Where

Where

By John Rogan

Nobody bothered me down at the docks, especially any high and mighty land owning Tory, but I left Ireland after I juiced one so bad his head cracked open. I didn’t stick around to figure what happened to the guy, but he was not alright. He was an old Protestant type, his family hand-picked by the King or the Duke from Glasgow or Edinburgh. I don’t know if it’s the way I look at things, how I act, or just how life goes but no king or duke ever hand-picked me to go anywhere I would have liked to go. So this Prod starts making fun of my family that had to move out of our place and build a smaller one down the road, although it was winter then so we had to stay with the Days until winter passed and we could build more than the foundation with nothing but wet thatch around. So there’s no room for me at the Days so I spend my time down at the pub and this Prod keeps walking in and he must have asked someone my name because he comes lighting right after me one night all sweaty with drink. “How’s your family making out?” he says all dumb, drunk and little kid- like. Now mind you some cousins of his had comfortably moved into my old place without having to build, mortar or thatch a thing. And there all six of us down with the five of the Days all clustered in that little hut so no one can move. It’s the middle of winter. I’m scraping by begging for half-days down at the tannery whipping cowhides and having enough to eat, a couple pints then the rest goes down to my family and the Days. So I got all this on me. It’s cold out and I got nowhere to stay. I drink until I have to walk home and sleep on the cold crack floor next to my two sisters. Ma’s taking care of the new baby. And so this Prod starts yanking me about his big plantation and all sweaty and drunk how well he’s making out. Just saying it all matter-of-fact like it’s the weather and he knows it’s me, the man of the family who’s land he gave to his cousins. Because they were born in the right religion and I was born in the wrong. Well I never was into Kings and priests, nor people who are not kings and priests acting like they are ones. He’s telling me about all the sheep, the money, the employees under him. He keeps sayin under him. He’s turning really trying for my dander now he even says the McCormicks, my family, are now under him with the Days. Everyone, the whole county is under him.  Now I’m staring at him like did you just say my family’s name? And he stands there all getting nervous acting like I ought to be used to it by now. So I grabbed his pecker and lead him outside. Man you should have seen everyone woopin and Prods getting nervous and running to the next pub. So we get the old boxing going. He’s kind of crying from being grabbed from his pecker, but he’s not going to run and cry. So he stands and cries. It was a tough winter and I can be one mean asshole. So he ends up on the ground all pleading and everything and I suppose it was just the winter and my family all tossed out like that, but I guess I gave him a couple boots over the top. Cause when all the fighting ended he was heaving and breathing something heavy and odd.

So not even sayin bye to my family, My Ma, Dad, my two younger sisters, my new brother I ride up to Belfast. I thought constables could be at the Days and I could not stand to be carried away by some uniform wearing Tories with my kin watching on. I still miss them very so. From Belfast I go to Liverpool and from Liverpool over to New York City. After months puking in the dark of a ship tossing in the Atlanic waves I arrive in the port. I seen Sarah eating her lunch outside the Custom’s house on the 2nd day I start working down at the docks not knowing a soul in the world I could speak to without being jailed. She was eating a cheese and Tomato sandwich. And I say to her picking up on the cheese. “Now what brings a refined, educated woman like yourself down here among all these savages.” Turning red and chewing her sandwich she put on this little face like she was trying to talk but did not want me to see her chewing and pointing towards the Custom House she says her Uncle got her a job there. That really she’s never been to the city before last week and she never met no one Irish before.

