The Prisoner
The Correspondence of Lieutenant Thomas Burwell, Virginia Regiment
Collected and preserved by Mr. James Burwell of Williamsburg, Virginia in 1754–1757.
Editor’s note: The following letters were among the effects of Mr. James Burwell who compiled them for posterity, from his own collection, those of his father George Burwell, and the effects of his brother Lieutenant Thomas Burwell following Thomas’s death at the Battle of the Monongahela, July 9th, 1755 when he was twenty-eight years old. The letters are kept by the Burwell estate. The final letter was found folded inside Thomas Burwell’s coat, addressed, unsealed, undelivered. It is reproduced here exactly as written. — J.B., 1757
LETTER I
To Mr. George Burwell, Burwell Plantation, Williamsburg, Virginia
Delivered by colonial courier, August 3rd, 1754
Dear Father,
I am alive. I record this first because I expect it is what you wish to know, and because the fact of it still presents itself to me each morning with a quality of mild surprise that I have not yet overcome.
I was taken at Jumonville Glen on the fourteenth of July. We were moving through a creek bottom west of the Glen — twelve men, a game trail that Sergeant Hollis had represented as a road, and trees pressing close on both sides with the light coming down through them in pieces. I was at the rear of the column. I had been thinking, if you will forgive the confession, about Charles’s wedding. Specifically about the toast. I was composing a response to it in my head, seven weeks after the fact, when the firing started.
It was over before I had completed a single useful thought. Three men of the Regiment went down in the first volley. I went into the creek with my horse. When I came up there were four men standing over me and the world had changed its shape entirely.
I am held in a camp I estimate to be two days’ march north of the Glen. I am in adequate health. I have my boots and my coat and my wits, all three of which I intend to preserve. The man who appears to be in authority speaks English. Exchange negotiations, I am told, are a possibility.
I will write again when I am able. I remain, Father, in spite of everything,
Your obedient son,
Thomas Burwell
Lieutenant, Virginia Regiment
LETTER II
To Mr. James Burwell, Williamsburg, Virginia
Delivered by colonial courier, August 3rd, 1754
Jamie,
Same courier, same morning. Read Father’s letter first so you understand what I am permitted to say in that register, and then read this one, which is the truth of it.
I have been here three weeks. I was certain for the first four days that I would be killed and I was not and the not-being-killed has settled into a particular kind of captivity that I am still learning the dimensions of. My wrists were bound for eleven days. They are not bound now. I understand this to be a test of some kind and I am endeavoring to pass it by doing nothing that would cause them to be bound again.
The man who runs this camp is named Ashkii. He is perhaps fifty, broad through the shoulders, and possessed of a quality of stillness that I have never encountered in a man before — not patience, precisely, but precision. He moves when he has decided to move. He speaks when he has decided to speak. He came to me on the fourth day and offered me a choice between spending the winter tied to a post or being useful. I invoked my rank at him.
Jamie, I want you to understand the specific quality of what happened to my rank in that moment. It did not bounce off him. It passed through him like light through water. He registered it, refracted it slightly, and it arrived on the other side of him as nothing. He waited to see if I had more. I did not. He said those are your choices and left.
I told them the following morning that I would be useful.
He set me to carrying water. It took most of the morning to do it without spilling. I want you to know that I am a man who has now spent most of a morning learning to carry water and that this is the most honest work I have done in twenty-eight years. I do not know what to do with that information.
I am hungry for ordinary. Write to me.
Thomas
LETTER III
To Mr. George Burwell, Burwell Plantation, Williamsburg, Virginia
Delivered by colonial courier, August 19th, 1754
Dear Father,
A second letter, brief. I have been permitted paper and ink in exchange for instruction to two of the younger men in the camp on the subject of written English, which Ashkii has decided they ought to have. I note the irony of my captivity becoming a teaching arrangement without comment, as I expect you would find it as I do — somewhere between insulting and pragmatic.
