My Brother Sam is Dead (5 page)

I
T'S A FUNNY THING, YOU'D THINK, THAT IF THERE WAS A WAR
going on in your own country, it would change everything, it would make your life different. You'd think that there'd be men marching and drilling and people hurrying back and forth and lots of talk about the fighting. But it wasn't that way at all; it wasn't any different from usual, it was just normal.

Of course there were battles. There was a battle at Bunker Hill where the Patriots massacred the British troops before they were driven off, and the Rebels also took Fort Ticonderoga without much of a fight. But these battles all seemed far away—they were just things we read about in the
Connecticut Journal
and the other newspapers. Sometimes Father brought home
Rivington's Gazette
from Verplancks. It was a Tory paper and he wasn't supposed to have it; it was illegal, so he kept it hidden. It made me wonder how the war was going to make us freer if you couldn't read any paper you wanted any more. Oh, I don't mean that we ignored the war. There was always a lot of discussion about it around Redding, and sometimes people in the tavern would get into arguments over it when they'd drunk too much
whiskey. Once Father actually threw a man out of the tavern. He was a stranger, and I guess he didn't realize that Redding was such a Tory town because he told somebody that the only good Lobster-back was a dead Lobsterback and that King George was a great hairy fool. My father said, “That's subversion and we don't permit subversion here.”

The man smacked his beer mug down on the table. “I thought I was among free men, not slaveys.”

He hardly got the words out before Father jumped over to the man, jerked him out of his chair and pushed him through the door into the mud of the street. The man lay there on his back cursing Father, but Father slammed the door and the man left. I guess he suddenly realized that he was in Tory country.

But leaving out things like that, the war didn't affect us much around Redding in that summer of 1775. Except for Sam. Sam was gone and nobody mentioned him—not Father, not Mother, not me. Father didn't mention him because he'd kicked him out, and Mother and I didn't mention him because of not wanting to get Father angry. For all we knew, Sam could be dead. But I didn't want to think about that, so I didn't.

So the summer went along and I lived my ordinary life, which was mostly chores all day long. Having a father who was a tavern-keeper was a lot better than being a farmer's son, like most boys. Running a farm is terrible hard work—plowing and hoeing and milking cows and such and being out in the fields all by yourself with nobody to talk to all day long. Being around a tavern is a lot more fun. There are people coming and going, and a lot of them have been to the big towns like Hartford or New Haven or even New York or Boston, and they have stories to tell. But still, it isn't as much fun as people like Jerry Sanford think. Mostly Jerry works on his uncle's farm, and he thinks I have it lucky. He doesn't realize that there's an awful lot of wood to cut to keep the fireplaces going for cooking and a lot of water to come up from the well and if there isn't anything else to do, there's scrubbing the floors and washing the windows and keeping everything clean generally. My mother's strong on cleanliness. “Food tastes better in a clean house,” she always says. And of course there's the livestock
I have to care for, too. Besides, the woodlot is two fields down the Fairfield Road from the tavern and we have to cart it up.

So even if it was better than farming, it wasn't all that much fun. Of course whenever I could I ducked out and did something with Jerry Sanford. If it was hot, we'd go for a swim in the mill stream, or climb the trees up in his woodlot. We played mumble-the-peg or spin tops or play duck on the rock, which I usually won because I could run faster. Sometimes, if it rained we'd go up to Tom Warrups and get him to tell us stories about the Indian wars and the brave things his grandfather, Chief Chicken, did. Or if nobody was watching me, I'd sneak up into the loft and look at the old almanacs Sam brought back from college sometimes. But mostly I worked.

I saw Betsy Read a lot. She came into the tavern pretty often to buy thread or cloth or something, and I noticed that when she did she'd linger around on some excuse and try to listen to what people were saying until my mother would say, “Betsy, I don't think your mother intended for you to spend the day idling,” and she'd go. I didn't see what difference it made, anyway: I never heard anyone say anything important.

Then one day in September she came down with a jug to buy beer. She sat down at the table, and when my mother had her back turned filling the jug, Betsy gave me a wink and jerked her head toward the door. I wrinkled up my forehead at her to explain what she meant, but she just nodded at the door again. Then Mother brought the beer jug back and put it down on the table. “Off with you, Betsy,” she said. “Idle hands make the Devil's work.” Betsy got up, picked up the beer jug and walked to the door.

“I forgot to put away the pitchfork,” I said.

My mother gave me a funny look. “When were you using the pitchfork?”

“Did I say pitchfork?” I said. “I meant the water bucket, from when I watered the chickens this morning.” I went through the kitchen and outside and then ducked around the corner of the house. When Betsy came out of the front door I gave her a low whistle, and she slipped up to the side of the house beside me and gave me a serious
look. She wasn't much taller than I, but she was fifteen and of course she was smarter than I was. “Tim, I have to talk to you about something serious.”

It was a beautiful sunny day. The birds were twittering and the breeze was blowing and you could smell the hay in the field next to us waving in the heat. The wooden shingles of the tavern were warm. It was too nice a day to worry about things. I bent my head and touched my cheek to the warm shingles. “It's about Sam.”

“Tim, if he came back to Redding, would you tell your father?”

“I wish Sam would give Father back the Brown Bess.”

“Tim, stop worrying about that; Sam needs the gun.”

“I wish he would, though.”

“Please stop worrying about it. Just tell me what you would do if Sam came back for a visit.”

“Why does Sam want to fight with Father?”

“Please, Tim,” Betsy said. “I have to go, just answer my question.”

