My Brother Sam is Dead

by James Lincoln Collier

  We found all this out from one of the men who’d been taken away during the raid on Redding that spring. He’d been put in the same ship, and he’d been with Father when he died. “Before he died he asked me to make sure you knew what had happened. He said, ‘Tell them that I love them, and say that I forgive Sam, he’s a brave boy but he’s headstrong.’ The last thing he said was, ‘And now I go to enjoy the freedom war has brought me.’”

  But Father wasn’t the only one who died. Two days after we found out about Father, Betsy Read came down to the tavern. I gave her a pot of beer. “Did you hear about Jeremiah Sanford?” she said.

  “No,” I said.

  “He’s dead,” she said.

  “Jerry? He’s dead?”

  “Nobody understands it. They put him on a prison ship and he got sick and died in three weeks. It doesn’t make any sense. You can understand why they took Mr. Rogers or Captain Betts, but why imprison a ten-year-old boy?”

  “What harm could he have done them? This war has turned men into animals,” Mother said.

  “They sunk his body in Long Island Sound in a weighted sack,” Betsy said. “So his parents can’t even get him back. I don’t understand it, what did they want him for?”

  “They’re animals now, they’re all beasts,” Mother said.

  “I think they are,” Betsy said. “Sam should have come home.”

  It was the first time I’d ever heard her say anything against Sam and his ideals. “I told him that,” I said. “He said he’d taken a pledge with some friends to stick it out until they won.”

  “Does he still think they’re going to win?” Betsy said.

  “Maybe they will,” I said.

  Betsy shook her head. “Even Father says things are bad for the Patriots.”

  I looked at her curiously. “Don’t you want them to win?”

  “I don’t care who wins anymore. I just want it to be over.”

  “Sam wouldn’t like you to talk like that.”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “When I see him I’m going to tell him. For three years they’ve been fighting and all we’ve had is death and hunger. Your father is dead, Jeremiah Sanford is dead, Sam Barlow is dead, David Fairchild is dead, Stephen Fairchild was wounded, and more.”

  My mother nodded. “Right at the beginning Life said it would be that way. He said, ‘In war the dead pay the debts for the living.’ But he didn’t think he would have to pay himself.”

  So Father had forgiven Sam, and I think Mother did, although she never said so. But for myself I wasn’t sure. I knew I’d be glad to see him, and have him at home: but still I felt it was partly his fault that Father had died. Oh, he hadn’t captured Father or thrown him in prison or given him cholera or anything like that. But he was fighting on their side, and I couldn’t easily forget about that. Yet of course it was a British prison ship he’d died on. It seemed to me that everybody was to blame, and I decided that I wasn’t going to be on anybody’s side any more: neither one of them was right.

  So summer passed and it became winter once more and people were suffering worse than ever from want. Luckily, there wasn’t any more fighting around Redding. Anyway, in the winter they didn’t fight much. Nobody liked to fight in the cold, and when there was snow on the ground it was hard to march and easy to get sick. The Continental Army was encamped at a place called Valley Forge out in Pennsylvania somewhere. We didn’t know whether Sam was there or not. From what we’d heard they were practically starving and hadn’t any clothes. I was just as glad; it made me hope that the Rebels were at the end of their rope and would have to give up pretty soon and end this terrible war. I didn’t even mind that Sam might be suffering with cold and hunger. It would serve him right; we were pretty hungry ourselves.

  Sam began writing us letters every once in a while—every two or three months especially after he heard that Father was dead. He didn’t tell us where he was in his letters. Mostly they’d be about places he’d been. Sometimes Betsy Read would get a letter from him, too, and she’d come down to tell us about it. So time passed. The year 1777 ended and 1778 began. Spring came, then summer and fall, and we harvested. Oh how I hated the war. All of life was like running on a treadmill. I was fourteen, I should have been going to school all this while and learning something. Maybe by this time I would have begun to think about going to New Haven to study at Yale. I wasn’t much interested in Latin or Greek, but in the last couple of years I’d learned a lot about buying and selling and the tavern business, and I wanted to study calculating and surveying and the agricultural sciences: I thought I might have a career in business. I might apprentice myself to a merchant in New Haven or New York, or even London, to learn the art of trade. Sam owed it to me to come home and help Mother run the tavern for a couple of years while I started to make my way in the world.

  But until the war ended there was nothing for me to do but tread water. Prices kept on spiraling upward, merchandise grew shorter and shorter in supply, and everybody seemed to be in debt. You couldn’t refuse a hungry widow who’d lost her husband in the war some cloth or molasses on credit, but then how could we pay for new merchandise ourselves?

  We couldn’t get over to Verplancks Point that fall. The Rebels were holding all of northern Westchester County—Peekskill, Verplancks, Crompond, all of it. There was no way for us to get any cattle through. There wasn’t much cattle around, anyway. Bit by bit people had been slaughtering their stock for food. However, Mother and I had been able to get hold of eight scrawny cows, mainly from people who owed us a lot of money. There wasn’t much to them, but with food in such short supply I figured we could get a pretty good price for them if we could get them to a British commissary somewhere. Not that I cared which side we sold them to, but the British were the ones who had money—they had the whole English exchequer behind them. The Continentals were paying off in commissary scrip, which would be totally worthless if they lost. I’d heard that there was a British commissary in White Plains, which was about twenty-five miles southwest across the New York State line. I figured I might be able to drive the cattle down there through the woods. It would be very risky, but better than going hungry. And we needed some money to buy goods to keep the tavern and the store going. If the business died, we’d really be out of luck.

