by Howard Fast
“God have mercy on me,” I said to myself. “I am losing my mind, and soon I’ll be no better than Halfwit Jephthah in Concord, who is sixty years old with the brains of a five-year-old, and now I, myself, am hearing voices.” I was hearing voices. I heard a thin, cracked voice wailing, “Adam! Adam Cooper—are you around? Are you alive.”
I opened the door of the smokehouse, and there across the yard was my brother Levi.
“Levi,” I whispered.
He jumped like a startled rabbit and looked all around him.
“Levi! Here in the smokehouse!”
Then he saw me in the open door, ran to me, and threw himself sobbing into my arms, hanging onto me as if I was the only thing left in the whole world. He was crying now fit to break his heart, and that dried up the tears in me. I have noticed that when you have two brothers in a difficult situation and one begins to cry, the other usually contains himself. That was the way it happened to me. I pulled him into the smokehouse, closed the door behind us, and said:
“What are you doing out here?”
“Looking for you.”
“Well, who sent you to look for me?”
“Granny did. Adam, Father’s dead.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw him dead,” he sobbed. “He had two bullet holes in his chest. They shot him dead, Adam. Those lousy rotten redcoats shot him dead. That’s my father. They shot him dead, Adam.” He was shivering and shaking. I shook him until he had calmed down and was crying evenly again. Then I put my arm around him and squeezed him, the way Father had done to me, to show him that I wasn’t angry.
“Where did you see Father?” I asked him.
“Out on the common. Granny and Mother ran out there and I went with them. First the redcoats tried to stop us, but Granny was so wild and terrible angry that they let her go, and she fell down on her knees where Father was lying and began begging him he shouldn’t be dead, because out of five sons, he was the last one. But Mother just grabbed onto me and held me and looked at Father, and just wailing and wailing quiet, like a little girl—oh, it was terrible, terrible, Adam. It was just more terrible than anything, just more terrible, Adam, I tell you. Then a redcoat soldier came over, and he said something to Mother about could he help—I don’t know exactly what he said, because you can’t understand them so good the way they speak, and Granny stood up and spit in his face and said things to him like I never heard her say before. Goody Simmons was there and her sister, and the four of them, they picked up Father and carried him into the house. And there were dead people all over the common, with the women crying and wailing, and the redcoat soldiers all over everywhere—”
“Who else was dead?” I whispered.
“I don’t know all of them—I didn’t look. Some of them were across the common, and there were two men lying in the drainage ditch, I think one of those was Jonas Parker. Caleb Harrington is dead. Then I saw Jonathan Harrington crawling along through his own blood, the blood was running out under him, and there were some women trying to help him, and he was crying. Isaac Muzzy was lying next to Father. He was dead. He was all cut with bayonets and they had smashed in his head.”
He began to shake again, and I held him for a while and quieted him.
“They killed Father,” he said. “Father’s dead, Adam. Did you know that?”
“I know that, Levi,” I said softly. “But he didn’t feel any hurt or pain out of it. I saw how they shot him. It never hurt him at all.”
“It hurts to be dead.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“I know, I know,” I said. “Stop shaking. Everything is going to be all right.”
“It’ll never be all right again. Father’s dead.”
“Well, people die. People die. Don’t you think Father knew that he could die when he went out there to stand up to the British?”
“Then why did he go?”
“He had to go,” I told him. “He had to go.”
“Why didn’t you kill the British?”
He had asked it finally, and then someone else and then someone else—and they would never stop asking why no one, not one of us, fired his gun, not one shot, not one show of force or courage or anything like that—but only the running away. He must have felt it in me in the darkness, and he said:
“I didn’t mean that, Adam.”
“It wouldn’t make Father alive,” I muttered. “Father’s dead. We have to think of what to do.”
“He had two holes in his chest,” Levi said.
“What did Granny say to you?”
“They laid him down on the dining-room table. Goody Simmons began to wash him. His face was dirty and bloody. But Mother just stood there and said, ‘Moses Cooper, Moses Cooper—’”
“Don’t keep on talking about it and thinking about it.”
“He’s dead,”
“What did Granny tell you to say to me? Can I come home?”
“You can’t come home. There are redcoats all over the place. She says to hide in the woods back of Cousin Simmons’ house until darkness falls. Then we can hide you in the house.”
Yes, I thought, I’ll hide in the house and hide in the woodshed, and even if I come out into the sunshine one day, I’ll still be hiding.
“Will you do that, Adam?”
“Tell them not to worry about me. I’ll be all right.”
“You wouldn’t run away, Adam?” he begged me. “You wouldn’t run away and leave me all alone?”
“Of course not.”
We sat quietly in the darkness for a few minutes. Levi pressed close to me, pushing his face into my jacket. He felt small and helpless, and I was filled with guilt for all the times we had quarreled and all the names we had called each other; and I told myself that from now on, I would take care of him just as if I were his own father.
“You’d better go home now,” I said to him. “I guess it’s bad enough at home with all the misery they got, without worrying about what happened to you and me.”
