April Morning

by Howard Fast

  “Don’t you hear me, Adam?” the undertaker was asking me.

  “Yes, sir—I heard you.”

  “I mean that a man has some feeling about his profession. It’s not just an ordinary profession. I like to think that the bereaved take comfort out of my work, but this isn’t the best. Hardly. It’s makeshift, that’s what it is, Adam. The same kind of makeshift that I had to put together for the Parkers and the Hodleys and the Harringtons—and old Mrs. Fess, whose heart gave out. You wouldn’t think so, would you, with all this fuss and calamity, and with Archie Hoggins from Watertown—they got dead of their own, believe me—begging for help, well, you just wouldn’t think that an old lady would die at a time like this, I offer apologies. It’s pine boards knocked together, and not even stained.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “That’s kind of you to say so, Adam. But your father liked the best. That was one thing you could say about Moses Cooper, he liked the best. The best quality. Now there’s no reason why we can’t change it later, but—”

  I was pleading silently for him to shut up, and I was grateful to Cousin Simmons when he said, “Later is plenty of time for such things. Leave the boy in peace now.”

  “I didn’t mean to trouble the boy, Joseph. I just figured to tell—”

  “Leave him in peace. You and I will talk about it if it needs talking about.”

  When we came to the church, there was quite a small crowd standing around outside, among them a number of people whose faces I didn’t recognize. I learned later that all the Committee in Middlesex had appointed representatives to obtain accurate depositions of what had happened on the common, and while there were certainly good intentions at work, I doubt that the clear and absolute truth will ever be known. Inside the meetinghouse were more people, at least half of the Committee, and a good many relatives of the deceased. We laid Father’s coffin down next to the coffins that were already in front of the pulpit. It was quite dark now, and Hiram, the sexton, was lighting candles. The Reverend spread a black cloth over Father’s coffin, an act which comforted me, for in all truth I had been depressed by the green-pine look of it.

  A man who said he was from the Advertiser, in Boston, buttonholed me, and asked whether he could question me about what had happened on the common. I was past being able to think clearly, and I begged him to put his questions to someone else.

  “Don’t you have an interest in the truth, Mr. Cooper?” He called me mister, anticipating that I wouldn’t be able to resist the flattery.

  “I’m too tired to know what the truth is.”

  “A patriot always knows what the truth is.”

  I stared at him dumbly, a big, bluff man in his forties, dressed in good black worsted and white linen, a broad, fleshy face, a deep, rumbling voice that made my own sound to me like a hopeless squeak. I shook my head and pushed past him out of the church.

  The crowd outside in front was larger, and a man who appeared to know just about all there was to know was telling about the situation in Boston—that a siege of the city and the redcoats within it was being planned, and what the pledges of this Committee and that Committee were. I listened to him for a minute or two, and found myself dozing. Then someone took my arm and drew me away.

  It was Cousin Simmons. “Come away from there, Adam, my boy,” he said. “After a day like ours, it is as hard to endure oratory as the measles. I wish that Moses Cooper was here. He had a most marvelous gift for putting a man in his place.”

  I nodded, and Cousin Simmons went on, “Don’t you think that it is cruel or insensitive of me, Adam, to talk about your father. But it seems to me that it is most harmful for a person to bury the dead in his own heart as well as in the cold earth. Goody Simmons would have the skin off my back were I to cast one small doubt on this question of personal survival after death, and if the truth be told, I know no more than the next one. But I do know that something important survives in our children. Your father was a hard man to know, Adam, and sometimes a body just had to grind his teeth and say, Well, that’s Moses Cooper, and that’s the way he is, and there isn’t one blessed thing you can do to change him. But the way he was, Adam, was a most remarkable way. He was an educated man, like most of the men in our family. He was a prudent man. He put away for a rainy day, and you and your mother will be provided for, but he was not a miserly man. No, sir, he was not. He was a man of many strong convictions, and you had to suffer somewhat to be his friend—or his son.”

