“Mom, don’t. Please,” Thomas said, but she didn’t answer. We sped up 252 into the national park and then turned west toward Valley Forge Mountain, where we lived. Ahead of us, the sun had fallen below the fields.

“You can’t leave her. It’s dark,” Marie said.

We were still five or six miles from home. I hadn’t said anything to make my mother stop. We careened down the road, went through the covered bridge, past farmland and fences. Beside us, the shadows of dogwoods blurred in the dark as my mother kept driving, each tree hemmed in a halo of white where the bracts had fallen.

2

Valley Forge was best known for the winter that George Washington spent there with twelve thousand soldiers of the Continental Army, camped in makeshift log cabins, trying to survive. They were malnourished, half naked, and barefoot. Over two thousand died from exposure, disease, and injuries, and another three thousand were unfit for service. Miss Esposito, our ninth-grade history teacher, had said that Valley Forge was the turning point in the war, that it symbolized the revolutionary spirit and America’s sense of itself. I was the only one in my class who actually was from there. When I walked through the woods on the mountain, I thought about those freezing men who came up here to drag timber and fallen branches down to the encampment, who ran through the trees, deserting the army, or who may have crawled here to lie down and die. Some weren’t even men, only boys, Thomas’s age.

The army hospital was set up at Yellow Springs, the other side of the mountain, so the sick and dying men must have come through our woods, along the trails, to get there from the encampment. Men with no shoes trudging through snow, sick, walking the same woods as me or being carried. What would they have seen from a stretcher in the winter, looking up, no canopy of leaves? Just bare black branches against a gray sky, thinking it might be the last time they were witnessing the earth, and the sun wouldn’t even show itself. Maybe they didn’t even see trees at all; I’d read somewhere that to keep warm and build their cabins, the soldiers had felled nearly all the trees.

Valley Forge Mountain was not so much a mountain as a hill. Washington’s Headquarters was less than two miles from my house if I cut through the woods. In the 1950s the mountain was zoned for housing, but the woods were preserved as part of the park. Behind my house was the Horseshoe Trail, a hiking and bridle path that started in the park and went 140 miles until it met the Appalachian Trail in Harrisburg.