The Looting of Washington City - Part Two
The British had set Washington aflame. It was a fine time to be a teenage looter -- as long as you didn't come across a British soldier with the same idea. When the soldier found Paul in a house that was not his, he offered the ambitious young reprobate the chance to join him on a real money-making venture. Paul followed him out the door and into the chaotic streets.
Paul was fourteen, thin and pimpled, dressed in a patched and soiled wool coat and trousers that his legs had outgrown, showing his bare ankles. The previous fall his mother had vomited thin green bile for a week and died. When the weather had warmed into spring, a lack of funds had caused Paul to abandon the rented room in Baltimore where he had lived with his mother. He came to Washington City because had heard employment was available, and for a time he worked odd jobs. But he became peripherally involved in a fight between a miserly cooper and several assistants employed to fashion barrel staves, and when the cooper lay bleeding on the ground with an adze in his shoulder, Paul had slipped away.
Since then he had been wandering among the surrounding villages. The previous afternoon, when the fighting broke out in the hills near Bladensburg, he had followed the sounds of musketry and watched from a distance as the Americans broke ranks and fled. The British had gathered only those of their own dead that they could find readily, then set away toward Washington. Paul had been impressed by their discipline: they formed into columns and marched and bugled as if on a parade through the streets of London, not the hot, humid, muddy roads and swamps of Maryland. He scavenged for a time among the bodies felled by shot and cannon; he felt no revulsion at the dead, and had quickly acquired two very intricate silver snuff boxes, a gold ring, and, most splendidly, two pieces of Spanish bullion -- taken from one of the British dressed, confusingly, in a blue coat. Soon, though, the scavengers moving between the bodies had grown numerous, jealous, and surly, so Paul had moved on.
Now, in the streets of Washington, the fires were flaring in marigold colors. Paul's foot slipped in a fresh horse dropping. The ugly soldier was silent and a little ahead of Paul, and Paul followed, curious, not entirely certain that he wasn't actually being arrested. But the ugly soldier seemed preoccupied, and gradually Paul grew confident. A man walked down the center of the street with a small lamb under each arm, and another moved through the shadows with an armoire precarious on a wheelbarrow. A crash of glass rang from a nearby house. There was the report of a distant solitary gunshot. Even in the morning sun the light of the fires was fierce and steady.
The ugly soldier said, "It's rather like when we burned San Sebastian during the Spanish Campaign."
Paul, recalling the Spanish bullion in his pocket, said nothing.
"But Washington City," said the ugly soldier, "is hardly a city. It is a village, at most. Rather pathetic, really."
"I like it," Paul retorted, feeling suddenly, defensively patriotic.
"I do too," said the ugly soldier. "There is much to do here, possibilities, opportunities. Everything burned will have to be rebuilt. There will be expansion. A new nation, growing, growing. Not like old England, stale as a sea biscuit." He looked round with a smile of benevolence. "Yes, there is a future to be found here."
They passed the Capitol, its two large sandstone wings still smoking and flickering with flames that reached out the windows and blackened upward. The wings had been connected by a temporary covered wooden bridge which now lay in heaps of char. Chalking on a low wall nearby said, "JAMES MADISON IS A RASCAL, A COWARD, AND A FOOL." They moved through back lawns parallel to Pennsylvania Avenue, and when a squad of British in green plumed shako hats came into view marching down Pennsylvania, the ugly soldier hid in the shadow of a doorway. Paul stood by, watched the British go past, watched the ugly soldier come out again.
They walked on, and after a moment Paul said, "You've deserted."
"Pah," said the ugly soldier. But he pulled his lips away from his buck teeth in a hideous grin.
Finally the ugly soldier stopped and pointed at a four-story building with white columns across the front. A number of British soldiers and officers were milling around the columns. "Blodgett's Hotel," said the ugly soldier. "Do you know what's inside?"
"That's the Patent Office."