“What shall I tell them?”
“I’ll come later, when it’s safe. I’ll be all right. I’ll take care of myself.”
But when Levi slipped out of the smokehouse, I was alone again and afraid again, and no one to come between myself and my fear and grief.
The Forenoon
I MUST HAVE dozed off for just a moment or two, and I was awakened by the sound of voices. I crept to the door of the smokehouse and put my eye against a thin crack in the closing, and there, no more than three or four paces away, were two redcoats, standing there in the morning sunshine and looking, or so it appeared to me, directly at me.
“Now take that shed, Sergeant,” said one of them. “It could be stuffed as full with Yankees as a goose with pudding, and us none the wiser.”
“You have a point there, Blythe, indeed.”
“Or that woodpile there.”
“A possibility, no doubt.”
“They are tricky devils, they are.”
“Not to be trusted.”
“I would sooner trust my wife.”
“There you have the nature of them, Blythe. Sly. Sly as women. You and me could be standing there, having a word with each other, just two honest men attempting to do their duty according to a solemn oath they have sworn to the King, and they’d like as not be planning to pot us from that window up there.”
“The devil!”
“I don’t say it’s so. I say it could be so.”
“Then just inform me, Sergeant, why we don’t take a torch to the whole dirty pile and burn it to the ground?”
“That’s not for you and me to decide, Blythe. That is in the nature of policy.”
A third redcoat joined them, and said, “The Captain says to stand to parade on the common, Sergeant. We are marching.”
“Marching?”
“That’s what the Captain said. Marching.”
“And without a wink of sleep.”
“I
say it’s a shame, and I don’t care who hears that. There is enough feather bolsters in this town to bed downthe regiment.”
“I am merely communicating orders, Sergeant.”
The three of them walked out of my area of view, and then I heard the sound of bugles and the rattle of drums. Whether all the redcoats were marching, or whether it was only their regiment, with another regiment left to guard and search the town, I had no idea. But when I opened the door a few inches, it was clear as far as I could see, and I felt that this was my chance to get out of the trap of the smokehouse.
You might think that with my father dead, my own fear would have lessened; but it didn’t work that way, and all I knew was that I was alone—and who would take care of me. or see for me now unless it was myself? When they spoke of burning the place, I saw myself trapped in the shed, roasting to death. I only wanted to get out of there and go where I might never see a redcoat again.
So, with the coast clear, I leaped out. Still hanging onto my gun, I raced across the back yard and garden of the house, down a little slope, and plunged into a fringe of woods there, never glancing behind me or even to the side, but only eager to find the cover of the brush. It was still too early in the season for bushes and underbrush to be in leaf and provide cover, and the skin of woods was only about thirty paces across. But just beyond it, there was a stone wall, and behind the stone wall, I would have shelter, with the open meadows as a place of retreat.
But no sooner had I plunged through the woods than I almost ran into two redcoats, who were making their way along the stone wall. When they saw me, one of them let out a cry for me to halt, and the other threw up his musket and fired. I wasn’t more than twenty feet from him, so he might well have hit me if his piece had fired; but it flashed in the pan without taking in the chamber, and I sailed over that wall as if I had wings. Once in the open meadow, I had no fear that they could catch me. I had long legs, and many was the foot race I had won, but the redcoats were burdened by their heavy uniforms, their enormous muskets, and the big packs they wore on their backs. I stretched my legs and fled across that meadow as if the devil himself were after me—and I felt that way too—holding my speed for the quarter of a mile that separated me from the stone wall that bound the opposite side of the meadow. There, panting, exhausted, I fell across the wall into two arms that embraced me like a steel vise.
I clawed and twisted and struggled and tried in every way I knew to break that hold until I was brought back to sanity by a voice in my ear telling me:
“Easy, easy, easy, my lad. I have no desire to harm you. I only don’t want you exploding that bird gun in my face out of your excitement. Excitement is a bad state for a body. Many a good man would be alive today, if he weren’t dead from excitement. Now just take a good look at me. My name is Solomon Chandler, out of Lincoln Town, and I come across the meadows to see you running like a deer in flight. But them two redcoats you fled from, they are standing back there, and none too quick to come across the meadows a-hunt-ing us. Just look and see, and be calm.”
I relaxed, and he let go of me, and sure enough, back on the other side of the field, the redcoats were standing and watching, but making no move to come after me.
“And if they should take a notion to come,” said Solomon Chandler, “do we want to turn our backs to them?—or maybe to keep a cool head on our shoulders, since we are two to two, even odds, my lad, and a gun is a commoner, an equalizer, believe me.”
I stared at him now. He was a tall man, a full head taller than I was, and long in his arms and his legs and skinny as a starved crow. But it didn’t weaken him, being skinny; I had felt his grip and knew that. He had a long face, a long hooked nose, a jutting chin, and two pale blue eyes, deep-sunk in their sockets. When he smiled, he showed a mouthful of broken yellow teeth, with wide gaps between them. He wore a provision bag over one shoulder, a powder horn, a bag of shot and a water bottle over the other, and he carried a rifle as tall as he was. His hair was snow-white, and altogether he was the most freckled man I had ever seen and possibly the ugliest.
