April Morning (7 page)

My father, on the other hand, resisted a militia muster. It was incumbent upon him to take an antimilitarist position, and he bolstered his argument by suggesting the dangers of arming every sleepy citizen in the vicinity. Someone was bound to get hurt. Instead, he pressed for a Committee meeting in the church. If a redcoat army really was moving up the Menotomy Road, it couldn't move at much better than a snail's pace in the darkness, and we had plenty of time and there was no reason to lose our heads and jump to any wild conclusions.

The Reverend's position was that before we did anything, we should check the facts. I had half-suspected that he might put in a bid for a long prayer meeting, but all he desired was a practical approach to the problem. A number of citizens were pushing for an immediate ringing of the bells, just on the chance that someone in the neighborhood might still be enjoying his night's sleep, and the Reverend said:

“When the time comes for ringing the bells, we'll ring them, brothers. But let's just see where we stand before we go off half-cocked.”

Sam Hodley stated the fourth position, that it was much ado about nothing, and not for a minute did he believe a wild tale about a British army marching up from Boston. It made no sense, he said. Anybody who knew the British knew that they didn't march at night. Why should they?

“To take us by surprise at Concord,” someone said.

“What kind of surprise, when it's got to be dawn before they're halfway there?”

“The point I want to make,” the Reverend said, “is this. Just for the sake of argument, suppose there is an army of a thousand men bound this way. Now that puts the question up to us, doesn't it? The muster roll of the Committee adds up to seventy-nine men—providing nobody's sick or absent. Now it's all very well to talk about our rights, but just what are we going to do with seventy-nine men facing a thousand? Good heavens, brothers, it's not like we had experience in this line of work. We are not soldiers. The only man in my congregation shot another is poor Israel Smith, when he put a load of bird shot into his brother Joash's sitting place, and I see Joash standing there, and he'll tell you it's not a rewarding experience, not for him who gives or for him who receives.”

“I say amen to that,” Joash Smith agreed.

If he had only put it a little differently, the Reverend would have had my father on his side. There was nothing my father loved better than an appeal to reason, and a nice point of logic just melted in his mouth. But somewhere in the Reverend's words, there was an implication of incompetence and even of cowardice. My father was just unreasonable enough to talk down the militia and defend the Committee in the same breath, and though militia and Committee were composed of exactly the same seventy-nine men, my father made a sharp distinction between them. The one, he held, was a quasi-military body, and nothing, he felt, adds to man's foolishness as much as playing soldier. The Committee, on the other hand, was a tribunal dedicated to unity, justice, and the rights of man—to use my father's own words—the finest form yet known in man's response to the call of his destiny. I admit this description is flowery, and a bit strong for anyone who had met our Committee face to face, but my father loved the Committee and cherished it.

But when the Reverend came straight out with his doubts concerning the odds, seventy-nine to a thousand, my father was caught on the twin horns of principle and militarism. Later that same night, Cousin Simmons remarked on my father's response; Cousin Simmons blamed the Reverend for a lack of faith, and noted that when the Reverend should have been invoking Gideon: “And the Lord said unto Gideon, The people that are with thee are too many for me to give the Midianites into their hands, lest Israel vaunt themselves against me, saying, Mine own hand hath saved me,” he was instead meddling with the most temporal matters, namely the practical odds in a fight.

Father must have had the same thought in mind, and in any case, the principle waved like a flag. “Reverend,” he said, “with all deference to your experience as a man of the cloth, you seem to have missed the point.”

“How?” the Reverend demanded.

Everyone on the common perked up. Until now, the argument had been compounded out of confusion, uncertainty, and disbelief. But the ringing note in his voice—a tone Father reserved for the higher disputation—informed everyone that Moses Cooper stood firmly on a principle. Other men might have backed down, but next to my father, the Reverend was the most decisively opinionated man in the village, and the two of them at odds was worth walking a long way to see. The babble of voices died down, and the people pressed close around my father and the Reverend.