I am in good health. I have lost some weight but remain strong. The work they give me is physical and I am becoming adequate at it, which is to say I am becoming something I was not before – a man who knows how to use his hands. My palms have blistered. The blisters have calloused. The callouses have cracked in the cold. I have kept working through the cracking, which I mention not for sympathy but because it is the most honest account I can give of what this place is doing to me.
I think of home. The fields will be green still. I hope the tobacco is coming in well.
Your obedient son,
Thomas
P.S. The light here in the mornings comes through the pine in a way I have not seen before. I cannot account for why I have included this. Disregard it.
LETTER IV
To Mr. James Burwell, Williamsburg, Virginia
Delivered by colonial courier, August 19th, 1754
Jamie,
There is a woman named Sikwa. I am going to tell you about her plainly because you are the only person I can be plain with. I find that I need to say it out loud before it becomes a thing I only think.
I learned her name by accident — heard it called across the camp — and spent two weeks pretending I hadn’t because knowing it felt like a claim I had no right to. She brought me water on my first night, before I knew anything. She did not speak. She set the water near enough for me to reach and she looked at me.
I have been looked at in many ways in my life. My father looks at me as a ledger entry that has not yet resolved. My commanding officer looks at me as a variable of uncertain value. Charles does not look at me at all, which is its own instruction. Sikwa looked at me as though the question of who I was remained genuinely open. As though she had decided nothing yet and was in no hurry to decide.
I have thought about that look every day since.
She spoke to me three weeks later. I was splitting wood badly; fighting the grain, as she put it. She came out, stood nearby, and said nothing for five minutes. Then said: you’re doing it wrong. She showed me where the grain wanted to split. I split it cleanly. She went back inside.
What I want to tell you is this: I have never been corrected by someone who was not, underneath the correction, trying to establish something about themselves. She was not establishing anything. She saw a thing being done wrong and she said so. Then she left. That is all. I am aware that this is a small thing to report to you with this quality of attention. I am reporting it anyway.
Last Thursday she did something I have been turning over since. I was coming back from the water with the vessels — I have gotten adequate at this, finally. She was standing outside her longhouse doing nothing that I could identify. Not working. Not waiting for anyone as far as I could tell. She was standing in the morning cold looking at something in the middle distance that I looked for and could not find. She stood there for perhaps ten minutes. Then she went inside. I have no interpretation for it. I am reporting it because it happened and because I find that I want the record to include the things I cannot explain as well as the things I can.
Her husband died eight months ago. I know who funded the raid that killed him. I will not write the names here. You would recognize them. They sit at Father’s table.
Thomas
LETTER V
To Mr. George Burwell, Burwell Plantation, Williamsburg, Virginia
Delivered by colonial courier, October 8th, 1754
Dear Father,
I write in October, the leaves here turned and falling, the cold coming down from the north with a seriousness that Virginia cold does not have. I am well. I am warm enough. I have learned to build a fire that holds through the night. It is another thing I did not know how to do in July and which I now do without thinking, the way a man does a thing that has become part of him.
I assisted with a burial detail this month. Three men. I will not say more of it except that I found something in the earth during the digging — a small thing, British manufacture. I have kept it, and the keeping of it has clarified certain questions I had previously been content to leave unexamined.
I understand the war differently now than I did at the Glen. I believe this to be of use rather than of concern. A man who understands what he is engaged in serves better than one who does not.
Exchange negotiations have slowed with the weather. I expect to be home in spring. I am sorry for it and trust you will manage the winter without serious difficulty.
Your obedient son,
Thomas
P.S. I have been teaching two young men to read and write in English. One of them has already surpassed what took me two years of schooling. I do not know why I have included this, either. You may disregard it as well.
LETTER VI
To Mr. James Burwell, Williamsburg, Virginia
Delivered by colonial courier, October 8th, 1754
Jamie,
I dug three graves in October and found a musket ball at the bottom of the third one.
Virginia Regiment issue. I know the weight and the imperfect casting from the Williamsburg foundry — have handled enough of them that I could name them in the dark, which I nearly did. I stood there in the frozen earth with it in my palm and the man beside me kept digging and I kept looking at it and understanding, in the specific way you understand something that rearranges everything you thought you knew, that I had put it there.
