April Morning (11 page)

“Lay down your arms, you lousy bastards! Disperse, do you hear me! Disperse, you lousy peasant scum! Clear the way, do you hear me! Get off the King's green!”

At least, those were the words that I seem to remember. Others remembered differently; but the way he screamed, in his strange London accent, with all the motion and excitement, with his horse rearing and kicking at the Reverend and Father, with the drums beating again and the fixed bayonets glittering in the sunshine, it's a wonder that any of his words remained with us.

Yet for all that, this was a point where everything appeared to happen slowly. Abel Loring clutched my arm and said dryly, “Adam, Adam, Adam.” He let go of his gun and it fell to the ground. “Pick it up,” I said to him, watching Father, who pulled the Reverend into the protection of his body. Jonas Parker turned to us and cried at us:

“Steady! Steady! Now just hold steady!”

We still stood in our two lines, our guns butt end on the ground or held loosely in our hands.

Major Pitcairn spurred his horse and raced between the lines. Somewhere, away from us, a shot sounded. A redcoat soldier raised his musket, leveled it at Father, and fired. My father clutched at his breast, then crumpled to the ground like an empty sack and lay with his face in the grass. I screamed. I was two. One part of me was screaming; another part of me looked at Father and grasped my gun in aching hands. Then the whole British front burst into a roar of sound and flame and smoke, and our whole world crashed at us, and broke into little pieces that fell around our ears, and came to an end; and the roaring, screaming noise was like the jubilation of the damned.

I ran. I was filled with fear, saturated with it, sick with it. Everyone else was running. The boys were running and the men were running. Our two lines were gone, and now it was only men and boys running in every direction that was away from the British, across the common and away from the British.

I tripped and fell into the drainage ditch, banged my head hard enough to shake me back to some reality, pulled myself up, and saw Samuel Hodley standing above me with a ragged hole in his neck, the blood pouring down over his white shirt. We looked at each other, then he fell dead into the ditch. I vomited convulsively, and then, kneeling there, looked back across the common. The British were advancing at a run through a ragged curtain of smoke. There was nothing to oppose them or stop them. Except for the crumpled figures of the dead, lying here and there, our militia was gone. The last of them were running toward the edge of the common, except for one man, Jonas Parker, who staggered along holding his belly, his hands soaking red with the blood that dripped through them. Two redcoat soldiers raced for him, and the one who reached him first drove his bayonet with all his plunging force into Parker's back.

“Oh, no!” I screamed. “Oh, God—no! No! No!”

Then I saw redcoats coming at a trot on the other side of the ditch and, through my sickness and terror and horror, realized somehow that if I remained here, I would be trapped—and it was not death I was afraid of or being taken by them or getting a musket ball, but that thin, glittering bayonet going into my vitals or tearing through my back the way it had with Jonas Parker. So I leaped up and ran, still holding onto my gun without ever knowing that I held it. The soldiers saw me and ran to cut me off, but I fled past them, across the common, leaped the fence, and ran between two shuttered, blind houses and tumbled down behind a pile of split kindling, and crouched there, vomiting again, over and over, until my chest and shoulders ached with the convulsive effort of it. Then I ran behind the house and another house, and there was the Harrington smokehouse, and I hid in there, with the hams and butts and sides of bacon over me. I crawled into a corner, put my face in my hands, and lay there sobbing.

At fifteen, you can still manufacture a fantasy and believe it for at least a few moments; and I had need for such a fantasy, or I would lose my wits and senses completely; so I began to tell myself that none of this had happened, that it was all something I had invented and dreamed, that I had never at all awakened during the night, that my father was not dead and that the others were not dead. I didn't believe any of this fantasy, you must understand; I knew that I was inventing it; but I had to invent it and use it to get hold of myself and to stop the screaming and pounding inside of my head. In that way, it worked. I was able to stop my convulsive sobbing, and to sit with my back to the smokehouse wall and just cry normally. Once I had established a fantasy about my father being alive, I was able to break it down and argue with myself, and then accept the fact that Father was dead.

