Prelude to Glory, Vol. 2

by Ron Carter

  The estimates of the number of Tories, or Americans who remained loyal to the king in the various sections of the colonies, are found in Mackesy, The War for America, p. 36.

  Boston

  Early June 1776

  Chapter II

  * * *

  He saw the red coats with the white crossed belts and the lowered bayonets breaking through the haze of gun smoke, and he frantically jammed the ramrod down his musket barrel to seat the ball on the powder and he knew it was too late—too late. In strange silence, orange flame spurtled from the British musket, white gun smoke blossomed, and the solid hit of the huge .75- caliber lead ball knocked Billy Weems down backwards. The scalding pain numbed his side, and he tried to gather his legs to stand and face the running British regulars, and he could not understand why his legs would not work. He realized he had lost his own musket, and he groped in the tall April grass and flowers and dandelions of the beautiful green field west of the Lexington Green but could not find it. He saw the sun glint shining on the British bayonet and he tried to raise his legs to kick it away, and they would not rise. He saw the sweat on the man’s face and the kill-lust in his eyes and the silent shout as the man came upon him, and Billy cried, “Matthew!” but there was no sound as the bayonet plunged stinging deep into his middle, and then strong hands were shaking him and he was screaming, and then he saw his mother’s face in the lamplight. She was shaking him by the shoulders and talking sharp to him. He shouted, “Matthew!” once more and suddenly sobered and stared wild-eyed into his mother’s face, and could not understand how she got to the battlefield, where a thousand muskets were silently blasting and cannon were thundering without sound, and why he was seeing her in the dark when there was bright sunshine and it was midafternoon.

  He lunged from his bed, threw his mother to the floor, and fell across her, shouting, “Keep down! Keep down!” He held her to the floor, and then Trudy was beside him, crying and jerking frantically at his nightshirt. He reached to grab her, and she cried, “Billy, Billy, it’s me, it’s me.” He looked past her into the shadows in his room, and suddenly he slumped and all the air went out of him. He looked at his mother, and slowly his brain returned from the battlefield near Lexington to his bedroom. He reached to take her into his arms, and he held her while Trudy sobbed at his side.

  Gently his mother pushed him back and put her hands on his sweat-streaked face. “It’s all right, Billy. It’s all right. It’s all right. It’s me. You’re home. You’re safe.” He turned tortured eyes to his terrified sister and gathered her shaking eight-year-old body to him and held her tightly, and she threw her arms about his neck as she sobbed.

  For a time they stayed in the yellow lamplight as they were, until Trudy quieted and drew back from him. He gently touched her hair. “Are you all right?” he asked. She nodded her head while her chin quivered.

  His mother rose, and he stood, and she put her hand on his chest. “You’re soaked with sweat.” She threw back his bedcovers and felt the sheets. “And so is your bed. Change from the skin out and come out to the kitchen. I’ll make coffee.” She lighted the lamp in his room and turned to go, when he stopped her. “Did I hurt you?” She shook her head and motioned to Trudy, and they walked out of the room together, her lamp held high.

  Billy slowly sat on the edge of his bed, hunched forward, head bowed. Fourteen months. One year and two months. My side is healed. But when do the nightmares—the memories—stop? The killing—the dead men with dead eyes—I can still see their staring dead eyes. Accusing. He shuddered and rose to his feet, still slightly favoring his right side where the British ball had ripped nearly through his body and the bayonet had gone deep during the running ambush of April 19, 1775. Fourteen months ago.