Not me. Men like me. Men from Virginia with planter money and military ambitions who sit at Father’s table and talk about the necessity of the campaign. One of those men funded the raid that killed Sikwa’s husband. The ball in my hand was the same manufacture as the ball that killed him. I am the same manufacture as the men who gave the order.
I put it in my coat pocket. I kept digging. I said nothing.
A French dispatch rider came through camp last week. You know I have always been a good mimic, always picked up language faster than anyone gave me credit for. I understood enough of what he was carrying to know that the French are currently negotiating to hand Lenape territory to the British as a bargaining point. Not conquered territory. Traded. Like a field. Like a favorable rate on tobacco.
Both sides of this war are trading land that belongs to neither of them and the people standing on it are the currency of the transaction.
I do not know what to do with this. I am currently doing nothing with it. I carry the musket ball in my coat pocket, say nothing, split wood along the grain, and I think.
Sikwa laughed last Tuesday. I had been trying to describe Virginia in summer — the light, the flatness of it, the specific color of the fields in July — and I was doing it badly, the way you do when you discover that a thing you have lived inside your whole life has no adequate description, and she laughed. Not at me. With me, at the inadequacy of it. At the impossibility of explaining home to someone who has never seen it.
I had not heard anything like that laugh in longer than I could calculate. I want you to know that it had the effect, brief and complete, of making everything survivable.
I will be here through winter.
Thomas
LETTER VII
To Mr. George Burwell, Burwell Plantation, Williamsburg, Virginia
Delivered by colonial courier, November 30th, 1754
Dear Father,
November. The cold is now serious in a way I did not have a word for before I came here. I am well within it — warmer, in truth, than I expected, having learned enough about fire and shelter that the cold has become something to be managed rather than endured.
I hunt now. I am not skilled but I am becoming less unskilled, which Ashkii informs me is the whole of what learning consists of. He is not a man who dispenses wisdom in the manner of a man who knows he is dispensing wisdom. He says a thing once, plainly. Then he moves on and the thing stays.
I think of Christmas coming. I think of the house at Christmas: the smell of it, the fire in the study, and the particular arrangement of the table that Mother established and that you have maintained exactly as she left it. I think of that table and I find, to my considerable surprise, that I can see it clearly. Clearly enough that it almost hurts.
I remain your obedient son,
Thomas
P.S. The man who watches me most closely in this camp is Sikwa’s brother-in-law. His name is Kimi. He lost his brother in the same raid. He is not wrong to watch me. I do not know why I have told you this. You will make nothing useful of it. Disregard it.
LETTER VIII
To Mr. James Burwell, Williamsburg, Virginia
Delivered by colonial courier, November 30th, 1754
Jamie,
Ashkii said something to me last week that I have not been able to put down.
He was checking a snare line — not looking at me, doing the thing and speaking at the same time the way he does, so that the speaking seems incidental and you understand three days later that it was the only point. He said: you came here a man made entirely of other people’s opinions and you are becoming something with its own shape.
I stood in the snow for what felt like a considerable time after he said that.
I want to tell you why it landed the way it landed, which is like a clean blow to the chest from a direction you did not know you were exposed from. In twenty-eight years of living, Jamie, I have been told things about what I should be, things about what I am failing to be, and things about what I might become if I applied myself correctly to the becoming. I have been told kind things by you that were kind enough to be suspect. I have never been told a true thing. Not a thing that was accurate in the specific way a well-made instrument is accurate — not flattering, not critical, just: correct.
He said it once and moved on and I have been carrying it the way I carry the musket ball. In the coat. Against the chest.
Kimi watched me the whole time. Sikwa’s brother-in-law. I told Father his name, which I immediately regretted, but there it is. He was thirty yards off checking his own line and he watched Ashkii say that to me. He watched my face receive it and I do not know what he saw there, but I know that he saw something and filed it and that he files everything. He buried his brother. He has been watching the British officer move through his camp for four months and become, from a certain angle, something that looks like it belongs here. He is not wrong to watch. He is the most reasonable man in this camp. He is also the most dangerous thing in it. Last Thursday I watched him sit with his nephew — Sikwa’s sister’s boy, four years old — and tell him something that made the child laugh so hard he fell over in the snow.