  “I’m not complaining,” I muttered.

  “I know you are not. Nevertheless, if you recollect him as a saint, you will lose him. Moses Cooper was no saint. He was just as stubborn as a Methodist preacher, but he was a brave man with fine convictions, and I don’t think there was ever a day went by that I didn’t feel pride and satisfaction in knowing he was my friend.”

  “Is that true, Cousin Simmons?” I asked him.

  “As true as the gospel.”

  “I was so happy last night,” I whispered. “When we walked across to the common, he put his arm on my shoulders. I felt that he truly loved me. That was the first time I ever felt it.” My voice broke, and in another moment I would have been crying; but Cousin Simmons put his own big hand on my shoulder, and with the other indicated the houses around the common.

  “There it is, Adam.”

  “Sir?”

  “We took up arms for our home place, and he died for it. That’s an old, old way, Adam, older than you or me, remember. There are worse ways for a man to die, I tell you.”

  I nodded. In silence, we walked along the edge of the common, the first of the evening dropping like a curtain all around us; and then Cousin Simmons pointed toward Buckman’s Taver

  “The Committee board meets there tonight, Adam.”

  “Oh?”

  “It was our feeling that we should issue some sort of a statement in regard to and respect for our dead. Some small tribute, which the Reverend could read from the pulpit tomorrow. I think the Committee must be heard on that. Don’t you?”

  “I do,” I agreed.“Father would have been the first to want that for someone else. He was very strong for the Committee.”

  “Rightly so, Adam. God help us, today, was strange enough, but can you imagine what today would have been without the Committees?”

  “I think so—yes.”

  We walked a little farther, and Cousin Simmons said, “They’ll be opening the muster book, Adam.”

  “Sir?”

  “It’s the word on the siege of Boston. They’ll want five thousand Gommitteemen at least. Every town.”

  “Will you be signing it, Cousin Simmons?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied slowly. “This is one time I do wish to heaven that I had Moses Cooper’s advice. I don’t know what’s beginning, Adam, or how and when it is going to end. I have three womenfolk at home, no sons, and a forge. A blacksmith’s prime to a town, if you ever thought about it, Adam. No smith, no iron. No iron, and the town is going to dry up and die. So I got to consider it. I can’t make any snap decisions, can I?”

  “No, sir. I don’t think you can.”

  “Any more than you can, Adam.”

  “Sir?”

  “A war has begun, Adam. Not just a battle. But a war. Haven’t you thought about that?”

  My heart as heavy as lead, I replied, “No, sir. I don’t think I have.”

  “You have to, you know. Now here we are, almost at Buckman’s. You’re mighty tired, so go home now, Adam. Think about it. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  I said good night to him, and turned back in the direction of my home.

  The Evening

  As I WALKED across the common in the darkness, my thoughts went back to my first awareness of a difference, a breaking away from the past into a future that became alive, self-shaping, apart—or so it seemed—from our own will. I was also bidding childhood farewell, an action not singular and definitive, but repeated many times until the nostalgia so thins that it is
meaningless. But I was not yet at that point.

  Because we played our game—the one we loved most—right here on the common, and it was only yesterday, my own yesterday; and up to the time when I became too old for games. I was twelve then. At twelve your hands are hard enough for work, but I do remember two more times, during the three years after that, when I played the game, in spite of my size, my long bones, my flat, strong muscles that could lift a plough off the ground.