Independence comes through and I was happy with just way things had been. But things got like back home all riled up again. I see Sarah on Sundays and afternoons and nights and a couple times when it’s nice we have picnics and I tell her about my family back home in Ireland, my Ma, Dad, two sisters and the young one I never really got to know. Not like I know the rest of them now. She tells me all about how boring her little town is and how her brothers in the Army and her Dad runs ships out of the harbor, but she says she lives deep in the woods in Binghamton, New York but she says it’s more like the wilderness it being so far out and resting next to all the woods and Indians in Pennsylvania. Her hair is in these dark, brown almost black little curls that run all the way down her back. We lay together in the warm grass and I never thought I’d be so happy after everything having been so bad and so lonesome for so long. She makes me these little sandwiches whenever we go for the picnics out in the big fields in Brooklyn Heights or Harlem. At night we’d walk through the markets and she’d buy crackers and jelly and we would sneak back into my rooming house and eat crackers, laugh, and be happy. After a time we kissed and I asked her to marry. But she knew her Father wouldn’t have it as much as Jesus was having Lucifer. I got mad then understood when her face got all drawn like she was in a real tough spot here. So I let her go. She went back to Binghamton to the Woods, her parents and the fleeing Indians.

That native scream the boys down at the Red Lion talk about stated to echo through my head when I slept. I’d wake up all drenched with stinky-sweat thinking of some brown wild man draggin her off into some thick woods. I would think about her looking up smiling then resting her head in my chest real simple and easy like it was a relief to rest on me more than just resting her chin but everything that couldn’t be figured out made sense resting there with me. It was sunny and nice on our picnics and when it wasn’t we’d sit around my grubby sailor’s boarder house talking about how different or backgrounds were but at the same time realizing they weren’t so different from two people just landing in the world and trying to figure things out now they got an assigned name, religion and place. We spoke mainly about how to react. What was the right way to react to so many different tough situations? We would come to some consensus: “No, no that will get you nowhere”, and “no, you can’t fool them that way”, or “aye, It’ll cause no big row to go and do that”. Just two people gauging between one another how to best respond to all the pressures flying at us.

So Sarah’s back in Binghamton not long now and I’m having a pint down at the Red Lion. And we hear the old conservatives are scattering about town getting their British flags ready for the pole and the parade. Maybe it was me working less and having to idle around the Red Lion. But we started firing at some redcoats we seen picking watermelons out of the patch that belonged to Sam Entwisle. They were ripping off his melons he’d grown all year because he didn’t pay no extra taxes to people who did no work for him. So we start firing at these dandies in red. I felt invigorated in a way not since I seen Sarah off. Now we keep drinking and firing through the afternoon until Grant comes up with whole hell of more than we got and so we’re firing at them keeping them off. Balls clipping the branches and the corner of an old pig sty I’m firing from. They wasn’t much of us so we could only do so much and we took off running down the Gowanus Road.

We run for a little bit then some fellas who fought the Indians and the French and know what they was doin  start telling us to stop running and form up. We go back down to the Red Lion with some real like soldiers now not just regular fellas with rifles like me. That morning come up all dewy, wet and overgrown like late August. And we all formed up with real soldiers and the Brits coming at us all formed and everybody crashing with their guns and smoke for hours. Then them vicious Germans come in their pointy hats and before we realize how many more of them is in front of us we start getting fired at from the back. Some Fellas I knew all bloody messes from the shots. So this all was more than me and some of the boys had anticipated stopping off at the Red Lion for a pint, so we’re all running up the road and when the road is too full we’re sloppin rearwards in the water and the mud of the Gowanus marsh praying a ball does not catch us in the back before we can get back to the defenses in Brooklyn.

The Continental forces are pulling out of New York now. It’s unsafe for me to go down to the docks to find work. Just like back home with Mom and Dad driven out again. It was frustrating. Enraging even, but I just kept on with myself. I hear all about The Continentals all fighting Iroquois and Brits out of New York and into Pennsylvania. I hear about Newtown, but I don’t know where that is to Binghamton. So I just have to wonder. If Sarah is okay. If she still eats jelly and crackers if I’m not eating them with her. If she married someone else.  How her hair smelt like flowers and perfume during our sunny picnics. If she is alive. If she can rest all care-free the way I’d seen her with me. If the Tories burnt her house down and while she was running out some Iroquois snatched her up into the woods. Sarah crying and bellowing as the Iroquois rode away with her through the branches her figure getting smaller and more desperate on the back of the horse before never being seen by civilized man again. So I head to Boston looking for work and end up taking a caravan out to Vermont. Me and couple brothers been working a quarry and granite catches a good sum if we dig it up and get it back to the city.