I thought: this is a man doing a wrong thing for a right reason, if it comes to that.
I pray it does not come to that.
Thomas
LETTER IX
To Mr. James Burwell, Williamsburg, Virginia
Delivered by colonial courier, February 3rd, 1755
Jamie,
There was a raid and I need to tell you about it while it is still loud in me because in a week I will have organized it into something coherent and the coherent version will not be true.
British Rangers. First light, yesterday morning. They did not know I was here — this was not rescue, it was raid; the same kind we ran ourselves out of Fort Necessity and thought nothing of, thought less than nothing of, thought of as the ordinary grammar of this war. They came out of the treeline to the east and the camp had perhaps thirty seconds of warning and then it was simply happening.
I was at the woodpile. I had my axe.
Ten seconds. Perhaps eight. Perhaps four, I don’t — signal them, shout, wave your coat, do the thing. You are a British officer and those are British soldiers. This ends now, you go home, you go back to Virginia and Father’s table and the Regiment and — I did not.
I did not signal them.
What happened next. I need to say it plainly and I find I can’t quite. I’m going to say it anyway. There was a weapon on the ground. A Lenape musket, dropped in the first confusion. I picked it up. I did not fire it. I want that down in your hand, Jamie. I need you to have read that, I did not fire it. I picked it up and I was on the right side of the fight and when it was over, when the Rangers broke back into the treeline, I was standing in the snow with it in my hands and my heart going like a millwheel. Ashkii alive to my left and Sikwa alive across the camp. I could see her, she was alive. Something in the arrangement of my bones that had been wrong for twenty-eight years had shifted into place and I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know what that makes me. I put the musket down and went back to the woodpile and I don’t know.
Kimi saw all of it.
I do not know what he will do with what he saw. I know what I have done and I know that it cannot be undone. I find — and this is the truest and most alarming thing I can tell you — that I do not want it undone.
Tell me I am not lost.
Thomas
LETTER X
To Mr. George Burwell, Burwell Plantation, Williamsburg, Virginia
Delivered by colonial courier, February 3rd, 1755
Dear Father,
There was a skirmish at the camp involving British irregulars. I was not harmed. The matter was resolved without consequence to my person.
I expect to be home before April.
Thomas
LETTER XI
From Mr. George Burwell, Burwell Plantation, Williamsburg, Virginia
To Lieutenant Thomas Burwell, delivered via British envoy, February 28th, 1755
Thomas,
Your letters have arrived, some promptly and some after considerable delay, and I have read them with the attention they deserve. I am glad you are alive. I state this plainly because I find plain statement serves better than elaboration in correspondence of this nature.
Colonel Washington has informed me that the exchange is being arranged and that you will be returned to the Regiment in March. He speaks well of your likely conduct, given the circumstances. I trust his assessment will prove correct.
I note that your letters have contained, with some consistency, details that do not appear to serve any obvious purpose — the quality of light through pine trees, a boy falling in the snow, a postscript about a man named Kimi which I confess I read three times without determining what you intended me to do with it. I have concluded that you intend nothing by these details and that captivity produces in a man a tendency toward the incidental. I expect this will resolve when you are home and properly occupied.
You are a Burwell and an officer of the Virginia Regiment. The world is ordered by men who remember what they are when circumstances press hardest against it. I have no doubt you have conducted yourself accordingly and I expect to find you unchanged in all respects that matter when you return.
Charles asks after you. The tobacco came in adequately. The house is as you left it.
Come home, Thomas. Be the man I know you are.
Your father,
George Burwell
LETTER XII
To Mr. James Burwell, Williamsburg, Virginia
Delivered by colonial courier, February 10th, 1755
Jamie,
She is gone.
I do not mean gone from the camp. I mean gone from me, which is a geography entirely its own.