  In the time he spent wiping sweat with the damp cloth, the memories rose clear as though it were yesterday. Eleven o’clock the night of April 18, 1775—the orders from Joseph Warren—the British are crossing the Back Bay to get Adams and Hancock at Lexington and then on to Concord to get our munitions—go to Concord to stop them. Running, trotting through the night with militia from Boston through fields and over hills and across streams to avoid the British on the roads—waiting at Concord for John Dunson and Matthew (John’s eldest son) and Tom Sievers—John his neighbor and Matthew his most beloved friend from earliest childhood, the brother he never had. April nineteenth they lined the ridges that ringed the beautiful Concord Green, and they met the flower of the British army at the North Bridge. They faced them and the muskets blasted, and the British gaped in disbelief as the colonials stood their ground and poured a second volley into the red-coated column. Officers and regulars dropped all up and down the orderly lines, and the stunned British turned. Their retreat became a rout as they ran in panic through an eighteen-mile corridor of swarming minutemen and militia they could not see in the woods and behind stone walls and in creekbeds and behind trees at Meriam’s Corner, the Bloody Angle, Parker’s Revenge, Fiske Hill, Lexington, and Menotomy. The British reached the outskirts of Charlestown and Boston as the sun set, a decimated, beaten army, near total annihilation.

  Billy reached for a fresh, dry nightshirt, and felt the slightest tremble in his hand as the bright, hot image of the muzzle flash of the British musket flitted before his eyes once again, and he felt the hit of the big musket ball and then the shocking sting of the bayonet, and then the jumbled snatches of senseless memories of John carrying him to a home in Lexington and Matthew staying with him, holding his hand, saying over and over, “You’ll be all right, I’ll stay, I won’t leave you.” Then six weeks of high fever, the dreams of rows of redcoats and muskets, and the deep ache as his body battled for life and wasted as it used all its strength to heal the bullet and bayonet holes. He still smelled the stench of bandages heavy with gray drainage from the wounds as they slowly closed and knitted. And always he could see the stolid face of his mother, and the strained faces of Matthew, his mother, Margaret, and his sister Brigitte, who came to bring meals for Billy’s family, place cool hands against his hot forehead, and sit quietly.

  And he remembered the times he awoke in the night to find Matthew in the deep shadows of a dimmed lamp, kneeling at the foot of his bed, hands clasped before his bowed head. “Almighty God, I beg of thee, please don’t take Billy. Please don’t take him.”

  The clear, piercing voice of a blue jay scolding somewhere outside his bedroom window startled him, and he glanced at the clock on the nightstand beside his bed. Just past four o’clock a.m. Dawn would break soon. While he shrugged into the nightshirt, he remembered the day the fever stopped and a ravenous hunger settled in. Soup, then vegetables, and finally meat. Never enough.

  “Billy, are you coming?”

  He walked down the hallway and through the arch to the kitchen, where his mother lifted the steaming coffeepot from the black stove, set the draft on the firebox beneath the plates, and walked to the dining table. They sat opposite, with Trudy at the end. Outside, the blue jay chortled again, and another answered, and then another as they argued territorial rights at the approach of a new day. Dorothy poured the pungent coffee into their cups, and while they added milk and sugar and stirred, Billy studied his mother.

  Dorothy Weems was not pretty. Born Dorothy Pulliam, and raised in the fishing port of Gloucester, she was in her third year of school when she understood in her nine-year-old heart that her thin-lipped, broad-nosed face was plain, and her body was square, stout, unattractive, and she did not know how to move with grace. At age fourteen she understood the pain of boys averting their eyes when she passed and cliques of chattering girls falling silent as she approached. She wept in the secrecy of her own small room, confused and bitter at the great secret that would explain why she had been born plain in a world that rewarded beauty. At age fifteen she accepted the cross borne by all who are not beautiful, and stoically began groping for anything that would give release from the gray hopelessness.

  Slowly she learned that excelling commanded respect, if not
acceptance, and she exhausted her body and mind relentlessly at whatever she undertook. She learned that silent smiles and quipped compliments were welcomed by others. And then she learned that the beautiful people needed listeners; she became an adroit master of the art of listening.

  At age twenty she was a respected friend of half the young men in Gloucester and sweetheart to none. At age twenty-two she passed into spinsterhood. When she was twenty-four, a north Atlantic hurricane slammed into the Grand Banks and sank four of a small fleet of twelve Boston fishing boats, leaving the surviving eight boats with rigging in shreds, mainmasts snapped, hulls ruptured. The survivors limped into Gloucester for repairs.

