April Morning

by Howard Fast

  I thought that it was beautifully put. I was cold and tired and hungry; still I admired that the Reverend, under such circumstances, could do near as well as he had done in church Sunday past. You must remember that he took off Friday and Saturday to prepare his Sunday sermon, and here was this, right off the top of his mind in the pitch-black night. I suppose that Father could have bettered it, being used to throwing in an argument at the drop of the hat, but for a reflective man like the Reverend, it was all one could ask. I even began to look forward to his projected exchange with the British, and to imagine some of the things I might say in his place. Just for the sake of peace, I hoped that his thoughts ran to less colorful language than mine.

  When he finished, the applause came from all around, and it was plain that he had the sentiment with him. I can’t express how relieved I felt. There is nothing that lessens one’s warlike ardor more than a few hours in the wet and cold of the night, and with the reassurance of the Reverend that this would be no more than a polite and skillful exchange of words and principles, I began to anticipate the finish of it and work up a certain amount of indignation at whatever was holding up the arrival of the British. In all truth, I must admit that one of the things I felt I simply could not face was the possibility of being left out of whatever would happen. I could imagine the other boys talking about it and building up their own personal deeds, the way boys do, and strutting in front of the girls; and the thought that I might be out of all this was just heartbreaking. But now it would be all right. I would have my cake and eat it, so as to speak.

  A number of the women and some of the younger boys had drifted out to the common. Jonas Parker and Simon Casper told them in no uncertain terms that they were to go home and stay out of the way. Then Jonas Parker yelled for the militia to fall into parade order and dress up. I had drilled with them enough to know what to do, and I found myself a place next to Abel Loring, in the second rank. Aside from Parker, Casper, Father, and the Reverend, sixty-six men had turned out for the muster. Even though there has been some argument as to the actual number, I know this for a fact—because once we were in rank, Parker had us count off, and the count came to exactly sixty-six. With the four men in front of rank, there were seventy of us assembled on the common, two lines of men, thirty-three in each line.

  At first, there was something of a scramble on the part of the boys to be in the front rank, where they could get a good view of everything that happened, but even the Reverend agreed that the British would get a better impression of us if they saw mature men instead of boys, and he and Parker and Father and Casper went down the ranks, moving the boys back and the men up front. The one exception was Jonathan Harrington. He was seventeen but small for his age, and he didn’t look much more than fourteen or fifteen, but he was a musician. The long-range plan was that we would have a regular corps of four drums and four fifes, and the Committee at Concord had been promising us the drums for weeks. But only one drum came through. Willie Diamond carried it until his mother drove him home and into bed. Abel Loring played the fife and so did Nathan Hamble. But Hamble was in bed with a bad sore throat, and Abel Loringhad forgotten to bring his fife when he joined the muster. Jonathan Crisp and I pressed him to run home for it, but he was afraid that if he did, the British would turn up while he was gone and he’d miss all the fun. That left Jonathan Harrington as our only real musician, and he argued that there was no point in having a musician unless he played his piece where the enemy could see it.

  His father was there, and I could see that he wasn’t pleased with the notion of his son standing in front, when all the rest of us were in the back. Father didn’t like the idea either. But Jonathan argued so hard and persistently that they gave way, and he took his place at one end of the front rank, just as proud as punch.

  We stood facing east, and it must have been past five o’clock in the morning now, for when you looked at the eastern sky and then at the western sky, you could see how the one was lightening and the other still a deep charcoal lit brightly with stars.

  The Reverend said to Jonathan Harrington, “Well, Jonathan, since your persistence has won your point, what can you play to ease our waiting?”

  “Anything you say, sir.”

  “Would you render ‘Old Hundred’?”

  “Oh, yes, sir,” Jonathan grinned. We all of us smiled a little when the Reverend mentioned “Old Hundred,” just as we would have been disappointed if he hadn’t. It was his favorite hymn. He still had in his house—I had seen it once—the original parchment sheet music that his folks had brought over from Old Amsterdam a hundred and fifty years ago, and which was supposed to have been hand-lettered by Henry Ainsworth; and there was almost never a Sunday when he didn’t call for the singing of it. Now we took it up, all of us with full voice, so that they could hear it in the houses and know how high our spirits were, singing:

  “Show to Jehovah all the earth,

  Serve ye Jehovah with gladness;

  Before Him come with singing mirth;

  Know the Jehovah He, God, is!”

  It was strange, but after we sang the one hymn, a pall fell upon us. I know that I was thinking about Jonathan Harrington, and how he had been talking of marriage with Bessie Suderland, and I thought how terrible it would be if he should be struck down, standing as he was in the first row, and how would Bessie Suderland feel? It was a foolish way to think. I looked at the men and boys around me, and their faces were gray and drawn and old in the predawn. The whole eastern sky was gray now; we were a part of it; and the gray lay in dew upon the grass of the common. My belly was queasy, but out of fatigue not out of fear; and I told myself that the British would not come. Had we made fools of ourselves? How did the men feel, standing here in their lines on the common, with every manner of weapon, bird guns, muskets, matchlocks, rifles, and even an old blunderbuss that Ephraim Drake insisted was the best weapon ever invented.

