Chapter 2: Scouting & Willy

When I awoke the next morning my long-unemployed member was rock hard as it often was at day-break, and I looked over at the girl who quietly slept beside me, her light-brown, blood-stained hair spread across the quilt, face almost child-like except for the swollen eye. My body wanted her bad, ached to have her, to have a woman. I pulled on my boots and went out to the river bank and pissed, relieving some of the pressure. The ankle-deep snow had stopped falling and there were no signs that we had pulled three bloody bodies from the cabin and rolled them down the hill. The low, dark sky promised more snow or sleet or rain. We had had all three recently. The river flowed on by, cold and gray, uncaring and full of ice sheets and big chunks that turned over and over.

Susan was stirring up the fire when I got back. "You're the first man I ever slept with that left me alone, since I was about twelve," she said. "Thank you." She smiled and went out to the necessary in the back to take care of her needs. I put a couple more pieces of split wood on the fire and thought about her, wondered how old she was among other things. Thought about staying right there till the war was over.

We ate greasy corn dodgers and fried sausage, drank what she called coffee. She agreed to go into town while I scouted out a back road that Washington and Greene hoped would take a large group of men to the far side of Trenton. Other men in my small company were looking at the bridges and fords south of town. She said she knew some people who should have good information, shopkeepers mostly, some tavern folk including a girl friend of hers, and said she would find out what I wanted to know. I said, "Be careful," and we both left, puffing clouds of breath into the morning air and leaving the cabin door wide open, hoping some of the blood and death smell would ease out.

After spending most of the day avoiding pickets and diving behind trees every time I heard a horse's bit-chain jangle, I found the back road and walked about four miles along it before turning back toward the river. Except for the Germans, Trenton seemed to be pretty much deserted. My fellow scouts had found that most people had left two or three weeks before, under pressure from the occupiers who wanted their houses as well as their daughters and whisky.

It was not much of a trail that I found. The Pennington road was rocky, pot-holed, two-tracked and middle-humped, but it would do if we did not try to take it more than two abreast. I thought about the poor men who had no shoes. Even though the German boots I was wearing were much better than the shoes I had left behind, my feet were frozen by the time I saw the small cabin again. Smoke curled from the chimney in the fading light and only one smallish set of footprints led inward.

The latch-string was out so I went on in without knocking and set my musket by the door. She had found a skinny piece of wood to replace the pin I had broken. Susan was sitting at the blood-stained table sewing on her torn skirt, dressed only in her oversized winter coat, her legs folded up under her. She had washed most of the blood out of her hair and tied it back like mine was. Her shift and stockings, also washed, hung over the back of a chair near the fire where an iron pot that smelled like stew bubbled happily.

She smiled at me as I pulled off my boots and worn stockings and went to stand near the fireplace.

"How'd you do?" I asked her while I thawed.

"Six brass cannon, a thousand men in three different companies and no forts," she said. "How's that?"

"Damn!" I said. "That's good. You trust the folks you talked to?"

She nodded and bit her thread, put the skirt on the chair back and took her torn and stained shift to her lap. I guess she washed it and herself in melted snow. "There's some extra stockings in the basket, hep' yourself," she said. "I suppose you know most folks has left, but one old woman said she thought Christmas would be a good time to hit them. Germans are likely to drink, whore and game all day, she said, celebrating. I think she was from over there, a redemptioner maybe, hard to understand. It's less than a week, three or four days isn't it?"

"That's good to know. I found the back road I went lookin' for." I did not tell her that I had already heard Christmas as a possible date for an attack, but I knew it had to be before the first of the year when more men would be leaving the shrinking army. It is hard to get always-hungry, seldom-paid men to re-enlist in a losing effort. I did wonder how come she had a bunch of rolled up men's stockings.

"Will you really do it, attack them right here?" she asked without looking up. "Soon?"

"I think so," I said, trying to sound like I thought it was a good idea when I did not. "That stew ready?" The smell had spit running in my mouth.

She nodded. "Bowls are by the fender. It's rabbit and turnip. I've got some snares in the woods out back.

I dished up two bowls and brought them to the table, found some pewter spoons in a jar and set to eating while she finished sewing her shift back together. After a bit I refilled my bowl, and she ate her stew. We shared what was left of the dead Germans' dark bread and red wine.

"Been thinking," she said, looking up at me with her one good eye. "'Bout last night."

"You was in no shape to be swiving," I said since that was what I had at least part of my mind on since I woke up rigid as a nail rod. "But I thought about it some, off and on today, helped keep me warm." I tried a grin on her.

"Still, I was surprised. I ain't had a man I wanted to have for more'n a year, not that I was wanting you, understand, then it was just boys really, playing, old friends, 'fore I wed. I don't even think about these Hessian's poking me. Can't be helped, can it? They's ravishing every woman they find, the brutes, even young girls an' ole wimmen ain't safe. My husband, that stupid piss ant, he stopped trying a month after we was wed. Too much work, I guess. I only married him to get away from my randy uncle and his grubby-handed boys. I kept wakin' with somebody in my bed that hadn't been there when I closed my eyes. My paw and ma died years back, typhoid."

I did not know what to say, so I did not say anything but put my mind to eating and mopped out my bowl with a piece of bread trying not to picture the soft body under the heavy coat, the puff-ball breasts with their rose-bud nipples.

"You have women over there?" she asked, nodding her head toward the river.

"Some," I said, "camp followers, washer women and the like, a few trollops, I suppose; some do it for a shilling or two, various ways, lots jes' in their hands. Officers' wives live with them, some of them do, so they tell me. I ain't seen any. If Miz Washington's over there, I'd be real surprised."

"How long's it been for you?" she said, licking her thumb and looking right at me with that green eye, showing me her small, white teeth in a good smile. Her other eye was an ugly reddish-blue, purplish-green, swollen tight shut. She wiped her stew-shiny lips with her knuckle and raised an eyebrow.

"What's wrong with your husband, other'n he's a cockless Tory?" I asked, avoiding the question but trying to count the months gone by after I bedded that skinny bar maid. It had not been many and just the five-fingered widow except for that fat woman the lieutenant caught me with at White Plains and would not let me finish, fact, I think he galloped her for me. Maybe there was another around Hackensack somewhere, very briefly, one or two, just a roll in the hay during one of many retreats. And there were some others, just casual sort of, spur of the moment things, and, of course, those stories in my head, the ones that helped me sleep.

Chapter 3 »