April Morning (15 page)

We came down off the wall as if he had toppled all of us, and we crouched behind it. I have heard people talk with contempt about the British regulars, but that only proves that a lot of people talk about things of which they are deplorably ignorant. Whatever we felt about the redcoats, we respected them in terms of their trade, which was killing; and I know that I, myself, was nauseated with apprehension and fear and that my hands were soaking wet where they held my gun. I wanted to wipe my flint, but I didn't dare to, the state my hands were in, just as I didn't dare to do anything about the priming. The gun would fire or not, just as chance willed. I put a lot more trust in my two legs than in the gun, because the most important thing I had learned about war was that you could run away and survive to talk about it.

The gunfire, which was so near that it seemed just a piece up the road now, stopped for long enough to count to twenty; and in that brief interval, a redcoat officer came tearing down the road, whipping his horse fit to kill. I don't know whether he was after our rider, who had gone by a minute before, or whether he was simply scouting conditions; but when he passed us by, a musket roared, and he reared his horse, swung it around, and began to whip it back in the direction from which he had come. He was a fine and showy rider, but his skill was wasted on us. From above me and somewhere behind me, a rifle cracked. The redcoat officer collapsed like a punctured bolster, and the horse reared and threw him from the saddle, except that one booted foot caught in the stirrup. Half crazed by the weight dragging, the dust, and the heat, the horse leaped our wall, dashing out the rider's brains against it, and leaving him lying there among us—while the horse crashed away through the brush.

It was my initiation to war and the insane symphony war plays; for what had happened on the common was only terror and flight; but this grinning, broken head, not ten feet away from me, was the sharp definition of what my reality had become.

And now the redcoats were coming, and the gunfire was a part of the dust cloud on the road to the west of us. I must state that the faster things happened, the slower they happened; the passage and rhythm of time changed, and when I remember back to what happened then, each event is a separate and frozen incident. In my recollection, there was a long interval between the death of the officer and the appearance of the first of the retreating redcoats, and in that interval the dust cloud over the road seems to hover indefinitely. Yet it could not have been more than a matter of seconds, and then the front of the British army came into view.

It was only hours since I had last seen them, but they had changed and I had changed. In the very front rank, two men were wounded and staggered along, trailing blood behind them. No drummers here, no pipers, and the red coats were covered with a fine film of dust. They marched with bayonets fixed, and as fixed on their faces was anger, fear, and torment. Rank after rank of them came down the road, and the faces were all the same, and they walked in a sea of dust.

“Committeemen, hold your fire! Hold your fire!” a voice called, and what made it even more terrible and unreal was that the redcoat ranks never paused for an instant, only some of them glancing toward the stone wall, from behind which the voice came.

The front of their column had already passed us, when another officer came riding down the side of the road, not five paces from where we were. My Cousin Simmons carried a musket, but he had loaded it with bird shot, and as the officer came opposite him, he rose up behind the wall and fired. One moment there was a man in the saddle; the next a headless horror on a horse that bolted through the redcoat ranks, and during the next second or two, we all of us fired into the suddenly disorganized column of soldiers. One moment, the road was filled with disciplined troops, marching four by four with a purpose as implacable as death; the next, a cloud of gun smoke covered a screaming fury of sound, out of which the redcoat soldiers emerged with their bayonets and their cursing fury.

In the course of this, they had fired on us; but I have no memory of that. I had squeezed the trigger of my own gun, and to my amazement, it had fired and kicked back into my shoulder with the force of an angry mule; and then I was adding my own voice to the crescendo of sound, hurling more vile language than I ever thought I knew, sobbing and shouting, and aware that if I had passed water before, it was not enough, for my pants were soaking wet.

I would have stood there and died there if left to myself, but Cousin Simmons grabbed my arm in his viselike grip and fairly plucked me out of there; and then I came to some sanity and plunged away with such extraordinary speed that I outdistanced Cousin Simmons by far. Everyone else was running. Later we realized that the redcoats had stopped their charge at the wall. Their only hope of survival was to hold to the road and keep marching.