  Then Father and Jonas Parker walked down our line and reminded everyone to see that their flints were not on cock. They didn’t want any accidents, they said. Father looked at me, and smiled and nodded, and that picked up my spirits a good deal. I took the bit of flannel off my flint.

  Far in the distance, shots were fired. We heard them. The sound was like twigs snapping in the winter frost. Everyone became tense, and men leaning on their guns picked them up and held them in both hands.

  In the west, the dark band of night washed away. The birds began to sing around the common, the way they do in the hour before dawn. A cloud high in the sky turned pink with the first reflection of the sun, but the east, the direction of the Menotomy Road, was still full of haze and mist.

  And then, after all the waiting, all the climax and the anticlimax of the long night, the British came and dawn came. Men who were talking dropped their voices to whispers, and then the whispers stopped, and in the distance, through the morning mist, we heard the beat of the British drums. It began as a rustle. Then it was the sound of a boy running through the reeds of a dry swamp. Then it was my own sound as I ran along a picket fence with a stick, and how did I come to be here, grown, with a gun in my wet hands? Fear began. I felt it prickle on my spine. I felt it like a weight in my belly. I felt it like a sickness around my heart, and its accompaniment was the steady, increasing roll of the redcoat drums.

  The Reverend smiled and pointed to Jonathan Harrington, who whistled up the tune of “Come Swallow Your Bumpers,” a song that everyone was singing in Boston and through the country; but no one sang, not even the Reverend. Jonathan Harrington played on alone, but then he stopped playing as the redcoats came marching out of the lifting mist. Then we were silent and tight, tight as strings drawn to the snapping point, and my hands hurt as they gripped the gun. Many of the men half raised their guns and bent a little, but we boys looked at each other and licked our lips and tried to smile. And in front of our lines, Jonas Parker, my father, Simon Casper, and the Reverend moved closer together.

  When the British saw us, they
were on the road past Buckman’s. First, there were three officers on horseback. Then two flag-bearers, one carrying the regimental flag and the other bearing the British colors. Then a corps of eight drums. Then rank after rank of the redcoats, stretching back on the road and into the curtain of mist, and emerging from the mist constantly, so that they appeared to be an endless force and an endless number. It was dreamlike and not very believable, and it caused me to turn and look at the houses around the common, to see whether all the rest of what we were, our mothers and sisters and brothers and grandparents, were watching the same thing we watched. My impression was that the houses had appeared by magic, for I could only remember looking around in the darkness and seeing nothing where now all the houses stood—and the houses were dead and silent, every shutter closed and bolted, every door and storm door closed and barred. Never before had I seen the houses like that, not in the worst cold or the worst storms.

  And the redcoats did not quicken their pace or slow it, but marched up the road with the same even pace, up to the edge of the common; and when they were there, one of the officers held up his arm—and the drums stopped and the soldiers stopped, the line of soldiers stretching all the way down the road and into the dissipating mist. They were about one hundred and fifty paces away from us.

  The three officers sat on their horses, studying us. The morning air was cold and clean and sharp, and I could see their faces and the faces of the redcoat soldiers behind them, the black bands of their knapsacks, the glitter of their buckles. Their coats were red as fire, but their light trousers were stained and dirty from the march.

  Then, one of the officers sang out to them, “Fix bayonets!” and all down the line, the bayonets sparkled in the morning sun, and we heard the ring of metal against metal as they were clamped onto the guns.

  One of the officers spurred his horse, and holding it at hard check, cantered onto the common with great style, rode past us and back in a circle to the others. He was smiling, but his smile was a sneer; and I looked then at my father, whose face was hard as rock—hard and gray with the stubble of morning beard upon it. I touched my own smooth cheeks, and when I glanced at the men near me, found myself amazed by the shadow of beard on their faces. I don’t know why I was amazed, but I was.

  Then another British officer—I discovered afterward that he was Major Pitcairn—called out orders: “Columns right!” and then, “By the left flank,” and, “Drums to the rear!” The drummers stood still and beat their drums, and the redcoats marched past them smartly, wheeling and parading across the common, while the three mounted officers spurred over the grass at a sharp canter, straight across our front and then back, reining in their prancing horses to face us. Meanwhile, the redcoats marched onto the common, the first company wheeling to face us when it was past our front of thirty-three men, the second company repeating the exercise, until they made a wall of red coats across the common, with no more than thirty or forty paces separating us. Even so close, they were unreal; only their guns were real, and their glittering bayonets too—and suddenly, I realized, and I believed that everyone else around me realized, that this was not to be an exercise or a parade or an argument, but something undreamed of and unimagined.

  I think the Reverend was beginning to speak when Major Pitcairn drove down on him so that he had to leap aside. My father clutched the Reverend’s arm to keep him from falling, and wheeling his horse, Major Pitcairn checked the beast so that it pawed at the air and neighed shrilly. The Reverend was speaking again, but no one heard his words or remembered them. The redcoats were grinning; small, pinched faces under the white wigs—they grinned at us. Leaning over his horse, Major Pitcairn screamed at us:

  “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 sto
p 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.