by Paul Lussier
Talk to ANYONE . . . The implication of this directive, on the face of it thoroughly preposterous, had me thinking for the first time that maybe Deborah was just out of her mind and I was nothing but a character suckered into a particularly captivating hallucination of hers. The moment of weakness was short-lived, however, for as soon as I did exactly as bidden, approaching the first stableboy I met with my top-secret news, all of Boston began to turn.
“To Concord. Tonight. It’ll be tomorrow then,” I said, just like that.
I thought sure the stableboy, clearly German, considered me a vagrant (“Raus!” he had threatened, pushing me aside) and either didn’t understand English or was feigning ignorance of the language in order to deflect what he mistook as a request for cash.
So I approached a street urchin: “Gage is going to Concord. Tonight. Tomorrow then.”
“Piss off, fuckface!” this one shrieked, shoving me to the ground.
Not to worry. My friend the German, as things turned out, had the situation entirely under control.
Ten-ten P.M. Suddenly the church bells, off-hour, began to toll.
Ten-fifteen. The German stableboy got to Revere, but Revere, having already been notified three times over (didn’t word travel fast!) by various men and women on the street, was by this point well on his way to the Charles River to cross into the countryside and give alarm. His mission, as he understood it, was to rouse the militia to secure the safety of Hancock and Adams, whose arrest and hanging were still believed to be Gage’s goal.
Gage, of course, had no such extreme plans. But the news of the Redcoats coming by sea was nonetheless key, for it enabled the people to prepare, to begin to set things into motion, according to plan.
The Minutemen in Lexington gathered in Buckman Tavern within minutes of the signal indicating that the British regulars were on their way, well before they could possibly have received word via courier that two lanterns had in Christ Church steeple been hung (“One if by land, two if by sea . . .”). Was it coincidence, intuition, confidence? No, faith, like the chick who takes the leap because he knows it’s time to fly.
Revere couldn’t help but smile when out from the dark (on no more than tonight’s advance word) popped two boatbuilders, Joshua Bentley and Thomas Richardson, offering to row Revere safely across the Charles, their journey in turn abetted by a young woman who appeared ready and willing to toss the renegades her warm flannel petticoat as a wrapper to muffle the boat’s oars.
And we’ll take over from there, Deborah had directed. We, I was about to discover, meaning not only human agency, but much, much more. . . .
We included Revere’s dog, who showed up just as the rowboat was about to shove off, his master’s forgotten spurs attached to his collar, without which Revere could never have made his famous ride.
We included the moon, only too eager to play a part. Near full in the clear night sky, normally the moon would have caught Revere’s boat in its beam, making it highly visible to the H.M.S. Somerset, the British warship anchored smack in the middle of the Charles.
But not tonight, April 18, 1775. They called it a lunar anomaly, a freak event in the sky, described (but never explained) by astronomers as an abnormal positioning of the moon a few too many degrees to the south. Be all that as it may, to be standing on the corner of North and North Centre witnessing Revere’s crossing was to behold a miracle. For Revere’s little boat—amid a river ordinarily lit so well by the moon that its currents could be read from afar—passed under the hissing tiger on the Somerset’s prow hidden completely by Boston’s own shadow thrown far across the bay and, thus, passed undetected.
I was in absolute awe.
“By the full moon, April the eighteenth,” she’d told me. Was this what it was, then? A way of availing herself of the parallax moon? Dark for Revere’s crossing, but bright on the road to Concord to the northwest—all the better to detect the scarlet of Redcoats coming our way?
I wouldn’t put it past her. Things like this, you see . . . she and her farmers, they just knew. Not from Newton or Spinoza, but from the land, or perhaps, in a pinch, the almanac.
Small wonder that the moment those Redcoats disembarked on the Charlestown side of the Charles (bound for Concord) they were doomed to be picked off like flies.
To be sure, I could now see that these soldiers mustering reluctantly about Boston (apprehensive about all the activity and the tolling bells) would be no match for men who worked with the moon.
The story was all in the hats.
