by Howard Fast
Levi’s skinny body was pressed up against mine, and I could feel him shivering under his nightshirt. I forced myself to be gruff and assured as I said to him, “There. Are you satisfied?”
“Adam—listen,” he whispered.
He has ears like a bat. I listened, but I couldn’t hear anything but the soft, sighing night noises.
“Adam, I hear hoofbeats.”
“Well, suppose you do, Levi. There are travelers by night.”
“Travelers don’t race their horses in the darkness.”
I heard it now, and Levi was right. The sound was of a horse being raced through the night, and clearer and clearer came the drumbeat of its hoofs. I strained my eyes toward the Menotomy Road, but it was too dark and there were too many trees obstructing my vision for me to make out a rider. But the rider was nearer now, and the hoofbeats echoed through the whole village; and then he pulled up in front of Buckman’s, and I heard him shouting at the top of his lungs, although I couldn’t make out his words. Being that Buckman’s is a way station, they always keep night lights burning, and now lights began to flicker in the windows of the tavern. I heard the rider shouting again.
Father came into the room, pulling on his trousers over his nightshirt. “What are you boys doing at the window?” he asked.
Levi told him breathlessly.
“You’re sure the rider was racing?”
We heard him shouting again. Mother came in, carrying a candle. Lights were beginning to flicker in some of the houses. “I don’t see why,” Mother said, “a rider by night must take us all out of our beds. You get under the covers this instant, Levi, or you’ll take a death of cold from this night air.” Granny then appeared behind her, demanding to know why everyone was up and about in the middle of the night.
“Is someone sick, Moses?”
“No one is sick,” Father replied. “Why don’t you all go back to bed?”
“Why don’t you?” Mother countered.
“Now look, Sarah. That was an express from Cambridge. He came up the Menotomy Road, didn’t he?”—turning to me.
“That’s right.”
“Well, if it’s an express, it’s Committee business. A man doesn’t take a chance on breaking his neck on a dark, rutted road without it being a matter of some importance. And if it’s Committee business, I have to be there.”
Mother shook her head speechlessly, and Granny said that she might as well go downstairs and put up coffee, because it didn’t look like there’d be much sleep in this house for the rest of the night. Father went back to his room to finish dressing, and Mother went downstairs after Granny.
I pulled on my shirt and trousers, and Levi wanted to know what I thought I was doing. Through the window, I could see lights in almost all of the houses by now. I told Levi that I had no intentions of missing whatever was going on out there.
“Then I’m getting dressed too,” he said.
“It’s no business of mine what you do. But Mother will pin your ears back.”
“Not if you don’t tell on me. I’ll go out the window and down over the shed. You going to tell on me, Adam?”
“Oh, believe me, you’re a fine one to talk about telling,” I said to him. “Every time I take a step, you’re there to play the rat. It would serve you right if I did tell.”
“But you won’t, will you, Adam?”
“I won’t,” I admitted, “but I won’t lie either. If Mother asks me where you are, I’ll tell her.”
“Maybe she won’t ask you,” Levi said hopefully.
Father had just closed the door behind him when I got down to the kitchen, and Mother gave me one of her looks and said, “Well, I suppose it’s morning, I suppose the good Lord forgot to bring the sun up this once but you know better. And just where do you think you’re going, Adam Cooper?”
“Only over to the common, please, Mother.”
“March right up to bed!”
“Mother,” I said, slowly and carefully, “you know that I never disobeyed you.”
“I should think not!”
“But if you don’t let me go, I got to disobey you. Every house in the village is lit up and all the men are turning out for the common. You can’t make me stay here.”
“You’re not—”
I think she was going to say that I was not a man, but Granny interrupted. It was the first time, as well as I could remember, that Granny had ever intruded into a discussion at odds between Mother and myself. She only said, quietly:
“I think Adam’s right, Sarah. He ought to be there.”
