April Morning (17 page)

Then Solomon Chandler sang out, so that everyone would hear him, “One thing, lads, the British are there now—but not for long! The last of them will be out before the hour's up!”

“Why?”

“Because it makes sense. Either they're back in Boston by darkness or they'll never be back there again!”

The men let out a cheer to that. Everyone wanted to find a reason to extract a crumb of comfort. And just then, three Committeemen on horseback came riding up. They had a force of a hundred men from Watertown and Cambridge, and they were waiting down along the Menotomy Road, just about a mile from where we were. They told us that a relief army of redcoats from Boston, fifteen hundred of them, had gone by about an hour ago into Lexington, and that before another hour was up they'd probably all be marching down the road and back to Boston. They were out to find everyone they could, so that the redcoats would retain a good and substantial memory of the Menotomy Road.

“And you found us, you did,” Solomon Chandler grinned.

That broke the tension. Everyone began to talk and shout and swear and wave their guns. It was a wild mood that took hold of the men, as if they realized, as Cousin Simmons had put it, that there was no more undoing of what had been done.

Solomon Chandler climbed onto his horse and shouted, “Follow me, laddies!” and then we all streamed after him, down off the hillock and toward the Menotomy Road. I didn't want to go, yet I went. We all went. We were in the grip of a force outside of ourselves. I know that my heart was breaking with anxiety over the burning of the village, and I tried to give myself strength and purpose by telling myself that everything that I had ever loved was destroyed or dead, and I might as well be dead too.

There was a place our people had in mind where the Menotomy Road dips between two banks of earth, with a great tangle of wild blackberry bushes on one side and a windfall of dead trees on the other. I knew the place well, because the bramble patch made for the best rabbit hunting in the whole neighborhood, and many was the time Father and I hiked down there for an early morning's shooting. Now the plan was to drag enough fallen trees across the road to block it, and then back the trees up with rocks and dirt. With such a breastwork, we felt we could hold the British long enough for a considerable army of Essex men, who were said to be marching in under the leadership of Colonel Pickering, to reach us. I suppose that there was some vague possibility that the plan might have worked; in any case, it was the only plan of any sort that emerged from that incredible and catch-as-catch-can day of battle. Everything else that happened was the result of some sudden notion of this or that Committee-man; and the only reason that the battle went on hour after hour was that no one was in any position to halt it or direct it. It was perfectly true that before the reinforcements reached the first redcoat army, they wanted to surrender. They were just about going out of their minds, plagued by an enemy they couldn't see, unable to use any tactics of battle they had learned or practiced in Europe, shooting away all their ammunition at stone walls, woods, and thickets, and losing almost a quarter of their number in dead and wounded. But there was no one they could surrender to, no one they could talk to or parley with; and when one of them came to the roadside west of Lexington with a white flag, he was shot dead by Abraham Clyde of Concord, who thought the white flag was only another one of the various regimental flags the redcoats carried.

So our plan might have worked and everything that followed might have been different, if the British hadn't already started down the Menotomy Road before we reached it. We were still a quarter of a mile away when we heard the Watertown and Cambridge men banging away at them.

Cousin Simmons and I and four or five of the others crawled into the windfall, and wriggled our way through the tangle of trees until we got a view of a few yards of the road. We were as well hidden there as a fox in her earth, about sixty or seventy paces from the road, and we began to shoot at the redcoats passing by. It was a strange and dreamlike business, lying there and seeing bits of red color emerge from the powder smoke that hung all over the place and over the road as well, then watching everything disappear under the smoke and only the smoke to shoot into, and then a bit of red here or a bit of red there—and such a feeling of a world gone mad, for there was nothing the redcoats could do but march on and accept their measure of death—and the bulk of our Committeemen running down the road from place to place, so that they were always with the army, like flies on a dying beast.

