Рита Браун - Tall Tail

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.”

Friday, August 12, 2016

“I’ve put three hundred miles on this car in three weeks. That’s the bugger about living out in the country. It’s twelve miles to go buy a tomato.” Harry looked down at the odometer on her Volvo station wagon, now reading 199,062.

“You don’t have to go twelve miles. Walk in the backyard.” Cooper noticed the sign for Zion Crossroads as they passed it, heading east on Interstate 64.

“True. I’m so glad you got an unexpected day off and Friday, too. I’ve been dying to go to Ledbury’s and it’s one thing after another. Haven’t been able to get to it.”

In downtown old Richmond, Ledbury’s was a relatively new men’s clothier, specializing in shirts designed by the owners. Harry wanted to buy a fancy shirt for Fair.

“It’s so quiet in the car without the animals,” Cooper remarked.

“I fear opening the door when I return home. Revenge.” Harry had considerable experience with feline payback.

“Hey, I looked at your new website. That was up fast. What did you think of working with Rae Tait? We watched those video outtakes together, but I never asked you how it was working with Crozet Media.”

“Good. I don’t have much to compare it to, but I thought she was organized, creative, and careful about the money. She finished early and under budget. Now, there’s a rare experience.”

“We still have no idea who broke into the office,” said Cooper. “Granted, it’s not number one on the burner as nothing of value was lifted. Still, it irritates me.”