I don’t know if it’s the way I look at things, how I act, or just how life goes. But I do a couple months of good work hauling slabs of rock down through those thick Green mountains. Me and the guy I work for are all buddies with all these fellas establishing Vermont as a real American state and not just some place Tories and French can come and go as they please. The fella I worked for was Eli Brownson and sitting around and drinking with him we got talking about personal freedom, rights, equality All this high-flying stuff he made sound like it could be down right down here on the ground. With no land-owners kicking people this way and that. He kept hauling slabs back to Boston getting less money per pound each time. No one’s building anything but cannons and Mini-balls while there is a war on. Especially, no fine courthouses or government buildings because no one knows who the right person is to live in them.

So me and Eli sitting around with his brothers drinking and telling stories cursing out the Brits. His nice wife matched me up with his sister Margaret. I start carrying on with Margaret. Still thinking of Sarah and all those sunny picnics, but Margaret is here and Sarah is I don’t know where. Sarah starts fading, when Margaret got this real sharp eye. Not all refined like Sarah, but like she been on her own awhile and real savvy about it. Her thick brown hair would curl up and stand on end like she was thinking hard or crazy or both. She was tough but pretty with her long delicate arms and thin fingers. She’ll call you on something and she’s right too then she get’s all feisty about it. In moments I would see how we were similar like we came up the same way or something. She understood a lot of things without me saying them. When I’d be all hollering or upset on something unimportant She would just curl up and wrap her long,thin arms around me, smile just smirked up, then lean in and nuzzle my neck and shoulder.  It’s just been so long since I had some kind of family. Margaret had no one taking care of her and no one was taking care of me, so I guess that’s how we start to care for each other. We was around each other all the time and it’s not long before people whispering about Marriage and I’m standing there in front of the priest sweatin nervous, but happy, smiling like a kid who don’t know how to do anything else and wondering how the hell I got myself to standing in this here church.

We’d go to dinners at her Uncle Ethan Allen’s. We’d look over all the British fortifications and whistle about sayin look what Ethan and his boys got for themselves. Ethan ran things in that part of Vermont at that time and Margaret was his wife’s sister. He talking all friendly to me at a dinner at his house outside Ticonderoga. We talking about the Brits trying to come back in and kick us out. I told him my story about being kicked every which way by the old cockney bastards. He was all upset about Lake Champlain and Arnold’s fleet getting kicked out. But the Tories could not hold onto the Lake he said they were weak. “They act and look strong but they flimsy.” He would say.

Spring come on and we spent most of the time getting paid by the Continental Army building brick and mortar walls in defensive positions in Ticonderoga. During that cold-ass winter we built a giant bridge along the ice to connect all the forts we built on Mount Independence with Ticonderoga on the other side. So I just trying to find honest work keep getting in bed with these Revolutionaries. It’s alright we think the same. I don’t believe it makes no sense to be ordered around by anyone you don’t want to be ordered around by. And if they don’t want to stop ordering ya or levying taxes or whatever the one doing the ordering has gotta go. If they want to do it peacefully or not is up to them. I’ll kill a man making me do something I do not want to. And we all have this attitude. All of us sitting around reading Thomas Paine. Margaret’s smiling at me from the campfire as I’m singing songs with Ethan Allen and the Brownsons about sending the British home. So I got a nice place now with Margaret and I love her more now than when I married her. Something about someone returning, being there for you for some length of time, faithful, reliant, and loyal. That’s what Margaret was loyal. And no one ever stuck by me like she had bringing me into her family and all. She goes around saying nice things and her family is glad I’m happy and her family is glad I’m making her happy. Settling into our nice soft, bed made from British wood seized at Ticonderoga over that long, cold winter it seemed like everything was falling together. Sleeping all warm with her around me every night. I was really becoming part of things around here. We welcomed in the New Year in a big fancy party with British officer plates and everything at Fort Ticonderoga with Ethan Allen, the Brownsons and Benedict Arnold. 1777 came rolling in with friends, warm fires and me and Margaret kissing something sincere and sweet to each other.

