My Brother Sam is Dead

by James Lincoln Collier

  I understood that, but I wasn’t going to give in. “Your family ought to be more important than your friends.”

  He looked embarrassed, but he didn’t say anything.

  “I think you’re a coward,” I said. I didn’t really think that—anybody who joined the army to fight couldn’t be a coward, but I was still angry at him.

  “No, I’m not,” he said.

  To tell the truth, it was me who was being the coward. Now that I’d got calmed down a little, I was afraid of what I might find when I went home. Suppose I walked in and found Father lying on the floor with a hole in his stomach bleeding to death, and maybe Mother dead, too. “All right, Sam, if you’re not a coward, come home with me and see if everything is all right.”

  He thought about it. “I’ll go as far as the barn with you.” Swiftly he loaded up the Brown Bess, with powder from the horn slung around his neck and pouch of shot he had dangling from his belt, and rammed it home with a ramrod.

  It impressed me, the casual easy way he did it. “Did you ever kill anybody, Sam?”

  He looked embarrassed again. “We haven’t done any fighting yet.”

  We set off across the snow fields, uphill and down, the way I’d come. Sam set a pretty good pace. He was hard and strong and used to it, from all the marching he’d done, and I had a hard time keeping up; but I was glad to go fast because I was so worried about Father. In fifteen minutes we came to our road, crossed it, and circled around back of the house. We ducked into the barn and stared at the tavern. There was smoke coming out of the chimney, but that was all—no sounds, no sign of men, no horses.

  “Nothing happening,” Sam said.

  “Come on in with me and see,” I said.

  “It’s risky, Tim.”

  “There’s nobody around,” I said.

  He stared at me. We both knew it was his job to go in because he was the older brother. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  We darted across the barnyard and into the kitchen, and all of a sudden there was Father standing there, the line of blood drying on his face. He and Sam stood five feet apart, staring at each other. Then Sam turned and ran. “Sam,” Father shouted. “Come back, Sam.”

  But Sam raced across the barnyard and then began pounding over the snowy field toward the woodlot, the Brown Bess under his arm. Father and I ran out into the barnyard and watched him go. Father knew he couldn’t catch Sam. We watched him until he got to the stone wall at the edge of our pasture. He jumped up on it and stood there looking back at us. Then suddenly he waved, jumped down from the wall, and disappeared into the woodlot.

  UP TO THAT TIME THE WAR HADN’T BEEN VERY REAL. I MEAN I knew it was going on because of stories in the Connecticut Journal, and from tales we heard in the tavern—stories travelers would tell us about somebody being killed or suddenly coming across some fresh bodies in a field. One man who stopped with us had been at the Battle of Lexington and had been wounded in the knee there. He walked with a limp, and he had the ball that wounded him on a string around his neck. And of course Sam wasn’t the only one from Redding who’d joined the militia; there were others, and every once in a while you’d hear about this one or that one having been in a battle and maybe having been killed or wounded.

  But none of them were people I really knew and so the war had always seemed to me like a story—something that happened in some faraway place or faraway time, and didn’t have anything to do with me. But after the search for weapons, I had a different feeling about it: it was real and it could come home to me, too.

  Luckily, the troops hadn’t really hurt anybody: a few of the men who’d put up a fuss like Father had got punched around a little, and Father had that cut which left a very thin scar you could hardly see. But even if nobody had got hurt, the people in Redding were good and angry about losing so many of their guns. Guns were valuable. It wasn’t so much a matter of hunting—there wasn’t too much game around, although some farmers occasionally got a deer or a muskrat for the pot. Mostly people wanted guns to go after the wolves that sometimes came down into the pastures after lambs, and for general protection.

