Monmouth

The gun had walked backwards again. Eli put his shoulder to the wheel and pushed with the others, his feet slipping in the dust. They brought it up to the mark. The gunner crouched behind the breech, sighted, and told them to move it a little to the left.

They had been doing this for an hour, or for the whole afternoon; Eli had stopped being able to tell which. He could not remember arriving on the hill. There had been men coming the other way on the road, without their muskets, who told the artillery as they passed that the army was going back, as though it were news they were handing round for nothing; then an officer had pointed the crew off the road, and they had hauled the piece up here, on the flank of the line, and unlimbered it. Below them the infantry stood behind a hedge, which was all the argument anyone had offered for staying, and they were still there.

He went back to the limber for a cartridge.

The leather of his shoes had split on the march. He had put cord round the left one to hold it together, and now the cord had worked under his heel, so that at every step he trod on the knot. He could mend it if the firing stopped for a minute. It did not stop.

The gun went off while he was at the limber. He felt it in his chest before he heard it, or thought he did; he could hardly hear anything now. The man at the muzzle sponged the bore. Eli waited for his hand to come up before carrying the cartridge forward.

He had learned to wait. At Germantown he had hurried a cartridge forward before the sponge was out, and been shouted at by three men at once; and he had understood that each thing had its right moment, and that the moments came in an order, like the figures in a sum, and could be worked out beforehand by anybody who would stop being frightened long enough to do it. He watched the sponge come out, put the cartridge where he was told, and went clear.

The gunner did not turn round when he spoke. Eli could see the back of his neck, dark red above the shirt. Everybody had taken his coat off. The sun stood over the hill as though it had been posted there, and there was no shade anywhere except under the carriage, where nobody could sit. Lem would have said that a man could fry a mackerel on the wheel rim.

“A little left.”

They moved it. The gunner raised his hand.

---

The old man from the Kennebec brought water in a bucket. Some of it had spilled on the way. They drank in turns, the dipper passing from hand to hand, and Eli had one mouthful and wanted the whole bucket.

“Leave it,” said the old man, watching him look.

“I have.”

“I know.”

He took it down the hill again. Eli watched him go, stooping a little, past two men lying beside the track. They had been there when the crew brought the piece up. One had a shirt over his face now. The other was lying in the same way, with one knee drawn up, and Eli could not see whether he was breathing.

The sergeant called for another cartridge.

At the limber Eli fumbled it. His hands were wet and the cartridge slipped, and he caught it against his belly before it fell. He stood very still. Then he walked back with it held in both hands, as if it were a bowl filled to the brim.

The gunner was sitting on the ground.

At first Eli thought he had sat down to look along the barrel from lower down. He had been doing it all morning, standing and crouching, trying to see through the smoke. But he was beside the trail, with his legs out, and the back of his head against the wood.

The sergeant put down his handspike and went to him.

“Up, now.”

The gunner slid sideways. His face was purple. The sergeant caught his shoulder and held him, and spoke to him again, close to his ear. Eli stood with the cartridge in his hands and watched the man’s eyes. He had never seen eyes like that in a face that had no wound on it.

“Put that down, Wheeler.”

He did not know who had said it. He went back and put the cartridge down. When he returned they had carried the gunner a little way behind the piece and laid him on the ground. The sergeant had loosened his shirt. Another man was holding a hat over his face to shade it.

“Wheeler,” the sergeant said. “Lay her.”

Eli looked at him.

“You can cipher, Wheeler. The captain says so. A gun is a sum with a bang at the end of it, and you’ve watched him do it long enough.”

He had. He had watched the quoin go under the breech, and the gunner’s hands on it, and the way he looked along the barrel. Watching had been something to do while he waited for the next cartridge, and he had not known until the sergeant said it that he had been working a sum the whole time.

He went behind the gun.

---

There was a line of men beyond the hollow. Through the smoke he could see their tall caps and the dark red of their coats, and above them a colour that appeared and disappeared. They were moving towards the hedge. The gunner had been laying on them.