But we, our little group of people, remained in our cover—for there was no way that the redcoats could reach us, and most of us were too tired now to go on running back and forth along the road. We lay there and fired at the redcoats and the smoke; or at least Cousin Simmons and the others did; I fired off my fowling piece once, and then I realized that at this range, even if some of the bird shot did reach the redcoats, it would sting no harder than a mosquito. It was a great relief to find some sensible reason not to go on shooting. I burrowed into the ground behind a fallen tree, rested my cheek against the stock of my gun, listened to the shooting and screaming and cursing—more profanity in five minutes than one heard in our village in the course of a year—and then fell asleep.

It might strike you as strange that I could fall asleep right in the midst of a battle; and you might even consider it downright ungracious that anyone should go to sleep during a battle as talked about and lied about and written about as this one; but the fact of the matter was that I had gone without a night's sleep, and been through the massacre on the common, and had quartered back and forth across the country since then like a fox driven to distraction—so that the wonder of it was, not that I had finally fallen asleep, but that I had managed to remain awake as long as this.

I was awakened by the silence. I guess it was the first silence in six or seven hours, and it was just unbelievable and a little frightening as well.

I don't mean that it was a complete and total silence, or anything unnatural or spooky. There were sounds in the distance and in the background, as there always are, but even these sounds were muffled by the tangled pile of trees; and missing were the violent and awful sounds of battle, the crash of firearms and the savage shouting and swearing of men in anger and pain. When I listened more carefully, I thought I could still hear battle sounds, but far off and very faint. It was still daylight outside, but under the windfall there was a sort of comforting twilight, and being used to gauging time without a pocket watch, I had a feeling that at least an hour had passed.

I lay still for a little while after I awakened, luxuriating in the peace, and then I heard the noise of twigs and branches breaking, men making their way into the windfall, and voices; first the voice of the Reverend:

“God be kind to us, Joseph, and merciful. I tell you frankly that I don't have the courage to go back to Goody Cooper and tell her that her son as well as her husband lies dead today.”

“What about myself?” Cousin Simmons answered him. “Aside from having the boy's blood on my own conscience, I'll have to face her. Why didn't you send him home? she'll ask me.”

“The boy's blood isn't on your conscience, Joseph. No man's blood is on anyone's conscience today—unless it be on the conscience of the Englishmen who made the first slaughter on the common.”

“You don't know Goody Cooper, Reverend.”

“Where did you see him last? Where did you leave him?”

“Trouble is, Reverend, I don't think I ever knew a better or more uncomplaining boy.”

“He was a good boy, Joseph. No question about that.”

“It just shakes my faith in the Almighty to think of the innocent cut down like this.”

“Nothing should shake your faith, Joseph. His ways are inscrutable.”

“Uncomplaining, Reverend. When you consider all that boy went through since last night—”

At first, it was pleasant and rewarding to lie there and listen to them talk about me in the past tense. I guess there never was a boy who didn't imagine himself dead, so that he could take comfort out of the fine things said about him. But there was a note in their voices that made me wonder whether they had the same respect for my intelligence as for my forbearance. I sat up and called out to them.

“God be praised!” the Reverend cried.

Helping me to my feet, Cousin Simmons asked if I was wounded.

“No, sir. I'm all right.”

“Then what on earth happened to you, Adam?”

“I fell asleep.”

They both of them stared at me open-mouthed.

“You what?”

“I fell asleep,” I repeated. “I just fell asleep.”

“So long as you're all right,” the Reverend said.

They helped me out of the windfall, and I asked Cousin Simmons about the battle.

“It's down past Cambridge by now, and the Committeemen are marching in from all over. If the redcoats get back to Boston, they're there to stay. There'll be five thousand of our men around Boston before nightfall.”

“Then can we go home?” I asked him.

“We're all going home, Adam—there's others had more sleep and more rest.”

But what I would be coming home to I didn't know; and for all I knew, the town could be in ashes and everyone dear to me, dead.