We tumbled to a stop in Deacon Gordon's cow hole, a low-lying bit of pasture with a muddy pool of water in its middle. A dozen cows mooed sadly and regarded us as if we were insane, as perhaps we were at that moment, with the crazy excitement of our first encounter, the yelling and shooting still continuing up at the road, and the thirst of some of the men, which was so great that they waded into the muddy water and scooped up handfuls of it. Isaac Pitt, one of the men from Lincoln, had taken a musket ball in his belly; and though he had found the strength to run with us, now he collapsed and lay on the ground, dying, the Reverend holding his head and wiping his hot brow. It may appear that we were cruel and callous, but no one had time to spend sympathizing with poor Isaac—except the Reverend. I know that I myself felt that it was a mortal shame for a man to be torn open by a British musket ball, as Isaac had been, yet I also felt relieved and lucky that it had been him and not myself. I was drunk with excitement and the smell of gunpowder that came floating down from the road, and the fact that I was not afraid now, but only waiting to know what to do next.

Meanwhile, I reloaded my gun, as the other men were doing. We were less than a quarter of a mile from the road, and we could trace its shape from the ribbon of powder smoke and dust that hung over it. Wherever you looked, you saw Committeemen running across the meadows, some away from the road, some toward it, some parallel to it; and about a mile to the west a cluster of at least fifty militia were making their way in our direction.

Cousin Joshua and some others felt that we should march toward Lexington and take up new positions ahead of the slow-moving British column, but another group maintained that we should stick to this spot and this section of road. I didn't offer any advice, but I certainly did not want to go back to where the officer lay with his brains dashed out. Someone said that while we were standing here and arguing about it, the British would be gone; but Cousin Simmons said he had watched them marching west early in the morning, and moving at a much brisker pace it had still taken half an hour for their column to pass, what with the narrowness of the road and their baggage and ammunition carts.

While this was being discussed, we saw the militia to the west of us fanning out and breaking into little clusters of two and three men as they approached the road. It was the opinion of some of us that these must be part of the Committeemen who had been in the Battle of the North Bridge, which entitled them to a sort of veteran status, and we felt that if they employed this tactic, it was likely enough the best one. Mattathias Dover said:

“It makes sense. If we cluster together, the redcoats can make an advantage out of it, but there's not a blessed thing they can do with two or three of us except chase us, and we can outrun them.”

That settled it, and we broke into parties of two and three. Cousin Joshua Dover decided to remain with the Reverend and poor Isaac Pitt until life passed away—and he was hurt so badly he did not seem for long in this world. I went off with Cousin Simmons, who maintained that if he didn't see to me, he didn't know who would.

“Good heavens, Adam,” he said, “I thought one thing you'd have no trouble learning is when to get out of a place.”

“I learned that now,” I said.

We ran east for about half a mile before we turned back to the road, panting from the effort and soaked with sweat. There was a clump of trees that appeared to provide cover right up to the road, and the shouting and gunfire never slackened.

Under the trees, there was a dead redcoat, a young boy with a pasty white skin and a face full of pimples, who had taken a rifle ball directly between the eyes. Three men were around him. They had stripped him of his musket and equipment, and now they were pulling his boots and jacket off. Cousin Simmons grabbed one of them by the shoulder and flung him away.

“God's name, what are you to rob the dead with the fight going on!” Cousin Simmons roared.

They tried to outface him, but Joseph Simmons was as wide as two average men, and it would have taken braver men than these were to outface him. They blustered, and then took off, and I asked Cousin Simmons who he thought they were.

“Never saw them before. I tell you they're no Committee-men, I tell you that, Adam. Most likely, they're Boston men, the way they behave.” He didn't think highly of Boston men, for reasons I went into earlier.