  The worst part of it was that food was already beginning to get short. Army commissary officers, like the one Sam was working for, were buying up a lot of the livestock to feed the troops. Sometimes soldiers would just take a couple of cows out of somebody’s fields without paying for them, too. Both sides did it—the Patriots and the Tories. They weren’t supposed to, they were always supposed to pay, but a lot of time at the end of a day’s march they’d find that there wasn’t anything for them to eat, and they’d just go out into a field, butcher a couple of cows, cut them up and carry them off to camp on their shoulders. It was a terrible thing to lose your milking cows because it meant no more milk or butter or cheese. There wasn’t anything anyone could do about it, though. Oh, whenever it happened the people would get up a petition and complain, but it never did much good because the soldiers were gone and the beef was eaten.

  By January of 1776 food was getting to be a real problem for us, too. It wasn’t so much that we were going hungry, but that the meat and flour and rum and beer and everything else we needed to run the tavern and the store kept going up and up in price all the time. This forced us to raise our prices; then prices would go up again, and we’d have to raise them some more.

  But still, the worst part of the war was missing Sam. Of course he’d been gone at college before, so I’d got used to the idea of having to do his share of the work and all that. But when he was at Yale I didn’t have to worry about him all the time—worry that he’d be shot or get sick and die or something else. Although to tell the truth, I envied him, too. I could picture him in my mind standing on top of the stone wall by the woodlot, the Brown Bess cradled under his arm, waving at us.

  He seemed so brave and grown-up, and I wished that I could be brave and grown-up like him, too. I didn’t like the idea of being shot at or wounded or killed very much, but it seemed to me that it must feel wonderful to be able to load up a gun in the casual way he did it. I knew that to a younger brother everything your older brother does seems wonderful. I remember being little and watching Sam milk Old Pru and admiring him and thinking how clever he was. And then it got to be my turn to learn how to milk Old Pru, and I found out that there wasn’t any glory to it; it was just hard work and made your hands ache. So I guess that being a soldier probably didn’t have much glory to it, either, that it was mostly just a lot of hard work. But still, I envied Sam, and I wished I were old enough to do something glorious, too.

  So time passed and the war went on. Sometimes we’d read about Patriot victories and other times about Tory victories. It all seemed confused. It was hard to tell who was really winning—partly because sometimes both sides claimed to have won the same battle. Father said, “The Rebels are damn fools, how can they expect to beat the whole British army? They can win these skirmishes in the woods, but as soon as the British catch them in pitched battle they’ll be done for, and no good can come out of it but a lot of men dead.” Sometimes Patriot militiamen would come through Redding, and usually the officers would come into the tavern for a mug of beer, but they never bothered anybody, they just went away again. I’d stand at the door and watch them go; and I wondered, if I went for a soldier, which army would I join? The British had the best uniforms and the shiny new guns, but there was something exciting about the Patriots—being underdogs and fighting off the mighty British army.

  So it became spring; and one April morning in 1776 Mr. Heron came into the tavern with Tom Warrups. There was a soft rain falling and a fire burning in the fireplace. Father was rushing a chair seat, and I was helping him. It all seemed warm and cozy.

  Father stopped his work. “Good morning, Mr. Heron,” he said. Father was always polite to Mr. Heron. He’d been to Trinity College in Dublin, and he was a surveyor. He’d been elected to the General Assembly in Hartford, but he’d been pushed out of it by the Patriots for being a Tory. He was
rich, too, although nobody knew where he got his money from. He owned a black man and he had other servants besides.

  “Good morning, Life,” he said to Father. Then he noticed me. “Good morning, Tim.”

  “Good morning, sir,” I said.

  “Life, you’ve got a smart boy there. Smart as Sam if he wanted to be. I hope he’s going on with school.”

  My father shrugged. “I’d like him to, but I can’t spare him from here every day.”

  Mr. Heron may have wanted me to go on with my schooling, but I wasn’t so sure of it myself. I figured I was as smart as Sam, but I didn’t have as much interest in school as he had. I liked ciphering all right, but I didn’t care much for spelling and studying the Bible and memorizing psalms.

  “Oh Sam’s smarter than I am, sir,” I said, just to be modest.

  “I like to see him in school when I can,” Father said, “but I need him here a good deal. I can’t run the tavern without him.”