  We called the game Pontiac. Once, Pontiac had been a villainous fed Indian, but by the time I was old enough for the game, he had changed into a hero. We were children who knew little enough of what went on in the talk and minds of our elders, but we knew that Pontiac, who had been bad, who had slaughtered the men of General Braddock, was no longer bad. He became a valid hero, so as to say. The game was played this way. However many of us there were, we divided ourselves into two parts. The redcoats made an outside circle. The Indians were inside the circle. The redcoats had a ball, which they flung back and forth across the circle, attempting to hit the Indians. Each Indian hit was eliminated; he had to remove himself from the game, which he usually did after substantial argument—and in time, one Indian was left, a boy who could now avoid the ball easily enough, since he had no one to interfere with or confuse his movements. He was Pontiac, and he had the right to choose any redcoat he pleased for scalping. The scalp was by rule limited to a hank of back hair, no thicker than a small finger; but many a boy with an ugly gap in his back hair had some explaining to do at home. I, myself, was scalped twice, but I had been Pontiac at least a dozen times, and I had the scalps hidden in my room to prove it.

  And now, as I walked home across the common, I remembered the game and childhood and clung to both, but hopelessly. By the time I entered my house, I had surrendered them.

  The house was filled with neighbors. The widow Susan Simmons had taken charge in the kitchen, and the whole house was warm with the smell of good things cooking and baking. I think that then I was somewhat upset that so much attention should be paid to food and cooking and eating in a house where death had been, but as time goes on I appreciate the deep wisdom of it. Food is close to the meaning of life. There are tributes enough to the dead; the food is a tribute to the living, who are in need of it at the time. There could have been no better consolation for Mother than the need to feed hungry people, among them myself.

  “Adam, I told you to eat before, and you never did,” she said to me. “I can’t depend on you to take a crust of bread if my back is turned.”

  That was certainly new, and a part of the difference; formerly, any reference to my stomach likened it to a bottomless pit. She used to say to the neighbors, “I don’t know where the boy puts it. I just don’t know. But it frightens me to watch what he does to pie or to hot bread.” Now, I was going to starve myself if she didn’t feed me forcibly. For her, I had to be a man with terrible urgency; there was no time to dream about the games I had played on the common. She had taken a grip on herself, and now when she wept, she would weep out of the sight of others; but she had to tell herself that here was a man, Adam Cooper, fifteen years old, but overnight a man. But I wasn’t. It doesn’t work that way.

  I sat down at the kitchen table, and the women fussed over me and set twice the amount before me than even I could consume. But once I began to eat, I couldn’t stop until I was near to bursting with roast and pudding and hot bread and pie. While I ate, the women whispered about me: “Poor boy, he looks so tired.” “Such a fine boy.” “Such a dependable boy.” “I always said so about Adam Cooper, and I was right.”

  Levi sat opposite me with hero-worshiping eyes. He had brought my fowling piece in from outside where I had dropped it, and cleaned it and polished it until the metal shone like silver. In his mind, too, I had departed from a childhood we once shared. No more battles between, us, no more threats or name-calling.

  “Now he feels better,” one of the women said, with the triumphant satisfaction a woman can exhibit when she sees a man well fed. But I felt no better—only more tired, more hopeless, more defeated.

  Ruth was there again, now. She stayed on the other side of the room and looked at me whenever she felt others would not notice. In the candlelight and the firelight, she was lovelier than I remembered. But I wanted to cry out to her, “Too quickly, too quickly! Can’t you see what they’re doing to me? Don’t let them do it to you.” But she wanted it. Her eyes were the eyes of a woman, and whatever the future held, she would not be afraid of it.

  When I had finished eating, Mother took me aside into the pantry and said to me, “Where is Father lying now?”

  “In front of the pulpit with the other coffins. The Reverend covered them with black cloth.”

  She nodded, and then was silent for a moment.

  “Adam?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “If I don’t appear just the same—I mean the way you think about me as your mother—today and even tomorrow, you understand—”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “I mean that all you went through today, so much—oh, my God, so much, and I can’t even talk to you about it, or listen to your story about it. Do you understand?”

  “Of course I understand, Mother.”

  “In a little while—a few days.”

  “I know, Mother.”

  “Are you very tired now, Adam?”

  “It’s funny,” I said, “but I was more tired before.”

  “That’s good. I want you to take a package of candles over to the meetinghouse.”

