My Brother Sam is Dead

by James Lincoln Collier

  On the way we’d stop at places where Father knew people. One night we would spend with those cousins of mine I’d never met. Father always stopped at the same places. They expected him every year: it was a good chance to catch up on family news.

  The trip was planned for the end of November. It was best to go as late in the year as you could, because the closer to winter it was, the scarcer beef was and the higher the price you could get. But if we waited too long, it would snow and then we would have trouble. Most of the time it was easier to travel when the snow was on the ground. You just hitched a horse to a sledge and slid over the packed snow. But it was hard to drive cattle in snow, and it was hard to pasture them along the way, too. So about the beginning of November Father began keeping a sharp eye out on the weather. He’d consult some almanacs, which usually disagreed, and he’d ask certain farmers who were supposed to be good judges of weather when they thought the snow would come. But the weather judges didn’t agree any more than the almanacs did, so in the end Father would go out and frown at the sky a dozen times a day, and then make a guess.

  The truth is that Father didn’t really want to take me. “I don’t think you’re big enough yet to handle the wagon,” he told me.

  “I know how to handle the wagon, Father. I’ve done it lots of times.”

  “Around here, yes. But not with thirty cows to look after as well. Besides, the woods are full of those cow-boys over there. They claim they’re patriots gathering beef for the troops, but really they’re nothing more than thieves. And we don’t have a gun anymore.”

  Father was right about the thieves who people called cow-boys. We’d heard all kinds of stories from travelers about them. All of that part of Westchester County, from the Connecticut border over to the Hudson River, had gotten to be a kind of no man’s land, with roving bands wandering around plundering people on the excuse that they were part of the war. “I’m pretty brave, Father,” I said.

  He shook his head. “I don’t like taking you, Tim, but I have no choice. There’s nobody else to do it.”

  I was glad there was nobody else to do it. It was pretty boring hanging around the tavern day after day, making fires and chopping wood and cleaning up and looking after the chickens and Old Pru and the pigs. There would be a lot of exciting things on the trip—meeting my cousins and seeing the Hudson River which they said was a mile wide, and watching the boats sail up and down it. Besides it would get me out of school for a few days.

  So Father collected cattle and watched the weather; and on the twentieth of November he came in from his weather look saying, “It’s cloudy and getting chilly. I think we’d better start off in a day or two.”

  It was a good guess. When we started out two days later there was a half an inch of snow on the ground which had fallen during the night. The sun came up later on and melted it, making the roads muddy, especially after the cattle had churned it up. I walked alongside the wagon guiding the oxen and keeping them moving when they slowed down. We had four hogs in the cart, with their feet tied together. They were always trying to get out, and I had to make sure they didn’t get loose. Father rode our horse Grey along behind the cattle to keep them moving. We went pretty slowly. There wasn’t much to do except to look around at the hills and fields. It seemed pretty exciting when we passed a house, especially if there were some people there. A couple of times there were children staring out the windows as we went by. It made me feel proud of myself for being a man while they were still children, and I shouted at the oxen and smacked them on their rumps with my stick, just to show off how casual and easy I was with oxen and how used I was to managing them.

  Father’s plan was to go up through Redding Ridge to Danbury, and then turn a bit southward to go through Ridgebury and across the border into New York, where we’d spend the night in North Salem with our cousins. We’d spend the second night with friends of Father’s at their farm near Gulden’s Bridge. It wasn’t the straightest way over to Verplancks Point, but Father went that way because it took us past our cousins’ place.

  We reached Ridgebury around lunchtime. We didn’t stop to eat, but chewed on some biscuits and drank some beer for thirst as we walked along. We couldn’t have a conversation, really: the cattle made too much noise as they tromped along mooing, and we had to shout to hear each other. And that was why we didn’t hear the men riding up on us until they came in sight over a little hill in front of us.

