John Finn

by Vincent McCaffrey

  I said, “I’m sorry.” And I was. I had missed a great opportunity. I could have told that lie very easily because I wanted it to be true even then.

  She shook her head again, as if she had her own regrets. She said, “Don’t be. You didn’t love me. That was all. There wasn’t a lot of me to love then. I was just a girl. Foolish and full of poetry.”

  I laughed. A single laugh was all I could manage before I swallowed it. I had to wait to be sure she understood the laugh was not at her. I shook my head at myself.

  “I wrote something. Back then. I should try to find it—to show you. I used it later on in a novel I was writing. My unfinished college novel. I used those words myself. Almost that exactly: ‘Foolish and full of poetry.’ But I was talking about myself. Of course. I suppose I was always talking about myself, wasn’t I? But it was offered as a description of the kind of girl I was looking for and hadn’t found. I remember because it was that very line that made me stop writing that damn book. It suddenly sounded so stupid to me. So unhip. Uncool.”

  She offered no reaction. The expression on her face seemed suspended between thoughts. I wasn’t even sure she was thinking about what I had just said until she finally answered.

  “But we weren’t. Either of us. Cool was only what we wanted to be. . . I unfoolishly went off to graduate school. And you—you looked so handsome in that ROTC uniform—you went off, looking very smart I should add—off to the army to pay your school loans. Not very poetic or foolish of either of us.”

  I said, “At least we had our self-delusions in common.”

  She smiled at me. I judged it a tolerant smile. She said, “Maybe. But they were our best thoughts. Don’t you think? It was what we wanted to be. And there we were, both looking for the same thing and missing it, only because it wasn’t really there yet. In either of us.”

  That was it. That was me, for sure. I wondered if it was in me even yet. But I suppose I wanted to understand something else now. I wanted to know why she had taken my hand that evening a few weeks before, on the Charles. And for the moment, I am stupid enough not to appreciate what she was saying or the obvious subtext of my asking.

  “So what’s changed your mind about me now?”

  Her smile fled. A swatch of yellow sun caught a leaf shadow against her face and gave it a sudden sadness.

  She flinched at the sun, or maybe just at her own thought. “It’s not your doing. Don’t worry. You’re not at fault this time either. I lost my illusions long ago. I made myself fall in love with Harry. And then, as if that was not enough of a lesson, I did it again with Leonard. You can’t make it up. No matter how much you want it to be.”

  Was this just for old times’ sake then? Not a pleasing thought to me at all just then. Did I really want to know?

  What I replied was, “No. You can’t.”

  It was the flinch on her face that came back to me afterward. So much like an unexpected sting.

  I’ve managed to get some of it down in those fat little notebooks—-year after year. And read them later with a fear I never felt at the time they were written. I can never read much of it without recoiling at a sudden prick—at the sting, not just the prick I was. I can’t look at them for fun. There’s no pleasure in many of the thoughts at all. As if every flower has its bee.

  I think it’s only natural to forget the stings. Mary Ellen and I were unhappy long before she decided to divorce me. She doesn’t write things down herself. She keeps them in her head and browses through them at night, in bed. Some nights she can’t sleep at all. She’d wake me up, angry that I could sleep while she twisted over some hurt or another. She would forget them in time, but not before rubbing them raw more than once and spoiling my sleep as well.

  Perhaps that’s wrong too. There must have been more than a few things she could not forget—else why did she finally give up?

  Mary Ellen always believed I remembered everything. But I never do, really. I just write it down and keep it until it has no use.

  8. A short history of a long day

  The background is important. You cannot figure the present without a feel for what’s buried beneath.

  The Boston News-Letter, a paper of overt Loyalist sympathies, published a one paragraph account only a day afterward: “Last Tuesday Night the Grenadier and Light Companies belonging to the several Regiments in this Town were ferried in Long Boats from the Bottom of the Common over to Phips’s Farm in Cambridge, from whence they proceeded on their way to Concord where they arrived Yesterday:” There it was! All of that most important moment in American history reduced to the simple fact of it. There, with no glimmer of the judgment of all the history to come.

