April Morning

by Howard Fast

  When I had finished, he remained silent for a while, and I could see that he was thinking over all that I had said. Meanwhile, he had taken an old black pipe out of his pocket and a plug of tobacco just as black. Thoughtfully, he shaved tobacco off the plug and stuffed the pipe. I was wondering whether he’d kindle a fire to light the pipe, but after he had taken a draw or two on it, he put it back in his pocket unlit and unsmoked.

  “Cowards, you were, Adam?” he asked at last.

  “Yes—cowards.”

  “Oh? I think you got something to learn, laddie, about the nature of cowardice and bravery. It takes no courage to fire a gun and to kill, merely a state of mind that makes killing possible. Such a state of mind does not come easily to decent folk. But we will see.” He rose to his feet and picked up his long rifle. “Come along now, Adam—if you’re minded to throw in your lot with me.”

  “I can’t go home now.”

  “Then come along, boy.”

  “Where?”

  “In good time—all in good time. You know where the Mill Brook forks?”

  “I know the place, yes.”

  “Well, son, there’s a little pasture south of it where I imagine we’ll find a few sturdy Middlesex lads. It’s a long way ahead of us, and what’s started ain’t easily finished.”

  We set off again, Solomon Chandler walking more slowly now, and we cut across the fields, over stone walls, and through bits of woods—but still more or less paralleling the Concord Road. North of us, we heard the sound of drums and the shrilling of pipes, faint at first but then clearer; and the sudden panic in me was eased by Chandler’s hand on my shoulder.

  “Easy, easy, boy,” he said. “Their music never hurt a living soul, and you just make up your mind to stroll along just as casual as if you was out walking with your lassie. If you have one now. Do you?”

  I nodded.

  “Tell me her name.”

  “Ruth Simmons,” I whispered.

  “Then that would be Joseph Simmons’ daughter, him the smith back there. Am I right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Bless my heart. Now, do you know, Adam, the last time I set eyes on her, she came no higher than my kneecap. And what kind of lovers are you? Are you betrothed?”

  “I’m too young to be betrothed.”

  “Oh, bite your tongue with such words! How old are you, boy?”

  “Fifteen,” I answered.

  “Fifteen. Now in my own days, that was never too young for a betrothal, or for a marriage either; but we’re a careful lot these days, and they say a lad should have this and that before he takes him a lady. Myself, I was married at seventeen years, and never regretted it—good heavens, no. And you’re a big, upstanding lad. To look at you, I would have said you were seventeen at least.”

  “Johnny Harrington was seventeen, and they killed him on the common.”

  “Take your mind off such things now, Adam,” he said gently. “Don’t worry the dead. Let them lie in peace.” We had topped a little hill, and there, half a mile to the north of us and plainly visible, was the highroad. His arm over my shoulder, Solomon Chandler paused there and pointed toward the long column of redcoats, stretching up and down the whole length of the road that was in our view. At this distance, they were like toy soldiers, small, harmless, and impersonal.

  “Have a good, long look at them, Adam. It’s a healthy business to regard what you fear. Look at it long and calm, and you will find that it calms you inside.”

  I did as he said, and bit by bit, the panic in me worked out; my heart beat less strongly, and the awful, mindless fear of them began to subside. While this was taking place inside of me, Solomon Chandler talked on, his tone as chatty and comfortable as if we were sitting in Mother’s kitchen and not out here in the open with the redcoats only half a mile away.

  “Study them, Adam,” he said, “and realize their stupidity and ignorance. They have a great contempt for us, and they call us peasants and louts, but not one in ten of them can read or write his letters. A good half of them are convicts, cutthroats and footpads, serving out their time in His Majesty’s colors instead of in jail. The rest of them are poor, ignorant devils, with a religion as cloudy and superstitious as their minds. They are a poor substitute for machines. They do what they are told to do, and when there is no one to tell them, the life goes out of them.”

  “Where are they marching?”

