My Brother Sam is Dead

by James Lincoln Collier

  The escort left us at Peekskill. We turned south, following a road that went along the river. Oh, it was exciting to me. There were all kinds of boats going up and down or moored offshore. Scattered along the river bank were docks and wharves with skiffs and rowboats tied up to them. Men and boys were fishing from the docks, and sometimes we could see people out in boats seining. It seemed like fun, a lot more fun than being a tavern-keeper.

  “I wished we lived here, Father,” I said.

  He shrugged. “If wishes were horses beggars would ride.”

  “Still,” I said

  “Oh, the river’s pretty,” he said, “but fishing’s hard work. You try hauling one of those seines up from the bottom sometime and you’ll find out.”

  “Are the people here Loyalists?”

  “A mixture. The Dutch settled most of the land up and down the Hudson. There are a lot of them still here and they don’t much care for the English crown.”

  We reached Verplancks Point at the end of the afternoon. It was a wedge-shaped spit of land which poked out into the river. Father had been right; the river was gigantic here. I could just barely make out the houses on the hillside across it they were so far away. It was like a huge lake filled with boats. “They call this part of the river Haverstraw Bay,” Father told me.

  At Verplancks Point the land was not steep, but sloped gradually down to the water. There was a long wharf jutting out into the river, with some boats tied to it. Set back on the land were pens for cattle, sheep and hogs; and around and about were sheds and houses belonging to the men who worked the docks and shipped the livestock. Most of it went down to New York. There were thousands of British troops quartered in New York, and British sailors, too, besides the regular population of 25,000. They needed as much beef as they could get and prices were going up all the time.

  Father found Mr. Bogardus, the man he usually sold his livestock to. We herded the cattle into pens, and untied the poor hogs and turned them loose in the hog pens, too. Then Father said, “I’ll be talking business with Mr. Bogardus for a while. Have a look around, but don’t stray too far.”

  The sun was going down red and cold over the dark hills across the river. It felt good to be free of the animals. I had nothing to worry about for a while and that was nice. Going back would be easy with only the wagon full of goods to watch over. Of course there could always be trouble from the cow-boys, but Father didn’t seem worried about it, so I put it out of my mind and wandered down to the wharf to see what was going on. The river was beginning to turn black, and the fishing boats were coming into the wharf. They tied up, and the men and boys in them handed out barrels of fish. I could see that Father had been right: they looked tired and wet and cold and dirty from the mud that came up from the bottom on the nets. One boy about my age got off a boat and just sat right down on the dock and stayed there, all huddled up under his coat, too tired to move.

  They carried the fish into one of the sheds near the wharf and began to clean them. It was amazing to me to see how fast they worked—snap-snap-snap with a knife and there was the fish with its head slapped off and opened up into two white fillets. There were a lot of pretty big fish, too—sturgeon, they called it.

  Finally I began to get cold myself and walked off the wharf and back up to the pens. It was warmer there by the animals, and after a while Father came along. We staked the oxen out in a bit of grazing common near the pens and went into the tavern for some supper. Father was happy. He had got a good price for the cattle and had negotiated for most of the other things he wanted to bring back to Redding. It was a good wagonload: two hogsheads of rum, a half dozen big sacks of salt, a couple of barrels of molasses; a large chest of tea, a sack of coffee beans, a dozen brass kettles and some tin pots; a chest of breeches and some brass buckles; some drills, knives, files, axes and spades; and small boxes of pepper, allspice, cinnamon, and white powdered sugar.

  We slept that night in the tavern. “We ought to sleep in the wagon and save the money,” Father said, “but I guess it’s too cold for that.”

  The next morning we loaded the wagon with the things Father had bought and started off. Father tied the horse to the back of the wagon and walked along beside me to help manage the oxen. It was nice having company. I was sorry to say good-bye to the Hudson River. I liked being there and when we reached Peekskill and turned up the long hill away from it, I kept looking back over my shoulder at the water shining in the sun until we went over the brow of the hill and I couldn’t see it anymore.

