My Brother Sam is Dead (16 page)

She started to run, but then she thought better of it and walked steadily out there. When Sam saw her he came a little way out of the barn shadows. For a moment he and Mother stared at each other, and then they began to hug, and I came up and put my arms around both of them and hugged them together. Then Mother pushed back and stared at him. “I haven't seen you for two years, Sam,” she said.

He grinned. “Do I look different?”

“Dirtier,” she said.

He laughed. “Is that all?”

“No, older,” she said. “You've gotten older.”

“Tim has too. I hardly recognized him.”

“He's had to grow up fast,” Mother said. “He didn't have much choice.”

“I thought you'd all be mad at me,” he said. “I didn't know if you'd be speaking to me.”

“Oh we're willing to speak to you all right,” she said. “We need you back home.”

“Hey, Tim, I thought you were going to bring me something to eat.” He was trying to change the subject.

“I forgot,” I said.

“Tim, get your brother some bread and a piece of that ham that's hanging in the kitchen.”

I went back to the kitchen and got the food. I knew they were going to have an argument. When I got back to the barn Mother was saying, “Sam, we don't even know if he's alive. You have to come home now. We need you.”

That was the first time I'd ever heard her admit that Father might be dead. Sam winced. It hurt him. “I don't think he's dead, Mother.”

I handed him the food.

“Oh lovely,” he said. “Thanks.” He tore off a piece of the ham with his teeth and then stuffed a hunk of bread into his mouth.

I said, “Is that the way they eat in the army?” I knew it wasn't going to do any good to argue with Sam; he wasn't going to change his mind. I didn't want Mother to have a fight with him.

He swallowed. “I guess we figure if we're lucky enough to have anything to eat, we don't care how we eat it.”

But Mother wouldn't give up. “Sam, you have to come home. We need you. Your people have taken Father from us; they'll have to give us you in return.”

“Mother, I can't come home. That's desertion, they hang people for that.”

“When is your enlistment up, Sam?”

He frowned. “In two months. But I'm going to re-enlist.”

“No, Sam. You have to come home.”

“Mother,” I said, “don't argue with him. You can't make him change his mind.”

“He's just being stubborn,” she said.

“God, Mother,” he said, “I came to pay a visit and first Tim badgered me about Father and now you're badgering me about coming home. I can't come home until it's over. It's my duty to stay and fight.”

“You have a duty to your family, too.”

“My duty to my country comes first. Now please everybody stop arguing with me.”

“And get killed in the meantime,” she said.

“Maybe,” he said.

We were quiet for a moment. Then he said, “We've made a promise, a group of us, not to quit until the Redcoats are beaten. We've made a pledge to each other.”

“Oh Sam, that's a foolish promise.”

I said, “Mother, stop arguing with him.”

“You're both fools,” she said.

He was getting angry. “For God's sake, Mother, people are out there dying for you.”

“Well they can stop dying,” Mother said. “I don't need anybody's death.”

“Let him alone, Mother,” I said. “He isn't going to change his mind.”

We were silent, and I knew she was trying to accept it. “All right,” she said finally. “All right.”

We changed the subject. We talked about the crops, and about people, and he gave us a message to take to Betsy Read. “We'll probably be moving out soon,” he said. “I don't know. Tell her I'll try to see her if I can.” He paused for a minute. “I'd better go now before somebody misses me.”

He hugged Mother and then he hugged me, and turned and slipped through the rain and the night out of the barnyard. We watched him go, knowing that we might never see him again. Then we went back into the tavern.

I had a funny feeling about seeing Sam. It wasn't just that he was more grown-up or that I was more grown-up. It was something else. For the first time in my life I knew that Sam was wrong about something; I knew that I understood something better than he did. Oh, I used to argue with him before, but that was mostly to show that I wasn't going to just agree with everything he said. But this time I
knew
he was wrong. He was staying in the army because he
wanted
to stay in the army, not because of duty or anything else. He liked the excitement of it. Oh, I guessed he was miserable a lot of the time when he was cold and hungry and maybe being shot at, but still, he was part of something big, he thought that what he was doing was important. It felt good to be part of it, and I knew that was the real reason why he didn't want to come home.

Knowing that about Sam gave me a funny feeling. I didn't feel like his little brother so much anymore, I felt more like his equal.

I
N JUNE OF THAT YEAR, 1777, WE FOUND OUT THAT FATHER
was dead. He'd been dead for a month. It had happened pretty much as we'd guessed it: he'd been sent to a prison ship in New York. There was one funny thing about it, though—it wasn't a Rebel prison ship, it was a British one. We never did figure out how that had happened. It had just come out of the confusion of the war somehow. It didn't much matter, in the end, though. Those prison ships were terrible places—filthy and baking hot in summer and freezing in winter and of course nothing but slop to eat. The worst part was disease: if anybody got sick with anything serious, everybody on the ship was liable to get it. That's what had happened to Father: they'd had an epidemic of cholera on the prison ship he'd been on. About forty or fifty people had died from it, and he'd been one of them. They'd buried him someplace on Long Island, but we weren't sure where. Mother said, “After the war we'll find where he lies and have a headstone made for him.” But I don't think even she believed we'd be able to do that.

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.