by Howard Fast
The Afternoon
WE 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.
Then Solomon Chandler sang out, so that everyone would hear him, “One thing, lads, the British are there now—but not for long! The last of them will be out before the hour’s up!”
“Why?”
“Because it makes sense. Either they’re back in Boston by darkness or they’ll never be back there again!”
The men let out a cheer to that. Everyone wanted to find a reason to extract a crumb of comfort. And just then, three Committeemen on horseback came riding up. They had a force of a hundred men from Watertown and Cambridge, and they were waiting down along the Menotomy Road, just about a mile from where we were. They told us that a relief army of redcoats from Boston, fifteen hundred of them, had gone by about an hour ago into Lexington, and that before another hour was up they’d probably all be marching down the road and back to Boston. They were out to find everyone they could, so that the redcoats would retain a good and substantial memory of the Menotomy Road.
“And you found us, you did,” Solomon Chandler grinned.
That broke the tension. Everyone began to talk and shout and swear and wave their guns. It was a wild mood that took hold of the men, as if they realized, as Cousin Simmons had put it, that there was no more undoing of what had been done.
Solomon Chandler climbed onto his horse and shouted, “Follow me, laddies!” and then we all streamed after him, down off the hillock and toward the Menotomy Road. I didn’t want to go, yet I went. We all went. We were in the grip of a force outside of ourselves. I know that my heart was breaking with anxiety over the burning of the village, and I tried to give myself strength and purpose by telling myself that everything that I had ever loved was destroyed or dead, and I might as well be dead too.
There was a place our people had in mind where the Menotomy Road dips between two banks of earth, with a great tangle of wild blackberry bushes on one side and a windfall of dead trees on
the other. I knew the place well, because the bramble patch made for the best rabbit hunting in the whole neighborhood, and many was the time Father and I hiked down there for an early morning’s shooting. Now the plan was to drag enough fallen trees across the road to block it, and then back the trees up with rocks and dirt. With such a breastwork, we felt we could hold the British long enough for a considerable army of Essex men, who were said to be marching in under the leadership of Colonel Pickering, to reach us. I suppose that there was some vague possibility that the plan might have worked; in any case, it was the only plan of any sort that emerged from that incredible and catch-as-catch-can day of battle. Everything else that happened was the result of some sudden notion of this or that Committee-man; and the only reason that the battle went on hour after hour was that no one was in any position to halt it or direct it. It was perfectly true that before the reinforcements reached the first redcoat army, they wanted to surrender. They were just about going out of their minds, plagued by an enemy they couldn’t see, unable to use any tactics of battle they had learned or practiced in Europe, shooting away all their ammunition at stone walls, woods, and thickets, and losing almost a quarter of their number in dead and wounded. But there was no one they could surrender to, no one they could talk to or parley with; and when one of them came to the roadside west of Lexington with a white flag, he was shot dead by Abraham Clyde of Concord, who thought the white flag was only another one of the various regimental flags the redcoats carried.
So our plan might have worked and everything that followed might have been different, if the British hadn’t already started down the Menotomy Road before we reached it. We were still a quarter of a mile away when we heard the Watertown and Cambridge men banging away at them.
Cousin Simmons and I and four or five of the others crawled into the windfall, and wriggled our way through the tangle of trees until we got a view of a few yards of the road. We were as well hidden there as a fox in her earth, about sixty or seventy paces from the road, and we began to shoot at the redcoats passing by. It was a strange and dreamlike business, lying there and seeing bits of red color emerge from the powder smoke that hung all over the place and over the road as well, then watching everything disappear under the smoke and only the smoke to shoot into, and then a bit of red here or a bit of red there—and such a feeling of a world gone mad, for there was nothing the redcoats could do but march on and accept their measure of death—and the bulk of our Committeemen running down the road from place to place, so that they were always with the army, like flies on a dying beast.
But we, our little group of people, remained in our cover—for there was no way that the redcoats could reach us, and most of us were too tired now to go on running back and forth along the road. We lay there and fired at the redcoats and the smoke; or at least Cousin Simmons and the others did; I fired off my fowling piece once, and then I realized that at this range, even if some of the bird shot did reach the redcoats, it would sting no harder than a mosquito. It was a great relief to find some sensible reason not to go on shooting. I burrowed into the ground behind a fallen tree, rested my cheek against the stock of my gun, listened to the shooting and screaming and cursing—more profanity in five minutes than one heard in our village in the course of a year—and then fell asleep.
It might strike you as strange that I could fall asleep right in the midst of a battle; and you might even consider it downright ungracious that anyone should go to sleep during a battle as talked about and lied about and written about as this one; but the fact of the matter was that I had gone without a night’s sleep, and been through the massacre on the common, and had quartered back and forth across the country since then like a fox driven to distraction—so that the wonder of it was, not that I had finally fallen asleep, but that I had managed to remain awake as long as this.
I was awakened by the silence. I guess it was the first silence in six or seven hours, and it was just unbelievable and a little frightening as well.