Kimi told her about the raid. Not all of it — he does not know all of it. He does not know I held the weapon, knows only that I did not signal the Rangers, which is sufficient. He has built from this a theory. The theory is: spy. The British officer has been cultivating trust in order to extract intelligence, has been using Sikwa specifically as a means of penetrating the confidence of the camp’s women who talk among themselves about things the men do not always say plainly. The theory is wrong in its motive and correct in its observation, which is the most dangerous kind of wrong.
I know this because Ashkii told me. He told me without expression, in the tone of a man delivering weather, and waited to see what I would say.
I did not say that Kimi was wrong about the observation. I said he was wrong about the motive. Ashkii looked at me for a long time and then said: I know. And then he left and I understood that knowing and being able to say so publicly are not the same thing. Ashkii cannot spend the capital he would need to spend to defend me without costing his people something they cannot afford to lose.
She has not come near me in six days.
The camp is the same dimensions it was a week ago. It is considerably smaller. I move through it and there is a place where she is not that is louder than all the places where things are.
I want to tell you something about the six days. On the third day I saw her cross the camp with water — the same task, the same vessel, the same economical walk — and I understood that she was not avoiding me with anger. She was avoiding me with grief, which is different. It’s worse. It means she has already decided and deciding cost her something real.
On the fifth day Kimi sat with his nephew in the snow. The child fell over laughing. Kimi looked up and met my eyes across the camp. He did not look away. Neither did I. He is doing a wrong thing for a right reason. I cannot hate him for it. I cannot forgive him for it either and I do not think forgiveness is what the situation requires. The situation requires that I go home.
The envoys are coming in March.
Thomas
LETTER XIII
To Mr. James Burwell, Williamsburg, Virginia
Delivered by colonial courier, March 12th, 1755
Jamie,
I went to see her this morning.
I had been preparing what I would say for three weeks and when I stood in front of her I said none of it. What I had prepared was an argument — a careful sequential dismantling of Kimi’s theory, evidence marshaled in order, and the truth laid out like a surveyor’s work. I stood in front of her and understood that she did not need an argument. She had already made her own accounting of the situation and reached her own conclusions. The conclusions were not about Kimi’s theory. They were about cost.
She looked at me — that same look, the open question, except that now I could read it well enough to see that the question was not who are you. The question was what will this cost me.
I told her the truth. I told her I was a different man than the one who arrived here in July and that she was the reason I knew the difference. I told her I was going back to a world that would require me to perform the old one; that the performance would be adequate but it would be a performance and we both knew it. I told her I was not asking her for anything. I did not ask.
I gave her the musket ball.
She looked at it in her palm the way I had looked at it in mine in October. A long time. Then she closed her hand around it.
She said, in English, the first English she had spoken to me since February: I know what you did at the woodpile.
I said: Kimi saw me.
She said: I know what Kimi saw. I know what you did.
She meant the difference between them. She had known all along. She had been protecting herself not from the wrong version but from the true one, which was the version in which I was exactly who she thought I was and it still could not be enough.
I walked back across the camp. I did not look behind me. Kimi was watching from the far side. I met his eyes. I kept walking. There was nothing in his face that I would call satisfaction. There was something I would call recognition — one man seeing another man pay a price and understanding that the paying is real.
Three days, Jamie. Then I am in British hands and gone.
Thomas
LETTER XIV
To Mr. James Burwell, Williamsburg, Virginia
Written in transit, March 15th–17th, 1755
Jamie,
I am writing on the march because the envoy’s man has paper and because I find I cannot not write. Forgive the hand — we are moving and the road, such as it is, does not encourage steadiness.
I must confess I have been guilty of untruth in some things I have previously told you. Not in the facts — the facts are exact. I have lied in the tone. I wrote it like a man who has achieved something, like a man who paid his bill and left the table with dignity. That is not what it was and you deserve the truer version.
The truer version is that I walked back across that camp, went into my structure, sat on the ground, put my back against the wall, and did not move for a considerable period. I am not going to tell you what that period looked like. I am going to tell you that when I came out the light had changed and the camp was doing the ordinary things camps do at that hour. I stood in it like a man standing in a country whose language he speaks perfectly and to which he does not belong.
