The Proud and the Free Read Free

blow, I listened to his instructions on language to be used in his presence and in his household.
    Thus I went to serve him and to learn cobbling, and a full sabbatical I served before I threw his leather apron in his face and walked out to join the 1st Regiment of Pennsylvania, then being raised to march north and help the farmers in the siege of Boston town. I mention this because in the narrative I propose to tell, concerning what befell myself and my comrades in the winter of 1781, you may be moved to ask, now and again, How does one account for these men? What made them and what moves them, and why do they endure what they endure?
    Also, you may ask, What of this one who writes the narrative? What of Jamie Stuart? He is native born in the American land. What kind of bitter cud does he chew over and over again, retching the acid into his teeth?
    But it is not my intention to make such a compilation. If I at twenty-two was no lad, then I was little enough of a lad at ten. Childhood is for those who can afford it, and my own purse was light from the beginning. In the years I sat crouched over the bench in the workshop of Fritz Tumbrill, particularly before that day when Molly Bracken walked into the shop, like sunshine coming into a dark well, in those years I thought often of my father’s lean and tired face.
    A word about that face before I go into the tale I must tell; for I think that before you are finished you will have some curiosity about my own look, and if you see my father, you will see me too.
    I remember him best at the loom. The light was poor in the shack where he worked, so when the weather was good, he took half a dozen shingles out of the roof, and through the opening a broad shaft of light fell upon the loom and upon his face as well. I would play on the floor facing him. Sometimes I would glance up and meet his eyes, and his whole face would smile, for I was all he had in the world. But at other times, he would be unaware that I was watching him, and I would note the incredible sadness of his face. Ah, what a sorrow was there! What grief for the thin crust of bread he handed to his child! A Scotsman is dour, they say, but the quality is not born into a man but comes rather from the soil he scratches.
    My father’s face was a long one, as mine is too. A narrow one. His brows arched, and on either side his forehead there was a slight indentation of the bone – as there is on mine. The nose was long and well-shaped, the curve of the head high, the hair a tarnished sand-color, and the eyes gray-green. The chin was large yet gentle, long and narrow, and the neck was lean, as the man was, a tall, lean, long-muscled man; and taking away a quarter of a century it is a fit description for myself, Jamie Stuart, when I signed my name to the enlistment papers and became a soldier in the army of the Revolution for the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. An ugly lad I was, to a way of thinking, but I had qualities that I little knew of, myself, until I was rubbed like a sword on a grindstone, and then because of those qualities men gave me a post not without honor for a lad of twenty-two, as you will see.
    So I have told you a little of my life in each direction, a little of what was in the old days, when one day was not so different from the other while I learned the best way to ease my back so that Fritz Tumbrill’s blows fell as lightly as possible, while I learned how to bevel the leather for the sole and how to sew it for the upper, how to cut, shape, trim and awl, how to drink and coddle and roll – and some of what came after, when I grew old and away from the memories of my youth.
    But Fritz Tumbrill never made an animal of me, or I would have become like him. Instead, I hardened and I became something else, and through Molly Bracken – of whom you will hear more – I learned to read and write. So I was able to read in a newspaper of the incident that happened in Massachusetts in April of