I don’t mean that it was a complete and total silence, or anything unnatural or spooky. There were sounds in the distance and in the background, as there always are, but even these sounds were muffled by the tangled pile of trees; and missing were the violent and awful sounds of battle, the crash of firearms and the savage shouting and swearing of men in anger and pain. When I listened more carefully, I thought I could still hear battle sounds, but far off and very faint. It was still daylight outside, but under the windfall there was a sort of comforting twilight, and being used to gauging time without a pocket watch, I had a feeling that at least an hour had passed.
I lay still for a little while after I awakened, luxuriating in the peace, and then I heard the noise of twigs and branches breaking, men making their way into the windfall, and voices; first the voice of the Reverend:
“God be kind to us, Joseph, and merciful. I tell you frankly that I don’t have the courage to go back to Goody Cooper and tell her that her son as well as her husband lies dead today.”
“What about myself?” Cousin Simmons answered him. “Aside from having the boy’s blood on my own conscience, I’ll have to face her. Why didn’t you send him home? she’ll ask me.”
“The boy’s blood isn’t on your conscience, Joseph. No man’s blood is on anyone’s conscience today—unless it be on the conscience of the Englishmen who made the first slaughter on the common.”
“You don’t know Goody Cooper, Reverend.”
“Where did you see him last? Where did you leave him?”
“Trouble is, Reverend, I don’t think I ever knew a better or more uncomplaining boy.”
“He was a good boy, Joseph. No question about that.”
“It just shakes my faith in the Almighty to think of the innocent cut down like this.”
“Nothing should shake your faith, Joseph. His ways are inscrutable.”
“Uncomplaining, Reverend. When you consider all that boy went through since last night—”
At first, it was pleasant and rewarding to lie there and listen to them talk about me in the past tense. I guess there never was a boy who didn’t imagine himself dead, so that he could take comfort out of the fine things said about him. But there was a note in their voices that made me wonder whether they had the same respect for my intelligence as for my forbearance. I sat up and called out to them.
“God be praised!” the Reverend cried.
Helping me to my feet, Cousin Simmons asked if I was wounded.
“No, sir. I’m all right.”
“Then what on earth happened to you, Adam?”
“I fell asleep.”
They both of them stared at me open-mouthed.
“You what?”
“I fell asleep,” I repeated. “I just fell asleep.”
“So long as you’re all right,” the Reverend said.
They helped me out of the windfall, and I asked Cousin Simmons about the battle.
“It’s down past Cambridge by now, and the Committeemen are marching in from all over. If the redcoats get back to Boston, they’re there to stay. There’ll be five thousand of our men around Boston before nightfall.”
“Then can we go home?” I asked him.
“We’re all going home, Adam—there’s others had more sleep and more rest.”
But what I would be coming home to I didn’t know; and for all I knew, the town could be in ashes and everyone dear to me, dead.
When I saw the tower of the meetinghouse, I felt better, and then I saw the Parker barns on the outskirts of town, and I told myself that if they had burned one, they would have burned the other too. You might think we would run in our haste to be there and see what had happened, but you don’t hurry for bad news. Also, we were tired, all three of us. So we came up to the town slowly, and bit by bit we realized that it still stood, only the three houses that I spoke of before burned down.
I left Cousin Simmons and the Reverend to go to my own house. We were not the only ones returning to the village. Others
came across the fields, and still others were trudging wearily up the Menotomy Road—and all of them could be denned by a sort of tired sadness that was evident in the way they walked and the way they trailed their guns. We had won the battle, but there is less joy in winning a battle than the history books tell you.
“Best to go home, Adam,” the Reverend said. “I will come by and pay my respects later.”
I would have begged them to come along with me and not leave me with the task of facing what awaited me alone, but when I looked at them, I had no heart to. Both of them had aged woefully. Their faces were gray and drawn, covered with a stubble of beard, with dirt and grime and dried blood. Their clothes were torn and filthy, and their eyes were red with fatigue and gunpowder irritation. I felt that I must present as dreadful an appearance, but I was younger than they were, and nothing can feel as superior as youth.
So I nodded and left them, and walked toward the house, approaching it from the back, where the herb garden was. Levi must have been watching and waiting for me. My own sight was blurred, for the sun was already low and burning into my eyes, and I heard him before I saw him. Shouting, “Adam! Adam! Adam!” he hurtled toward me and plunged into my arms, and I just let my gun drop and hugged him as if he was everything in the world. He was crying, and I began to cry too. I sat down on the ground, still holding him tight, and did my best to stop my tears. I knew that it would be only moments before I had to face Mother, and I didn’t want it to be with tears in my eyes. I could imagine that there had been tears enough for that day.
“We thought you were dead,” Levi sobbed. “There was a big damn fool from, Concord come by here before, and he said he saw you lying dead up at the crossroads.”
“Do I look dead?”
“Oh, Adam—I don’t want you dead.”
“Well, I’m not dead. I’m alive. I may be tired to death, but I’m alive.”
“I don’t want you dead, Adam.”
“Stop saying that I’m dead, because I’m not dead.” I shook him, and he looked up at me and managed to smile through his tears. Then I got to my feet, and there, at the edge of the herb garden, Mother was standing with Granny next to her, Granny’s arm around her to hold her up, and Mother’s face as white as snow. Her mouth was open a little, the lips trembling. Granny just stared at me, shaking her head slightly.
