Queering Benedict Arnold, 2 Norwich, Connecticut: April 14, 1759 By Jake Preston
"Queering Benedict Arnold" is historical gay fiction. The story alternates between twenty-first century scenes in which Jake Preston and Ben Arnold (a descendent) investigate Benedict's life, and eighteenth-century scenes imagined by Jake and Ben. Some characters and allusions hark back to "Wayward Island" (in nifty's file on Beginnings). Jake Preston is the narrator in both works.
Most episodes are faithful to history, except for sexual encounters, which are fictional. You should not read this story if you are a minor, or if you are offended by explicit gay sex.
Benedict Arnold was an American military genius who was treated unfairly by jealous rivals while he lived. After his death, he was denounced as the archetypal traitor in history and folklore, but he was a target of inexplicable hatred long before his treasonable conspiracy with John André to surrender the fort at West Point to the British. Taken as a whole, "Queering Benedict Arnold" is an attempt to discover the origins of that hatred. Comments and suggestions welcome: jemtling@gmail.com
Nifty stories are free to Readers, but donations are encouraged.
In a pool on the Quinnebaug River, eight young men gathered for an afternoon swim, downstream from a waterfall and a mill. The waterfall forced the surged water, which propelled a rotating wheel that gave power to a grain-mill. Ben and I gazed at the scene from the cliff above. We stood to the right, near the crest of Quinnebaug Waterfall. Across the river, a fine red-brick house rose on the cliff, federal-style, overlooking the scene. Behind the blinds of a window, a woman looked down at the water hole. She was handsome and richly dressed, but past the age when most colonial women would marry. I imagined her lonely and wishing she could dance and laugh as a ninth bather among eight naked man. Even the homeliest of them looked beautiful to her. "Was she the owner of the mill?" I wondered. This was not impossible, even in colonial times.
On the left bank, below the federal-brick house, five men were assembled on a rugged boulder. A sixth dove from the rock into the riverpool. Two swam away from the boulder's edge. The men on the boulder seemed posed. One reclined recumbent, on the far left. The second knelt, his right arm stretched toward the boulder's edge, as if he was holding an invisible sling. "A studio trick," I thought, remembering one of my sessions posing for Anna Ravitch. "You keep your arm stretched out in an unnatural pose by holding onto a sling. The sling is omitted from the painting, leaving only the male nude." The other men stood in a group, like a male version of Three Graces, unaware of each other, dancing centrifugally. One was taller than the others, an English-looking athlete, six feet tall with dark brown hair. His Mohegan companions ranged from five- feet-four to -six, to judge from our distal perspective.
"That's Benedict Arnold, my ancestor, ten generations removed," Ben said. The facial resemblance between him and Ben was unmistakable. The date was April 14, 1759, eighteen years and three months after Benedict Arnold's birth. How strange that in our first vision of this legendary figure, we found him skinny-dipping with seven commandos in an idyllic swimming-hole! It reminded me of Anna's "Water Hole Follies," a visual narrative of a U.S. Marine episode that she had borrowed from Larry Gwin's Baptism, a Vietnam War memoir. I told Ben about Mrs. Ravitch's lecture on swimming-holes in art history, beginning with "The Swimming Hole" (1885): America's first truly great artist, Tom Eakins, got his inspiration from Walt Whitman's verbal picture of twenty-eight skinny-dippers in Leaves of Grass (1855). "Tom Eakins got canned from his job as a teacher after he gave a 'mixed' life-drawing class in which men and women students sketched a male nude," I told Ben.
The scene was subtly erotic, even though the men posed centrifugally, scattered from an invisible point in the cosmos, each independent of the others. The erotic feeling derived from the impression that the men were not there by volition. It was as if an artist had assembled them, like a boy might do with toy soldiers, positioning them in diverse poses according to the dictates of a childish will. Had the scene been a painting, Benedict's seven companions could have been painted from the same nude model.
Ben and I took a downhill path toward the pool. We got there in time to see all eight men sporting in the water. Their faces glistened with wet, it ran from their long hair. Little streams passed all over their bodies. Unseen hands passed over naked bodies, descending tremblingly from temples to ribs. The young men floated on their backs. Their white bellies bulged to the sun. No one flinched when a hand seized fast to him. No one asked who it was when someone declined over him with pendant and bending arch. No one thought whom he soused with spray.
