Free Cain at Gettysburg by Ralph Peters Page B

He excelled at his schoolwork, even though he was beaten by the schoolmaster, another excellent Quaker. He was beaten not for what he did, but for who he was. For learning his lessons more quickly than the children of honest parents. Quakers did not believe in violence, but Mr. Harding had beaten him until he could not rise under his own power.
    Perhaps it had been the beatings that made him strong. At fourteen, he could have killed the schoolmaster with his bare hands. But he never considered doing so. He accepted his punishment, as if there were justice in it, after all. But his schoolmates were another story.
    That fall, on an apple-frost day, the teasing refrain of “Drunk as a monkey and dead in a ditch” was repeated a time too many. He did not behave with the restraint asked of a Quaker. He set upon the largest boy, a Presbyterian sent to the school because it was free, and beat him nearly to death. None of the other students, full of catcalls minutes before, dared intervene. Tom Blake, the drunkard’s son, put his fists to Master Robert Knox so fiercely that he broke his jaw and ribs. The boy had to lie abed into the new year.
    His grandparents sent him down to North Carolina, to fellow Quakers. Mr. Curran, white of hair, had put him to work in the store, watching him carefully and locking him into his bedroom when it was time to sleep. But that was all right. No one knew about his father there, so there was no trouble. And the Currans took him to their hearts, the truest Christians he had ever known. They even bore it when, at his maturity, he told them he could no longer go to their meetinghouse, that it wasn’t in his heart. Even after that, Mr. Curran rewarded him by making him part owner of his store. It was a business where no man was cheated, but each man was held to account. Even as Blake grew ever taller and brawnier, as if under a magic spell, the mild work suited him. He looked like a blacksmith, but reveled in pen and ink.
    He had nursed so many hopes. And, unlike many a man, he had been willing to work to fulfill them. His energy was boundless. Within himself, he sensed he could do anything. He would make men respect him. He would earn their respect. He would become the pride of his community. He would be envied.
    Even after war’s trickery began, he nurtured his dream. After his love married and he learned more about himself than a man should know, he had kept up his hopes for honors. Cobb was right: He had dreamed of becoming a lieutenant and then a captain, as battles took their toll of other men.
    Then, on the night they camped near Culpeper Court House, a courier had come by, seeking a drink of water and directions to General Heth. The horseman was the boy he had beaten nearly to death. He recognized Blake immediately. After a moment’s shock, Lieutenant Knox grinned mightily. In a ringing voice, he cried, “Well, if that ain’t Tom goddamned Blake, the town drunk’s boy! This where he ran away to?”
    Blake had only turned away, hiding his face, as Adam had done from the Lord on the flight from Eden. He knew then that his dreams were at an end. He had been put in place forever, and the society in which he moved, even that of the stone-pegged hills, would never let him be anyone else. He would never be an officer, not if the war lasted a century. Were he to prosper and grow rich hereafter, he would still be “the drunkard’s son.”
    But he had one thing they could not take away. He had the war.
    *   *   *
    He dreamed of the golden fields beyond Roznowo. He knew that the old manor house stood just behind his back, shaded by great trees as old as time. Mesmerized by the shimmering world before him, he could not turn. Wheat rose above his father’s knees as they walked the fields together. The northern sky was a peerless blue, and his father’s hand was powerful. But he could not see his father’s face. The man looming so