The Redcoats sported heavy hats made even more cumbersome by the canvas slipcovers required to prevent their cracking in the sun, snapping in the cold, and soaking up the rain. Additionally, they towered so high on the head they had to be cinched tight to the scalp with straps.
The American militiaman’s tricorne, on the other hand, fit low, capably redirected rain, and was contoured to the head by the weather.
The Redcoats’ hair was plaited and powdered and waxed; breeches kept bright white under penalty of court-martial; coarse red woolen fabric that chafed; horsehair neck collars bound tight and rising to the chin. All this as compared to the Rebels’ natural locks, caught back with a ribbon or a thong; loose-fitting, homespun camouflage brown attire, or a grayish blue that echoed the night sky.
No match at all.
Just after midnight. The wee hours of April nineteenth. Gage’s soldiers, having been roused from their beds, were finally lined up at the riverbank and given orders to embark—without any direction as to where they were to go or why. Lucky for them the townspeople knew and amiably directed them to the dock, filled them in on the pertinent details.
“You’re taking the cannon back from Concord,” one townsman advised, clueing in a half-asleep Redcoat.
Another Bostonian cracked, “And you’re sure to miss your aim!” prompting laughter all around—even from the British soldiers, who couldn’t help but agree.
About this time, Lord Percy, in command of the Fifth Regiment, was taking an evening walk. Overhearing a group of Yankees casually discussing the evening’s “top-secret” troop movements through town, he went berserk. Thinking he was the only one who had not been informed of Gage’s plan to raid Concord, he raced to Province House and stormed into Gage’s office to announce what he had just learned “from civilians in the street, good sir! How can this be?”
Gage, fearful for his job (rumor had it that three new generals—Howe, Burgoyne, and Clinton—were already on their way to replace him), felt it was now or never to regain favor with the king; a show of strength at this point in time was of the essence. If word were ever to get out that Gage had not persevered in his plans because the civilian population “found out,” he’d be sent packing back to England faster than his wife could come. Better he fail in playing the hero than play the fool by backing down.
“Persevere,” he instructed Percy, commanding him to ready his brigade. For many years afterward, whenever the dramatic story of the Battle of Lexington and Concord was acted out in the street by the citizenry, as often it was, here Gage was portrayed peeing his pants.
Percy was to help Colonel Francis Smith (God knows why—possibly because this was a battle that Gage was meant to lose; there’s no other explanation), to whom Gage gave command of the action along with orders to take to Concord twenty-one companies of soldiers, Loyalist militia, and volunteers.
Of course, as much as Gage thought Americans canny, lovely, and smart, he couldn’t bring himself to believe they were psychic (not yet). At least not until he excluded the possibility that his sluttish Jersey wife had opened her not-quite-wide-enough-for-him fat mouth and betrayed him. One look at her and, well . . . suffice it to say, she was history. Soon thereafter she was plopped onto a ship to England, never to return: “Madam, begone!”
Unfortunately, Colonel Smith, more than needing help, required full-scale rescue. The journey across the Charles, which Revere had executed in a matter of minutes, took Smith’s men well over th
ree hours. And once they did reach the opposite shore of Back Bay, they were already too tuckered to trot.
Actually, they never really made it to shore—not by boat, anyway—for the British longboat keels, always too deep for the Charles, ran aground, forcing the soldiers to jump into waist-deep water and drag themselves to shore with their hats, boots, wool uniforms, and 125-pound packs in tow.
Then there was the regrettable combination of fatty Colonel Francis Smith and fey Major Pitcairn sharing command (they had gotten out of town, oblivious to the fact that Percy and his just-mustered outfit were still in Boston, scrambling to get ready). Not all opposites are happy ones, I suppose.
At odds from the start, the ever-hungry Smith insisted they await food provisions before pushing on (two days’ worth, he required, even though the expedition was designed to last at most several hours). At first a waiting period was fine for the ever-fastidious Pitcairn, who used the time to order and reorder his troops, insisting they stay in the water until a design he liked had been achieved (so as to make them attractive on shore). But then Pitcairn wanted to march. What would Smith say? “Not before my sandwich arrives!”