The men spoke Mohegan. Benedict Arnold was their natural-born leader. He conversed as one who had spoken the Mohegan language since childhood. Ben and I listened without understanding. From their gestures, from the way that they looked and pointed to mill and its water-wheel, we could tell that Benedict Arnold and one of his Mohegan companions were negotiating some sort of dare. Next thing we saw, Benedict swam toward the churning water-wheel. He seized one of its blades, and clung to it while the wheel lifted his body upward. The wheel turned its course and crested while Benedict Arnold held on for dear life. He disappeared. Minutes later, he bobbed head and shoulders out of the foamy swill by the water-wheel. He swam free of its churn and returned to his companions.
Ben and I looked up. The mysterious woman no longer watched from her window. She stood at the edge of the cliff, her gaze fixed on the risky daring of Benedict Arnold. Neither he nor his seven commandos were aware of her presence.
Ben and I were in for another surprise when the men got back into their clothing. All donned moccasins and deerskin flaps fore and aft, including Benedict Arnold. No longer centrifugal in their interactions, they engaged in horseplay while helping each other get dressed. Benedict seemed particularly fond of one of the Mohegans. "That's Red Feather," Ben said, "the Mohegan Shaman's son," alluding to a shapely youth whose butt was held captive in Benedict's proprietary grasp.
The water-wheel adventure was a dare. "I'll wager your arse for mine that I can spin around that water-wheel," Benedict Arnold said to Red Feather. When Red Feather accepted the wager, he figured on winning some friendly arse from a lad he had loved since childhood. Common sense would prevail, he thought, when Benedict swam close to the water-wheel. He figured that Benedict would resign the attempt out of instinct for self-preservation. Benedict's arse would be his. Erotic expectation gave way to worry at the sight of Benedict hurled upward on the blade, his browned complexion contrasting the white skin of his river- drenched arse, gleaming in afternoon sunlight. "He's going to get himself killed!" Red Feather exclaimed-regretting his part in a dangerous dare. But Benedict rode the watercourse and emerged in the foamy surf. Red Feather's regret gave way to relief-attenuated by grim apprehension at losing his virgin butt in the bargain.
Now is the time to say what we knew of Benedict Arnold's physique. Five years earlier, at age thirteen, he stood five-feet-nine, head and shoulders above other boys his age, who (in colonial times) averaged five-feet-three or -four. By age eighteen, Benedict had grown to six feet. His shoulders were broad, his arms and legs muscular from working on his father's trading-sloop in the harbor. He had a commanding profile: a prominent nose and chin, a high forehead, light gray eyes and a handsomely dark complexion, matched by a strong voice. To his friends he seemed confident; to his enemies, arrogant.
In the privacy of a wigwam in the forest, Benedict Arnold claimed his prize, not without sensitivity owed to a lifelong friend. This was no time for virginal butchery: no matter that Benedict had won fair and square in a dare. Benedict helped Red Feather get naked, and carefully folded his clothes. His hands roved Red Feather's torso. Its crannies and curves were well known, but defamiliarized by the touch of tremulous fingers in the austere setting of the wigwam. Red Feather steadied his hand, and guided it by descendent indirection to his inner thighs and his scrotum. Red Feather gasped at the warm clasp of fingers around his bulbourously slickened shaft. Benedict embraced him and they kissed while he fondled the throbbing cock. He explored Red Feather's pits and inhaled a brief whiff of tragus-squeaky-clean from their swim in the Quennebaug, but the fragrance of maleness returned in vague hints, just enough to spur Benedict to erotic madness.
Benedict tore off his clothes and tossed them aside dramatically. Red Feather retrieved them and folded them in a neat pile atop of his. "A lover takes care of his lover's body," he said. "That includes making sure that his clothes are neat and clean." Benedict shared his nudity with Red Feather. They played with each other's foreskins. It goes without saying that Mohegans and English colonists shunned circumcision as a crude barbarity.
In sight and in touch, Benedict and Red Feather shared mutual knowledge of each other's nudity as a result of years of skinny-dipping in the Quennebaug; canoeing nude in parts of the river that ran through Mohegan territory; diving from the sterns of ships in Norwichtown harbor; fighting mock-wars between Indians and English who intruded on Mohegan hunting-grounds. In war-games, the 'Mohegans' fought naked to distinguish themselves from Mohegan boys who pretended to be English: an Adirondack equivalent of skins versus shirts in basketball. When teams were chosen for war-games, Benedict insisted on playing Indian, whether from a natural inclination toward exhibitionism, or to act out frustration over how his family, living in genteel poverty in an ageing mansion, was no longer treated with respect in Norwichtown. Sometimes they played at Mohegans versus Wampanoegs, traditional enemies, or Mohegans versus Narragansetts. In historical fact, the Mohegans never fought the English, their traditional allies.
