April Morning (16 page)

“Where there ain't smoke, you can see it. But it ain't the whole redcoat army! Oh, no! Not by a bushel or two, no, sir!”

As a matter of fact, the road was defined by the powder smoke that lay over it. The noonday sun was overhead, and it was a windless, unseasonably hot day. Some of the smoke drifted and dissipated, but most of it hung over the road like a thick curtain—a fact that the redcoats should have thanked God for, since without the smoke to cover them, it is questionable whether a man of them would have gotten through. We learned later that the British commander was ready to surrender his army at this point, but there was no one to surrender to; and often enough, lying sleepless at night, I imagined how that march must have been for the redcoats, trudging down that burning road, the dust and the powder smoke choking them, a pale sun burning through, and the Middlesex men hidden behind stones and walls and trees.

The firing never stopped. It blazed up at one point and then at another. About thirty men had gathered at the Atkins place, and we went up to the road to fire a volley into it. Then we went back to the well, where the Atkins women were drawing water. All our fear of the redcoats had vanished, and somehow we knew as certainly as if they had signed a paper to such effect that they would not break their march and leave the road. Yet perhaps not all our fear—for there was one thing we did not do, and that was to blockade the road and stop them. It was one thing to fight them as we were fighting them; something else to stand up to their muskets without cover.

Mrs. Atkins and her daughter Esther and her twelve-year-old son Ishmael were all drawing water and working at the well fit to break their backs. They were good-hearted people, die women a little subdued by the number of menfolk in their family and a good deal bewildered by the fact that a part of a war was being fought a quarter of a mile away. Aside from being thoughtfully placed along the British line of march, their well was a deep one, with a considerable reputation for cold and pure water. When we got there, Cousin Simmons couldn't bear to watch those women breaking their backs over the well handle. He said he didn't think that war was any reason for men to turn into hogs and women into slaves; and he took over the handle himself and then shamed some others into turns. Those women had raised fifty buckets out of the well already, and anyone who ever turned a well handle knows what that means.

Myself, I must have drunk half a bucket of ice-cold water sweet as honey, and some more to pour over my aching head. The Atkins women had brought out every scrap of bread and provision in their house, and no one went away from there hungry. I was wolfing down some sausage and bread, when Esther Atkins came over to me and asked whether I wasn't the Cooper boy from Lexington.

I said I was. She was a handsome girl of seventeen or so, with black eyes and black hair, and it was said that she had more suitors than a dog has fleas.

“But last time I saw you, you were just a shaver.”

“I'm fifteen, ma'am.”

“I heard tell about your father. Moses Cooper. He was your father?”

“Yes, he was.”

“I'm sorry—oh, indeed, I am.”

One of her own brothers would be dead before the day was finished, but neither of us knew that then, and she brought me a piece of berry pie out of the kindness of wanting to do for me. Many people were kind and gentle on that day; it wasn't unrelieved horror, and fewer were cruel than you might have thought. I saw at least three men carrying wounded neighbors on their backs, and there was another incident as we moved eastward that was worth remembering.

You see, about thirty men had gathered at the Atkins place. Some of them were Lincoln Town men, who had come up with Cousin Joshua Dover, and others were from the neighborhood and from across the Sudbury River. Two of these were in the fight at the North Bridge, where Yankees of Massachusetts fired upon the British for the first time, although they held, as we did, that not a man among them fired his weapon until the redcoats had loosed a volley and slain two good Concord men and wounded others. The leader of the Sudbury men was one Alan Becket, a small, nervous, energetic man who complained bitterly that the battle was being fought without rhyme or reason, that nothing had really been planned, and that for all our cutting and sniping at the British, we were letting a whole army of them escape, when here was a golden opportunity either for capturing them or wiping them out to the last man.

For my own part, I was ready to live and let live. I was beginning to react to the sleepless night, and every bone and muscle in my body felt my fatigue. It had appeared to me, from all I had ever read or heard about war, that a battle was fought quickly and then put away to rest and wait for inclusion in the history books; and I felt that I had been through three battles already, and that it was enough. But Becket held otherwise, and he was persuasive enough to bring the men around to his way of thinking.