  We spent the night at Father’s friends near Mohegan. In the morning we got up at sunrise and left. The sky was cloudy and hung down over our heads like a blanket. “It’s going to snow pretty soon,” Father said.

  “It’s cold enough,” I said.

  “I think so,” he said. “At night it will be, anyway. I hope we beat it home. I don’t want to travel twenty miles with the oxen slipping and sliding up and down every hill.” He shook his head. “We’ve got a problem, Tim. I want to avoid the Ridgebury area where we ran into those so-called Rebels before. I thought we’d curve south a little, hit into Connecticut at Wilton Parish and then go up through Upawaug to Redding, but that’ll take us a half day out of our way, and with the snow coming, I’m not sure we want to risk it.”

  I didn’t feel so easy when I thought about the cow-boys. “Do you think they might be waiting for us?”

  He shrugged. “They know we have to come back sometime. The people in Mohegan heard that a drover from Norfield had been shot on the Ridgebury Road two days ago and his cattle driven off.”

  “Was he killed?”

  “Nobody knew. The report may not be reliable anyway.” He shook his head. “I don’t know, Tim, if it snows we ought to go the shortest way home, but I don’t like going back through Ridgebury.”

  “If it’s snowing really bad maybe the cow-boys won’t want to come out raiding.”

  “There’s that,” Father said.

  I didn’t say anything more. Neither being raided nor traveling through the snow was going to be much fun. We just pushed on. There wasn’t much to do; mostly I stayed at the head of the oxen and kept them moving. Sometimes Father walked with me, but sometimes he mounted Grey and rode on ahead a mile or so. He didn’t tell me what he was doing, but I knew; he was scouting the road ahead for cow-boys.

  It began to snow just after noon. It wasn’t much at first—just a few light flakes drifting down from the sky. “Damn,” Father said. “Oh damn.”

  “Maybe it’ll stop,” I said.

  “No,” he said, “we’re in for it now.”

  We pushed on. Ten minutes later the sky was full of flakes falling quietly through the air. It was beginning to feel colder and every once in a while a quick gust of wind would slash the snow into our faces. “It’s going to be a bad one,” Father said.

  “Maybe it’ll pass by,” I said.

  “I’m afraid not, Tim.” He frowned. “I think we’d better take a chance on going back by Ridgebury. I don’t think many men will want to ride in deep snow.” By one o’clock it was a real, hard snowfall. The wind had picked up and the snow was blowing into our faces. The oxen became white and wet and they kept shaking their heads to throw the snow off. We walked along with our heads bent forward to keep the wind and snow from flying in our faces. I tucked my hands in my shirt for warmth.

  In the middle of the afternoon we reached a fork in the road. “Hold up the oxen,” Father said. I prodded them to a stop. He stood by the cart staring around him. There was already six inches of snow on the ground and it was blowing steadily down on us. “We could turn off here for Wilton Parish,” he said. Then he shook his head. “There’s no hope for it, Tim. We can’t go on through this all night. We’ll have to push on to North Salem and hole up at the Platt’s until it stops, and then take our chances on Ridgebury.”

  I didn’t feel very good. My hands were cold and my face was cold, and my feet were getting wet through my boots and they were going to be cold,
too. I couldn’t stop thinking about the cow-boys. We’d just been lucky getting away from them the first time. They were bound to be angry with us now for escaping, and they’d want to hurt us to get even. “Can we get an escort through Ridgebury, Father?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “We’ll ask at the Platt’s.” The walk seemed to go on and on. The oxen were balking at walking in that blowing snow. They kept trying to turn their backs to it, and it took Father walking on one side of them and me on the other to keep them going straight. They blinked and shook their big heads and bawled. It was queer how the heavy falling snow muffled the sounds of their bawling. Fighting them all the time was tiring. Several times they just stopped and lowered their heads and stood blinking in the snow, and it took us five minutes of beating them and cursing them to get them going again. It seemed to go on endlessly. With all that snow pouring down around us I couldn’t tell where we were. We could only see about twenty yards in any direction—far enough to tell when we might be passing a woodlot or a house if it was close to the road, but that’s all. But Father always knew where we were. “Bear up, Tim,” he’d say. “It’s only a mile to Green’s Tavern and just three miles from there.”