  “Still, it’s a shame to waste talent. I could make a surveyor out of him if he’d apply himself. Perhaps I might take him on as an apprentice in a year or two, once he’s learned to cipher.”

  Being a surveyor was a good thing. You could make a lot of money. Father said that surveyors always knew about the good deals on land and could get rich speculating. So that part of it sounded good; but I wasn’t so sure about all that studying. “I don’t know if I’m smart enough,” I said, mostly to be modest again.

  “Certainly you are, Tim.” He sat down at the long table. “Tim, how about getting me a pint of beer? And one for Tom, too.”

  Tom Warrups did spare work for Mr. Heron; sometimes he ran messages for him, too. He didn’t sit because he was only an Indian, but stood leaning against the wall. I got mugs down from the shelf and filled them, and served them around, including one for Father. He sat down at the table, too, and I went back to rushing the chair.

  “What do you hear from Sam?” Mr. Heron said.

  “Nothing,” Father said. I knew he didn’t want to talk about Sam, but he couldn’t be rude to Mr. Heron.

  “He never writes?”

  “No.”

  They weren’t paying any attention to me. I took a quick glance at Tom Warrups. He was standing there holding his mug of beer, his face blank. I couldn’t figure out which side he was on. He lived on Mr. Read’s land, and Mr. Read was a Patriot. But he ran messages for Mr. Heron, and Mr. Heron was a Tory.

  “It’s a shame about Sam,” Mr. Heron said.

  My father shrugged, but didn’t say anything.

  Mr. Heron must have known that Father didn’t want to talk about Sam, but he said, “Perhaps there’d be a way of finding out where he is.”

  “If he wants to see us he knows where we live.”

  Mr. Heron nodded. “Actually I didn’t come to talk about Sam. I want to talk about Tim. I have a little job I thought Tim might do for me. I need a boy to walk down to Fairfield for me.”

  I watched Father’s face. His eyes got narrow and he stared straight ahead. “Why a boy, Mr. Heron? What’s wrong with Tom?”

  Heron shrugged. “Pretty hard for a strange Indian to walk down there without getting stopped every five miles. Nobody’s going to bother a boy.”

  It was a scary idea, but exciting. It would be a real adventure. But of course I knew that I wasn’t supposed to have any opinion in the matter so I kept my mouth shut.

  “What’s he going to be carrying?” Father said.

  “Oh just some business letters,” Mr. Heron said casually. “Nothing important.”

  Father said nothing, but stared down into his beer. Mr. Heron took a drink. Then he said, “There’s no danger, Life, nobody’s going to bother a boy.”

  “Business letters,” Father said.

  “Yes. Business letters.”

  I couldn’t keep my mouth shut any longer. “I can do it, Father. I can walk down there tomorrow morning and be back by suppertime.”

  “Be quiet, Tim.”

  “I’d pay him a shilling.”

  My father stared into his beer again and then slowly he began to shake his head. “No, Mr. Heron,” he said.

  “No. I’ve got one mixed up in this bloody war already. I’m not going to let the other one go.”

  Mr. Heron paused before he spoke. “I said they were business letters, Life. Business letters.”

  Father stared at him. “No, Mr. Heron. No.”

  When Father said no he meant no. It disappointed me. It would have been a good adventure walking down to Fairfield on my own. It was on Long Island Sound. I’d only been there two or three times in my life, when I’d gone down with Father and Sam to buy rum. Carrying letters down to Fairfield would give me something to boast about to Sam. But Father had said no. That was that and Mr. Heron knew it.

  Mr. Heron finished his beer, and stood up. “I had more faith in you than that, Life,” he said. “I thought I could count on you. We’re all making sacrifices these days.”

  My father was standing, too. “I’ve made a sacrifice, Mr. Heron, I’ve lost a son. You know I have no love for the Rebels, but this is one war I’m not going to fight.”

  Mr. Heron nodded, and he and Tom Warrups left. I picked up the beer mugs to clean them. “I wish you’d have let me go, Father. Nothing would have happened to me.”

  Father put his hand on my shoulder. “Those weren’t business letters, Tim.”