So I keep taking work bulking up defenses on Mount Independence and getting credit for food and housing from the Continental Army. Margaret starts ballooning up in May and we announce it to her family. Woman start bowing themselves in the Street when me and Margaret doing shopping in the Markets outside Ticonderoga. People start calling me Sir. I hope it’s a boy, but I be just as happy as a girl with as much stout as Margaret.

Now what makes Margaret’s mind so active and sharp can make it hassled and mean. And that’s the way she start getting when Burgoynes army start moving out once all the snow melt away. We ain’t seen them around Ticonderoga until around June. Margaret stressing and stressing about the Brits as she getting bigger than a house. And I keep calming her down like back when we first met and she go from upset to happy just because I say a couple words. I tell her everything will be fine and that I will always be there to protect her through no matter what. She gets all red and stops stressing and rests her head on my shoulder all peaceful like she knows it will be. Then July roll around and Burgoyne down right around the fort. We move Margaret down to Bennigton. She all upset thinking the baby is gonna get bounced dead. And she keep getting more and more upset and I’m saying goodbye to her down in Bennington because I gotta get back up and help the boys around Ticonderoga. She crying and I telling her It’d be all right. I’ll be back soon, just got to take care of the Brits movin into our old home. So she crying and me wantin to cry, but I leave looking all strong, although I don’t feel so strong leaving Margaret there alone in the bed. I start riding and get out to Rutland before I hear everyone high-tailing it out of Ticonderoga and the Champlain valley. The had got cannons pointed right down on her overnight, so aside from all the high talk I  always heard about fighting Brits everyone turn tail and run.  I joined up with some boys holding them off at Hubbardton. I crouched behind a big glacier stone and alternating two rifles I keep firing at them Red Bastards all formed up while other fellas from the Continental Army and The Green Mountain Boys take off running. We burn down some warehouses with all the corn and grain in them. Heading back down to Bennington Burgoyne decides he gonna head south with me. All I think is he trying to get at My Margaret. So we chop down trees along the road, big ones on top of one another. “This ain’t your country, Burgoyne should have stuck to staying in old Sutton!” we yelling as the trees coming down. We burning fields of big juicy corn after taking what we could for oursleves. Burgoyne’s scouts get stuck in all the mud coming off the melted snow on the mountains. One day I knock a scout clean off his horse outside Lake George. All red and silver glinting on the ground. Blood coming out the young fella’s mouth. Not much older than me. He hurt so bad he don’t know where he is so I bring him to God for him. A shot right between the eyes like we done to hurting horses. Looking at his bleeding skull and his nice uniform I wondered how everything got so messed up. If I was playing the right part.

I head the flanking party outside Bennington against the Hessians. We put little pieces of paper in our hats like we heard they was telling the Germans the way loyalists do. They be looking with their big Franco noses and taking no shots and we was right up on them firing like a thunder storm right over head. One big bastard screeching that awful language gets me all wrapped up as we’re moving up the end and I’m beating him pulpy with an empty rifle I found on the ground and his filthy language get less sharp and coarse and he fades away into skull fragments and brain stew. We follow up the line me screamin and running like a demon. Ripping powder from my teeth and firing just as soon as the musket is primed. Thinking if they get through these lines they get to Margaret. Burgoyne realized it was up and he done take off running for Saratoga. When I seen Burgoyne’s men pull away I was happier than when I last seen Margaret.