  “Can we warm up at the tavern?”

  “The fewer people who know we’re going through, the better,” he said. I ducked my head against my chest and tramped on.

  It began to get dark. What with the oxen balking so much we were two hours behind schedule. The snow was almost a foot deep and already the oxen were having trouble on the hills, slipping and stumbling when their hooves would strike an icy patch or a pothole hidden beneath the snow. The darkness increased until it seemed as if we were buried in it I went on a couple of yards ahead of the oxen to feel out the road, while Father wrestled with them alone. We didn’t talk anymore, except when Father cursed. Finding the road was hard. I would have to keep veering from side to side to touch the rail fences and then make a guess about where the middle of the road was. Looking back I could just make out the black lumpy shapes of the oxen and the cart, with Father fighting along at their heads. Once he said, “This is Simple’s Crossing. Only two miles, Tim.” Two miles seemed like an endless distance.

  But finally we saw the spot of light and then the windows shining through the snow. We pulled the oxen through the gate and drove them into the barn. They bawled with happiness. Father went into the house to tell the Platts that we were there. I unhitched the oxen, pitched them some hay, and went into the house myself. There was a great fire burning in the kitchen fireplace and the smell of Johnny cake and hot gravy. My cousins swarmed around to help get my clothes off. I stripped right down to the skin, not caring that the girls were watching. They got me a blanket to wrap up in and a place by the fire and a plate of hot Johnny cake and beans and gravy all over it, and I began to laugh because it felt so good to be warm and safe again. That night my cousins and I slept by the kitchen fire.

  WHEN I WOKE UP IN THE MORNING IT HAD STOPPED SNOWING and the sun was shining. Water was running in small streams off the roof. It was pretty—everything a foot deep in snow and the sun sparkling off the fields. But even though it was pretty I didn’t like it. Plowing through snow a foot deep with the oxcart all the way back to Redding was going to be miserable work. Our feet would get soaked right away and stay wet and cold all day long, and as the snow got warm and then chopped up by the oxen we’d find ourselves stumbling around in a slippery mixture of snow and mud. Mrs. Platt gave us a breakfast of biscuits and gravy. We said good-bye to everybody, hitched up the oxen and pulled out of the yard onto the road. “Are we going to have an escort?” I asked Father.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Platt rode out last night to arrange for one, but with the snow, people may not want to ride. But that works two ways—the raiders may not want to ride, either. You work the oxen; I’m going to ride on ahead.”

  So that’s how it went. Father would ride a mile or two and then ride back to see how I was doing; and then he’d ride out again. That way if he ran into the cow-boys he could race back to me and we could find a place to hide. “If you hear me shout, don’t wait, run for the nearest piece of woods you see. They won’t come into the woods on horseback in this snow.”

  The only trouble with this plan was that there usually weren’t any woods close to the road. Most of the farmers had used up the trees near their houses and had their woodlots on back land. But still there were patches of woods here and there, so as I plowed along through the snow I kept looking around for woodlots to run to if something happened. It wasn’t going to be easy running in that snow, though.

  But there was nothing to do about it but push on. The oxen were more willing to pull than they had been the day before. It was warm enough and there was no snow blowing in their faces. But they kept slipping, especially on the hills, and I would have to tug and pull at them to keep them going forward.

  I was alone most of the time because Father was out of sight somewhere up the road. In the snow Grey made very little noise, so that I couldn’t hear him coming. Every once in a while Father would surprise me by riding silently into sight. He’d wave, and I’d wave back to let him know that everything was all right, and he’d ride away again.