  “To Concord, no doubt, having heard that we put some shot and gunpowder away there. But it will be easier going there than coming back. Each of them carries his Brown Bess, fifteen pounds of regulation musket that I would not give you sixpence for. Mind you, they don’t even have a back sight on that gun of theirs. It’s a handy tool for a bayonet and murderous when they stand up against you as they did on the common, but a single shot will never find you. They don’t know how to aim the thing. It kicks like a mule, but the bullet carries only a hundred paces. And the pack on their backs weighs forty pounds more. Five pounds of shot and water, a heavy spun uniform, canvas leggings, and a wig under that fool hat they wear. Oh, yes, indeed—it will be easier going than coming.”

  “We won’t try to stop them then?”

  “Oh, no, Adam—not at all. It was a shame that a terrible thing had to happen at your home, but we won’t try to stop them now. Let them march. There are good boys at Concord to move away whatever must be saved, and there will be good, boys at the old North Bridge too, if they should desire to cross it. All in good time, and we’ll be going along now.”

  We marched off again, the old man walking as easily and casually as if there were no redcoat within twenty miles, instead of a thousand of them a stone’s throw away; and I must say that it had its effect upon me. I could feel my mood changing. Where my whole body and every thought had been saturated with grief for my father, now I could feel that same grief hardening like a knot in my belly. Whatever lay ahead of me, I at least began to sense that I would be able to face it; and the old man seemed to know the change in me. He nodded approvingly and said:

  “We are an old race of people, Adam, and there is not any fear that can’t be faced and dealt with. Make yourself compatible with it, and it shrivels. That’s been our way this long time. You might ask yourself, How does old Solomon Chandler know what he knows about the British? Well, I went a-soldiering with them all through the French War, and I learned some knowledge of them, believe me. You know what they called me, laddie?”

  “They call us damn Yankees.”

  “That’s the new learning. Then they called us gillies, which is a Scot word for peasant. Hey, you suffering, thickheaded gillie, damn you! That was a common form of polite address by their officers, who looked down upon us with contempt, in that we were not gentlemen. The artful ways they had! There was one of them, a captain or something of the sort, who once asked my opinion on a matter of the weather. I answered him, It will be fair weather, Jehovah willing—and then he says back to me, What the devil are you gillies, Jews or something, with your damn Jew names and your talk of Jehovah this and Jehovah that?”

  “And what did you say to that?” I wanted to know.

  “Tell you, Adam—I am slow to retort. A man’s better for thinking a bit before he says his piece, and I looked at that redcoat man, up and down, I looked at him, and then I said very quiet and gentle to him, It is only by the mercy of that same Lord God Jehovah that I don’t cut your throat. He saw that I meant it, too.”

  “And did he bother you for it, Solomon?”

  “Heavens, no. He became a gentleman, like he was born and bred to be.”

  We came to the lane that runs north and south, from Lin-coin Town to the Concord Road, and I remembered how, only the autumn before, Father and I had been out hunting in the hours after dawn, and I shot two fat rabbits south on the lane, and we were nigh freezing to death when we got to Cousin Joshua Dover’s house in Lincoln, and there it was for the first time that I had a good drink of hot rum, beat up with butter and sugar.

 
The day before this, I could remember nothing about Father but the birchings and his anger and sarcasm; it was curious that now I recalled so many good things, and discovered that the bad things were not so bad after all.

  Today, as we reached the lane, which was sometimes called the Lincoln Lane and sometimes the Indian Trace, we saw nine men walking up it from the south, all of them with guns and sober faces; and we waited there in the lane for them. Some of them I knew by sight, and one of them was Cousin Joshua Dover and another was his nineteen-year-old son, Mattathias. They grinned when they recognized me, and then they saw from my face that something bitter and sad had happened. We would have our Thanksgiving dinners usually together with the Dovers and the Simmonses and with the family of Mother’s brother, Simon Hatch, so I knew the Dovers well enough. Mattathias took me out with my bird gun the very first day I used it, and instructed me on how to load it and prime it. He was a heavy, slow-moving person, but kind and soft in speech, just as his father was. His father had studied for the pulpit but given it up later to take over his grandfather’s store and flour mill, yet he kept on studying and had the reputation of being the finest Hebrew scholar in Middlesex County. I had heard Father say that he maintained a correspondence with ministers all over New England, and that he was the most consulted man in the colonies when it came to subtle and confusing interpretations of text, and had even made a number of journeys to Providence to check his facts against the old scrolls that the Jews kept there.