  Hunger is a pretty terrible thing. It’s like going around all day with a nail in your shoe. You try to put it out of your mind, but you never really quite forget it, and when something reminds you of it, like reading about a big meal in a story or seeing a stack of bread, it really hurts—I mean it just plain hurts. It makes you feel weak, and you get sick easily, too. That winter everybody had colds and went around sniffling most of the time. Some people got really sick, and then their families would have to scrape up extra food to feed them with. Oh, I don’t mean that people were dying from hunger. Nobody was actually starving to death, but most were hungry a lot of the time.

  All through November I tried to find out about the British commissary—whether it really existed or not, and where it actually was. But I couldn’t find out anything I really trusted. It was all rumors—the commissary was at White Plains. No, it wasn’t at White Plains, it was at Horseneck. Yes, it was at White Plains after all, but the Rebels had it under siege. And so forth. I didn’t want to go until I was sure: if I ran into Rebels I’d lose the cattle and probably be put in prison myself. It was only worth the risk if I were sure where the commissary was: otherwise we might just as well eat the cattle ourselves.

  So that was the situation on December 3, 1778, when Sam came back to Redding. That morning he walked into the tavern. He looked thin and tired. There were black circles under his eyes and his uniform was torn in about six places. He’d lost his belt and was wearing a piece of rope around his waist, and his hat wasn’t an army hat but just an ordinary fur cap. But he was glad to be home, and grinning. “Hello, everybody,” he said.

  Mother was out in the kitchen and I’d been stoking up the fire. “Sam,” I shouted.
“Mother, Sam’s here.”

  She burst into the tavern and began to hug him, and I hugged him, too, and then he crouched down in front of the fire and ate a bowl of porridge with honey that Mother brought him. “This is the first time I’ve been warm for a week,” he said.

  So we asked him all the natural questions: where he’d been and where he was going and so forth. “I’m going to be in Redding for a while,” he said. “General Putnam is bringing a couple of regiments here for winter encampment. We’re going up to Lonetown and hole up until spring.”

  “What’s the idea of that?”

  “The rumor is that we’re supposed to be situated to move either west to the Hudson or south to Long Island Sound in case of a British attack either place. Some say we’re mainly here to watch over the magazines at Middletown. I don’t know—those are the rumors. But we’re building huts so I guess we’ll be here for awhile.”

  “How did you get off?”

  “I’ve had a bit of luck. Colonel Parsons—Samuel Holden Parsons, that is—has moved into the Betts’ house. An adjutant came around and asked if any of us were from this area and I said I was, and Colonel Parsons brought me into town this morning to show him around.” Sam grinned. “To the ladies, mostly. I told him that there weren’t any ladies in Redding except my mother and my girl. He said they would do, so Mother you’d better put on your best dress.”

  Mother smiled, but I don’t think she thought it was very funny. “You’re so thin, Sam,” she said. “Are the troops all starving?”

  “Everybody in the country is hungry,” he said. “It’s going to be worse this winter, too. Have you got any cattle, Tim?”

  I was proud that he asked me instead of Mother. “Eight,” I said. “They’re not much to look at.”

  “Butcher them and hide the meat. Or sell it. You can get a good price for the hides from the troops. Sell what you can. I promise you, the stock will be stolen.”

  Mother frowned. “You mean your troops are stealing from your own people?”

  “A starving man will steal food from babies.” He shook his head. “There’s a lot you don’t understand. All of us have seen good friends killed. I had a friend bayoneted, and it took him six hours to die, screaming all the while. All we could do was hold his hand and wait. I saw a captain I loved blown in half by a cannon ball. He was the best officer we ever had, he worried about his men, he put them first. He never ate before we were fed, and I’ve seen him go without to give his portion to a sick man. The redcoats blew him in half, right into two pieces with his guts dangling out of both parts.” He shivered. “After a few things like that you don’t give a damn for anybody but your friends anymore. You kill Redcoats the way you butcher pigs. The troops know that Redding is a Tory town. As far as they’re concerned taking cattle from Tories is getting revenge. Sure, lots of them would steal from anybody, whether they were Tories or Patriots or anything else. Some are unscrupulous when they’re hungry and some are unscrupulous by nature and they’ll take whatever they think they can get away with. Of course the majority of men are honest and won’t steal, but if they decide you’re Tories, they’ll have no compunction about taking your beef. And let me tell you, it’s pretty easy to decide somebody’s a Tory when you haven’t eaten anything but hard tack and pork fat for weeks. I’ve done it myself.”

  “Sam.”

  “I won’t apologize.”

  “War turns men into animals,” Mother said.

