My Brother Sam is Dead

by James Lincoln Collier

  I went on along like this for around fifteen minutes covering a good mile and maybe more, when I saw a patch of hemlocks bordering the left-hand side of the road. There was a farmhouse on the hillside behind them. Perhaps Father had gone in there for food or something. I considered cutting off the road across the field to go directly to the farmhouse, but then I decided I’d better stick to following the horse tracks, in case. I plowed on until I came to where the hemlocks began to border the road, casting a cool shadow on the snow. There it was written out for me to see as plain as if I were reading it in a book. The road was all a turmoil of mud and snow marked with dozens of hoof-prints. There were more hoofprints in the hemlock grove; and then going on up the road away from me the tracks of three or four horses. The cow-boys had lain in ambush in the hemlock groves, jumped Father, and taken him away someplace.

  I stood there in the snow trying to think, but my mind just stopped working. All I could think was that Father was gone. I began silently to pray, “Oh please, God, oh please.” Then suddenly I realized that the cow-boys might be still around, hiding somewhere and watching me. My neck began to prickle and I swung around and stared off across the fields, then back to the hemlocks. There was nobody. All was silence: no sound of horses, no sound of people talking, no sound of anything but a faint wind breathing in the tops of the hemlocks.

  Why hadn’t they come back for the wagon? Perhaps Father had got them to believe some story. Or perhaps they were going to do something with him first and then come after me and the wagon. What I wanted to do was start running and not stop until I got home. It wasn’t more than twelve or fifteen miles: I could make it in three hours if I pushed. I was scared, that was the truth. It felt so lonely to be by myself with Father gone and maybe dead and nobody but myself to do—to do whatever had to be done. I was too scared even to cry; I just felt frozen and unable to move or think of what I should do next.

  But finally I told myself that I had to stop being scared, I had to stop just standing there in the middle of the road. To get myself shaken awake I jumped up and down a few times and clapped my hands. That unfroze me a little and I began to think.

  The first thing I did was duck back into the hemlocks to hide in case somebody came along. Then I asked myself what Sam would do if it were him, because he’d be brave and smart and do the right thing. And of course Sam wouldn’t go running home. He’d do something daring. The most daring thing to do would be to track down Father, which wouldn’t be too hard in the snow, and rescue him. That would be daring all right: I didn’t have a gun, didn’t have a sword or anything but a knife and a stick.

  Then it came to me that even though rescuing Father was the daring thing to do, it wasn’t the smartest thing. So I asked myself another question: what would Father do? And the answer that came pretty quickly was that he’d get the oxen and the wagon and the load of goods back home if he could so we’d have something to run the store and the tavern on through the winter. When I thought about it for a minute more I could see that it was the right answer. Maybe Father would get away; the cow-boys might even let him go after a while. One way or another he would be counting on me to get the wagon home—that was for certain.

  I jumped out of the hemlock grove and started jogging back toward the wagon. The oxen wouldn’t have strayed; oxen don’t wander when they’re attached to a heavy wagon. The only risk was that somebody had come along and stolen them or made off with the goods. I went along as fast as I could, all the while looking around for signs of people j but there was nobody and in a few minutes I got back to the wagon. Everything was all right. I picked up my stick, banged the oxen on their rumps and they heaved and grunted and started off.

  There wasn’t much point any longer in listening for the cow-boys. I was pretty certain they’d be along sooner or later, after they’d done—done whatever they were going to do with Father. What I had to do was figure out some way of persuading them to leave me and the wagonload alone. I could always run up into the fields and save myself, but the point was to try to get the wagon home so we could earn our livelihood through the winter.

  About half an hour later I came to the hemlock grove and the place along the road where they’d captured Father. Now I began to watch ahead for tracks leading off to the sides of the road where cow-boys might try to ambush me. But I didn’t see anything, and on I went, trying to think of a good story for the cow-boys when they came.