He said that instead of running back and forth to the road to take pot shots at the redcoats, and wearing ourselves out in the process, we should head southeast and pick up the Menotomy Road south of Lexington, about five miles from where we now were. Even without hurrying, we could reach that spot before the British did, and as we moved we could gather to us all the Committeemen we encountered. With even a hundred men, we could try to trap the British somewhere between Lexington and Menotomy, and if we could hold them up for an hour or two, we might find that several thousand Committeemen had arrived to join us.

It all seemed very iffish and offhand to me, but Cousin Simmons agreed that it was at least a plan of a sort, and that was better than just milling around with no plan at all, with everyone a commander and everyone changing his mind. By now, Solomon Chandler and the other riflemen had come down from the barn roof, and they gave their support to Becket's plan. The last stragglers of the redcoat army had passed by the point of road opposite us, and while we could overtake them easily enough, Chandler was of the opinion that it made far more sense to try to cut them off south of Lexington. More men were joining us, and when we began to march, we numbered better than half a hundred.

We were almost a mile south of the Concord Road when we crossed the Lincoln Road, fifteen or twenty minutes later, and just as we were crossing it, as luck would have it, a redcoat cavalry patrol came down from the north, perhaps scouting to see whether the road to Lincoln might offer an alternative route of escape. There were four men in the patrol, and as they came into sight, at least twenty of us fired at them. Three of them whipped their horses around and got away, but the fourth fell out of his saddle and lay in the road, his horse standing beside him. It was poor shooting, but I had discovered that it was always poor shooting when men let off their pieces in a hurry, never stopping to consider or take reasonable aim. It was a condition I was grateful for, since it kept a good many folks alive who would otherwise be dead.

We rushed over to the fallen man and crowded around him—not yet being enough of soldiers to suspect the possibility of a larger force returning—and we saw that he was conscious, with a bullet hole in his shoulder. He was a pink-cheeked boy of about twenty, and after he had looked at us, he closed his eyes and prepared to be shot to death by the barbarians we had been described to him as being. But his courage wasn't sufficient to prevent tears of pain and fear from rolling down his dirty cheeks; and the sight of him lying there and crying and looking so much like a little boy had its effect on all of us. I know that I had a hard time to keep from crying myself.

Dr. Cody of Watertown was with us, and although our family had always regarded him as a fraud and a quack, he did a quick and handy job of stopping the bleeding and tying up the wound. Then we picked up the boy and carried him all the way to the Dunn House, where we left him.

Some of the men wanted Becket to ride his horse. I respected Becket for saying that he would feel foolish up there, and anyway he deferred to Solomon Chandler's age. Chandler was pleased as a boy at riding the British filly, his rifle dangling forward like an old-time lance.

Cousin Simmons remarked that there was nothing to bring out a man's innermost character like being up on a horse while everyone else walked along on the two feet God gave him.

The Afternoon

W
E WERE ABOUT
a mile and a half to the south of Lexington now, between the Watertown Road and the Menotomy Road; and all that was home to me, all that was warm and sweet and good, my mother and my brother Levi and Granny and Ruth, my relatives and my friends—all of this was a hoot and a holler away, just over the hill and across the trees, just so near that I could almost reach out and touch it; but instead of going home, as any sane person would, I was part of a motley group of farmers who were off to trap a British army and destroy it. It made no sense whatsoever, and I said so to Cousin Simmons.

“Well, Adam,” he said, scratching his head, “it's war now, you know, and in wartime things don't make sense the way they would in peacetime.”

“I had a belly full of war and killing, Cousin Simmons.”

“I know that, Adam. So have I, when you come right down to it. Maybe so has everybody here except an old fire-eater like Solomon Chandler. But we can't stop.”

“Why not?”

“Good heavens, Adam, we declared ourselves. There just is no stronger declaration of a man's purpose than to take a gun and shoot someone dead.”

“But they shot us first.”