“You don’t know them!” I gasped, still trying to get back my breath. “You don’t know them! You don’t know what they did over there! We were standing on the common and they fired on us! They shot us down like dogs! They killed my father!”
“Ah, no—Jehovah damn them! Did they do that? Did they kill your father, your own blood?”
I nodded, and all my control went, and I burst into tears and put my face in my hands and cried like a little boy, full of shame and sick all through, but unable to halt my crying.
“Now that’s the right thing,” said Solomon Chandler. “Let the tears run freely. Grief should not be denied. Cry until you are free of it, boy. The Almighty knows that you have reason for it. Don’t be ashamed for me. I have six children and nineteen grandchildren, and each one of them is as dear to me as you were to your own father, may he rest in peace.”
I was able to stop then, and I was grateful to him, for as strange as his words were, they calmed me and soothed me—as if for the first time I actually realized that life would continue, and that my father’s death and what had happened in our village did not mean the end of everything. Glancing across the wall, I saw that the two British soldiers were gone. Solomon Chandler was asking my name.
“Adam Cooper.”
“Adam Cooper. All right, Adam, my boy, suppose we walk a spell and put a mile between them redcoats and us, and then we’ll just sit for a bit, and you will tell me what happened back there.” He reached into his waistcoat pocket and took out a silver watch. “Twelve minutes after nine,” he said, “and you’ve lost your youth and come to manhood, all in a few hours, Adam Cooper. Oh, that’s painful. That is indeed.”
“I wish it was true that I have come to manhood,” I said bitterly.
“Give it time, Adam. Give it time.”
And then he set off with a long, brisk stride. I had to half-run to keep up with him. He set off westward, and for about a mile, we walked parallel to the Concord Road. Then we turned south into the woods, climbed a hillock, and came to a tiny, grassy glade, screened from every side by brush and wood. I had thought that I knew all the countryside hereabouts, but Solomon Chandler knew it better than I did, every field and fence and coppice. Once we were in the glade, he asked me whether I was hungry, and when I nodded, opened his provision bag and took out of it cold roast chicken, a piece of ham, bread, and a boiled fruit pudding. He spread a cloth on the ground, laid out the food, cutting it up so that I should have no hesitancy about helping myself, and then pressed me to eat.
I felt that it was wrong of me to be so hungry. I felt that it was sinful, in the face of all that I had seen and all that had happened; but after I had tasted the first bite of food, I ate as ravenously as a starving man. I suppose it was my hunger and the circumstances that made it so, yet the food tasted better than anything I had ever eaten. Between the two of us, we finished the ham and the chicken and the fruit pudding, washing it down with water from our bottles. Only some of the bread remained, and this Solomon Chandler wrapped carefully and stowed back in his provision bag. Then he stretched his legs and his arms and said to me:
“Now, Adam, confess that you feel a trifle better?”
I nodded.
“Life is potent, Adam. If it wasn’t, you and I wouldn’t be sitting here. You witnessed a mighty terrible thing, but men are clever when it comes to doing sinful and beastly things to other men, and what you witnessed was not the first time and it won’t be the last either. But life has a special quality of asserting itself, and that’s a very important thing to learn about, it is.”
“My father’s dead. Talking like this won’t bring him back.”
“That it won’t, Adam—be sure of that. Nothing’s going to bring him back. You know, laddie, when a young man like yourself first watches the death of someone close and dear to him, it’s a bitter shock, it is. But if it was you lying out there on the common and your father out here,
then there would be no consolation whatsoever, none at all that I could offer. The natural way is to let the old go, let the young live and taste life. Your father went too soon, but oh, my heavens, laddie, life is only a day, a long, long day, but that’s all. I am sixty-one years old, and it’s like yesterday that I was a boy your own age, and a year older when I shipped out of Boston Town to see the whole world, and then back to be married and raise my own, and then off to the French War—and all of it comes down to a moment. The Lord God Jehovah, He is eternal and timeless, He that was and is and always will be—but you and me, laddie, we have a little bit to do and we do it as best we know how, and that’s just about as much as you can say for us or for your good father, may his soul rest. Now I have said enough. I could sit here and talk you deaf, dumb, and blind, I could. But I want you to talk to me. I want you to tell me what went on back there and just how it happened—all of it, how it began and then everything that transpired.”
He was not to be resisted, this old man, Solomon Chandler. He never raised his voice, and everything he said had a trace of apology in it; yet I found myself telling him every detail of the previous night, how the rider came to warn us, how we assembled on the common and how the British came. I left out none of it, nor did I attempt to polish it up and make us out to be heroes of any kind. I told him that so far as I could see, not one shot was fired from our side. I told him what kind of cowards we were, and how we ran as if the devil himself was behind each one of us.