I still hadn't made up my mind which side I was on in the war, and I didn't care whether Sam was a Patriot or a Tory or what. All I could think about was snuggling up to him and listening to him talk about scoring telling points. Knowing Sam I was pretty sure he was trying to score telling points from the other soldiers he was with. “I won't tell,” I said.

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

“You swear on the Bible, Tim?”

“I swear on the Bible,” 1 said. “When is he coming?”

“I don't know exactly,” she said. “Soon. He sent me a letter.”

I was disappointed. “He didn't even say when he could come?”

“No. I have to go, Tim. Remember, you promised.” But he didn't come soon. At first I thought he would come in a few days, but he didn't. A week passed and another week and still he didn't come. When I saw Betsy at the tavern or in church I would look at her in hopes that she would give me a sign or whisper to me that Sam was
coming soon, but she never did. I guess she was scared of having the subject come up in front of grownups, especially Father or the other Tories. Once I actually managed to speak to her when she came into the tavern while Mother was in the kitchen getting some bread for some travelers who were eating lunch.

“When's he coming, Betsy?” I whispered. “When?”

“Ssshh, Tim,” she hissed. “Just shush about it.”

So I shut up about it, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. I wanted to have Sam there and listen to him talk about the fighting and everything. I wanted to tell him about everything I'd done, too, all the things that would make him proud of me and respect me, like finally being able to throw a stone clear over the tavern, which we weren't supposed to do, and about being best in school in arithmetic. I never used to be very good at anything in school, but for some reason I suddenly got good at arithmetic

So September passed and then October. The geese flew south in long, wavering V's. The leaves went red and orange and then brown and fell so that they crunched when Father and I walked around on them out in the woodlot, where we were getting up the winter's wood. The sky went that low, November grey; the puddles grew coats of ice overnight, and one morning when I woke up the fields were white with snow. That morning Betsy came down to the tavern with the beer mug. Mother was out with the chickens, but Father was in the taproom sharpening the two-man saw, because we were going out to the woodlot.

“Hello, Betsy,” Father said. “How's your family?”

“In good health, sir,” she said.

“I'm glad to hear it. What can I do for you? Beer, is it? Well help yourself, you know where it is.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said. She crossed over to the barrel. Father bent over the saw, the file making the metal sing as he worked it over the teeth. “Tim, are you going to school this term?” Betsy asked.

“Yes,” I said. I looked at her. “We started last month.” Then I noticed that she was nodding her head slowly up and down. Sam was back.

I
WAS SO EXCITED
I
COULD HARDLY STAND IT.
I
FELT ALL
sparkly inside—sort of scared and happy both at the same time. When lunchtime came I could hardly force myself to eat, although of course I did, so nobody would suspect anything. Being so excited worried me. A couple of times I almost blurted something out. You know how it is when you get really interested in something, you forget what you're doing or even where you are. Well I was thinking so hard about going up to Tom Warrups' and finally seeing Sam after all this time that I kept forgetting it was a secret. Once I started to say aloud, “I wonder if Sam really shot anybody,” and another time I began to say, “Maybe I ought to bring him up something to eat.” But both times I caught myself in time.

The big question was to find an excuse to get away. On a school day it would have been different, I would have just told the teacher I had to go home and help at the tavern, and gone up to Warrups'. But I didn't want to wait until Monday; probably Sam would be gone by then anyway.

After lunch Father sent me out to the woodlot with the axe.
Although it had warmed up some, the day was cloudy and the thin layer of snow was still on the ground. From the woodlot the whole country looked white, as if it had been painted to match the church and the houses around it. I began cutting wood, wondering if I dared to sneak away to Warrups'. I decided not to: after a while Father would notice that there weren't any chopping sounds and come up to see what I was doing. I needed another excuse; and as I chopped I tried to think of one.

I was thinking like that when I first heard the horses. I straightened up, letting the axe dangle from my hand, and listened. There were a lot of them coming up the Fairfield Road from the south and they were coming pretty fast. I stared down the road toward the bend. They would have passed right by me. At first all I could hear was the heavy drum roll sound of hooves; then I began to hear voices of men shouting and the jingling of harness. Then suddenly they came pouring around the bend of the road into sight. It was a party of maybe twenty people, and even at a distance I could see that some of them had on blue uniforms which meant that they were Continentals—the Rebel troops. I stood back among the trees and watched them come galloping by. It was a pretty unusual thing to see a party of horsemen in Redding. They came on, and then they were swirling by, an officer wearing a sword in the lead, followed by the ordinary soldiers. Most of them had Brown Besses like ours slung over their backs. I guess they were mostly from the Fairfield trainband. The horsemen pounded on, churning the snow on the road into mud. I kept down in the shadow of the trees, but they didn't pay any attention to me anyway. In a moment they had swept past. I darted through the trees to the road, and looked after them. They pulled up at the tavern. The officer and three of the men dismounted, and then the rest galloped off.

I was scared, but I was curious. I figured the officer had gone into the tavern to drink a mug of beer. I hadn't really seen many true soldiers, and I wondered what they were like. I wasn't sure if it was safe, though. What would they do if they knew that Father was against the war? Still I didn't want to be left out of the excitement. So I cut back through the woodlot and across the snowy fields so I could come up to the house from behind. I figured I would sneak in the kitchen
door and listen to what was going on first. I was still carrying the axe. It was dangerous to run with an axe, because you might fall and cut yourself, but it made me feel safer to hold it in my hand. I went on running through the light snow, and then I came up behind the barn and eased myself around it into the barnyard. I could hear the horses stamping and jingling their harnesses in front of the tavern.