  First mate on one of the battered boats was a bull of a man named Bartholomew Weems. Short, legs like oak stumps, arms that could hoist a 360-pound barrel of salt cod onto his thick shoulders and neck and carry it up the gangplank, Bartholomew Weems’s square face was plain, homely. He was twenty-nine years of age, and his life on the sea had weathered his ruddy complexion. His beard was red, his hair sandy, his mouth too big, his teeth large and square.

  The following Sunday he saw Dorothy Pulliam in the second row at the small white church. He worked his hat with awkward hands after the meeting, shifted his feet and looked at the cobblestones in the church walkway, and stammered when he introduced himself. One week later he faced her once again after church. His boat would be finished in two days and he would leave for Boston. Would she allow him to write to her?

  Yes.

  Six weeks and six letters later he once again fronted her after church. He had sailed from Boston to see her. He had a question. She met his eyes. Would she ever consider marriage? coming with him to Boston?

  Yes.

  When?

  She would be packed in three hours.

  The minister at the church married them before they boarded the boat for their return to Boston.

  He had the peculiar, lonely ways of a bachelor and the crusty language and crude manners of a fisherman, but he loved her with all his heart. With wisdom born of her own loneliness, she was blind to his shortcomings, and lived for the time his fishing boat returned and they were together. She miscarried their first child; the second was stillborn. Their third was a husky, ruddy-faced, barrel-chested boy who came howling into the world with a shock of reddish hair, unmistakably his father’s son. When Billy was eleven, their second child was born, a blue-eyed, dark-haired girl, Trudy. Eight months later a somber-faced man stood in Dorothy’s doorway and refused to raise his eyes as he worked his hat with his hands and told her the fishing fleet had lost two boats in a storm off Newfoundland. Bartholomew Weems was among the missing.

  She lived for Billy and Trudy. She threw herself into anything she could do to make an honest living. Under the watchful eye of crusty old Doctor Walter Soderquist, she learned enough about birthing to become a midwife and to do some practical nursing. She taught herself fine needlework and crocheting and to knit mittens so tight they were said to turn water. With an old quill and ink, she worked by candlelight after the children were in bed until she could write invitations, announcements, and business cards with the beautiful French scroll so perfectly done that the quality exceeded that of a printing press. Guided only by her eye and her rug hook, she could soon transform a pile of discarded rags into tightly braided rugs, oval or round, any size, with unbelievable designs. Slowly her work became known, then sought after. She trained Billy to help in all she did, and while yet an adolescent he developed a steadiness.

  Their small brick home and their yard, with fruit trees and the flower garden, were clean, well ordered. The salt-sea air blistered the paint on the white picket fence, and every second year Billy scraped and repainted it. Inside, the small parlor was unpretentious but pleasant, and the dining room, with its great, open stone fireplace for heat and cooking, was immaculate. The old wood-burning stove in the kitchen was painted black every second year when the fence was painted white. They wasted nothing. They were not wealthy; neither did they want.

  When Billy was thirteen, Dorothy knelt with him and Trudy for evening prayers, and with hands clasped before her face she turned to him. “Billy, in the name of Him to whom we pray this night, you must make a sacred promise to me.”

  He turned surprised, inquiring eyes to hers.

  “You will never go to sea for a living.”

  He understood. “I promise.”

  One year later she acquired a position for him to clean the office of Potter and Wallace, who kept a counting house. Two years later he became a beginning apprentice.

  Taller than either Dorothy or Bartholomew, plain, husky, strong as a bull, Billy was blessed with a carefree joy for life that was contagious. Before he could walk, his mother had become fast friends with Margaret Dunson, who lived two blocks away with her family, one of whom was Matthew, two months younger than Billy, taller, serious, intense. By age five Billy and Matthew had sensed that each was a rare complement to the other, and they became inseparable, each barging into the home of the other without announcement, accepted as one of the family. When Bartholomew was lost at sea, Matthew wept with Billy and slept on the floor next to him for more than a week. At school, bullies soon discovered the folly of picking on either one of them.

  Dorothy raised her cup and tentatively sipped. “Nightmare gone?”

  Billy nodded and raised his cup.