  The sun was beginning to get down in the sky behind me. It would be getting dark soon. Already it was getting cold and a bit of a chill wind was springing up. I was just as glad of the dark, though. There were houses to pass by and little villages to go through and in the dark it would be safer. I planned not to stop for the night, but just push on all the way home. Besides, I didn’t know of anyplace to stop; Father had friends along the way but they were strangers to me. I went on thinking about something to tell the cow-boys; and after a while I began to get an idea.

  On I went, belting the oxen when they slowed down.

  The sun dropped behind the hills in back of me, leaving a red smear on the sky, which slowly turned black. I shivered. I was hungry. There were some more biscuits and jerked beef in a sack in the wagon, and a bottle of wine Mr. Bogardus had given Father for a present. The wine would warm me up a bit. But I decided not to eat or drink anything yet. I knew I was going to be really tired and cold and miserable soon enough, and it would be nice to have the food and the wine to look forward to.

  I was thinking about the wine when I saw the cow-boys. They were sitting on horseback in the middle of the road about twenty yards ahead of me—three black figures stock still in the night. The sight of those unmoving figures shocked me, and I almost ran. But I didn’t. Instead I slapped the oxen on their rumps as if I hadn’t any worries about who was standing in the middle of the road. One of the horses stamped and his bridle jingled in the night.

  I cleared my throat quietly so I wouldn’t sound scared. Then I shouted, “Are you the escort? Am I ever glad to see you.”

  One of them pulled the cover off a lantern he had been holding. A circle of hazy light spilled out into the night, showing bits of horses and faces and guns and the trampled snow. “Pull up the oxen,” the man with the lantern shouted.

  I stopped the oxen up and walked forward a few paces. Then the man with the lantern leaned forward to let the light shine on me. “It’s the boy,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “Father said that the escort would be along soon, but when you didn’t come I was worried that the cow-boys would get to me first.”

  “We’re not the—” one of them started to say.

  “Shut up, Carter,” the man with the lantern said. “Come here, boy.”

  I took a couple of steps forward. Now the lantern was shining in my eyes, and it was hard for me to look up and see their expressions. All I could see was the horses’ legs and the snow. The man’s voice just came out of the glare. “When did your father say the es—we’d be here?”

  “He figured you’d be here an hour ago. That’s why I was so worried. He told me not to worry, but I couldn’t help it. He said that when the shooting started to fall flat and I’d be all right.” I paused “I thought there’d be more of you, though. Father said there’d be at least a half dozen men in the escort. He said just fall flat when the shooting started.”

  There was silence and then one of the others said, “I don’t like this. It sounds like an ambush.”

  The man with the lantern swung around a bit to face him. “Are you going to get scared off by a boy’s story?”

  “What, sir?” I said.

  “Never mind, boy.”

  “Do you have anything to eat, sir?”

  “Shut up, boy.”

  “I don’t like this. Let’s go.”

  The man raised the lantern to look at the others. Now I could see their faces a little. Oh they looked tough—unshaven and dirty, wearing swords and pistols, and muskets tucked in behind their saddles. “Are both of
you going to be scared off by a boy’s story?” he snarled.

  “I still don’t like it. How do you know it’s a story?”

  “Oh stop being a couple of old women.”

  “It isn’t worth the risk, Judson. Let’s leave.”

  “Not worth the risk? There’s a hundred pounds worth of stuff in that wagon.”

  “Judson, stealing rum is a hanging matter. I don’t want to—”

  Just then a dog barked in the distance. The oxen bawled.

  “Damn,” one of them said.

  “It’s them.”

  “It’s just a dog barking,” Judson shouted.

  “I’m not taking the chance.” He wheeled his horse in the snow, and the other did likewise.

  “Damn you men,” Judson said But they had begun to gallop off through the snow. Snarling, he pulled the cover over the lantern, and then he wheeled his horse, too, and disappeared down the road.

  I stood for a moment listening to the sound of their hooves dying out in the snowy road, and then I began to laugh and cry all at once. My hands shook so hard I dropped my stick and my knees were so weak I could hardly walk. I felt terrific, because I’d fooled them; it would be a great story to tell Sam. But everything else was awful—Father being gone and me being alone in the snow and dark and hours to go before I got home. I climbed into the wagon and ate the biscuits and beef and drank about half the bottle of wine. I guess I was sort of drunk, because I just kept putting one foot in front of the other and by midnight I was home.