  “What?” I was surprised.

  “I don’t know what Heron’s game is. He talks like a Tory all right, but it doesn’t all quite make sense. Best thing is not to get involved with him. You can be sure any letters he’s sending around aren’t just about ordinary business. Now let’s forget that he ever came in here.”

  He stared into my eyes and I stared back. “Yes, Father,” I said.

  But I couldn’t forget about it. Mr. Heron had wanted me to carry some sort of war messages or spy reports or something, and that night as I lay in bed in the loft, I thought about it. Oh, it would scare me all right, walking down to Fairfield with spy messages, but I wanted to do it, because it would give me something to boast about to Sam. He’d been having all the adventures, he was going to come home with terrific stories about being in the army and fighting and all that, and I wanted to have something to tell, too. Why should he have all the glory? Why shouldn’t I have some, too? I wanted him to respect me and be proud of me and not think of me as just his little brother anymore. I couldn’t score telling points in debates the way he did, but I could be just as brave as he was and do daring things, too.

  It made me angry with Father for not letting me go. It wasn’t right—not with what Sam was doing. Of course Father hadn’t let Sam go; Sam had run away. But still it made me angry and thinking about it, I slammed the bed with my fist. If only I could find a way to sneak off for a day.

  I thought about it some more the next morning when I was milking Old Pru and the more I thought about it the angrier I got. By the time I had got Pru milked and driven out to the pasture, and fed the chickens and collected the eggs, and hung the milk down the well to keep it cool, I was plain boiling. It wasn’t fair, that was all. And when I got back to the house I was angry enough to stand up to Father.

  He was sitting at the taproom table drinking tea. I faced him and stood up as straight as I could. “Father, why can’t I carry messages for Mr. Heron? You’re on the Tory side, too.”

  He glanced at me and then blew on his tea to cool it. “Because I said so.”

  “That’s no reason,” I said.

  He stared at me. “If you don’t stop arguing with me, I’ll thrash you, Timmy.”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “If we’re supposed to be Loyalists, we should help—”

  He slammed his fist down on the table and then jerked his thumb toward his chest. “I’ll manage the politics in this family,” he said.

  “Father—”

  “Timothy, goddamn it I’m going to—” And then he stopped, and I knew why. He’d shouted at Sam and Sam
had run away. He was scared that if he shouted at me I’d run away, too. “Tim, please,” he said calmly as he could. “It’s dangerous. You think that because you’re only a child they won’t hurt you, but they will. They’ve been killing children in this war. They don’t care. They’ll throw you in a prison ship and let you rot. You know what happens to people on those prison ships? They don’t last very long. Cholera gets them or consumption or something else, and they die. Tim, it isn’t worth it.”

  I knew he was right, that it wasn’t worth taking the chance. I wanted to do it anyway. But there wasn’t any use in arguing about it with Father.

  Two weeks later I figured out how to do it. I was out on the road in front of the tavern trying to clean the mud and dirt off the boards we laid down there in the spring, when Jerry Sanford came up the road.

  “Where are you going?” I said.

  “The shad are running,” he said. He held out a coil of fishing line with hooks and weights attached. “Father said I could try my hand at it.”

  “You’re lucky. Look what I have to do.”

  “Ask your father if you can go.”

  “He won’t let me. There’s too much to do around the tavern.”

  “Ask him.”

  So I went inside to where he was holystoning the taproom table. “Father, Jerry Sanford is going after shad. Can I go?”

  “You’ve got a lot of things to do here.”

  “If we caught a lot we could salt them down.”

  He thought about it. “All right, go. It would be a nice change to have some fish chowder.”

  So we went back to Jerry’s house and got another line and some hooks, and then walked down to the millstream, which was really the Aspetuck River. There was a dam there for the mill, and below the dam a couple of hundred yards was a large pool. In the spring the shad ran upriver to breed, but they couldn’t get past the milldam, and the pool was just swarming with them. We caught dozens. We had a terrific time. Father was pleased. He really enjoyed fish chowder. But best of all, I had my excuse to get away.