So it was that a full four hours after leaving barracks—Smith, miserable; Pitcairn, prissy—the Redcoat company finally shoved off through the Cambridge marsh, breeches full of soggy water, thick mud sucking at their shoes. One hour later I made that same trip in thirty minutes.
Fifty feet into the marsh, Smith halted his troops once more. Ostensibly concerned that the soldiers’ wet, muddy footfalls would awaken the countryside, he sent his men, all nine hundred, down a slippery embankment into a stream, which he ordered them to ford. And with their backs turned, he caught a nibble of salt cod (“A tiny bite—nothing more!”), along with his breath (apparently he was hyperventilating so badly his men thought surely he’d die).
Meanwhile, back in Boston, Percy was still waiting on Smith (via Pitcairn) for his orders. He would have had a long wait: Gage’s instructions conjoining them were sitting on Pitcairn’s night table, delivered long after Pitcairn had departed.
Pitcairn would be trading bullets with Yankees on the Lexington Green by the time Percy had it all figured out and was finally leaving Boston. It was not until nine o’clock that morning, April 19, 1775, that a puzzled Lord Percy, with two cannon, a baggage train, and eight hundred men, finally trickled out of Boston to reinforce a battle that had already been lost before Percy had even shouted “Forward—march!”
And by the time Percy’s parade dawdled into Lexington, the skirmish there was over and Smith’s men had already taken it on the chin at Old North Bridge in Concord. News that one of their soldiers’ heads had just been tomahawked off by a sixteen-year-old Rebel did little to spoil Smith’s tidy breakfast and Pitcairn’s brandy alexander, which during the battle they’d demanded be served them on the rather pretty Concord Green.
Where Percy’s brigade became invaluable, however, was during the British retreat from Lexington. All that artillery power worked wonders in beating back the farmers stashed behind fences and in the woods chasing the Redcoats off, “assassinating” them “in cold blood” with clumsy fowling pieces, one by one by one. . . .
I had cantered back into Lexington much earlier, around four that morning, well ahead of Pitcairn and Smith, and far ahead of Percy—a full five hours before the skirmish at Concord’s Old North Bridge. As soon as I crossed the river (with the help of Revere’s oarsmen), I was met by a courier offering me a horse (“from Buttrick”), warning me to “ride like the devil” and warn the countryside through to Lexington, to act as backup for Revere.
I arrived just before that first shot: the one “heard ’round the world.”
Upon my arrival, Lexington didn’t, to me, seem at all prepared for battle. I thought for sure something had gone wrong. The Green looked like Harvard Yard did back in ’70, except instead of soused students picking food fights and torturing underclassmen, there were Minutemen rolling around, playing at boule and beer-chugging competitions.
They’d been drinking since midnight, just after news of the “two lanterns” had been passed on, and they were drop-down dead drunk.
Not exactly the vigilant, austere Patriots of lore.
Women and children, as if preparing for a show, were competing for viewing space in upper windows, atop chimneys and roofs, urging the militiamen on in an exercise that bore no resemblance to any military drill I’d ever seen (soldiers tripping over their own two feet and each other’s, another attempting a cartwheel).
I didn’t have to look very far for Buttrick and Robert, standing there in the tavern’s yard, Robert rolling rub-a-dub-dub on his drum, as if nothing about the scene before us were out of the ordinary or disturbing at all.
Half an hour later, at four-thirty A.M., a discouraged Revere shuffled into town, on foot. I approached him immediately. For while it had been evident during my ride that Revere had managed to alert the countryside as planned, I wondered, as I arrived in Lexington, why no one had seen hide nor hair of him. “Where have you been?” I asked, figuring there was no point in not getting right to it.
He explained that when he’d reached Lexington he’d gone immediately to the Clarke parsonage (around three hours ago, at one A.M.). After a chilly, annoyed reception from Hancock and Adams, who hated being roused in the dead of night, he left, urging them to break from town as soon as possible. From there he was traveling to Concord when he was arrested by a British advance man, taken prisoner, and soon thereafter released predicated on his bluff that there were thousands of Rebels awaiting the British in Concord. This caused the advance guard to panic, take Revere’s horse, and run.
