Sometimes he would remember the clutch of grey cottages huddled under the green wing of Long Hill. The track continuing past them to the village proper with the small church, the vicarage, the baker, the blacksmith all surrounded by the Home Farm fields. He thought of walking away up that track when he was seventeen. Turning to wave at his brothers and sisters standing in the door.
``I'm off to America,'' he'd told them all. His passage paid, his indenture papers signed.
``You'll starve to death in America,'' his mother had said. He'd been close to starving at home. Could America be worse?
``You will die in the American darkness,'' his grandmother said. His grandmother had left them for the world of madness years before. She sat in the cold fireplace conversing with spirits who swirled around her.
He worked ten years for a tavern keeper in Pennsylvania and when he'd worked his due he walked away without a thought and went into a tavern and next thing he knew he was in the army.
In a few years he was a corporal at a fort in the wilderness. It was a good life. Plenty of food most of the time. Good company. Beth the laundry woman took his money and his love.
There were Indians around the fort most of the time. Some looking for handouts, some just curious about the strange ways of these warriors. The Indian children liked him. They liked to stand around him and watch him darn his socks and write in his journal.
``What are you doing?'' they asked in a language he did not understand. He tried to show them and he let them take his pen, his needle and try for themselves. Their brightness touched his heart and he thought of his own brothers and sisters now surely all grown and never to be seen again.
In the winter there was trouble. The children stopped coming to the fort. Beth the laundry woman said that an attack was planned. He laughed. ``They are so few and weak. They will die if they attack the fort. If you can, you should tell them.''
But there was one among them who saw visions, one who walked in madness. He said that no arrow, no bullet or spear could kill him. He conducted spirit dances under the winter moon and there were those who saw two hundred warriors dancing in the cold white light and they turned to flying snow and they fell to the earth and slept and waited. And Beth said she had seen them. Seen the warriors turn to flying snow. Saw them fall to earth and wait.
The soldiers talked among themselves. ``I have seen such things,'' he said. ``I saw a Roman boy, left by the Legions to guard the wall as they rode their horses out of the country. The Roman boy still waits by Hadrian's Wall. This I know because I have seen him and my grandmother too saw him.'' Such things could be. And fear grew among the soldiers. Two hundred warriors! The soldiers were forty. Ten sick and two of those dying.
When the attack came they saw the warriors behind every tuft of frozen grass, every depression in the ground. They fired off shot after shot and wasted most of their ammunition fighting off ghosts. When the living ones attacked they were able to take down the fort and burn it. The captain escaped and made it fourteen miles before the cold took him.
Next morning in the snowy, smoking ruins the children came. They were looking for a darning needle, a pen and a notebook which they never found.