“No, thank you, sir,” he said to the horse breeder, “I’ll just keep a-lookin’.”
In spite of each disappointment, his faith never wavered that he would some day find the Morgan. And with each disappointment Miller Chase drew closer to Joel. “Tell ye what, son. When your days as apprentice be over with, I’ll take ye on as partner. I’ll even let ye build a barn of yer own behind the mill and raise colts . . . that is, if ever ye should find him.”
Often in imagination Joel was in his own rough-made stable. He would be chewing on a wisp of sweet-smelling hay, while outside a spring rain drummed on the roof, and inside, three brood mares nursed their foals. What tickled Joel the most was that in the far stall the Morgan looked on, big-eyed and proud.
What did it matter if in the midst of Joel’s dream Mistress Chase snapped a dish towel smartly across his face and gave her opinion of apprentices who had only half a mind on their work? Joel felt neither the sting of the towel nor the sting of the words, for the dream persisted.
• • •
Days stretched out into long years. War came, and it tapped Joel on the shoulder. By this time he was no longer an apprentice. He was a young man now, working as partner to Miller Chase, and he was free to enlist. The reasons for the war were only half clear to him. He had heard that British seamen were scrambling aboard American ships and forcing American sailors to help fight Napoleon. He had heard, too, that the English were threatening freedom of the seas. And so, on June 18, 1812, when the men in Washington declared war on Great Britain, Joel figured they probably knew what they were doing.
When his thoughts were on war, he tried hard to think of the important things at stake. But he kept seeing the horses instead, seeing them charge into battle, face gunfire, seeing them fall half dead on the field with bullet wounds, and no one to care for them. What if Little Bub were one of the wounded? Or what if he were the mount of some ruthless officer who cast him aside for a fresh horse rather than water and feed him?
Joel was like a man with a fire burning inside him. His mind was made up. There was a small mounted force in the Vermont militia, and he would join it. But he would not go empty-handed, for he knew of the desperate need for all kinds of supplies.
While other volunteers were saying long good-byes with feasting and laughter, Joel worked and dripped sweat. He went from house to house, chopping wood, scrubbing and sanding floors, cleaning out stables, doing any task at all, if only the housewife would give him a wool blanket or a water bucket in return.
“Warmth and water—that’s what wounded horses need!” he explained.
When Joel had collected a goodly supply, he presented himself to the first sergeant of the small division of cavalry stationed at Rutland. The sergeant, a shoeing smith, was a jovial fellow, squatty as an apple tree, with shining seed-like eyes almost lost in wrinkles and folds.
“Sergeant!” Joel said, then stopped to put down the big bundle of freshly washed blankets and the stack of buckets. He remembered suddenly to salute.
The smith returned the salute in amusement, but his eyes were busy, looking over the much-needed equipment, sizing up the earnest young man. He hooked his thumbs in the belt of his leather apron.
“Reckon you had more to say, son?” The words chuckled out, as if whatever the young man had to say would be good.
“Sergeant!” Joel began a second time. “I understand you doctor the sick and disabled horses, and shoe the healthy ones.”
The smith nodded his bald head and smiled into the serious eyes.
Joel hesitated. “Could I . . . that is . . . could I help? I’ve a hankering to work with horses,” he added quickly, without explaining why.
“Let’s try you out, then!” And the smith heaved a great sigh, muttered a prayer, and bent down to gather up the blankets.
16. “I’ll Go to Plattsburg!”
THE EARLY days of the war were strangely quiet for Joel, and for all Vermont. With most of the fighting on the high seas between gunboats and frigates, the foot soldiers and cavalry were not called into action.
An uneasiness lay on Joel at the utter sameness of his days. Groom stout horses. Groom ribby ones. Clean and oil saddles and bridles. Wash blankets. Help the smith with a colicky animal, help him shoe a nervous one. Joel tried to make believe that each horse was Little Bub and so do a better job. But it was no use. These creatures were as unlike Justin Morgan as water is unlike wine.