  HAVING FATHER GONE WAS STRANGE, THE TAVERN SEEMED cold and empty, the way it is when you wake up at night and realize that the fires have gone out. Mother didn’t cry, except right at the beginning, the night I told her what had happened. She went on believing that he was alive. “They had no reason to kill him, Timothy. I believe they’re holding him somewhere. They’ll let him go by and by.” But the days passed and he didn’t come home, and soon she changed her story. “He’s in a prison ship somewhere,” she said. “As soon as this terrible war is over he’ll come home again.”

  I didn’t know whether she was saying what she believed or was just trying to keep me from thinking that my father was dead. Now half the family was gone and our lives were really changed. Mother and I had all the work to do, which meant that there was hardly any time off for either of us. We even had to work on Sunday, which was a sin. “God will forgive us, Tim,” Mother said. “Don’t worry about it, I’m sure of that.” I didn’t tell her that I wasn’t worried.

  But the work worried me all right. There was so much to do—old Pru and the chickens and sheep to take care of and the spring, planting the corn and greens we needed for the tavern, and the cleaning and the cooking. And of course somebody had to be at the tap all the time to draw beer and serve the meals to travelers and make up beds for people who came through needing a place to sleep. There were a lot of people going through, too—messengers going here and there and people moving to different towns and commissary officers and such. So business seemed good, but actually it wasn’t, because a lot of people—the ones on official business—paid in commissary notes which were just pieces of paper that wouldn’t be worth anything at all unless the Rebels won. You couldn’t buy very much with the commissary notes: a lot of people wouldn’t take them, unless they were strong Patriots and felt they ought to in order to show faith in George Washington and the Rebel government.

  Business was good in the store, too. Food was in short supply and so was everything else, and we could sell anything we could get our hands on—cloth, farming tools, wheat, sugar, rum, anything at all. We even started dealing in used goods. Farmers were desperate for everything—shovels, plowshares, candle molds, churns, and all the rest of it. Sometimes Mother would hear of a widow whose husband had died or been killed in the war, and couldn’t manage the farm anymore. She’d be willing to sell us the old farming tools, and we could easily resell them at a good price.

  But even that didn’t help much. Prices kept going up and up, and depreciation of the paper money took a lot of the profit out of it. You’d sell a bag of nails for a shilling, and when you went out to buy some more you’d find that the price had gone up to two shillings. So you came out behind. We’d raise the price of nails and then by the time we were able to get hold of anymore the price would have gone up again, and we’d still be behind. Of course you weren’t supposed to raise prices. The Connecticut General Assembly had made laws about how much you could charge for things. But the laws weren’t any use: if you had to pay two shillings for nails, you couldn’t sell them for two shillings, no matter what the law said. What we did was get around the law by charging the legal two shillings for the nails, or whatever it was, and then charge a shilling more for the bag we sold them in. It wasn’t really honest, but we didn’t have any choice. The whole thing really made me feel pretty sick, working that hard from sunrise to sunset and never being able to get ahead. But there was nothing we could do about it except to pray every night that the war would end soon, and Father and Sam would come home again.

  We spent a lot of time trying to get letters to Sam. Mother figured that once Sam realized that his own side had captured or maybe even killed his father he’d come home and help manage things. “He should be tired of playing soldier boy by now,” Mother said. “I should think that glory would have worn off.” She had a talk with Colonel Read about it. Colonel Read had been head of a whole regiment of militia, but he’d quit the job. He said it was because he was too old, but everybody knew that was just an excuse: he’d quit because he was against the war and didn’t want to fight in it. He was a Patriot, but he didn’t approve of the war.

  He said to my mother, “Mrs. Meeker, even if you can persuade him to come home, they may not let him.”

  “That doesn’t seem right.”

  “Of course Sam could claim it was a hardship case—the father gone and only the younger brother left at home. But the fact that Mr. Meeker is considered a Tory won’t help.”

