April Morning

by Howard Fast

  In the course of this, they had fired on us; but I have no memory of that. I had squeezed the trigger of my own gun, and to my amazement, it had fired and kicked back into my shoulder with the force of an angry mule; and then I was adding my own voice to the crescendo of sound, hurling more vile language than I ever thought I knew, sobbing and shouting, and aware that if I had passed water before, it was not enough, for my pants were soaking wet.

  I would have stood there and died there if left to myself, but Cousin Simmons grabbed my arm in his viselike grip and fairly plucked me out of there; and then I came to some sanity and plunged away with such extraordinary speed that I outdistanced Cousin Simmons by far. Everyone else was running. Later we realized that the redcoats had stopped their charge at the wall. Their only hope of survival was to hold to the road and keep marching.

  We tumbled to a stop in Deacon Gordon’s cow hole, a low-lying bit of pasture with a muddy pool of water in its middle. A dozen cows mooed sadly and regarded us as if we were insane, as perhaps we were at that moment, with the crazy excitement of our first encounter, the yelling and shooting still continuing up at the road, and the thirst of some of the men, which was so great that they waded into the muddy water and scooped up handfuls of it. Isaac Pitt, one of the men from Lincoln, had taken a musket ball in his belly; and though he had found the strength to run with us, now he collapsed and lay on the ground, dying, the Reverend holding his head and wiping his hot brow. It may appear that we were cruel and callous, but no one had time to spend sympathizing with poor Isaac—except the Reverend. I know that I myself felt that it was a mortal shame for a man to be torn open by a British musket ball, as Isaac had been, yet I also felt relieved and lucky that it had been him and not myself. I was drunk with excitement and the smell of gunpowder that came floating down from the road, and the fact that I was not afraid now, but only waiting to know what to do next.

  Meanwhile, I reloaded my gun, as the other men were doing. We were less than a quarter of a mile from the road, and we could trace its shape from the ribbon of powder smoke and dust that hung over it. Wherever you looked, you saw Committeemen running across the meadows, some away from the road, some toward it, some parallel to it; and about a mile to the west a cluster of at least fifty militia were making their way in our direction.

  Cousin Joshua and some others felt that we should march toward Lexington and take up new positions ahead of the slow-moving British column, but another group maintained that we should stick to this spot and this section of road. I didn’t offer any advice, but I certainly did not want to go back to where the officer lay with his brains dashed out. Someone said that while we were standing here and arguing about it, the British would be gone; but Cousin Simmons said he had watched them marching west early in the morning, and moving at a much brisker pace it had still taken half an hour for their column to pass, what with the narrowness of the road and their baggage and ammunition carts.

  While this was being discussed, we saw the militia to the west of us fanning out and breaking into little clusters of two and three men as they approached the road. It was the opinion of some of us that these must be part of the Committeemen who had been in the Battle of the North Bridge, which entitled them to a sort of veteran status, and we felt that if they employed this tactic, it was likely enough the best one. Mattathias Dover said:

  “It makes sense. If we cluster together, the redcoats can make an advantage out of it, but there’s not a blessed thing they can do with two or three of us except chase us, and we can outrun them.”

  That settled it, and we broke into parties of two and three. Cousin Joshua Dover decided to remain with the Reverend and poor Isaac Pitt until life passed away—and he was hurt so badly he did not seem for long in this world. I went off with Cousin Simmons, who maintained that if he didn’t see to me, he didn’t know who would.

  “Good heavens, Adam,” he said, “I thought one thing you’d have no trouble learning is when to get out of a place.”

  “I learned that now,” I said.

  We ran east for about half a mile before we turned back to the road, panting from the effort and soaked with sweat. There was a clump of trees that appeared to provide cover right up to the road, and the shouting and gunfire never slackened.

  Under the trees, there was a dead redcoat, a young boy with a pasty white skin and a face full of pimples, who had taken a rifle ball directly between the eyes. Three men were around him. They had stripped him of his musket and equipment, and now they were pulling his boots and jacket off. Cousin Simmons grabbed one of them by the shoulder and flung him away.

  “God’s name, what are you to rob the dead with the fight going on!” Cousin Simmons roared.

  They tried to outface him, but Joseph Simmons was as wide as two average men, and it would have taken braver men than these were to outface him. They blustered, and then took off, and I asked Cousin Simmons who he thought they were.