  When he saw the expression on my face, he went straight to me and took me by the arms, Solomon Chandler meanwhile explaining the circumstances of our meeting and something about what had happened.

  “Your father?” Cousin Dover asked.

  “They shot him down dead.” I didn’t cry again, I was finished with that. I felt cold and bleak, but I also felt that whatever I did from here on would be done because I willed it so, not because I was a boy who couldn’t control his emotions.

  “I think you had best tell them all about it, hard as it is, Adam,” Solomon Chandler said.

  So I told the story again, but more shortly now, and harder and crisper with the things that had happened. I was angry now. It was a slow thing, this beginning of anger inside of me, and it was not until afterwards that I knew it was happening and growing and curdling.

  When I finished, there was a silence as heavy as sorrow, and no movement or motion but the pressure of Cousin Dover’s arm around my shoulder—just the silence in the pretty country lane, with the bees humming about their spring work and the birds singing and the west wind sighing—and faint, ever so faint in the distance, the rattle of British drums.

  They absorbed it and digested it, and then they composed themselves to it and mixed their horror and anger and indignation. And then they asked questions with the quiet uncertainty of people visiting the home of a friend who had died.

  “How many of our people were slain?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can you guess, boy?”

  “Maybe eight, ten, twenty—there’s no way for me to tell.”

  “Do you know some for certain?”

  “Some.”

  “What were their names, boy?”

  “Caleb Harrington, his son Jonathan, Jonas Parker—he was militia leader for our town—Samuel Hodley, and my father. Maybe the Reverend was slain, I’m not sure.”

  Their faces became even harder, and one or two of them rubbed their eyes and stared at the ground.

  “You’re sure there was no provocation from us?”

  “I saw none. Our guns weren’t cocked. Father and the Reverend, they insisted that the guns be not cocked, and that would prevent accidents from happening.”

  “So they started it.”

  “No matter now,” another said.

  “It’s the finishing now.”

  “Is the news off to Waverly?” Solomon Chandler asked.

  “We sent a rider off with the first gunfire.”

  “Where’s the assembly, Solomon?” asked Cousin Dover.

  “Where we planned for it. South of the Mill Brook fork in Ashley’s Pasture. So come along, I say, come along.”

  Eleven of us now, we marched on, following the cow track that led from the lane to Atkins’ farm. At the farm, there were Levi Atkins, his brother, Seth, his father, old Moses Atkins, and the four Atkins boys. They were armed and ready, and apparently they had been waiting a long while for the men from Lincoln Town.

  Now there were eighteen of us, and we cut through the Hancock Woods toward the Mill Brook. When we came out of the woods, I could have cried out with joy, for there were Cousin Simmons and the Reverend and Tom Dover.

  I don’t know how I can explain what that meant to me. It doesn’t make much sense for me to say that after what had happened on the common, I had the feeling that the whole village had died—not only the dead men who lay on the common, but the whole village dead and gone and never again to be the way it was. It was a heavy and sad feeling, combining with the loss of my father, the loss of everyone else who was dear to me. And when I saw Cousin Simmons and the others from home, that broke and went away; and without shame or care for who was watching, I threw myself into his big arms and let him hold me as tight as if I was a little shaver and he my own father. Then I thought he’d break my ribs, the way he clutched me in those blacksmith arms of his, and when he let go of me, I saw that the tears were pouring down his cheeks.

  “God be praised!” he said.