  With the main body of Regulars already at their destination, the account added these crucial facts: “the First Brigade, commanded by Lord Piercy, with two pieces of Artillery, set off from here yesterday morning at Ten o’Clock as a Re-inforcement, which with the Grenadiers and Light Companies, made about eighteen Hundred Men.” Then the account falls back to the previous night, “Upon the People’s having Notice of this Movement on Tuesday Night, alarm Guns were fired throughout the Country, and Expresses sent off to the different Towns, so that very early Yesterday Morning large Numbers were assembled from all Parts of the Country.” Could the reporter have been wholly unaware of the years leading to this moment, of the countless other night rides to carry the correspondence of the rebellious committees, of the innumerable drills on misty mornings across the commons of a hundred villages that made such a rally of effort against this Royal incursion possible? Perhaps so. He could not then have known about lights in church steeples or muffled oars upon the Charles. The account rushes onward, “A general Battle ensued, which from what we can learn, was supported with great Spirit on both sides, and continued until the King’s Troops retreated to Charlestown, which was after Sunset. The Reports concerning this unhappy Affair, and the Causes that concurred to bring on an Engagement, are so various that we are not able to collect any Thing consistent or regular, and cannot therefore with certainty give our Readers any further Account of this shocking Introduction to all the Miseries of a Civil War.” So much for the shots heard round the world.

  ​Earl ‘Percy’ was the British commander’s name. The errant spelling of the period was less of a problem than the erring facts. On April 25th, with clearly different sympathies, the Salem Gazette reported: “Last Wednesday the 19th of April, the troops of his Britannick Majesty commenced hostilities upon the people of this province, attended with circumstances of cruelty not less brutal than what our venerable ancestors received from the vilest savages of the wilderness.” Here we can see the first bias that will make a new nation from a colony.

  ​By May 3rd, two weeks after the first encounter, printer and publisher Isaiah Thomas, also a participant in the event, was reporting in the Massachusetts Spy: “Americans! Forever bear in mind the Battle of Lexington! Where British Troops unmolested and unprovoked wantonly, and in a most inhuman manner fired upon and killed a number of our countrymen, then robbed them of their provisions, ransacked, plundered and burnt their houses! Nor could the tears of defenseless women, some of whom were in the pains of childbirth, the cries of helpless babes, nor the prayers of old age, confined to beds and sickness, appease their thirst for blood! Or divert them from the DESIGN of MURDER and ROBBERY!”

  ​And in those last lines of Thomas’s appeal, alluding to defenseless women, childbirth, the cries of babes and the aged confined to beds and sickness that we have the first reporting of what had happened not in Lexington but at Menotomy.

  “It was then young flood, the Ship was winding, and the moon was Rising,” Paul Revere later said. I have always felt that single clause, “and the moon was rising.” To bear more weight of history than any other. I have long believed Revere to be the first American. Not the great Franklin, or Washington, or Jefferson. Revere. This forty-year old Apollo was more than a patriot. He called himself a ‘mechanic.’ He was a craftsman, a father and a hu
sband. He was an entrepreneur and engineer. He was an engraver and artist. He was not a wordsmith, but he was a revolutionary. The spirit of the new-formed American character was in him.

  Revere had ridden in his cause far beyond Concord, and more than once—on to New York and on to Philadelphia. He had what is often called ‘native genius.’ He was capable of walking through the only gunpowder mill in the colonies, a closely held technology the British had banned in their effort to suppress rebellion, and to comprehend what he saw without taking notes, and then remember enough to duplicate it again in nearby Canton—a resource the Revolution could not have done without, and a crucial bit of spying for the war to come.