I beat this private from the Continentals from Connecticut into tears bragging about seein action. I’m hitting the private talking about action and killing Redcoats and everyone tellin me to calm down that there’s something wrong with me, I been on the road too long, burning, chopping and shooting. What this kid know about losing people, taking lives, being run all over by Redcoats? I guess I felt he just had to walk back down to Connecticut to have his kin hug him and all. And around the fellas I start balling thinking of my two sisters and how old they is now with boyfriends and them telling the boyfriends about their older brother they never seen again. And my brother up walking somewhere wondering where his brother is and finding no better answer than the doubt that follows him everywhere and every time he asks that question. My folks falling asleep heartbroken with little tears at the corner of their eyes wonderin where. People at church askin and whispering that his family don’t even know where. I think of Sarah and the nice husband her father found for her down in Binghamton and them sitting all happy in front of a sunset on their porch. And Sarah thinking of me a moment then thinking she don’t know where then I pass out of her head. And with my child on the way I abandoned Margaret. Leaving her to her bed and the endless hours alone. It was all settled happy and safe with a family and me the smiling father and it’s all ripped away like now.  Run here and run there. I don’t even know what town I’m in. I’m not sure if I’m in New York or Vermont and the Brits saying none of those places is places to begin with.

Unlike the Continentals I have more free agency and my worth was proved in the two months after Ticonderoga fell. I was at the front of the firing line outside Bennington coming up along them Hessians like we was the Devil’s conscience. I went wherever Burgoyne was going and burnt crops and collapsed bridges and chased off red scouts. After I slapped the Private and done crying like a baby-girl in front of the Continentals my C.O. gave me leave for Bennington to go check on Margaret and collect myself. I get in to Bennington and it’s the first cool day in September when you can feel Autumn and Winter trying to poke in. I had heard of Brits bleedin heavy down at Freedman’s Farm. And I was happier than I had been in the last two months since I last saw Margaret. I miss the smell of her hair and her body and her mouth smartin up to just beneath a smile before she kisses me like an embarrassed little girl. She may have had the kid. Either that or she was big as a Moose. Either way I welcomed the warm relief that would flow out between us. No matter how bad a mood we both been turned into in the last two months it would wash away like when I see her face and she see mine and her soft voice comes lilting out and we touch like spring sunlight after a long, dark winter.

And just like that I’m like my parents, my sisters, and my brother in town. All people avoiding me an whispering when I walk in somewhere. Me trying to find out information and people keep turning and telling me to go ask this other person. I’m getting all heated on the Market Street with every one giving me the run around when I thought I was done running around. And I’m yelling at this older feller dodging my questions this way and that and I can tell he knows something. While my blood is still up and I’m grilling this old fella real mean, and while I’m all red in the face and yelling at this guy I think how the boys giving me leave back at camp were right. They something not right. There a pit of pain in the bottom of my stomach all the time in the morning when I wake up and at night before I go to sleep. A pain that switches to different parts of my stomach and only really feels good when I’m mad screaming, yelling, hitting, shooting or burning. So I turn around and all Margaret’s sisters standing in a line, but no Margaret, and I figure she just laying up somewhere with the baby or about to have him or her. I had been thinking of names something biblical and battle-like maybe old-time Israel heroes like Rachel or David. To show my offspring is true fighters like my whole life been. Then her sister says how she bleed out. Then I see the priest and the pain in my stomach starting crawling up my throat and I start shaking. “We tried getting word out” voices start saying. “We sent messengers all up and down, no one could find you.” “We thought you may be kilt at Hubbardton.”, “God bless.”, “She went bravely”, “We tried to find you, but we couldn’t find where.”, “The baby came out small and not breathing and she lost a lot of blood.”, “We had all the doctors.” “But they couldn’t do nothing.” “She’s with the lord now.” I grab the neck of this priest in my face saying “where that!? Where’s the lord!” Foaming at the mouth other men showed up coming to hold me back. The priest retreating scared, but understanding. And me standing in the street foaming and cursing and screaming yelling at the other fellas like they had the answer but I knew like all the other people Ma, Dad, My sisters, my brother, Sarah I wanted to ask where they were and no one had a better answer than silence. “Where is she!” I kept yelling until the fire in my stomach pulsated throughout my limbs, my eyes glazed over crazy, spit stuck to the side of my mouth and after a bunch of fellas holding me and not trying to hit me and me asking the fellas around “Where is she?” And them shaking their heads at me like no one knew and they never seen something so awful as a man who doesn’t know where the people he loves are.