“That's an argument, Adam, and we're past arguments. Gun shooting is a declaration, not an argument. Nobody's going to be calm and reasonable about who shot first. There's been too much shooting already to ever trace our way back. Now we're enemies until one side or another wins its purpose. If we were to back off now they'd come with their gallows rope and hang up maybe a hundred, maybe a thousand, maybe ten thousand. We'd never sleep a peaceful night again—not ever again, no V.”

“Then when will it end?”

“When will it end, Adam? I'll tell you when it will end—hen we drive them back into their ships, and when their ships sail away from here and leave us in peace in our own land. Not until then.”

“You're talking about a time. Maybe years of time,” I said wearily.

“Maybe years of time, Adam. That's true.”

“I'm talking about today, Cousin Simmons. I'm talking about right now—about going home right now.”

“Heavens to Holland, lad—where would you go? The redcoats are no doubt entering Lexington right this precious minute.”

“They wouldn't catch me.”

“There's a real smart observation. Suppose you tell me how you are going to manage that.”

“I'd crawl up,” I muttered. “I'd lay there at the edge of town until they left.”

“Why, the place is crawling with them—and you'd go crawling in there? That makes no sense at all, Adam, and you know it.”

“Maybe I do know it, Cousin Simmons. I'm just sick of this whole bloody business.”

“I can understand that,” Cousin Simmons nodded. “You're just a boy, Adam, and you've had a hard enough time of it and a long day to boot, a terrible long day. Don't you think I'd like to see you out of this, you being my own kin and fatherless? But that's just it.”

“What is?”

“The fact that you're Moses Cooper's first-born, and there isn't a man here doesn't know it—and doesn't know he was killed in the slaughter.”

We paused for a few minutes to rest ourselves on the little bare hillock we called the Indian burying ground—although so far as I knew, no one was buried there. My father once told me that the Indians, being heathen, did not properly bury their dead, but built a sort of frame structure on the burying ground and laid their dead upon it, open and uncovered to the sky and the sun and the rain and the snow. I had liked the notion and half-regretted that I was not born an Indian; for it seemed infinitely preferable to being lowered into a deep, wet hole in the ground. Now the thought came back to me, a stabbing awakening of grief and remorse—the guilt attached to the way I had allowed myself to be flung into the battle and absorbed by it, with my father lying in our home, hardly even cold with death. I felt that the least I could do for him was to keep my thoughts on him and keep my sorrow alive.

I felt even worse when someone shouted that Lexington was burning. There were well over a hundred and fifty men in our little army by now, and we all stood dumfounded and helpless on the little hillock, staring northward where smoke rose into the sky. We discovered subsequently that only three houses had been set afire and actually burned down, the Loring House, the Mullikan House and the Bond House; but from the amount of smoke in the sky, it appeared to us then that the entire village was being consumed. I was sick at heart with the thought that our house was burning, and that there was nothing at all that I could do about it. I was asking myself, What about Mother and Granny and Levi? Were they in the house? For all I knew, they could be hiding down in the cellar, trapped there, with the house burning down over their heads. I said as much to Cousin Simmons, whose own face was desolate enough.

“Oh, no, Adam,” he replied sadly. “That's one thing you don't have to worry about. Your grandmother would not hide herself in the cellar if all the dragoons in England were in her front yard. It's Ruthie and Goody Simmons I'm distressed about. It's a bitter thing for a man to have to stand idle and helpless and watch his home being consumed into ashes.”

Some of the men began to talk of going up and attacking the British and driving them out of the town. It was wild, desperate talk. We had inflicted awful damage upon the redcoats and would do more before the day was over—but not by going up against the volleys of their muskets when they could all stand in their lines together and see what they were shooting at. So the talk was only talk—no more than that. Jonathan Crisp, who had been on the common with us, was there, with his cousin Salem, who was a year younger than he; and they both burst into tears. The men watched them, and shook their heads sadly, because the whole world appeared to be crumbling around us; and none of us had been prepared for it or had anticipated it. It had happened too quickly. I could see that the men were driving themselves sick with their frustration—such a crowd of us standing here on the hillock and not being able to do one blessed thing to rescue the town from the redcoats.