I am angry, Jamie. I want to tell you that because I have not let myself say it plainly and I am running out of time to say things plainly before I arrive in a world where plain speaking is its own kind of danger. I am angry at the war and at the men who designed it and at Father’s table and at the specific architecture of a world that made a man like me and sent him here to become something better than that and then requires him to walk back into the original shape as though the months between are simply a gap in the correspondence.
I pass landmarks I can read now. The snare in the birch stand — Ashkii’s work, I know his pattern. The fire ring under the granite overhang. A camp from October, from before the cold locked everything down. I am fluent in a world I am leaving at three miles an hour and there is nothing to be done about that. I know it and knowing it does not help.
The envoy’s man is named Prescott. He is twenty-two and from Philadelphia. He has asked me twice what it was like. I have told him twice that it was difficult. He accepts this. He has no way to know that difficult is the wrong word entirely, that there is no right word. The right word would require eight months of living to understand and he has not lived them.
Three more days.
Thomas
LETTER XV
To Mr. James Burwell, Williamsburg, Virginia
Delivered by hand, April 2nd, 1755
Jamie,
I need to tell you about the debriefing because I have been putting it off. If I put it off any longer it will calcify into something I cannot examine.
Colonel Washington received me on the morning of April first. He is a large man and a careful one — careful in the way of someone who has learned that carelessness costs lives, which is the best reason to be careful and produces the best kind of careful man. He was kind to me. He offered me brandy and meant it. He asked me how I was and waited for an actual answer, which distinguished him from every other person who has asked me that since I crossed back into British lines.
Then he asked me what I had observed.
I had the map ready. I had drawn it the night before, in my room at the fort, sitting at a real desk with real paper and an actual candle. I had drawn it carefully. The camp sits on the north bank of a creek, sheltered by a granite ridge to the northwest. There is one approach from the south that would allow a column of men to advance within musket range before being seen from the camp’s watch positions. The creek is fordable in three places that I know.
The map I gave Washington places the camp four miles east of where it sits. The southern approach does not appear on it. The creek crossings are wrong. I drew it with the same hand I use for everything — steady, even, the hand of a man with nothing to hide — and I slid it across the desk to him.
He studied it for a long time. He set his finger on the creek and moved it slowly west along the line I had drawn, tracing the route a column would take from the British position. His finger stopped where the ford should have been and was not. He looked at the map. He looked at me. The room had the particular silence of a room where a fire has recently gone out — still warm, no longer alive. I met his eyes with the specific blankness of a man whose memory has been disordered by captivity and stress, and after a moment he nodded.
He said: you’ve been through a considerable ordeal. Memory plays its tricks.
I said: yes sir. I am sorry I cannot be more precise.
He said: what you’ve given us is more than we had.
I said: I hope it serves.
Jamie, I want you to understand what it costs to lie to a decent man. A corrupt man is easy — you are simply using the tools of his own world against him, and there is a justice in that which makes it bearable. Washington is not corrupt. Washington looked at my wrong map with genuine gratitude and I sat across the desk from him, held his gratitude, and said nothing. It was the hardest thing I have done since I stood at the woodpile with eight seconds to decide.
I walked out of that room and stood in the fort’s yard in the April light and waited to feel something definitive — guilt or righteousness or grief or relief. What I felt was something quieter than any of those. I felt the specific solidity of a man who has decided who he is and acted accordingly and must now live inside that decision.
I am living inside it.
I will be in Williamsburg by Sunday.
Thomas
LETTER XVI
To Mr. George Burwell, Burwell Plantation, Williamsburg, Virginia
Delivered by hand, April 6th, 1755
Dear Father,
I am returned. I am in good health. I presented myself to Colonel Washington upon my arrival and completed a full debriefing. The Colonel expressed himself satisfied.
I look forward to Sunday dinner, if the invitation stands.
Your obedient son,
Thomas
LETTER XVII
To Mr. James Burwell, Williamsburg, Virginia
Delivered by hand, April 13th, 1755
Jamie,
I went to Father’s study this morning while he was in the fields. I stood at the window, looked at the tobacco, and tried to locate the feeling I used to have in that room, which was the particular combination of smallness and longing that I spent twenty-eight years mistaking for ambition.