  “Been nearly two months since the last one,” she said. “They should stop soon.”

  “I wish they would. I’m sorry about them.” He turned to Trudy. “I wish they didn’t scare you so bad.”

  Trudy sipped at her coffee.

  “Any pain left?” his mother continued.

  “No. Only the things I see in my mind.”

  “With both armies gone to New York, those memories should go away.”

  Billy raised his cup. “I wish I could have seen the redcoats leave.”

  Dorothy nodded. “March seventeenth. Nearly three months ago. You were walking, but you couldn’t stand straight. I couldn’t let you walk that far.”

  “I heard them. And I guess I heard George Washington leave, too.”

  Dorothy sipped. “That was a little later.”

  “I don’t know much about him.”

  “From Virginia. Plantation owner. He was a hero in the French and Indian wars. Surrounded Boston and drove Gage and Howe and their army out. They say he was made general of the whole army because he was from the south, and we needed someone who could bring the south and north together.”

  “I hope he can. Heard anything about what’s happening in New York?”

  Dorothy shook her head. “Some red-coated troops have already landed there, and rumor is they’re expecting more. Many more.”

  Billy glanced at Trudy. Her hands were around her warm cup, while her head was bowed as she battled to keep sleepy eyes open. He looked at his mother.

  “Let’s get her to bed,” Dorothy said, and pushed her chair back.

  At the sound, Trudy’s head rose. “Can’t I sleep on the sofa? I hate being alone when you’re both out here.” Billy tenderly lifted her to the sofa and laid her down while Dorothy covered her with a quilt. She closed her eyes as they stepped silently back to the table. For a time they sat in the lamp glow, lost in their own thoughts. Outside, the blue jays again took up their morning disputes, and the robins joined in.

  “Soon be dawn,” Dorothy said. “Things will look better then. Things always look better in daylight than dark.” She studied Billy for a moment, then finished her cup. “Want to go back to bed for an hour or two?”

  He pursed his mouth. “No. I’ll get a quilt and sit by Trudy. Somehow when I sleep in the rocker I don’t dream as much.”

  “I’m going to lie down for a while.” Dorothy brought a quilt from his bed, with his heavy felt house slippers, and watched as he draped the quilt over his shoulders and started to sit in the large rocker. “Put on your slippers. You’ll get sick.” She watched until he obeyed, then turned d
own the lamp and walked softly back to her bedroom. Billy leaned back and gently rocked in the chair for a time, watching the black curtains turn gray with the approach of sunrise. Gradually his head tipped forward and the rocking slowed, and stopped, and he slept.

  He opened his eyes at the sound of felt slippers on the bare, polished hardwood floor and for a few moments struggled to understand where he was, and then he started and his head jerked up.

  “Good morning,” Dorothy said quietly. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”

  The window curtains were bright. “What time is it?”

  Dorothy glanced at the Dunson clock on the mantel. “Past seven-thirty. Beautiful morning. Don’t wake Trudy.”

  He quickly pushed the quilt from his shoulders, stood, and glanced at the sleeping child breathing deeply on the sofa as he followed his mother into the kitchen. “Why didn’t you wake me? I’ll be late.”

  “For what? work? It’s Sunday.”

  Billy shook his head, then exhaled a grunt and grinned. “Forgot the Lord’s Sabbath.”

  Dorothy set the draft on the stove and thrust two more sticks of wood into the glowing coals. “The Almighty may forgive you this once if you will prepare for church. For now, get dressed and fetch four eggs from the root cellar. I’ll get breakfast started.”

  They wakened Trudy, and with breakfast finished, Dorothy walked to the great fireplace with pine shavings in hand, used the small brass shovel to open the bank of coals from the previous night, and gently blew on them with the worn leather bellows until the first flame flickered. She added more shavings and then sticks of pine, poured water into a large black kettle on one of the swinging arms, added diced carrots and potatoes, replaced the heavy lid, and swung the pot back over the fire. Trudy helped rub thyme and allspice into a small shoulder of mutton, place it in a roasting pan, and carefully slide it into the wall oven built into the great fireplace.