  There were six of them, and they were carrying weapons—mostly old muskets, but one or two of them had swords and pistols. They were dressed in ordinary clothing—brown shirts and trousers and muddy boots. As they came toward us, I began to turn the oxen to the side of the road so they could pass. But they didn’t go on by. They charged up to us, surrounded us, and stopped. I knew they were cow-boys. I pulled the wagon’s long brake lever and whoa-ed the oxen. The cattle stopped going forward and began milling around. I turned and looked back at Father.

  He sat on his horse among the cattle looking very calm. “What’s this?” he said.

  One of the cow-boys pushed through the cattle to get close enough to Father to talk. “What’s your name?”

  “What business is it of yours?” Father said. I was hoping Father wouldn’t argue with the man—it scared me.

  “Government business,” the cow-boy said.

  “No doubt,” Father said.

  “Answer the question or we’ll hang you and the boy from the nearest tree.”

  “My name’s Meeker,” Father said.

  “Where from?”

  “Redding.”

  “Redding?” The man turned in his saddle and spit onto the muddy road. “Tory country,” he said. “I suppose this cattle is going to end up in Lobsterback stomachs.”

  Father shrugged. “Where it ends up I don’t know and I don’t care. I’ve been selling my beef at Verplancks Point for ten years, and I haven’t yet asked who was going to eat it.”

  “Times have changed, Meeker. Now we want to know who’s doing the eating. And we don’t want it to be Lobsterbacks. There’s only one place where beef goes from Verplancks Point and that’s New York. And the British army owns New York.”

  I was getting pretty scared. He was tough-looking.

  Father shrugged again. “I can’t tell anybody what to do with a cow after I’ve sold it to him. That’s his business.”

  “So the point then is not to sell it to the wrong people, isn’t it?”

  “I can’t tell who—”

  “Get down off that horse, Tory.”

  “I don’t think I like being called that,” Father said calmly.

  “Please, Father,” I said.

  “Jesus,” the cow-boy said. “All right if you don’t want to get down from the horse, we’ll knock you off it.” He pulled a pistol from his belt and pushed his horse a few steps further until he was within reach of Father.

  “Father,” I shouted.

  He grimaced and shook his head. Then he got down from the horse.

  “That’s better,” the man said. “Now you and the boy walk out into the middle of that field and sit down.”

  I looked at Father. “Do what he says, Tim. Go out there.”

  “Aren’t you coming?”

  “Go, Tim.”

  By now the cattle were wandering around all over the place. Some of them had gone up the road ahead of the wagon. Others were edging out into the pastures alongside the road looking for forage. I pushed past a couple of cows, trotted out into the middle of the field, and sat down about fifty yards away from where Father was standing among the cows talking to the cow-boys. I knew he was trying to talk them out of taking the cows. If we lost our cattle, we’d be in a lot of trouble because we’d have no way of getting rum and the things we needed to run the store and the tavern.

  I could see him gesturing—pointing up the road and then out to me as he explained something to the men. I wondered if he was scared. He seemed so calm and cool with the cow-boys, but I wondered if down undernea
th he was really scared. I knew I was scared.

  Then I saw the man who had been doing all the talking lean down from the horse and hit Father with something—the barrel of his pistol I guessed. Father put his hands up to cover his head. The man hit him again and Father disappeared. He just dropped down among the cows and I couldn’t see him anymore. I jumped up, but Father didn’t get up and I still couldn’t see him. “Father,” I shouted. The cow-boys turned to look at me. “Please,” I shouted. “Please don’t hit him anymore.”

  The men turned away from me. The man who had hit Father got off his horse and stood there beside it, staring down at the ground. I knew he was looking at Father. He was still holding the pistol in his hand. “Please don’t shoot him,” I shouted. “Please.”