It was not there.
I want to be precise about what was there instead. Not peace — peace suggests an absence of difficulty and the difficulty is very much present. Not contentment. Something more structural than either of those. Something like: a foundation. The specific solidity of a man who knows what he is made of because he has been tested against something real and found, not perfect, not heroic, simply — present. Himself. There in the room in a way he never was before.
I looked at Father’s ledger on the desk. He keeps it open to the current page. He always has; a habit of his I have never questioned. My name appears in it in the column that tracks the plantation’s future arrangements. Third son. The entry is brief.
I closed the ledger. I do not know why. He will open it again and find nothing changed and will think nothing of it. But I closed it.
I wrote a document last night. Not a letter — a record. Everything: what the French dispatch contained, what the musket ball means, what the war is and who it serves and what it will cost the people standing on the land that is being traded. I wrote it in the hand I use for correspondence so it will be legible to whoever finds it. I folded it and put it in my coat in the same pocket that carried the musket ball from October to March.
I do not know what I will do with it. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps it is enough that it exists, that someone wrote it down accurately, that the true version is somewhere in the world even if it never reaches anyone who can act on it.
Sunday dinner was adequate. Father looked at me across the table the way he always has — the ledger look, the assessing look, the look that finds me and moves on. I sat in it without the old contraction. I did not need anything from that look. I have been looked at differently, and by better, and I know the difference now in my body.
Come to see me soon. I find I need to sit with someone who knows what I actually am.
Thomas
LETTER XVIII
To Sikwa, of the Lenape people, Western Pennsylvania
Written April 19th, 1755
Found in the coat of Lieutenant Thomas Burwell following his death at the Battle of the Monongahela, July 9th, 1755
Addressed. Unsealed. Never delivered.
Sikwa,
I have no means of reaching you and I am writing this anyway because some things require the form of a letter, even when the letter has nowhere to go. This is a record, then. A thing that happened, set down so that it does not un-happen simply because no one who was there is watching anymore.
I am in Williamsburg. It is spring. The light here is the flat generous light I described to you badly in January — that particular color I could not name — and I want you to know that I was right about it. It is exactly that color. You would find it strange. I would give a considerable sum to watch you find it strange.
I drew Washington the wrong map. I want you to know this in case it matters. I placed the camp four miles east of where it sits. I gave him the wrong creek crossings. He believed me because I am the kind of man who is believed, which is a quality I have spent my life applying to purposes considerably less worthy than this one. The map I gave him will not find you. It is the only thing I had left to give, and I gave it.
I think about the look you gave me on the first night. I have thought about it every day since October. I have finally understood what it was. It was the look of someone who had not yet decided. Who was still holding the question open. I was twenty-eight years old in the way of a man who has been looked at all his life by people who had already decided, and you looked at me like the answer was still being written. I became, in the space of eight months, a man worth the open question. I do not know how to explain what that is worth. I know that it is worth more than I can say in a letter that has nowhere to go.
You said you knew what I did at the woodpile. You meant the whole of it — not what Kimi saw, which was a man failing to signal, but what actually happened, which was a man choosing. I have thought about why you said it in that moment, in that specific moment at the end, when the saying of it could not change anything practical. I think you said it because you wanted me to know that you had seen me clearly. That you had always seen me clearly. That the open question was not whether I was a good man — you had answered that — but whether a good man and an impossible situation were going to be enough.
They were not enough. We both knew that. The world is not arranged for enough.
I carry what you gave me in the same place I carried the musket ball. Inside. Against the chest. Where it doesn’t show but where it is always present, always the same weight, always the specific gravity of a thing that is real.
I hope the camp is where I did not tell them it was. I hope the ice held through the spring. I hope Ashkii’s snares are full and Kimi’s nephew is growing and the women who taught me that I was doing things wrong are still correcting men who need correcting.
I hope you kept the musket ball.
I hope —
Thomas Burwell
[The letter ends here. The final line is incomplete. — J.B.]
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