Uncle buys me a nice headstone. Tell him I want these words carved on it: ‘Ebenezer Woodruff died so that others might eat pumpkin.’”

  “A noble sacrifice,” I said in jest.

  “More people should make them,” he said, his tone not jesting one bit.

  CHAPTER XXII

  Friday, December 26–Wednesday, December 31, 1777

  I WAS THERE WHEN THE ARMY FIRST BEGAN TO BUILD HUTS. THEY APPEARED TO ME LIKE A FAMILY OF BEAVERS, EVERYONE BUSY; SOME CARRYING LOGS, OTHERS MUD, AND THE REST PLASTERING THEM TOGETHER. . . IT IS A CURIOUS COLLECTION OF BUILDINGS, IN THE TRUE RUSTIC ORDER.

  —THOMAS PAINE, LETTER TO BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, AMERICAN AMBASSADOR IN FRANCE

  WE SMUGGLED THE PUMPKIN INTO OUR tent just before dawn and told the fellows to eat their share without asking questions. When they caught a good look at Eben’s face, their eyes went wide, but they kept their mouths shut. When they later saw the bloodied lips and a broken tooth of John Burns, a few of them chuckled, but they never said a thing.

  As the roll call was breaking up, we heard an artilleryman say that His Excellency General Washington had served his guests veal, mutton, potatoes, and cabbage for Christmas dinner. They had to drink water like us on account of they had no wine.

  “Didn’t have pumpkin, neither,” Eben whispered to me.

  “He should have invited us,” I said.

  We had another wicked snow after Christmas and day after day of cold. General Washington’s log city grew in haste, inspired by the weather. A company from North Carolina won the prize for finishing first. I figgered it was on account of they weren’t used to the snow the way us from New England were.

  We lagged far behind. One of our axe heads fell apart into three pieces and could not be repaired. After that, Greenlaw left the cutting of the trees to the sergeant and Eben, whilst he stayed at the hut site, using an oversized hatchet, adze, and froe to prepare the logs for stacking into walls.

  The sergeant said that we’d be building hospital huts as soon as all the troops had decent shelter. Until then, the sick and the injured who could survive the journey would be taken to country churches and barns that had been turned into hospitals. Peter Brown had been taken to the Yellow Springs hospital along with two other fellows suffering from the bloody flux. There was no way of knowing if Peter was on the mend or dead.

  By the end of the year, our floor was dug as deep as my hips. It was a mud pit on the bottom, but I promised everyone that the fire would dry it out. (I fervently hoped this was the truth.) Faulkner had taken over the construction of our chimney, and Silvenus appointed himself the dauber of walls, filling in the cracks between the logs with mud, with the assistance of young Benny. The Janack twins were again pulled from our company, this time to go into the countryside with the foraging parties and convince the country people to sell hay, straw, meat, and pretty much anything else to the army. If the folks wouldn’t sell it, the foragers were ordered to take it.

  The foraging parties soon sent back wagons of victuals into camp. Our rations were small, but they came more or less regular. Most morns, we breakfasted on porridge or hardtack. Dinner and supper both were soup made with whatever meat and bones were to hand, some days with beans thrown in. Once we had a turnip, too. When the meat had green bits on it, we’d roast it in the fire first, to deaden the taste, then put it in the pot. Some fellows called it “carrion meat” and said it was only good enough for vultures. If a vulture tried to take my piece, I’d have roasted him, too.

  Snow began to fall from mushroom-colored clouds as I made yet another dreary trip to the woodlot. The walk grew longer every day as the trees required by thousands of huts and fires were felled. Mount Joy would soon be bald, and then we’d have the even longer trudge to Mount Misery. If the ground would have frozen solid, it would h
ave been easier to drag the logs and firewood bundles. But every freeze had been followed by a thaw and the woodlot road was thick with mud that stuck to my boots like cold molasses.

  The crows were not at all happy with the destruction of their homes. I stopped at the edge of the woodlot to catch my breath and watch three of them circle over the busy huddle of men who worked with long saws cutting tree trunks down to hut-building lengths. The crows swooped down and landed one at a time on a low branch to scold the men, cawing and screaming loud as I ever heard them.

  Only . . .

  Someone shouted for the sawing to stop. The men walking out of the woodlot stopped and looked behind them. The birds flew off to the east. The kchop-kchop of axes stopped, and for a moment there was silence.

  Then the screaming started again; not angry crows, but the sound of a man in agony.

  Ebenezer Woodruff burst into the clearing, his hands bright red and dripping.

  “Help!” he shouted. “My uncle! The axe!”

  I ran.

  The sergeant lay screaming a quarter mile into the woodlot. He clutched his ankle, rocking back and forth in the blood-drenched snow, his dripping axe next to him.

  “Oh, God. Oh, God,” I whispered.

  “We can’t make the blood stop!” Eben fell to his knees and wrapped his hands around his uncle’s ankle, but it made no difference.

  A fellow in a hunting shirt and knit cap rushed over, wrapped a length of rope just below the sergeant’s knee, and twisted it hard around a stick so that the rope tightened around the leg. The tide of blood slowed. Sergeant Woodruff gritted his teeth and reduced his screams to groans of agony.

  “I’ll get a doctor!” I ran for the path.

  They gave him a half bottle of rum to drink before they placed him on a litter and carried him the bumpy mile to the closest surgeon’s tent. The doctor had run ahead of the litter and had his own small saw sharpened by the time we arrived. Uncle Sergeant’s anklebone was splintered into too many pieces to heal, and the doctor had to finish the job the axe started. I tried to get Eben to walk away from the doleful sounds made in that tent, but he would not, so I stayed with him.