As the slow days dragged by, Joel tried to reason with himself. “Maybe Bub wouldn’t know me if I did find him, and maybe I wouldn’t know him.” Yet all the while he could see the purple-brown eyes, and feel the lips nuzzling at his neck, and hear the funny neigh that started out so high and fierce and pinched off into a rumbly snort.
“Sergeant,” he said one night as he lay sleepless on his cot in the smith’s tent, “this be a half-hearted war! If I had my ’druthers, I’d ruther be in the fight or else stayed to home.”
The smith was sitting cross-legged before the open flap of the tent, smoking and looking out into the starry night. He took his pipe from his mouth and faced around to Joel. His words came hard and fast-spoken. “The tide has turned, son. Ye may as well know the worst—the British are fixin’ to attack New York State! Why, this very moment they’re swingin’ down from Canady at such a pace that Colonel Totten up in Plattsburg is cryin’ out for help.”
Joel sat bolt upright. The blood pounded hotly through him. “What we waiting for, sir?”
“For Governor Chittenden to make up his mind.”
“What’s holdin’ him back?”
“Conscience, mebbe.”
“Conscience!” Joel choked out the word.
“Aye. He don’t feel he’s got a right to send our militia out of Vermont.”
“But, sir, Plattsburg’s only a whoop and a holler across Lake Champlain!”
“Aye. And my guess is that the Governor might be layin’ awake this minute, making a mighty important decision.”
The smith’s prophecy came startlingly true. In the dark watches of the night Governor Chittenden relented, and while he still would not order the militia to Plattsburg, he did not forbid the men to go.
When morning came, how they cheered the news! All up and down the ranks hands went up and voices shouted, “I’ll volunteer!” “I’ll go to Plattsburg! I’ll go!” Even the horses neighed as if they, too, welcomed action.
The town of Plattsburg sat perched on high ground overlooking Lake Champlain and the Saranac River. When Joel and his troop of men and mounts arrived, they found a battleground in the making. On a spit of land jutting out between the river and the lake, blockhouses and forts, storehouses and a hospital had already been built, and now the dirt was flying from trenches being dug.
Meanwhile, out in Plattsburg Bay, four American frigates were riding at anchor, their flags spanking in the breeze.
A September haze hung over land and water, and Joel felt as if it were charged with suspense, ready all in a moment to ball up into thunderclouds and rain down rockets of fire.
The feeling of excitement and danger grew in him as he learned that, even with the Vermonters, there were only four thousand Americans to face fifteen thousand British—fifteen thousand veterans, fresh and jubilant from their victory over Napoleon. Already the news had leaked out: The British are coming—marching down from Montreal, steady of pace, steady of purpose, some afoot, some mounted. Fifteen thousand strong!
The American plan of action had leaked out, too, and the men, instead of being filled with terror, were full of eagerness to try it. Two roads led into Plattsburg from the north, one the Dead Creek Road that hugged along Lake Champlain, and the other the Beekmantown Road a few miles inland. Colonel Totten’s plan was to divide his small army and send them northward to annoy and delay the enemy until the trenches were finished. Up the Beekmantown Road he sent the regulars, and up the Dead Creek Road he sent Colonel Appling with the mounted riflemen from Vermont.
As his platoon jogged no
rth along the lake road, Joel thought he heard an oncoming sound. Could it be the first rumblings of thunder, or the muffled tap of drums? He thought he heard it, and then he knew he heard it, above the hoofbeats of the horses. A rolling boom of noise! Now he saw movement—denser than cloud shadow, brighter than autumn leaves. The Redcoats!
“Open fire!” came Appling’s sharp command.
Joel felt his mount tremble beneath him, felt his own rifle add to the fierce volley as if someone else had pulled the trigger.
With a crack of musket fire the marching British replied, while from their guns, hidden in the hills, screaming bombs and hissing rockets rained down on the Americans. To their amazement, the British saw the Americans fall back as if the volley of fire had overpowered them!
But already the Colonel’s plan was beginning to work. Deliberately the Americans were bewildering the British. Deliberately they were challenging and vexing them by hindering their drive. They felled trees across the road, and broke up bridges as they withdrew.