  “I was ashamed of it afterwards,” Sam said, “but not very and my belly was full.” He nodded slowly. “Tim, butcher the cattle. Let the meat freeze and hide it in the loft under the hay until you need it.” He glanced out the window toward the Betts’ house. “I better go. Colonel Parsons may be waiting for me.”

  “Don’t go yet, Sam,” Mother said. “We’ve just seen you.”

  “I’ll be around all winter, Mother. Maybe I can get attached to Colonel Parson’s staff. I’ll try to get a pass if I can. Anyway, I can always slip out at night. It’s risky. Colonel Parson’s is not harsh, but General Putnam is in charge. He’s a great patriot, but he’s rough and tough on men who shirk their duty. A hundred lashes for desertion and if there’s too much of it, I know he’ll hang some people as an example. That’s the kind of man he is. But I’ll be back to visit again one way or another.”

  He left. We walked out into the yard with him, and he crossed over to the Betts’ house and went in. “He’s so thin,” Mother said. “I worry that he’ll get sick. I couldn’t bear to lose another, Tim.” All at once she began to sob. It only lasted ten seconds. Then she turned and went into the house, and when I went in a minute later she was calmly scrubbing some beets.

  After December 3rd we began to get used to the sight of soldiers constantly around town. There were always messengers going by and trains of supply wagons crunching over the snow and sometimes groups of soldiers on work parties would appear at the tavern for beer. Having the troops around was good for business. Some of the officers lodged in houses around about. Often in the evening they came up to the tavern to play cards and drink or smoke. Business was good—or rather it would have been good if we had had anything to sell, and people had had anything to pay for it with besides commissary scrip.

  The biggest demand was for liquor. Life at the encampment was cold and miserable and the only relief for them was drinking. They didn’t care what it was—rum, whiskey, cider, anything we could get. Whiskey was pretty hard to get. The General Assembly had made it illegal to distill whiskey because it was made from grain, and grain was needed for food. Rum was easier to get and we could usually get cider, because every farmer made it. I spent a lot of time riding around among the farmers buying whatever they had. They’d often have rum they’d taken in trade for livestock. I could offer them good prices for liquor because we could get good prices for it: the officers didn’t care how much they paid for liquor. As they said when they were drinking, “A short life but a merry one.” Which of them knew when he was going to die?

  Of course the ordinary soldiers didn’t have much fun. For one thing, there was always the snow. It came down in a great blizzard about a week after the troops had started to build the encampment. Their huts were not finished and they were forced to work in bitter cold and storm. The cold was a problem. The huts were really just tiny log cabins with big stone fireplaces making the whole rear wall. In cold weather they had a lot of trouble getting the mortar to set. Because of this the chimneys leaked so badly that half the smoke blew back into the room. The snow made hewing wood difficult, too. Sam told us that they were having an awful time getting the huts finished Even when they were done they weren’t much to live in—twelve soldiers jammed into a 14 by 16 room, breathing more smoke than air and having to stumble over people whenever they wanted to move around. And the snow never stopped falling. By January it covered the countryside three feet deep, so that the stone walls disappeared. You could drive a sled over the snow anywhere you wanted without paying attention to where the roads were.

  Sam was able to get into town every week or ten days. Colonel Parsons used him as a messenger a lot because he knew his way around Redding. Sometimes he would come in with a commissary officer looking for lime or nails or leather or all the hundreds of things armies need. The idea was that Sam might know who had things. Often he’d come into the tavern and ask me if I knew who had hay or sleds or something else to sell.

  To be honest, I felt uneasy about telling him such things. The commissary people always paid for whatever they bought, but it was usually in scrip, and on top of it, the farmer didn’t have much choice about selling or not. But I couldn’t bring myself to lie to Sam. It was something I’d never done.

  All the time Sam was after us to butcher the cattle, I didn’t know what to do. The idea of selling them to the British was gone. With all the Rebel troops around it was too risky trying to move cattle anywhere. Besides, it would have been next to impossible in that deep snow. Still, I kept hoping that I could find someo
ne who’d offer me a good deal for them. But Sam was pressing me. “I’m warning you, Tim, sooner or later somebody’s going to get them.”

  “I thought General Putnam gave strict orders against stealing.”

  “Oh he did, and knowing General Putnam he’ll hang any soldier he catches stealing. He’s tough as nails but he’s honest. Besides, he wants the people to come around to our side, and if he lets the troops forage, he’ll lose all sympathy with the populace. Oh, I know him. He’s had a lot of men flogged already for disobeying orders, and Pm sure he’s just itching to catch somebody stealing so he can make an example of him.”

  “Then what’s the worry?”

  “Don’t be stupid, Tim. A lot of men will take a chance anyway, especially when they’re drunk. You wait; sooner or later they’ll get into your beef if you don’t watch it.”

  Mother and I kept churning it around between us. She figured Sam was right. “You know what happened to Sally Myles’ heifer.” Mrs. Myles was a widow who lived alone in a tiny hovel in Redding. She had a few tough chickens and one scrawny cow. She kept going mostly by selling milk and eggs to the people around.