“Fear of this,” I choked, and touched my cheeks. “Fear of breaking. Of weeping. Of grieving. There is a lifetime of grief inside me. It is in my chest and in my belly. It is in my head and in my arms. My legs ache with it. My feet too. It is beneath my skin and in my blood, and I can’t . . . hold . . . anymore.”
“Oh, Samson,” he whispered.
He moved to my side and stroked my hair and dried my cheeks, though he was the one who was wounded. I tried once to rise, and he pressed me back down and brought me the canteen I’d filled for him.
I drank and cried, and drank again, but he did not leave me, and when the shuddering stopped and my chest was emptied, he moved his pallet close to mine and stretched out on his side, his chest to my back, and pulled me close, cocooning me with his body.
“Are you in much pain, sir?” I whispered, so weary I could not lift my head.
“Shh. I’m fine. Sleep,” he murmured. I thought he pressed a kiss to my crown, but maybe it was just his breath, stirring my hair.
“I am afraid to sleep. Afraid to dream. When I close my eyes, I keep seeing him fall.”
“Tell me about young Phineas,” he said.
I did, tiptoeing through the early years, my voice slurred and my stories brief, but the fear retreated in the face of sweet reminiscence.
“Phineas Thomas, the boy who was bested by the magic breeches,” John said. “That is the boy you must remember.”
“He said death felt like flying,” I murmured, and let myself drift toward sleep. “He said Jerry was gone too. I believe him. I’ve felt it for a while, since Tarrytown, but didn’t want to admit it.”
“Oh, Samson,” John whispered again, knowing how I felt about the youngest of the Thomas brood, my other half, my best mate, but I was beyond words. I wanted only to rest in the comfort of his arms.
I dreamed of roads and wildflowers and racing through the trees, and Phineas soared above them, but I did not see Jeremiah. He’d already said his goodbye.
When I rose the next morning, I was emptied out, but instead of feeling gutted, I felt cleansed, even whole. Perhaps my grief had begun to distort me into someone else, and I’d returned to original form. I felt numb.
Poor General Paterson did not.
He was not beside me when I woke, and I doubt he’d slept much at all. Every movement reopened the welts, and the salve Dr. Thatcher applied wasn’t as good as the one Morris had given me. Still, I carefully daubed it on the crisscrossed wounds and bandaged them tightly, and we began the long walk back to the Peekskill encampment, even though our horses had arrived with the wagons and the second detachment.
“It feels better to walk than to ride,” he said, and I insisted on walking beside him. We trudged along, letting the others pull ahead.
“You should ride, Samson. Your walking doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“I am walking with you, sir. All the way.”
“You are so headstrong,” he complained. “It’s tiresome.”
“Deacon Thomas said the same thing. But I am not headstrong. I am strong-minded.”
He chuckled, which I had intended. “What is the difference, pray tell?” he asked.
“One is a virtue. One is not.”
“Ahh. So that’s how it works. We take our faults and reframe them. How clever.”
“It is a very important distinction. You, sir, are not harsh, but you are austere. You are adamant about rules. You have to be. Your men suffer when you aren’t.”
“How so?”
“Rationing saves lives in winter. So does cleanliness and thrift and guards that aren’t drunk.” I swallowed. “And delivering painful justice because mercy would encourage wolves.”
“I don’t know that my experiment in mercy went so well yesterday.”
We were quiet then, caught in the tangle of mercy and justice and which was which.
“They always send you, don’t they?” I asked. “When there’s a rebellion or a traitor or a conflict that must be resolved. They send you.”
“It is, oddly, the story of my life. Faithful and dutiful above all else. Old Reliable. Do you know that is what my mates called me at Yale? I was always the one who got everyone else out of scrapes. I was the staid one. The stern one. When they were planning something, they wouldn’t tell me about it, because they knew I’d try to talk sense into them. But I was always the one they came to when it all fell apart.”
“Elizabeth said you were likely to get pulled into the fray wherever you went, even though you wanted to avoid it. She said, ‘He has wide shoulders, a level head, and a patriotic heart.’ Like Solomon, but with no desire for a crown. I think she is right.”