  This time they didn’t even turn around to look at me. The man on foot kept waving the pistol around. He seemed to be talking, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. I stood in the middle of the field trying to think. Maybe I could run across the fields and find a farmhouse where they might be able to get some people to come and save Father. But if the cow-boys saw me running, they could easily catch me in the open fields, and ride me down if they wanted. I didn’t know if I was brave enough to take a chance. The cow-boys were still looking down at Father. I turned and began to run across the field. Behind me I heard somebody shout. Then I heard horses galloping. I swirled around to look. The cow-boys were galloping off down the road in the direction they had come from, leaving the cattle and the wagon standing in the middle of the field. I stared; and then a different group of riders came charging up the road from the other direction. There were a dozen of them, and they were driving hard. As they came up to the cattle still milling about on the road they reined up sharply. Then most of them threaded their way through the cattle and dashed on, leaving two behind. I saw Father stand up, and I began running back across the road to the field.

  The new horsemen had dismounted, and by the time I reached Father, they were helping him to the side of the road. I ran up. “Don’t worry, Tim,” he said. “I’m all right.”

  He had a bad cut on his head which was still bleeding and another smaller one over his eye. His eye was swollen and it was going to be black and blue by the next day. He sat down on the ground while one of the men washed the cut on Father’s head with water from a leather canteen and bandaged it with Father’s own handkerchief.

  “Who were those people?” Father asked. “Cow-boys?”

  “Cattle thieves is a better name. We had reports that they were riding this morning, and we’ve been looking for them all day. You’re a Loyalist, I take it?”

  “I’m interested in making a living, not fighting a war,” Father said. “My boy and I are just trying to get this beef to Verplancks Point the way I do every year.”

  “Verplancks Point?” The man grinned. “It’ll go to New York, then. We’ll see that it gets there. There are still a lot of people loyal to His Majesty in these parts.”

  So they did. They waited until the others gave up on the chase and came back, and then they rode with us to the New York line. We waited there again until they got us another escort to take us farther along the way, and we crossed over into New York, the first time I’d ever been in a colony besides Connecticut. It disappointed me. It didn’t look any different and I didn’t feel any different, either. Here I was in a foreign country, and it was just like being at home.

  MY NORTH SALEM COUSINS LIVED IN A CLAPBOARD FARM - house just off the Ridgefield Road. Their name was Platt and there were a lot of them—four girls and two boys and the parents and their aunt who lived with them, too. The house wasn’t really big enough for them. The four girls slept in one room with the aunt—three girls in one bed and the biggest girl and the aunt in another. The boys slept out in the barn except during the coldest weather, when they made up pallets on the floor in front of the kitchen fireplace. When I saw how crowded they were I realized that I was lucky not to have been raised on a farm: there was usually plenty of room in the tavern for me and Sam.

  We got there after dark. They gave Father and me some bread and stew, and they all crowded into the kitchen to talk. It seemed like they all wanted to talk at once. They hadn’t seen Father for a year and they wanted all the news: how Mother was and what the war was like in Redding and where Sam was and all the rest of it. They were curious about me—they’d been hearing about me for twelve years, and finally they were seeing me with their own eyes. And I’d been hearing about them all that time, too, and it was interesting for me to see them.

  I felt shy, but they didn’t because it was their house. So they began asking me a lot of questions until Mr. Platt made them all be quiet so he and Father could talk. Father told them about the scary thing that had happened on the way over.

  Mr. Platt just nodded. He was a tall, thin man, and his clothes hung on him loosely. “They call themselves Patriots. They say they’re only trying to keep people from selling beef to the British, but don’t believe it. They’ll take it and sell it to the British themselves if nobody else will buy. They’re just cattle thieves.” He was angry. “Lawlessness has run wild, common decency between people has disappeared, every man is armed against his neighbor.”

  “In Redding we still have law and order,” Father said.

  “We should have it here, too. There are plenty of Loyalists in Westchester County, but there’s no control. Rebel and Tory live almost in open warfare with each other.”