  The people who were with me watched respectfully. We were not used to war and death in those days. We were plain people, and nothing like this had ever happened to us before. Solomon Chandler took off his hat, shook hands with the Reverend, and suggested that this would be an appropriate time for some sort of benediction. The Reverend wiped his eyes and nodded. Those wearing hats removed them, and the Reverend said quietly:

  “For thy everlasting mercy, Almighty God, we thank thee.”

  Then the hats went back on, and we struck out for Ashley’s Pasture. I heard one of the men from Lincoln comment that it was a short and peculiar benediction, and that he didn’t think much of a preacher who couldn’t draw some moral out of the events of today. But I guess the Reverend could be excused. He had been through a lot, and I know that he had always been fond of me, even though I once overheard him telling Mother that when it came to plain, downright intelligence, I couldn’t hold a candle to my younger brother Levi.

  We were twenty-one strong when we reached Ashley’s Pasture, and there were over thirty men there already and waiting for us, and while we remained there, during the next hour, men kept coming in to join us, by ones and twos and threes—so that eventually there were at least a hundred of us gathered there. They had several breakfast fires going, and the first thing Solomon Chandler and other smokers did was to get hot coals to start their pipes. While the Reverend never actually came out and condemned smoking as part of the devil’s witchery, he did take a very dim view of the practice, and no one in our home had ever smoked. However, when Solomon Chandler offered me a draw on his pipe, I didn’t refuse. I guess it was that morning that I became a smoker.

  The Midday

  THE REVEREND never let a Sunday go by without imploring his congregation to fear God, and that was one of the matters I used to brood upon as a part of passing the time in church. I don’t think that anyone with a fairly honest recollection of his childhood will fail to admit that time passes more slowly at meeting than anywhere else, unless perhaps—as I’ve heard some say—in jail. And one of the things that always plagued me in church was that, no matter how hard I worked at it, I couldn’t truthfully say that I feared God. The way I saw it, He simply did not rate with Father or Mother or darkness or the witch’s house behind the meetinghouse, or the schoolmaster, or old, cantankerous Gideon Phaile, who hated children so much he always whacked away at them with his stick when they came within reach—not with any of them as an object to be feared.

  If we had been High Church, like
some of our more distant relatives in Boston, and had prayed to an impersonal and elegant God, I might have come to the proper attitude; but the Reverend clung to Jehovah as the proper name for what he softly and lovingly would describe as “the Ancient of Days,” and somehow or other, the name Jehovah invoked no menace at all. If one of Mother’s seafaring relatives had turned up and been introduced to me as Jehovah Hatch, I would have considered it natural and not impious. Also, I once overheard Father and the Reverend discussing this very matter, and Father leaned to the opinion that our race—meaning Presbyterians, and some Congregationalists and some Quakers, but mostly Presbyterians—were not afraid of God but of women. “We have established the new matriarchy,” he said, and that led me to Granny for an explanation of what the word meant. “It means your father never grew up,” she said, but then went on to explain it properly. I subsequently decided that there was a good deal of truth in what Father said.

  In any case, I have never seen men really relaxed unless they were in a position secure from intrusion by women. No matter how hard and bad their case might be, they took it as a holiday; and even though what had happened in our town cast a pall over everyone at Ashley’s Pasture, the evil tidings of the massacre could not wholly dissipate the feeling among the people. Something had happened, and more would happen, but here it was in between in the April sunshine and as balmy and sweet a day as Massachusetts had ever known. I felt aggrieved at first that they were not weeping with me in my sorrow, but then I remembered what Solomon Chandler had said and tried to comfort myself with the fact that life continued. I was beginning to understand, though vaguely, that it must continue, even if our common was to become the common of every town in Middlesex.

  The men were all in little groups of relatives and neighbors, some of them toasting bacon over the fires, some cleaning their weapons, some just sprawled out comfortably and chatting. Many of them stopped to say a kind word to me as I passed among them, and here and there, and increasingly so, were men from home who had stood with me through the night on the common. I was amazed at how many were alive and turning up here, for somehow I had the impression that most of us had been slain in the first fire. Plainly, this was not the case.