“Well, sir,” Father said, “let me take up the way you put it, so that we understand the situation. Like yourself, for the sake of argumentation, I will assume that an undisclosed number of British troops have been ferried across the Charles River and are now making their way in the direction of this village. Granted?”

“Granted,” snapped the Reverend. He never quibbled in an argument. He preferred to head in directly and lock horns.

“Whereupon,” my father continued, “you qualify our rights and our duties by asking what seventy-nine men may be expected to do against a thousand?”

“I do. Indeed, I do.”

“However, we don't know that a thousand men are marching here. It may be no men, fifty men, one hundred men, or two thousand men. As to numbers, we can only speculate. You will grant that, sir?”

“Granted. And come to the point, Brother Moses Cooper—come to the point, I say.” He had a knit shawl over his shoulders, and he wrapped it closer about him. If the cloth had not called him, the Reverend would have made a great actor. He had only to raise one eyebrow and look down his long, pointed nose at you, to produce more effect than a hundred words.

“On the one hand a speculation—on the other hand a certainty.”

“What certainty?” the Reverend demanded. He was becoming very impatient with Father—so impatient that he walked into the trap without ever seeing it.

“Our duty! Our oath in the holy name of freedom!” Father cracked out the words like a dead shot. “Is our principle flexible? Have we nurtured the Committee only to abandon it the moment it faces a test? Have we drilled a militia only to sweep it into hiding at the first glimpse of a thieving redcoat?” Father was taken; he could never resist the sound of his own words, and when he saw that the crowd was with him, he just couldn't bear to stop. “I say no! I say that right and justice are on our side! Who are these red-coated bandits that we should fear them? Are we strangers to the military curse that strangles England—the monster of conquest and blood lust that beckons us to equate the fat George with the antichrist? We know where they find their so-called soldiers, the sweepings of the filthy alleys of London, the population of their jails, the men condemned to the gallows and reprieved to teach us legality! We know them, and we fear them not! Our duty remains our duty! Our course remains the just cause!”

I felt like jumping up and cheering. It was as good as the best the Reverend had ever done on hell-fire and damnation, and it made my skin prickle and my hair stand on end just to listen. When the crowd let out a whoop, I whooped with the best of them. I was just as proud as punch.

Yet I think the Reverend's face was sad, and for some reason the fire went out of him. It wasn't like him to step down from a hot issue, but this time he did. He just nodded.

“I'm going to muster the militia, by God, I'm going to!” Jonas Parker cried.

“Can we have the bells, Reverend?” Cousin Simmons asked him.

He just nodded again, and half a dozen of the boys, myself among them, raced for the church, to have a hand in the ringing of the bells.

It's always fun to swing on the ropes and ring the bells, but to ring them in the middle of the night is so much of a treat that it's downright sinful. I felt that way. I guess that to some extent I had stopped thinking, and I was carried away by the rich sound of the bells pealing across the countryside. Before we rang the bells, there might have been some farmers on the outskirts of town who were still claiming their honest hours of sleep, but when we finished, I will swear that the whole blessed county was up and awake.

When we tired of the bells, Jonathan Crisp and Abel Loring, two boys who were a year or so older than I, came running up and told us that the militia were signing the muster book at Buckman's place, across the common. They had both signed and were on their way to their homes for weapons. When we heard that, the fever took us, and we promptly abandoned the bells and made a rush toward Buckman's to get our names onto the muster book. Halfway there, Ephriam Holt's mother—he was no more than thirteen—collared him and dragged him back to their house. What she said to him doesn't bear repeating, and while that was a matter between herself and her son entirely, I don't approve of some other things she said to us.

There was a crowd of men and boys, and a good many girls and women too outside of Buckman's. The guest room of the tavern was lit up and packed with just about as many as it could hold, with the rest in front pressing to get in. I saw Levi squirming his way into the crowd, and I got hold of one arm and dragged him out.

“Just where do you think you're going?” I asked him.

“I want to see the excitement, Adam.”