The temper of the British rose to the boiling point. Their triumphal march had been spoiled by these stubborn Americans! They had to stop to heave the big trees aside, and they had to build makeshift bridges, while time spent itself.
All the way along, the Vermont cavalrymen annoyed the British veterans, coaxing them, teasing them down, down Dead Creek Road and into Plattsburg. When at last they were there, the Americans clattered across the final bridge to the safety of the peninsula. Then they destroyed that bridge, too, while the ships in the bay welcomed them with loud and mighty salvos.
Joel’s heart thumped wildly as he saw that the regulars on the Beekmantown Road were now crossing and destroying the upper bridge and joining forces with them on the little spit of land. “It worked!” he shouted to himself. “The plan worked!”
But the real test of the few against the many was still to come. Across the river, the two armies—British and American—now eyed each other like cats ready to pounce. The American was the hunting cat, waiting. The British waited, too, waited for the Royal Navy to come sailing into Plattsburg Bay to give added strength and courage.
An hour went by, two hours, three hours. Joel tried to study the horses tethered across the river, but they were so many blobs with sticks for legs. Dusk closed in like a fog. The day went by. Then night and morning and brassy noon, and night again. Two days, three days, with only an occasional rattle of musket fire from both sides. Four days. Five days, while dry leaves lazied to earth and the sun set and rose, and men and mounts grew restive.
But on the sixth day a flotilla of British sloops and gunboats sailed regally into the bay. Suddenly the world was all noise and flame as the gunboats opened fire on the American ships.
At the same moment the British troops on land began their attack. Using planks and barrel staves for rafts, they tried to cross the Saranac, to climb up the steep banks of the peninsula.
“Follow me! Follow me!” Appling shouted as he wheeled his horse to meet the enemy.
Joel and the smith rode in tandem, following teams pulling gun caissons to the line of action. Their eyes were everywhere at once, on the teams, on the mounts up ahead. Horses stumbling or breaking into a crazy gallop were signals to them of bullet wounds or shell shock. Often before a horse fell, Joel had galloped to his side and caught the cheek strap of the frightened animal. Then he would tie the creature to a tree behind the lines where he would be out of danger.
All that morning of September 11 the land battle seesawed back and forth—first the British gained the river bank, then Appling’s Vermonters raced up and fought them back.
But out in the bay the British were having the worst of it. Their fine vessels were splintering like matchboxes, tossing helter-skelter on the waves. By afternoon there was scarcely a gun in position. The captain, knowing the battle to be lost, ordered his vessels to strike their colors in surrender.
News of the surrender sent the Americans on land into a frenzy. They suddenly felt giant strong. Band after band let out whoops of joy. The sound was so loud it ricocheted to the hillsides and back again until it seemed as though untold numbers of new recruits had arrived. It was the clamor and shouting, as well as the Americans’ spirit, that frightened and defeated the British on land.
To conceal their retreat, the British kept up a barrage of fire, but in the midst of it a black storm spilled from the heavens and poured down on the battlefield. In haste they abandoned their guns and fled. Only their dead and wounded, both men and horses, were left behind.
Now seemingly from nowhere came the American medical aides, their lanterns winking yellow in the rain. Colonel Appling sent for Joel and the smith to help with the wounded men of both armies. They improvised stretchers by thrusting muskets through coatsleeves, and they carried the wounded to the hospital building. All the while Joel worked, his mind kept remembering a mother robin who year after year built her nest on his window ledge. He remembered how she would hop onto the rim of the nest, worm in her beak, and whichever nestling squawked the loudest got the worm. It was the same on the battlefield, he thought: whichever man moaned the loudest was cared for first.
All night long Joel worked in the rain-soaked field, helping wherever help was needed. By midnight every wounded man was in the hospital. Then, at last, he could go to the horses. Suddenly new strength came into him and he felt his heart beat faster. What if one of the British horses were Justin Morgan? Dead or alive, he had to know.