  “Mother, what for?”

  “Take them there. I don’t want him to lie in the darkness tonight.”

  “But, Mother, the Reverend has candles. They’re burning now. The place isn’t dark.”

  “Let these candles be for later.”

  “All right,” I agreed. “I’ll take them there, Mother.”

  Granny sat at the kitchen table and made the long, green bayberry candles into a package. She had become an old lady. She had been my grandmother, but until tonight I had not thought of her as an old lady, withered and consumed; and it occurred to me that she had lost more than I lost. Nature rules wisely at times, and it’s in the order of things that the parent dies before the child. Granny had lost too much.

  “Adam dear,” she said to me, “tell the Reverend that if these tapers are lighted, they will burn until the dawn comes. They are extra thick. I never thought it when I dipped them. I never thought it at all.” I kissed her cheek, and the women fussed over her.

  Before I left, I glanced around for Ruth, but she had gone. I went out through the herb garden, and just outside the gate, Ruth was waiting for me.

  “What’s that you’re carrying, Adam?” she whispered.,

  “Candles. Mother wants them at the meetinghouse, so Father won’t lie in darkness.”

  Ruth nodded. “Could you lay them down a moment?”

  I placed them on the wayfarer’s bench, and Ruth flung her arms around me and kissed me again and again. It was like I had never kissed her or embraced her before, her mouth so warm and soft, her body so tightly against me. “Oh, Adam—Adam,” she said, “when the news came that you were dead, my whole world died. Every bit of it. Nothing was left. My head was empty and my heart was empty, and I knew that I would grow old like Goody Hartman and become a skinny, dried-up old maid.”

  I just couldn’t see Ruth Simmons as a skinny, dried-up old maid. One of the things we had in common was an appetite, and at the Thanksgiving dinner, November past, the two of us had astounded the family, who declared that our performance was stunning, even for Massachusetts. But I was moved that she should feel that way.

  “I love you so much, Adam. I’m not afraid to say it now. I want to.”

  I guess I returned her feelings, even if I did take it somewhat more for granted. I couldn’t think of myself as being married to anyone but Ruth Simmons—if only because there were so many things about myself that she just shrugged away and ac
cepted, things I would have the devil’s own time explaining to another girl. I also had a strong suspicion that Ruth would make life unbearable for any other girl I took up with. But such things as marriage had been comfortably in the future.

  Ruth knew me well enough to reassure me, and told me that it was all right. “You don’t think I want to be married at the age of fifteen?”

  I knew that the Simmonses, men and women, were strong-minded, and I mentioned that.

  “Adam Cooper, how you talk sometimes!”

  “You want to walk over to the church with me?”

  “Of course I do,” she said.

  I picked up the candles, and we started toward the common, holding hands and walking very slowly. It was most comforting, and I couldn’t help thinking how rewarding and pleasant it would be if we could be together all this night and the next night too. Then I thought of Ruth and the other women too—alone in the town through the length of this day, with the town and the children and everything else as their burden, and the dead men to lay out themselves, never knowing whether their men were alive or dead or would ever return to them. I spoke about it to Ruth, and how hard it must have been.

  “It was harder for you, out with the battle,” she said.

  “I’m not sure. A battle’s a funny thing—this one, anyway. It wasn’t like any battle I ever read about in books. It was terribly confused. No one seemed to know much about what was going on or what to do, except to shoot at the redcoats.”

  “Did you, Adam?”

  “Know what to do? No. Not a blessed bit.”

  “I meant, did you shoot at the redcoats?”

  “A few times, yes. I only had bird shot in my gun, so mostly they were out of my range.”

  “Did you kill anyone?” she whispered.

  “No. I hit some soldiers once, because I saw them jump and yell out with pain. But I don’t think I killed anyone.”

  “Did you want to, Adam?”

  “Maybe once, but only for a little while. I don’t hate anyone enough to want to kill him.”