Hell or Richmond Read Online Free PDF

accusations that they belonged in uniform themselves. Unasked, they loudly damned the war and the nigger, in brogues as foreign as their red and ready faces, willing to fight in any saloon, but not on a field of battle. It grated on Brown to see the lack of care they took with the boats and their even worse care of the mules. It bothered him more than it had a right to do to see busy towpaths left in disrepair and the brass fittings at the harbormaster’s station left unpolished. When Captain Burket had been harbormaster before the war, each last buckle on a mule’s belly had shone. Now it felt as though nothing mattered but making money today, tomorrow be damned. The town was home, and it wasn’t.
    Yet, for all the rawness and brute collisions between the Dutch and Irish, home still had a decency Brown missed in the South. Here, in Virginia, there were great houses and shanties, with little between them. In Schuylkill Haven there wasn’t one building as grand as the plantation house down the field or the mansions behind the courthouse on Warrenton Hill. Back home, men lived in a world more evened out, with due respect given but no sense that one fellow was a king and his neighbors dirt. They were different worlds, North and South, and Brown wondered, as he had often done, if they belonged together.
    On the last fair day back home—kind weather for early March—he and Frances had fled her family for the orchard west of the river, seeking an hour of privacy amid trees months shy of flowering, and he had felt they understood each other. He was good enough with words with other men, but women wanted something more, and he was not sure that he possessed that something. Frances didn’t seem to mind. She just smiled. Her presence beside him on that bright day had been thoroughly, wonderfully good. He had wanted, terribly, to ask her to marry him then. But he held back. The war had made widows enough. Nor did he want her to be a cripple’s nurse. He would ask when the war was over, if he returned a whole man. It was the only decent course he saw. And if Charles Brown no longer believed in high and mighty causes, he had come to believe in decency all the more.
    For now, he labored over letters to her, conscious of his defective spelling and wishing, for her sake, that he had more education. Most of what he had learned he had taught himself, at the cost of candles sold three for a penny, the sort that smoked and stank. He had been sent out, a small boy, to work in a tobacco factory for twenty-five cents a week, by a miserly father afraid to end up in an almshouse. The Lord’s own joke, his father had died of cholera, without telling even his wife where he hid his money.
    Laboring at the stacks and racks had been hateful work, its only lasting effect his dislike for tobacco. He had grown strong early and, at thirteen, went to work on the canal, driving mules and caring for them, doing the chores the regular boatmen avoided. He didn’t mind. The air was fresh, and as for the mules, they were never worse than men and often better.
    Hardly had he moved up to a man’s job aboard a coal barge when he did a foolish, foolish thing that the men around him misunderstood as bravery. The doing had been no more than the act of an ignorant boy who might have gotten a bullet or worse for his trouble.
    He had been present at the last, feeble gasp of the Schuylkill Rangers, the canal pirates who came down from the mountain hollows to steal for their livelihoods. Everyone had believed them to be finished off years back, part of the local history and no more, but a few broken-toothed young fools had attempted to rob a coal barge Brown was aboard. They were not far from Port Clinton when the fuss began, with a shot fired in the air and cries that this was a robbery. The would-be-brazen voices quivered with fear, though, as if a game had gotten out of hand. The pirates were such novices that they didn’t know that a coal barge headed south to