Revere further explained that having marched his way back to Lexington just moments ago after being unhorsed, he was astonished to find John Hancock and Samuel Adams still hanging about the Clarke place.
Subscribing to the school of thought that would have held Adams’s and Hancock’s arrests an unmitigated disaster for The Cause, he was resolved to induce them to go. Toward that end, he wished to procure Hancock his trunk, without which Hancock refused to make a move. Wondering how the hell I’d ever gotten it up those stairs all by myself, he asked for my help. “Would you mind terribly . . . ?”
Wouldn’t you know that it was while dragging the goddamned trunk from my bedroom at the tavern that all hell began to break loose down below.
From around the bend, Pitcairn, the British officers, and six companies of Redcoats appeared: an orderly flood of scarlet and steel meeting swaying lines of brown and blue on Lexington Green. (Smith, of course, was well behind his vanguard of regulars.)
As to the millstone of a trunk: Now what? Drop it? Toss it? Use this opportunity to take a forbidden look inside? Continue to drag it toward Hancock?
We carried on as before, figuring that if some action were to occur, it wouldn’t be anytime soon.
We were wrong.
“Let the troops pass by and don’t molest them without they begin first,” were militiaman Colonel Barrett’s orders, just as Revere and I were crossing the Green with the monstrous trunk.
“Disperse, ye Rebels, ye villains, disperse, lay down your arms!” cried Pitcairn. At which point I tripped and fell.
“This fucking lug! I’m gone. Let it drop!” I shouted to Revere.
Then, from someone on our side: “If they mean to have a war, let it begin here!” My, wasn’t this escalating quickly . . .
The shot.
I ducked.
More shots.
Smoke, fire, splattered guts and blood, yelps and whimpers and screams of pain.
Minutes later, eight were dead.
Who shot first? Was it my shouting that had triggered it? Who fired at whom and from which side?
Nobody would ever know.
The question of who fired first would forever remain a mystery, which as far as I was concerned was proof enough that the Battle of Lexington was just what Deborah prophesied: the Big Bang, a paradox of new life,
transcending opposites like a British or an American side.
Robert dropped his drum, Buttrick his gun. Both came running to me.
“John,” Buttrick said.
“Colonel Buttrick,” I countered, extending him my hand. “Robert.” I reached for an embrace.
And so it was that we clung to each other out in the open in the middle of the square, a little drummer boy and his dad and the man who loved his dad holding on to each for dear life, rocking themselves in sorrow on the grass.
And nobody cared.
And all was silence. Even the tread of the British soldiers marching on, moving out, couldn’t disturb us.
Pitcairn (and Smith) would get theirs on the march back to Boston.
And the trunk? Somehow it arrived at the parsonage safe and sound, Revere managing to affix it to Hancock’s carriage.
“Oh what a glorious morning!” Sam Adams was heard to exclaim as the chaise carrying him and Hancock raced out of town, leaving behind their women, the dead on the Lexington Green, and all memory of truth or dare.
Not so glorious a morning for Hancock, as things turned out. Realizing too late he had forgotten his smoked salmon, and that with all this frenzy he certainly could use a bite right about now, he sent a servant back for it, a black man named Todd.
The salmon never came to him, because I had pilfered it and was at that time feeding it to my brethren on the Green. Wasn’t it delicious, though.
In the end, all Hancock ate that day was potatoes, baked on dirt in the woods.
Yes, the Big Bang had come.
CHAPTER 23
Food and Guns
How on earth did I move from vowing, after the battle at Lexington, never to be parted from Deborah again, to being grateful to see her shipped off to the West Indies as a traitor to her country?
The answer is in the story of how I became a scoundrel.
Of course, Deborah’s attempt on Washington’s life had a lot to do with it. Indeed, had I not been well on my way to scoundrelhood at the time of Deborah’s capture and arrest for her purported crime, I would have seen things differently. For in truth her transformation into an assassin turned out to be not nearly as reprehensible as mine into a dutiful soldier of war. If for no other reason than that her alteration was for the good of The Cause and mine was merely because of jealousy and fear.