"Yes. Something good will be there, which I can take and set up myself a living with." He glared hard at Paul, as if Paul had laughed at him. "Better a good living for the rest of my life than a few coins spent by the end of the month. I always was useful with my hands. There will be something." He raised his hands and gestured in a complicated weaving motion. "For example, a mechanical loom, or a better lantern or plow. I could use a plow, but it would be better if I could use the idea and manufacture such plows and sell them. A man with a good idea can be a rich man. And it really does not matter where you might have obtained the idea. Possibly I will take it back to England, and you can use it here in the United States of America. An improved formulation for paint, for example. Or a clever sort of device for the sharpening of knives or scissors. A horseless conveyance of some type." He faltered and gazed at the hotel a minute, then suddenly resumed: "That might be all that is needed to live very nicely the rest of one's years." He smiled happily. "You will help me carry away what I need, and anything else is yours. Possibly we will go into business together."
For several minutes they watched the British gathered in front of the hotel. Paul said, "I believe they're going to burn it." The ugly soldier said nothing. There were a couple of Americans mixed in with the British and a discussion was on-going. Minutes passed. More British officers, bearing sword and epaulets, arrived and joined the disputations. The ugly soldier lingered skittishly behind a porch, peering over the rails.
The British and the Americans went on arguing, went into the hotel and came out again. It all seemed foolish to Paul, so it was a relief when the ugly soldier turned away abruptly. "I need to think over this," he said. "Where can we get something to drink? To clear my head?"
They moved away and down the street. The ugly soldier wandered into an alley, tried some doors, and discovered an unlocked servants' door. Paul followed him inside. Like an offered blessing, two open bottles of wine lay spilled on the table in the kitchen. The ugly soldier seized one bottle and drank the remnants. He coughed and slammed the bottle down. "Badly made wine is a vicious fluid," he said.
Paul picked up the other bottle, but it was empty. "You drank it all," he complained.
"Where do they print the money?" the ugly soldier asked. "Those are what we want. The presses. Or not the presses but the dies." He swung the empty wine bottle loosely in his hand. "Along with some ink and paper stock. Even if they change money, they will still have to honor the old for a time. Make our own money. But we must be quick. If the officers find the presses, they will destroy them and burn the whole place to the ground."
"If they've gotten to the Patent Office, surely they've already been to the Treasury."
"You're probably right." The ugly soldier brooded. "If we could steal all the clocks, people will pay us to tell them what time it is."
"And the watches and sundials."
"Yes, those too."
Paul snickered. The ugly soldier turned on him a mournful look, which, with the buck teeth, looked strange and awful.
"You're American, are you not?" asked the ugly soldier. "You're supposed to be a frontier entrepreneur. You're supposed to be resourceful, are you not?"
But Paul had grown up post-Revolution and had always been American with no idea that an American was supposed to be anything. He had been nowhere else, and to him America was everything. Attempting to placate the ugly soldier, Paul said, "We might go to some of the houses that have burned and gather the nails out of the ashes."
In a cupboard they found food and a couple more bottles of wine and passed some hours drinking and discussing in this fashion. By late afternoon both were exhausted, and they went into separate bedrooms on the second floor. Paul's bed was small, forcing him to curl his legs.
In his sleep he was bothered by the face of his mother. She looked down on him from the greatest possible heights, and he wished he could earn her pride, but in himself knew he never would. His mother was uncompromising, and life was too hard. When it offered certain chances, he could not turn from them.
After a few hours of worthless sleep, he got up and wandered about the room.
She had punished him if he failed to stand when addressed; if he said I have heard this before; if he sniggered; if he forgot to remove his hat when entering a doorway; if he failed to bow to a stranger; if he made what she called antic postures. Forbidden were nicknames, ugly faces, pointing, lying, jeering, or wicked assertions. Sometimes in punishment a branch was cut and split at one end, then pinched over his nose and left hanging. Sometimes he was struck about the head with a heavy thimble. Sometimes he had to sit for hours on a one-legged stool. Sometimes, if he had been surly, a wooden rod was tied into his mouth like a horse's bit. He never knew his father, and he hated his mother. Then she died, and he cried for days, and he would have turned a knife in his own guts to have her back.