When I saw the tower of the meetinghouse, I felt better, and then I saw the Parker barns on the outskirts of town, and I told myself that if they had burned one, they would have burned the other too. You might think we would run in our haste to be there and see what had happened, but you don't hurry for bad news. Also, we were tired, all three of us. So we came up to the town slowly, and bit by bit we realized that it still stood, only the three houses that I spoke of before burned down.

I left Cousin Simmons and the Reverend to go to my own house. We were not the only ones returning to the village. Others came across the fields, and still others were trudging wearily up the Menotomy Road—and all of them could be denned by a sort of tired sadness that was evident in the way they walked and the way they trailed their guns. We had won the battle, but there is less joy in winning a battle than the history books tell you.

“Best to go home, Adam,” the Reverend said. “I will come by and pay my respects later.”

I would have begged them to come along with me and not leave me with the task of facing what awaited me alone, but when I looked at them, I had no heart to. Both of them had aged woefully. Their faces were gray and drawn, covered with a stubble of beard, with dirt and grime and dried blood. Their clothes were torn and filthy, and their eyes were red with fatigue and gunpowder irritation. I felt that I must present as dreadful an appearance, but I was younger than they were, and nothing can feel as superior as youth.

So I nodded and left them, and walked toward the house, approaching it from the back, where the herb garden was. Levi must have been watching and waiting for me. My own sight was blurred, for the sun was already low and burning into my eyes, and I heard him before I saw him. Shouting, “Adam! Adam! Adam!” he hurtled toward me and plunged into my arms, and I just let my gun drop and hugged him as if he was everything in the world. He was crying, and I began to cry too. I sat down on the ground, still holding him tight, and did my best to stop my tears. I knew that it would be only moments before I had to face Mother, and I didn't want it to be with tears in my eyes. I could imagine that there had been tears enough for that day.

“We thought you were dead,” Levi sobbed. “There was a big damn fool from, Concord come by here before, and he said he saw you lying dead up at the crossroads.”

“Do I look dead?”

“Oh, Adam—I don't want you dead.”

“Well, I'm not dead. I'm alive. I may be tired to death, but I'm alive.”

“I don't want you dead, Adam.”

“Stop saying that I'm dead, because I'm not dead.” I shook him, and he looked up at me and managed to smile through his tears. Then I got to my feet, and there, at the edge of the herb garden, Mother was standing with Granny next to her, Granny's arm around her to hold her up, and Mother's face as white as snow. Her mouth was open a little, the lips trembling. Granny just stared at me, shaking her head slightly.

“He's not dead,” Levi said apologetically.

Mother took a few steps toward me.

“I'm awful dirty,” I whispered. “I guess I never been so dirty in my whole life.”

Then Mother came up to me and took me in her arms, holding me so tight I thought my ribs would break, her face buried in my dirty shirt. Then she let go of me and stepped back and began to cry. Granny went over to her, stroking her shoulder and whispering, “Poor dear, poor dear.” It seemed to me that Granny might have spared a moment for greeting me, but she hardly appeared to know that I was there. Levi picked up my gun, and Granny led Mother back into the house, myself following them.

A number of neighbors were in the kitchen or standing outside. Ruth was there, and her mother and her widow aunt Susan, and old Mrs. Cartwright, the midwife, who always helps out on funeral occasions, when it comes to the laying out and the shrouding, and there were some of Levi's friends, the Albright boys, and little Jonah Parker, who had death in his own family. They made way for me to enter the kitchen. Ruth held back, but never took her eyes off me, and the Widow Susan took my arm. Mother dropped into a chair and stared at me, her whole body shivering and the tears running down her cheeks, and Granny's face was all twisted up with her own attempt to refrain from weeping—realizing, perhaps, that it would only take a little more to have all those women half-hysterical.

I had anticipated a bad time of coming home, but I hadn't thought it would be anywhere as heartbreaking and uncomfortable as this. For the life of me, I didn't know what to say, except to tell Goody Simmons that Cousin Simmons was back and at their house.