“Don't you know that if Father catches sight of you, you'll get more excitement than you can bear? Does Mother know where you are?”

“No. I sneaked out over the shed.”

“Oh, that's smart,” I told him. “That's real smart. She's just worried to distraction by now, that's all—with you out in the middle of the night and no idea where you are.”

“Everyone else is out, Adam.”

“All I can say is you'd better get home and get home quick.”

“What are you going to do, Adam?”

“Sign the muster book,” I said, my mouth dry.

Levi must have gone home then. At any rate he was gone, and moving with the press of people I found myself in the entrance to the guest room, or hostel room, as we sometimes called it, of Buckman's. All around me were friends and neighbors, some of the men grinning when they caught my eye, but everyone warm and nervous and bound together by a thousand invisible threads, the way people become facing a great danger or excitement in common. It sometimes seems to me that we live inside of invisible shells, but just as much shells as the fat Maine lobsters inhabit; and only at a time like this do the shells melt away and the real people emerge.

Cousin Simmons saw me, pushed over, squeezed my elbow, and said softly, “A boy went to bed and a man awakened, hey, Adam?”

“I do hope so.”

“Do me a favor, Adam?”

“Anything you say, Cousin Simmons.”

“Your Cousin Ruth is out in all this commotion, and I don't blame the girl with everything stood topsy-turvy. Do find her and bring her home after you sign the muster book.”

“I'll be pleased to, Cousin Simmons, but sure as the sunrise, I don't know whether I'll be signing that muster book. I just have my hopes and prayers.”

“He's all bark and no bite. You should have learned that, Adam.”

It's slow learning about your own father, I thought, and I said a prayer like this: Oh, don't let him do it to me in front of everyone standing here! Don't let him look at me the way he does, like I was nothing but a chicken thief caught in the act, and tell me that I'm no account and not fit to stand in with the men! I couldn't bear it now! I simply couldn't!

I was in the room now. There were at least six candles on the table where Father sat, with Jonas Parker on one side of him and Samuel Hodley on the other. Jonas Parker had the muster book out in front of him, and when someone came to sign it, he would push it toward him and make a serious and almost ceremonial thing of the entry. Father had the minutes book of the Committee, and when someone signed the muster book, Father entered the name and the salient facts in the records of the Committee. It appeared pointless to me for two separate sets of records to be kept like that, yet I knew that most of the men agreed that the civil and military aspects of the matter should be cleanly separated. Samuel Hodley was the emergency storekeeper, and it was up to him to determine whether the militiaman had enough powder and shot; and if not, to see that it was issued. When a man had signed in, Jonas Parker would tell him:

“You are now on call and assignment until you are officially released from duty with a release signed by one of us three. In other words, you are now a member in good standing, under orders and in discipline in this Committee of Defense and Correspondence. Go home and get your gun and powder and shot, a pound of bread and a water bottle. Muster on the common at four o'clock in the morning.”

I don't mean that he said that over and over, but enough times so that no one would fail to hear it. Even though I myself held to Samuel Hodley's opinion, that this was all a great bother and disturbance over nothing at all, his words made me feel cold and desolate for a moment.

I was in front of the table almost before I realized. “Name?” my father said briskly, in the official tone he used for Committee business—and then he looked up and saw me as I replied:

“Adam Cooper.”

His eyes fixed on me, and I felt that they were boring inside of me and reading every thought. For myself, I had the feeling that I was looking at my father for the very first time, not seeing him as I had always seen him in the vague wholeness of age and distance, but looking at the face of a surprisingly young man, his wide, brown face serious and intent upon me, his dark eyes shadowed in their inquiry, his broad full-lipped mouth tight and thoughtful. How was it, I wondered, that I had never noticed before what a strikingly handsome man he was? How was it that I had seen in him only the strength of his overbearance and not the thewed strength of those massive brown arms spread on the desk with the white shirt sleeves rolled high and carelessly? It was no wonder that men listened to him and heeded his words.