I couldn't help looking again and again at the face of the dead redcoat. What struck me hardest was how small he was. Perhaps it was his position in death, but he appeared no taller than my brother, Levi, and his purple lips were drawn back from a mouth half toothless. His blue eyes were wide open, and his face was so thin and pinched and starved that I became sick all over again, and wept as I vomited. Cousin Simmons pulled me away, and then as we approached the road, he got down on his knees and crawled. I did as he did, and soon we were in a space between two rocks, with the road a bit beneath us and some fifty paces away.

There was no powder smoke here now, but westward, where the road ran through a dip, there was a great deal of firing and a whole cloud of smoke. Here, the redcoats were plainly visible as they trudged by, their faces grim and murderous, their scarlet coats no longer bright. Two dead redcoats lay on the edge of the road, on the side away from us. Four others, who were wounded, sat alongside the dead. As they marched, a cart drawn by a brace of mules appeared in the column. The soldiers continued to march, crowding around the cart, while it was loaded with the dead and the wounded. There must have been half a dozen dead bodies already in the cart, and two wounded men shared the space with them. Now two more dead and four more wounded filled the cart to overflowing. We could hear the wounded moaning and cursing in their pain as the cart went by, and Cousin Simmons whispered that war was a dirty and terrible business.

“We don't know any of them,” I whispered back. “They're strangers here in our land. We don't know who that boy back there is. We'll never know his name, no one will.”

“We got to make war on them, Adam.”

“Then let's shoot. I can't stay here like this.”

His hand gripped my shoulder. “Easy,” he whispered. “Now—one, two—” And then we both fired. A redcoat flung out his hands and fell. Two others yelled in pain from my bird shot, and then the whole column was screaming curses in our direction and loosing a volley of musket fire. We lay pressed to the ground as the balls whined overhead and buried themselves in the trees; and then we leaped up and got out of there, racing through the woods, leaping a stone wall, and then running the length of a pasture and over another stone wall. We lay on the ground then, soaking in our sweat and panting and listening to the cursing rage and the constant sound of gunfire.

“Water, please,” I begged Cousin Simmons.

He handed me his bottle and said, “Finish it, Adam. Then we can get water at the Atkins place, over yonder.”

I drained the whole bottle, stared for a moment at Cousin Simmons, and then said, “No more. Isn't it enough?”

“That's not for me to say, Adam. Listen to the gunfire. That's our flesh and blood fighting there. Can you walk away from them?”

“Will it bring my father back?”

“No, Adam. Nothing will bring him back. But we're not fighting an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. That's how old Solomon Chandler sees it, but the Scripture is not meant to be taken literally, as some would have it. This is a war, Adam.”

“Why? Why?”

“A man's land is his own, Adam. A man's place is his own. All we wished when we stood out on the common was to tell them that this was our place. We had no riches or gold or silver. Your father would have said to them, Go home and leave us be. This is our place, our common, our meeting house, and our houses. We are a Committee to defend what is ours. There will be trouble if you march into our land and work your will on us. That's all he wanted to say to them, but they chose to have it differently, and now it's too late. The war is all over us.”

He rose and pointed southward, where a broad wheat field sloped up to the horizon. Men were coming across it. The word went out, and the sound of shots carried farther than you could hear them, and all morning the men had been coming, and still they were coming as the news was passed on.

We went on to the Atkins place. They had a barn that was less than a quarter of a mile from the road, and on the peaked roof of the barn four riflemen stood, firing as carefully as if they were on a turkey range. Solomon Chandler was one of them, but I no longer felt any warmth toward the old man. I would kill and he would kill, but he took pleasure in the killing. Cold as ice, he stood up there on the roof and picked his targets from the smoky road. He waved to me and shouted:

“I got me a redcoat officer, laddie boy. There he was up on the road on his prancing horse. Three hundred paces, and I picked him off neat as a feather. The hand of Jehovah reached down and smote him.”

Another man joined us below and called up to them, “Can you see the whole redcoat army?”