I imagine Mother was too shocked to reply. She nodded, and without allowing the matter to cool, I dashed out of the house and took off for the common. Middle of the night or not, the village was up and awake, and every man and boy in town was either already at the common or heading for it. When I reached there, a crowd had formed around the rider, packed around his horse about ten deep; and you could see from the way he sat on his saddle, proud as a king, that he was enjoying the attention. As far as we were concerned, he was the most important man in New England—important enough to make my father and Jonas Parker and the Reverend, the three of them at the horse’s head, wait until he had finished draining a mug of beer that someone had passed up to him. When he finished the beer, he wiped his mouth with his sleeve and indicated his willingness to continue. He was a young fellow, and I noticed what a handsome pair of black riding boots he sported.
By then, I had wormed my way into the crowd. I had also gathered, from the talk around me, that he rode a warning express, that the British had marched out of Boston, and that a great army of them were headed this way, up from Charlestown to Cambridge and then on to Menotomy. I didn’t believe it—not at first. For months and months, the talk had been that the British would send a force into our townships and put an end to the militia drilling and the Committee organization, but they never did, and somehow we had accepted the fact that they never would, and that all the hot talk would simmer down and that there would be a meeting of minds, what my father called “an intelligent and equitable settlement of all the points of dispute.” Yet here was a rider telling us that a British army was coming.
“Now just one thing,” my father was saying to him, “just one thing—what time did they start?”
“I told you they were getting into the boats to cross the Charles at ten o’clock.”
“That’s three hours ago. Did you wait until they crossed the river? How long did it take them?”
“I waited until the first of them set onto dry land, I did—and they were forming up on the Menotomy Road. We just decided not to wait any longer.”
“Well, what time was it then?” Parker demanded.
“Heavens to Holland, mister—what did you expect us to do? Build a fire so as we could read our clocks? All they had to do was catch sight of us, and that would be the end of any hope of my being here.”
“Then you don’t know what time they got across the river?”
“Well, just how long does it take an army to cross a river, mister?”
“That’s what we’re asking you,” my father said with unusual patience.
“And I don’t know—which is what I’m telling you.”
“Did you come straight here?” the Reverend asked.
“By the Lord, I did, hell for leather—and I like to broke my neck on that pitch-black road. I’m here, ain’t I? But I can’t sit here all night. There was four of us, and one took off for Medford and another for Brookline and the third down to Watertown. You see, the meaning of it was that, one road or another, they’d be going to Concord where the stores are. Someone played the dirty rat and informed that the Committees were stashing away whatever they could put their hands on at Concord, so however they’re coming, you can believe me that Concord is where they’re headed at.”
“But they wouldn’t need an army for that,” my father protested. “They wouldn’t need an army just to confiscate the supplies at Concord.”
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��Don’t argue with me, mister, please.”
“Only how many troops?” Parker insisted. “Don’t you see that we’ve got to know?”
“Mister, it was nighttime and we were hiding. Did you want me to count them?”
“A thousand—two thousand?”
“A thousand at least. Maybe two thousand, maybe more. They had a line of boats stretching across the river, and every boat packed full of redcoat soldiers. That’s all I know—Now, make way for me. Let go of my reins, mister.”
The crowd opened up for him, and he spurred his horse. He was a good rider, but wild and careless. He saw the common rail at the last minute and jumped it, sailed over it light as a feather, and then rode hallooing and shouting down the highway toward Concord.
After the rider had departed, the common showed signs of becoming the liveliest debating area in all New England. The central argument involved the Committeemen and the militia officers and the Reverend, who was torn between the Committee and the militia on one hand and God and the church on the other. The secondary arguments involved the male citizens who supported one faction or another. The final arguments were mostly between mothers and their children, involving the chill of the night air, the general lack of decent attire, and the effects of the loss of sleep. Along with these three major areas of dispute, there were many subareas where tempers ran high, individual duels between man and wife, mother and daughter, father and son—all of it adding up to the briskest night scene I recollect in all my life. A dozen sputtering pine torches lit up the scene and gave it quality.
At the center of the dispute were four positions: Jonas Parker wanted an immediate muster of the militia. Since we had stored a hogshead of powder and another of lead shot in the cellar of Buckman’s Tavern, Parker suggested that as our mustering point. Mr. Buckman agreed nervously. Everyone could see that his mind was oppressed with the question of whether each man would pay for food and drink consumed or whether it would be billed to the Committee. Things billed to the Committee had a way of being written off with a noble gesture, and there’s nothing can be as destructive and disturbing to a small business man as a noble gesture.
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.