  I don’t believe I have ever been strong enough, even after Army basic training, to make a four-hundred-mile ride over rough roads, but I can appreciate the misery of it. Always as brave as what was necessary to the moment, Revere was never heedless and seldom reckless. And until that night in April, he was an Englishman. Because he acted before the first shots were fired, and because he was present when those shots were fired, and because he fully accepted the consequence of his actions from that first moment, I believe he uniquely belongs to history.

  The lights in the church tower are known to most. The wonderful Longfellow poem certainly made myth of it. And that there were others who rode in the night has always been known and is often retold, as if this somehow debunks the fact of Revere’s accomplishment. But because fine historians have detailed the adventure from start to finish, there would be no need for me to touch upon that ride in my fiction. Only the consequence.

  What is most important to my own story is that Revere passed through Menotomy shortly before midnight. He had ridden many miles and had many more to go over dark roads made ugly by spring thaw and natural erosion. Bad footing for horse or man. That he was a superb horseman is seldom noted, perhaps because it was assumed or else he would not have been given the task. But that he bravely paused at each house to call the warning is a better deed still. He was a hunted man. There were British officers on the road, put in place to stop him. His life was very immediately in danger, and stopping again and again did not make his chances of reaching Hancock and Adams in Lexington any easier. But he did this.

  And it was important to me that any house on his way would have been awake. The Andrews house was not directly on Revere’s route, but close enough to have been alerted shortly after his passing, when “alarm Guns were fired throughout the Country.” I believe Isaak Andrews and his family would have been awake, at least from that moment on. And certainly, by the time the 700 British soldiers under Smith marched by them in the moonlight soon afterward.

  My interest was clearly in that specific place mid-way on the larger map of events. I might have to understand the broader circumstance and thus investigate what had happened immediately before and after, but most important to me was what had happened in that part of West Cambridge then known as Menotomy. Because it was there that more British and Americans died during that long day than anywhere else, and it was there that a young woman and a boy were lost in the well of time.

  The immediate cause of all of this should not be placed at the feet of William Legge (you entertain yourself as best you can when you are doing dry research and puns can be removed in the editing), the second Earl of Dartmouth and Secretary of State for the Colonies in England. Legge was the stepson of Lord North, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and one of the most powerful human beings on the face of the Earth. It was in fact he who gave the actual order to confront the rebellious colonists who were draining the British Exchequer with their stubborn refusal to obey the Parliament and the King. But Legge was a reasonable man, founder of foundling hospitals, an opponent of slavery and, as Earl of Dartmouth, the namesake to a college in the American wilderness. There were many possible ways to accomplish his goal. He might have expected better than he got.

  The Continental Congress, then meeting in Philadelphia against the King’s wishes, carried responsibility for much of the continuing tensions which might otherwise have faded with the seasons. Their demands denied the powers of Parliament and offered little compromise. But, historically speaking, it was only a matter of time before the natural tendencies of the offspring who had so often been required to take care of themselves because of the estrangement of great distances, would break with the tenuous bonds of the mother country.

  ​The British soldiers—the Regulars, as they were known—were following orders, only as soldiers must do, without a morally compelling reason to refuse. Just as certainly, they were acting within the purview of commonly understood authority. They were on British soil, and they had a right to protect themselves.

  ​No, the responsibility for what happened that day must be laid at the feet of a single man. General Thomas Gage.

  It is important to remember that Thomas Gage was not a stupid man. Quite the opposite. He was, however, a product of his age, a general whose rank was manufactured by rigid custom and class. True, he had earned respect at the battles of Fortenay and Culloden, but, as the grandson of a peer, it is a fact that he purchased his first military positions. This was only the practice at the time, true enough. And then, to his credit, he had been wounded as a field commander during the French and Indian Wars, had lead the successful attack against the French at Fort Ticonderoga in 1757, and then succeeded by merit to the position of Commander in Chief of all British Forces in America.