  With hot food in my stomach and the open fire nearby, I was having a hard time staying awake. I knew I ought to go to bed because we had another hard day ahead of us, but I didn’t want to miss the talk.

  “I’m happy we haven’t got to that point in Redding,” Father said.

  “You’re fortunate. People have been tarred and feathered here, houses have been burned and livestock slaughtered. Both sides are doing it—one side burns a house and the other side retaliates. It won’t be long before they’re hanging people. I tell you it’s true, Life.”

  “What about the party that escorted us here?”

  “That’s one of our Committees of Safety. They’re about all we have to keep order. You were lucky—somebody along the way saw you pass by and knew there’d be trouble. There’ll be trouble all the way to the Hudson.”

  My Father shook his head. “I suppose that next year I won’t be able to get over here at all without an armed guard escorting me all the way.”

  “I judge you’re right, Life.”

  My eyelids closed. I struggled to open them again, and then the next thing I knew Father was shaking me and saying, “Come on, Tim, time for bed.”

  My cousin Ezekiel Platt took me out to the barn. He was only a little older than me. He was tall and skinny like his father and had red hair. We climbed up into the loft, wrapped some hay up in blankets for pallets, and settled into bed. Ezekiel was curious about me and wanted to talk. “Were you scared when those men came?”

  I didn’t like to admit I was scared, but I didn’t want to lie, either. “Some,” I said. “Did you ever have that happen to you?”

  “We haven’t had any trouble yet, but Father says that’s just because we’ve kept our noses clean. We don’t make an issue of being Loyalists,” he said.

  “Are you a Loyalist?” I asked.

  “Of course. Aren’t you?”

  “I guess so,” I said. “Only sometimes I’m not sure. Sam’s fighting for the Rebels, did you know that?”

  “We heard that,” Ezekiel said. “Father got into a rage. He said that Sam was too smart a boy to be fooled by sedition.”

  “He fought in the battle for New York,” I said. “Father says he’s headstrong, but he’s very daring besides being smart.”

  “My father didn’t think he was so smart for joining the Rebels. They’re likely to be hung when the war’s over.”

  “Maybe they’ll win,” I said.

  “They can’t. How can they beat the whole British army? It’ll serve them right for being disloyal
.”

  “Well I don’t know,” I said. “The way Sam explains it, it sounds right to be a Rebel. And when Father explains it, it sounds right to be a Loyalist. Although if you want to know the truth, I don’t think Father really cares. He’s just against wars.”

  We didn’t say anything for a while. “If you go to be a soldier, which side would you fight on?”

  “The loyalist, I guess.” But in my head I wasn’t sure about that. Suppose one day we were fighting and I suddenly saw that it was Sam I was aiming my gun at?

  We woke up before the sun, hitched the oxen to the wagon, herded the cattle out of the Platt’s pasture where they had spent the night, and started off again on the road toward Peekskill. Peekskill was on the Hudson River. We would turn south there and go down the river about five miles to Verplancks Point. From North Salem to Peekskill was more than twenty miles. It would take us all day to make fifteen miles to our next stop, Father’s friends south of Mohegan. We were supposed to pick up another escort. I hoped we would find it soon. I didn’t like traveling through this country alone, and I kept looking around all the time for galloping horsemen.

  The escort picked us up at Purdy’s Station. They stayed with us for about ten miles and then another escort took over. We spent the night with Father’s friends, pasturing the cattle in one of their fields. In the morning another escort took us to Peekskill. It was a pretty big town—hundreds of people lived there. It was on the edge of the Hudson River, and as we rolled down the hill into the town we suddenly could see the water. I couldn’t believe it—it was the biggest river I’d ever seen. Across the other side were beautiful hills, some of them craggy and rocky, dropping straight down to the water’s edge. It was so beautiful I could hardly keep my eyes off it. “Father, it’s so big,” I said.

  He grinned. “This is nothing, Tim. Wait till we get down to Verplancks Point. The river there is three miles wide.”