Eli crouched. The breech was hot enough that he took his hand away before touching it. He put it on the quoin instead. More wood under the breech put the muzzle down. Less put it up. He knew that. He had known it for a year, the way he had known his tables, without supposing that anybody would be hurt by his getting one wrong.

He moved it and looked along the barrel. He could see the caps, but the gun pointed to their right.

“Left,” he said.

The men put their hands to the wheels. They moved it too far. He told them back, and the sergeant told him to say how much.

He held his finger and thumb apart.

“That. Not more.”

They moved it. He looked again. The colour had gone into the smoke, but the men were still there, larger now, and moving slowly. He could make out the white across their coats.

He got up and raised his hand. He almost raised it before getting up, and the sergeant caught his sleeve.

“Clear of her.”

He went to the side. The gun fired.

It ran back past the place where he had been crouching. He watched the trail gouge the dust and stop. Then the crew were on the wheels again and the rammer went forward, and the sergeant was asking him what he was waiting for.

He looked for the gunner. The man with the hat had put it over his own head. Nobody was beside the body now.

Eli went back to the breech.

---

After the fourth round he could not see the caps. He could see a shape through the smoke, and he kept laying on that. Sometimes the wind cleared it for a moment and he found that they had moved. He corrected it then. When he could see nothing he asked the sergeant, and the sergeant came behind him and looked, and pointed with the handspike.

He wanted to wipe his eyes. His hands were black. He wiped them on his breeches and made his face worse.

The knot was still under his heel. He had forgotten it while crouching, and remembered it every time they ran the gun forward. Once it felt as if his foot would not go down at all. He made it go down. There were hands on the other wheel, waiting for him to push.

He lost count of the rounds, which he minded more than the heat. He counted the other thing instead, under his breath, as he had counted the common step in the mud at Valley Forge: the piece back to its mark, the vent stopped while the bore was sponged, the cartridge waiting until the sponge was out. It came to about the same number every time, which was a comfort, because it meant that the crew worked as a clock works. He watched for all of it, not yet trusting himself to leave any of it to the others. The sergeant told him to look to his own work, and he looked along the barrel again.

At some time in the afternoon General Washington rode behind the guns with his hat in his hand. The men cheered him. Eli cheered too, though he had not meant to, and found that his throat hurt and his mouth was full of dust. By the time he turned back the smoke had closed over the hollow.

The old man came up with water again. This time he put the dipper into Eli’s hand himself and told him to drink before he spilled it. Eli drank and gave it back. He could feel the water go down into him, cold for a moment, and then he was thirsty again.

“Are they going back?” he asked.

“Look.”

He looked. They had gone back from the hedge. He could not tell how far, or whether they would come again.

---

When the light began to go, the firing stopped. There was still firing elsewhere, to their left, then further off. Nobody came to tell them what it meant. The sergeant kept them by the piece.

Eli sat down beside the wheel. He wanted to take off his shoes but thought that if he did he might not get them on again. He pulled the cord round until the knot was on top. There was a groove in his foot where it had been.

Below the hill the infantry had come out from the hedge. Men were walking across the hollow. Eli watched one of them stop and kneel, and wished he would get up.

The old man sat beside him. For a while neither spoke.

“She went off well enough,” he said at last.

Eli looked at the wheel. There was a splinter missing from a spoke, white against the old wood. He put his thumb on it and took it away.

“I couldn’t see, towards the end.”

“Nobody could.”

He did not know whether he had hit any of them. He had laid the gun on a shape for the better part of an hour, and the shape had stopped coming, and whether that was his doing, or the gun on his left, or only the heat, was a sum with too many figures missing to be worked. He did not like to think that he had hit them, and he found that he did not like to think that he had not, since that would mean an afternoon spent making a noise; so he put the question away on the same shelf as the ditch at Kip’s Bay, unsettled.

He had meant to ask the old man whether he ever minded it. That would have meant telling him about New York, and he was too tired to begin. He leaned his head against the wheel and shut his eyes.

In a little while the sergeant came and told them to help with the gunner. They took him down the hill between them. Eli had hold of his feet. One shoe was still on; the other had fallen off when they lifted him, and the old man picked it up and carried it under his arm.