  Thomas Gage loved America. He had planned to retire here. He had married an American girl from New Jersey, Margaret Kemble, whom he loved dearly. They had five daughters and six sons. A lot of loving there!

  There is tragedy to be found in the story of this man whose greatest folly was to begin the American Revolution. His loss was in common with every farmer and shopkeeper and sailor who awoke on the morning of April 19, 1775, believing themselves to be British, and ended that day wondering what else they had become. At the end of that day, his dreams, his career, and his marriage, were all shambles.

  This bit of biography was compelling to me. But I had found no more direct connection between Thomas Gage and Mary Andrews. Her fate, and that of her family, had most certainly been altered by the orders of Thomas Gage to Francis Smith, John Pitcairn, and Hugh Percy, the commanders in the field that day. Her death, however, was not the doing of those officers, only the circumstances that had made it possible.

  Deeper animosities between Provincials and Soldiers had grown over time. The words of Ensign Jeremy Lister, who was with the Tenth Regiment of Foot, clearly report on the friction which had arisen, “being in eminent danger every Evening of being insulted by the Inhabitants the worst Language was continually in our Ears often dirt thrown at us they went so far as to wound some officers with their Watch Crooks, . . . who had nothing to lay to his charge only he was walking in the streets alone therefore thought him easy pray.”

  In his narrative, written seven years later, Ensign Lister says, “Things begun now to draw near a Crisis and we expected daily coming to blows, . . . on the 18th of April in the Evening there was a detachment ordered under Armes to go on a secret expedition, under command of Lt. Col. Smith of our Regt the detachment consisted of Light-Infantry and Grenadiers of the Army.”

  The Diary of Lieutenant John Barker of the King’s Own Regiment says they were ashore in East Cambridge at Lechmere Point at 11 o’clock that night, the very same hour Paul Revere left over Charlestown Neck. Lieutenant Colonel Smith of the Tenth Regiment was in command, accompanied by Lieutenant Colonel Bernard of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and Major Pitcairn of the Marines. (The fifty-two-year-old Robert Pitcairn, destined to die soon after from wounds received in the Battle of Bunker Hill, would be buried at the Old North Church, and further immortalized by a painting I had looked at many times at the Museum of Fine Arts).

  The Regulars climbed from their longboats into waist deep water on the Cambridge side, traversed several tidal inlets, and began their march about midnight.

  These
men were already cold, and starting out tired for having missed a night’s sleep. The wet leather of their boots must have made a frog-like chorus of their march in the moonlight for the first mile or two. That march was steady but not quick. They passed through Menotomy for the first time with only minor incident just before 3 AM.

  Samuel Abbott Smith, in his short but generally accurate history ‘West Cambridge 1775’ notes: “The Committee of Safety on the day before (the eighteenth) had held their session at the Black Horse tavern in West Cambridge, kept by Wetherby, which stood near the site of the old almshouse.” Three members of that body, a future Vice-President, Elbridge Gerry, and Cols. Lee and Orne, “spent the night here, and arose from their beds to view the unwonted sight. They watched the soldiers passing by, till, as the centre was opposite, an officer and a file of men were detached to search the house. This movement gave them the hint of danger, and they hurried down stairs. Gerry in his perturbation being on the point of opening the door in their faces, when the landlord cried out to him, ‘For God’s sake don’t open that door!’ and led them to the back part of the house, whence they escaped into the corn-field before the officer had posted his guards. There was nothing to conceal them from view in the broad field but the corn-stubble which had been left the previous fall a foot or two high, and that was little protection in the bright moonlight. Gerry stumbled and fell, and called out to his friend, ‘Stop, Orne; stop for me till I can get up; I have hurt myself!’ This suggested the idea, and they all threw themselves flat on the ground, and, concealed . . . by the stubble and half-clothed as they had left their beds, remained [there] till the troops had passed on. Col. Lee never recovered from the effects of that midnight exposure; he died in less than a month from that night. However, the house was searched in vain . . .”