Whatever the opposing teams called themselves, they stalked each other in the forest. Their games climaxed with wrestling that ended when one boy carved scalp from the other. To add realism to the game, Red Feather once borrowed a collection of scalps from a trunk in his uncle's cabin, the elderly Mohegan chief, Benjamin Uncas. (The Mohegans started living in cabins long before Red Feather was born. They continued to use wigwams for ceremonies, and Mohegan boys used them in games, and as hideouts.) The Shaman, Red Feather's father, was angry with his son for his flippant use of scalps that were won dearly by ancestral warriors. Chief Benjamin Uncas was inclined to indulge his nephew. After a family quarrel, the rod of discipline was spared, but the scalps were moved to a hiding-place that the boys never found.
Back to our scene in the wigwam: in their love-making, Benedict took an increasing interest in Red Feather's arse. His finger coursed Red Feather's cleft, down to the virginal button. Red Feather trembled apprehensively. In a whisper too low for the gods could hear, Benedict offered to release Red Feather from his end of their neck-risking bargain.
"Let's do it, now that we've come this far," Red Feather said. In his gear, he had a leather pouch filled with salve made from bear-fat, normally applied to minor cuts or bruises. He handed it to Benedict, flipped, and arched. Benedict inserted salve with an intruding finger, and coated his cock with it.
"I'd rather do this face to face," Benedict said. "I want to see you, and I want you to see me." He flipped Red Feather on his back and knelt between his knees. Red Feather frog-legged, and wrapped his lower legs around Benedict's neck. He tried a chokehold, in play, but hung loose when it mattered, sometimes with ankles embedded in Benedict's shoulders. The reddish-brown twinkle of Red Feather's aperture drove Benedict to action. He crept forward. When he plowed furrow to the center of Red Feather, he gasped at the tightness of tissue that teased every inch of his 'yard'. He knew he'd find pleasure, but what he felt inside Red Feather was intensity times ten. As for Red Feather: during initial penetration he swallowed a howl in his lungs and groaned through clenched teeth while Benedict enlarged his sphincters and reshaped his anal canal with a yard that knew neither measure nor mercy. No one but he and Benedict knew the exact moment when the rose was 'pluckt' and 'gather'd'.
When the hard part was over, they exchanged looks and Mohegan words, negotiating a path to mutual joy in the other. Benedict was rewarded for his merry joust by testosterone-slick that pooled between tight bellies and heaving chests. Red Feather's orgazzy aroma drove Benedict to erogenous madness. Blade- rotations on the water-wheel at Quennebaug mill could be counted, but Benedict's penetrations into Red Feather could not be counted. Release came to Benedict; silken relief to Red Feather, not without tristesse at losing the physical connection.
So it came about that Benedict rejoiced Red Feather, and Red Feather rejoiced Benedict. For the rest of their lives they were lovers, even when Fate took them on separate paths: Red Feather as a Mohegan Shaman, and Benedict as a sea-captain and smuggler, an intrepid general, founder of the Navy, and an exile whose exploits were blotted from history. Separated sometimes for months and for years, they still found ways to meet. When they were reunited, however briefly, they picked up where they left off.
Had Red Feather been English, their encounter would not have occurred, and Benedict would have gone through life knowing marriage and fatherhood, but the love of a man for a man would have been unknown to him. "Let us try to understand this," I told Ben. "Why did Benedict choose Mohegan boys for his mates?"
"Easy to say: they chose him," Ben said. "They chose him at a time when the Arnold family was shunned by most of the English in Norwichtown. Some folks were jealous of his aristocratic heritage: the Arnold ancestry went back to King Ynir of Gwentland, a twelfth-century kingdom in Wales. Others were gleeful with Schadenfreude when the family fell into poverty. When his father's business debts weighed them down, Christians in Norwichtown relished the day when the Arnolds would relinquish their mansion and (more importantly) their front pew in the Congregational Church. When this didn't happen, the Arnolds were shunned. Had the family complied with Norwichtown expectations, they would have been shunned for living in a modest neighborhood. Others kept their children away from Benedict because his father became the town drunk."