  “Never saw them before. I tell you they’re no Committee-men, I tell you that, Adam. Most likely, they’re Boston men, the way they behave.” He didn’t think highly of Boston men, for reasons I went into earlier.

  I couldn’t help looking again and again at the face of the dead redcoat. What struck me hardest was how small he was. Perhaps it was his position in death, but he appeared no taller than my brother, Levi, and his purple lips were drawn back from a mouth half toothless. His blue eyes were wide open, and his face was so thin and pinched and starved that I became sick all over again, and wept as I vomited. Cousin Simmons pulled me away, and then as we approached the road, he got down on his knees and crawled. I did as he did, and soon we were in a space between two rocks, with the road a bit beneath us and some fifty paces away.

  There was no powder smoke here now, but westward, where the road ran through a dip, there was a great deal of firing and a whole cloud of smoke. Here, the redcoats were plainly visible as they trudged by, their faces grim and murderous, their scarlet coats no longer bright. Two dead redcoats lay on the edge of the road, on the side away from us. Four others, who were wounded, sat alongside the dead. As they marched, a cart drawn by a brace of mules appeared in the column. The soldiers continued to march, crowding around the cart, while it was loaded with the dead and the wounded. There must have been half a dozen dead bodies already in the cart, and two wounded men shared the space with them. Now two more dead and four more wounded filled the cart to overflowing. We could hear the wounded moaning and cursing in their pain as the cart went by, and Cousin Simmons whispered that war was a dirty and terrible business.

  “We don’t know any of them,” I whispered back. “They’re strangers here in our land. We don’t know who that boy back there is. We’ll never know his name, no one will.”

  “We got to make war on them, Adam.”

  “Then let’s shoot. I can’t stay here like this.”

  His hand gripped my shoulder. “Easy,” he whispered. “Now—one, two—” And then we both fired. A redcoat flung out his hands and fell. Two others yelled in pain from my bird shot, and then the whole column was screaming curses in our direction and loosing a volley of musket fire. We lay pressed to the ground as the balls whined overhead and buried themselves in the trees; and then we leaped up and got out of there, racing through the woods, leaping a stone wall, and then running the length of a pasture and over another stone wall. We lay on the ground then, soaking in our sweat and panting and listening to the cursing rage and the constant sound of gunfire.

  “Water, please,” I begged Cousin Simmons.

  He handed me his bottle and said, “Finish it, Adam. Then we can get water at the Atkins place, over yonder.”

  I drained the whole bottle, stared for a moment at Cousin Simmons, and then said, “No more. Isn’t it enough?”

  “That’s not for me to say, Adam. Listen to the gunfire. That’s our flesh and blood fighting there. Can you walk away from them?”

  “Will it bring my father back?”

  “No, Adam. Noth
ing will bring him back. But we’re not fighting an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. That’s how old Solomon Chandler sees it, but the Scripture is not meant to be taken literally, as some would have it. This is a war, Adam.”

  “Why? Why?”

  “A man’s land is his own, Adam. A man’s place is his own. All we wished when we stood out on the common was to tell them that this was our place. We had no riches or gold or silver. Your father would have said to them, Go home and leave us be. This is our place, our common, our meeting house, and our houses. We are a Committee to defend what is ours. There will be trouble if you march into our land and work your will on us. That’s all he wanted to say to them, but they chose to have it differently, and now it’s too late. The war is all over us.”

  He rose and pointed southward, where a broad wheat field sloped up to the horizon. Men were coming across it. The word went out, and the sound of shots carried farther than you could hear them, and all morning the men had been coming, and still they were coming as the news was passed on.

  We went on to the Atkins place. They had a barn that was less than a quarter of a mile from the road, and on the peaked roof of the barn four riflemen stood, firing as carefully as if they were on a turkey range. Solomon Chandler was one of them, but I no longer felt any warmth toward the old man. I would kill and he would kill, but he took pleasure in the killing. Cold as ice, he stood up there on the roof and picked his targets from the smoky road. He waved to me and shouted:

  “I got me a redcoat officer, laddie boy. There he was up on the road on his prancing horse. Three hundred paces, and I picked him off neat as a feather. The hand of Jehovah reached down and smote him.”

  Another man joined us below and called up to them, “Can you see the whole redcoat army?”

  “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 n
orth, 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.