He was dead. He had been shot by a musket ball, and if that had not killed him, then a bayonet had been driven into him the way I saw the bayonet driven into Jonas Parker. No one had fallen down on the common and lived. I knew that. We had made a mistake. We were stupid people. We were narrow people. We were provincial people. But over and above everything, we were civilized people, which was the core of everything. We were going to argue with the British, and talk them out of whatever they intended. We knew we could do that. We were the most reasonable, talkative people in all probabilities that the world had ever seen, and we knew we could win an argument with the British hands down. Why, no one on our side had even thought of firing a gun, because when you came right down to it, we didn't like guns and did not believe in them. Yes, we drilled on the common and had all sort of fine notions about defending our rights and our liberties, but that didn't change our attitude about guns and killing. That British Major Pitcairn on his champing horse knew exactly what we were and how we thought. He knew it better than we knew it ourselves.

And now my father was dead. It was so absolute it closed over me like a blanket of lead. He would never come home again. He had put his arm about me the night before, and had given me such a feeling of love and closeness as I had never known in all my life; but he wouldn't do it again. He was like Samuel Hodley, with the blood pouring out of him; and I began to think of how much blood a man has, and you just never know that a man can bleed so much, a red river coming out of him, until you see it happen—and then I began to think about Mother, and ask myself whether she and Granny and Levi had watched the whole thing from the upstairs windows, and how they had felt when they saw it happen. If you could dig the deepest well in the world and call it misery, you could find the place of my feelings then. I sat there and cried. I hadn't cried so much since I was a small boy, very small, because a boy gets over crying early in a town like ours.

“God have mercy on me,” I said to myself. “I am losing my mind, and soon I'll be no better than Halfwit Jephthah in Concord, who is sixty years old with the brains of a five-year-old, and now I, myself, am hearing voices.” I was hearing voices. I heard a thin, cracked voice wailing, “Adam! Adam Cooper—are you around? Are you alive.”

I opened the door of the smokehouse, and there across the yard was my brother Levi.

“Levi,” I whispered.

He jumped like a startled rabbit and looked all around him.

“Levi! Here in the smokehouse!”

Then he saw me in the open door, ran to me, and threw himself sobbing into my arms, hanging onto me as if I was the only thing left in the whole world. He was crying now fit to break his heart, and that dried up the tears in me. I have noticed that when you have two brothers in a difficult situation and one begins to cry, the other usually contains himself. That was the way it happened to me. I pulled him into the smokehouse, closed the door behind us, and said:

“What are you doing out here?”

“Looking for you.”

“Well, who sent you to look for me?”

“Granny did. Adam, Father's dead.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw him dead,” he sobbed. “He had two bullet holes in his chest. They shot him dead, Adam. Those lousy rotten redcoats shot him dead. That's my father. They shot him dead, Adam.” He was shivering and shaking. I shook him until he had calmed down and was crying evenly again. Then I put my arm around him and squeezed him, the way Father had done to me, to show him that I wasn't angry.

“Where did you see Father?” I asked him.

“Out on the common. Granny and Mother ran out there and I went with them. First the redcoats tried to stop us, but Granny was so wild and terrible angry that they let her go, and she fell down on her knees where Father was lying and began begging him he shouldn't be dead, because out of five sons, he was the last one. But Mother just grabbed onto me and held me and looked at Father, and just wailing and wailing quiet, like a little girl—oh, it was terrible, terrible, Adam. It was just more terrible than anything, just more terrible, Adam, I tell you. Then a redcoat soldier came over, and he said something to Mother about could he help—I don't know exactly what he said, because you can't understand them so good the way they speak, and Granny stood up and spit in his face and said things to him like I never heard her say before. Goody Simmons was there and her sister, and the four of them, they picked up Father and carried him into the house. And there were dead people all over the common, with the women crying and wailing, and the redcoat soldiers all over everywhere—”

“Who else was dead?” I whispered.