  I didn’t like being alone so much. Suppose the cow-boys came suddenly up behind me? Or suppose they were hiding in one of the houses or barns along the side of the road? They’d get to me before I could run. As I slogged along I kept turning around and looking down the road behind me, trying to see around corners and through clumps of trees. About every five minutes I would imagine that I was hearing horses, and jump around ready to run for it. Then I would look up and there would be nothing but the empty white sheet lying over the fields and hills.

  At lunchtime Father came back. We sat in the wagon, drank some beer and ate some biscuits. “Ridgebury is about two miles up ahead,” he said. “I’ll ride through and come back and then we’ll go through together. I’ll be a lot happier when we’re through this place.” He shook his head. “We might as well push on and get it over with, Tim,” he said. “Bear up, it won’t last forever.”

  We got through Ridgebury all right. Some people came to the tavern door and stared at us as we went through. I guess they thought it queer to see us trying to travel in that snow. Father looked grim. “If nobody knew we were around before, they do now,” he said. Then we got out of the village and he rode on ahead again, scouting.

  My feet were wet and cold, and I was still hungry—biscuits and beer don’t make much of a lunch when you’re working oxen along. To keep my mind off my troubles I began trying to name all the countries in the world, which I was supposed to know because I’d learned them in geography. Some were easy to name: England, France, Sweden, Russia. But there were all those little hard ones, like Hesse and Tuscany and Piedmont. It took me a while to decide if I should count America or not. If the Rebels won the war then we would be a country; but Father was sure they were going to lose, so I decided not to count us. Another trouble was keeping them all straight in my head. After I got over twenty I’d sometimes forget whether I’d already counted Serbia or India or some place and have to go back over the whole list again. And I was trying to figure out whether or not I’d counted Arabia when it suddenly hit me that I hadn’t seen Father for a long, long time.

  I was shocked. How long had it been since the last time he’d ridden silently into sight? I couldn’t tell. It seemed like it had to be a half an hour at least, and maybe an hour. I jumped up onto the wagon and looked back across the white countryside, trying to get a feeling of how far I’d come since I last saw him. All I could see was white, a few clumps of trees, a couple of farmhouses, and the muddy black trail of the oxcart winding through it. Where had I been when I last saw Father? I couldn’t remember.

  Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it had only seemed like a long time. Maybe being involved with listing all those countries gave me a funny idea of time.

  But I didn’t believe it; we’d come a long way, as far
back over the hills as I could see, and that was a couple of miles. Now I was really worried. Of course there were a lot of simple explanations. Father could have met somebody he knew and started talking. Or he could have gone off somewhere to look for an escort. Or he could have stopped at a farmhouse to get us something warm to eat. There were a lot of explanations, but I knew none of them were true. If he’d been planning to leave me alone for a while he would have told me. He wouldn’t have left me by myself this long; he just wouldn’t have done it.

  So then what? Perhaps something had happened to Grey. He could easily have tripped in the snow and hurt himself. Maybe Father got hurt in the accident, too. Maybe he twisted an ankle or even broke his leg. No matter what it was, the important thing was for me to catch up to him quickly. I belted the oxen across their rumps with my stick. They grunted and shivered their heads and picked up their pace a little, but five minutes later they had slowed down. I hit them again, this time harder. They went faster but hardly for more than a minute or two. They couldn’t go much faster because of the snow, and even if they could they just weren’t going to. They weren’t horses, they were oxen and they just plain didn’t move fast.

  That worried me some more. If Grey had slipped, Father might have been badly hurt. He might be bleeding or even lying unconscious in the snow. And to tell the truth, I was feeling scared and lonely without him. I wanted to find him. So I pulled the oxen as far off to the side of the road as I could, kicked away some snow so they could find some weeds to graze on, and started plowing on up the road as quickly as I could.

  It was easy enough to follow Grey’s tracks. Nobody else had been along the road but Father. It was hard trying to jog in the snow, and I began to sweat. Every few minutes I stopped to rest and have a look ahead. If there was a rock or a high stump by the roadside I would climb up on that and look on ahead. But all I saw were the horse tracks running on and on.