The smith’s weariness seemed to lift, too. “Joel!” he called out. “You handle the flesh wounds. I’ll take the bad ones.”
Joel worked quickly now. He filled an empty powder horn with alum, carrying it to the horses who, unlike the men, did not moan. In the thick darkness it was hard to tell the hump of a horse’s body from a hummock of earth. He felt each mound carefully, letting his fingers tell him whether to stop and minister, or to go on. In the British sector he found a mud-slathered gray with a gaping wound in his thigh. With steady hand he poured alum into the wound, talking to the terrified animal as if it were a small child in trouble. He made himself look into the face of every horse, alive or dead, that he could find.
“I declare!” said the smith when they came together for a moment. “It puzzles me if ’tis the alum or your voice that stanches the blood and quiets the animals.”
Toward morning the rain spent itself and a pale glimmer of dawn showed above the horizon. Joel, his work done, dropped down in exhaustion beneath a tree. Before he let sleep claim him, his lips formed a prayer of thanksgiving. “Dear God, I do thank thee that Little Bub weren’t on the battlefield. But, O dear God, if it please thee,” he whispered, “let me find him soon.”
Then he pillowed his head in his arms and slept.
17. A Whinny in the Night
SOON AFTER the battle of Plattsburg the war began to peter out. Both America and England realized they had nothing to fight over. With Napoleon captured and the bloodshed at an end in Europe, the very reasons for the war seemed to disappear. So the whole business was called off. It was almost as simple as that. There were no harsh terms for either side. Nothing but blessed peace.
News of the peace brought great rejoicing. The blockade along the Atlantic coast was lifted. The country began to build a great merchant marine. Men began dreaming of free public schools, of clean prisons, of putting an end to slavery, of settling new lands to the westward.
And in the little village of Randolph, too, progress was afoot. Joel was man-grown now, with a man’s responsibilities. He was chairman of a committee to establish a free public library, and since his cavalry days even white-bearded men came to him for advice in doctoring their horses.
One bitter night in the dead of winter, Joel was on his way to the meetinghouse to discuss the new library. With his skates over his shoulder he stopped to pick up a neighbor, Ezra Fisk, Junior.
Usually the two talked and laughed as they skated up the river. But not this night. The wind blew howling out of the northe
ast, and a fine snow pricked their faces like so many needle points.
“Well be getting a blizzard if this keeps up,” Ezra yelled, turning his head to one side.
As they came to a bend in the river, Joel swerved to a sudden stop, listening. The wind had picked up a sound—a thin, high quaver. It was a sound that he knew in every part of him. It set his heart to hammering and started up an old aching inside him. “Could it be,” he thought, “the wind is playing tricks? Or could it be the screaking of our skates mixed up in wind?”
And then, and then it came again—the high, vibrating sound, blowing across him, into him, through his earmuffs, through his ears, into his mind. He tried to hold onto it, but the deep-toned thunder of the wind hurled it away.
“Ezra!” he shouted, skating wildly toward the figure pushing against the wind. He caught up to Ezra and spun around, bumping into him, sending him sprawling across the ice.
“Ezra!” he cried excitedly. “ ’Twas the voice of someone I know.”
The bewildered young man picked himself up, rubbing his elbow and knee by turns. “Voice or no voice,” he muttered in annoyance, “be that fit reason for trying to break every bone in my body?”
But Joel had wheeled about and was off like an arrow. The sound had come from somewhere in the direction of Chase’s Inn. In long, hard strides he was skating downriver, the way he had come. Through the whirl of snow he caught a prick of light ahead. He knew it for the familiar lantern on the shed behind the inn. He skated toward it, pulled by some seeming magnetism.
Behind him Ezra was calling, “Wait, you tarnal idiot! I want to see, too.”
But now Joel was ripping off his skates, running and scrambling up the river bank, while the wind lashed at him and tore at his scarf and the heavy skates thumped against his body. He must get to the shed quickly before the sound was lost to him forever. But even as he ran it came again, and Joel cried out, “I’m coming! I’m coming!”