“I don't know all of them—I didn't look. Some of them were across the common, and there were two men lying in the drainage ditch, I think one of those was Jonas Parker. Caleb Harrington is dead. Then I saw Jonathan Harrington crawling along through his own blood, the blood was running out under him, and there were some women trying to help him, and he was crying. Isaac Muzzy was lying next to Father. He was dead. He was all cut with bayonets and they had smashed in his head.”

He began to shake again, and I held him for a while and quieted him.

“They killed Father,” he said. “Father's dead, Adam. Did you know that?”

“I know that, Levi,” I said softly. “But he didn't feel any hurt or pain out of it. I saw how they shot him. It never hurt him at all.”

“It hurts to be dead.”

“No, it doesn't.”

“How do you know?”

“I know, I know,” I said. “Stop shaking. Everything is going to be all right.”

“It'll never be all right again. Father's dead.”

“Well, people die. People die. Don't you think Father knew that he could die when he went out there to stand up to the British?”

“Then why did he go?”

“He had to go,” I told him. “He had to go.”

“Why didn't you kill the British?”

He had asked it finally, and then someone else and then someone else—and they would never stop asking why no one, not one of us, fired his gun, not one shot, not one show of force or courage or anything like that—but only the running away. He must have felt it in me in the darkness, and he said:

“I didn't mean that, Adam.”

“It wouldn't make Father alive,” I muttered. “Father's dead. We have to think of what to do.”

“He had two holes in his chest,” Levi said.

“What did Granny say to you?”

“They laid him down on the dining-room table. Goody Simmons began to wash him. His face was dirty and bloody. But Mother just stood there and said, ‘Moses Cooper, Moses Cooper—'”

“Don't keep on talking about it and thinking about it.”

“He's dead,”

“What did Granny tell you to say to me? Can I come home?”

“You can't come home. There are redcoats all over the place. She says to hide in the woods back of Cousin Simmons' house until darkness falls. Then we can hide you in the house.”

Yes, I thought, I'll hide in the house and hide in the woodshed, and even if I come out into the sunshine one day, I'll still be hiding.

“Will you do that, Adam?”

“Tell them not to worry about me. I'll be all right.”

“You wouldn't run away, Adam?” he begged me. “You wouldn't run away and leave me all alone?”

“Of course not.”

We sat quietly in the darkness for a few minutes. Levi pressed close to me, pushing his face into my jacket. He felt small and helpless, and I was filled with guilt for all the times we had quarreled and all the names we had called each other; and I told myself that from now on, I would take care of him just as if I were his own father.

“You'd better go home now,” I said to him. “I guess it's bad enough at home with all the misery they got, without worrying about what happened to you and me.”

“What shall I tell them?”

“I'll come later, when it's safe. I'll be all right. I'll take care of myself.”

But when Levi slipped out of the smokehouse, I was alone again and afraid again, and no one to come between myself and my fear and grief.

The Forenoon

I
MUST HAVE
dozed off for just a moment or two, and I was awakened by the sound of voices. I crept to the door of the smokehouse and put my eye against a thin crack in the closing, and there, no more than three or four paces away, were two redcoats, standing there in the morning sunshine and looking, or so it appeared to me, directly at me.

“Now take that shed, Sergeant,” said one of them. “It could be stuffed as full with Yankees as a goose with pudding, and us none the wiser.”

“You have a point there, Blythe, indeed.”

“Or that woodpile there.”

“A possibility, no doubt.”

“They are tricky devils, they are.”

“Not to be trusted.”

“I would sooner trust my wife.”

“There you have the nature of them, Blythe. Sly. Sly as women. You and me could be standing there, having a word with each other, just two honest men attempting to do their duty according to a solemn oath they have sworn to the King, and they'd like as not be planning to pot us from that window up there.”