As a child, Benedict Arnold was inclined to a cheerful disposition that shielded him from melancholy during an iliad of sorrows that swept his family. His earliest childhood memory was a funeral in the parlor of the Arnold mansion when he was nine, after his brother Absolom died of yellow fever at age three (in 1750). At age eleven (in September 1752), Benedict was sent to Canterbury to study in Reverend Dr. James Cogswell's boarding school for boys. He returned home on September 10, 1753, for the funeral of his sister Mary, who died of yellow fever at age eight. In April 1754, Dr. Cogswell complained to Benedict's mother Hannah that Benedict was a problem pupil. One day during a barn fire, Benedict walked trapeze-like on the ridgepole, and cut a dramatic figure in smoke while the barn blazed below.
In mid-September (1754), Benedict returned to Norwichtown for good, because the Arnolds no longer had funds for his schooling. His mother Hannah's kinship, as Dr. Cogswell's cousin, was insufficient reason for the Puritan minister to keep a destitute, naughty nephew in his school. The family had planned for Benedict to follow in Dr. Cogswell's footsteps and study Divinity at Yale College. This future vanished in the rigor of Puritan ethics, which held that prosperity signified virtue, whilst poverty signified moral failure, amply demonstrated by Benedict's boyhood pranks. Another funeral followed (September 29, 1755) when his sister Elizabeth died of yellow fever at age six. By that time, Benedict worked as an apprentice for two apothecary-brothers, Daniel and Joshua Lathrop, who treated him well and taught him the art of pharmacy. Not even the apothecaries knew that the epidemic was spread by mosquitoes in the miasmic flats of the river where it emptied into the harbor in Norwichtown. Benedict might have died in the plague, too, were it not for his good fortune to be boarded in the dry plain of Canterbury during the months when the epidemic did its worst.
After the barn-burning episode, Hannah admonished her son in a letter, "Keep a steady watch over your thoughts, words and actions.... Always choose that your companions be your betters, that their good examples you may earn." But when Benedict returned to Norwichtown, the companions he chose were Mohegan youths. They were partners in hunting, fishing, trapping beaver and weasel, skinny-dipping in summer, ice skating in winter, and English vs. Indian war-games year-round. When he was with them he wore Mohegan dress. As their ring-leader, he drew them into foolish pranks. One day on Thanksgiving, when people gathered on Bean Hill for a baked-bean dinner, Benedict and his merry mates stole barrels of tar and lit a spectacular bonfire that blackened the sky. When constable's deputies ran up the hill to catch the Mohegan youths, Benedict threatened the constable with a beating. The diversion allowed the Mohegans to get away.
Benedict was unique in Norwichtown for his knowledge of Algonquian languages. Thanks to his boyhood friends he spoke Mohegan like a native, but he also learned Narragansett and Wampanoeg from his study of notebooks in his family's library: lists of words and phrases collected by his great-great- grandfather, William Arnold, and his great-grandfather, Benedict Arnold I. He memorized all the words, and compared them to Mohegan in a notebook of his own.
"The first clean fact I know about Benedict Arnold is that the English despised him because he was an Indian-lover," Ben said. "They suspected he was a covert heathen. People in Norwichtown called him the `half-bred apothecary'. If the Puritans had an Inquisition, he would have been burned at stake. Friendship with Indians ran in the family. In 1637, 104 years before Benedict was born, William Arnold traveled with Roger Williams from Massachusetts Bay to Rhode Island, where they were 'founding proprietors' of Providence Plantation, and co-founders of America's first Baptist Church. Roger Williams, William Arnold, and his son (Benedict Arnold I) made friends with Narragansetts, and learned the two Algonquian dialects in the region: Narragansett, and Wampanoeg. Their friendships and linguistic knowledge enabled William and Benedict to purchase 10,000 acres from the Narragansetts in Pawtexet. The Arnolds were the wealthiest family in Rhode Island."
Often the Arnolds allied themselves with Indians in disputes with English colonists. A well-known example was the 'Gortonite controversy'. A colonist named Samuel Gorton was the leader of a cult that denied the Trinity and the existence of heaven and hell. In 1641, the Narragansetts 'sold' land to Samuel Gorton. It was the same land that Benedict Arnold I had purchased four years earlier. Gorton knew this, but took advantage of the fact that 'land-ownership' meant 'hunting rights' to the Narragansetts. Squatting on Arnold's land, they mistreated the Indians, and refused to pay taxes to the colonial government. To maintain autonomy, the Gortonites seceded from Providence Plantation and declared themselves subject to Massachusetts Bay. After sixteen years of violent controversy, Gorton came to terms with Rhode Island. During this time, the Arnolds earned the Indians' loyalty.
As if by genetic transmission, Benedict Arnold inherited these traits. Some colonists whispered insinuations that the Arnold-Indian connection included heathen practices and more.