  Mother said, “If he’s got the brains he was born with he won’t tell them that, will he, Colonel Read?”

  Colonel Read smiled. “I don’t imagine he will, Mrs. Meeker.”

  But I wasn’t so sure anybody was going to be able to change Sam’s mind to begin with. He’d got himself set to win the war and throw the British out of the country so we could be free, and when Sam was determined he usually stuck to things. Pigheaded was what some people called him, but not me. Of course I still hadn’t figured out what he was fighting for. It seemed to me that we’d been free all along. What had the English government ever done against me? I thought about that a lot, and I never could find any way they’d hurt me that had mattered very much. Naturally in church we had to pray for the King and Parliament and that was a nuisance because it made the prayers go on longer. As a matter of fact, we weren’t supposed to pray for the King and Parliament anymore. The Assembly had declared that it was treason to pray for them. But Mr. Beach was pretty brave even though he was over seventy-five years old, and he went on praying for them anyway. A couple of times Rebels had come into the church and pulled him down from the pulpit and pushed him around, but he didn’t care. He made us pray for the King and Parliament just the same.

  Still, besides having extra prayers I couldn’t think of anything the King had made me do that I didn’t want to. But that wasn’t the way Sam felt about it, and I wasn’t exactly sure he’d come home even when he finally found out that Father was gone. There was only one way to find out, so we kept trying to get messages to him. We asked Betsy Read to tell him about Father if she got in touch with him, but she didn’t know where he was anymore than we did.

  So there were a lot of changes in our lives, but the biggest was the one that was happening inside myself. Ever since I had got the wagon home by myself I hadn’t felt like a boy anymore. You don’t think that things really happen overnight, but this one did. Of course I was dead tired when I went to bed that night, and Mother let me sleep late in the morn
ing. And when I woke up I was different. I noticed it first at breakfast. Usually I sat there over my porridge moaning to myself about the chores I had to do or having to go to school or something, and trying to think of some way to get out of whatever it was. Or when Mother turned her head I’d scoop up a fingerful of molasses from the jar and stir it into my milk. Or I’d eat breakfast slowly so I could stall off going to work.

  But that morning after the terrible trip home, right from the first moment we got finished saying grace, I began planning the things I had to do—which things had to be done first and what was the best way to get them done. It was funny: it didn’t even cross my mind to stall or try to get out of the work. I didn’t wait for Mother to tell me what to do: I brought the subject up myself. “I’ve got to get the wagon unloaded right away,” I told her. “Everything will get damp sitting out there in the barn. Maybe I can get Jerry Sanford to help me roll the barrels down.”

  Mother nodded. I think she must have been surprised to hear me talk like that, but she didn’t let on. “You’ll need somebody bigger than Jerry. Perhaps you can hire Sam Smith’s Negro, Ned.”

  We discussed it all, and about halfway through breakfast I began to realize that I had changed. I wasn’t acting my usual self, I was acting more like a grownup. You couldn’t say that I was really an adult, but I wasn’t a child anymore, that was certain. I thought about showing off in front of Sam when he came home. I’d say things like, “Well, Sam, we’ve decided not to put in oats this year, we’re going to use the space for corn.” Or, “We’re not keeping the kitchen fire going all the time—I haven’t got enough time for woodcutting as it is.” I would be the one who knew about things, not him.

  But even though it was nice to feel more grown-up and act that way, too, I missed Father. Especially toward the end of the day, when I was tired and cold and hungry and there was still wood to be brought up and the barn to be cleaned and Old Pru to be milked, I’d begin feeling sorry for myself and wishing that Father was back. I’d imagine that if I looked up I’d suddenly see him striding into the barnyard, and I’d look up, but he wouldn’t be there. I’d stand there feeling disappointed, even though I’d really known he wouldn’t be there, and I’d get angry with the Rebels for starting the war and angry with Sam for going to play soldier and have the glory while I had to do all the work at home. It wasn’t fair. It would make me curse and I didn’t care whether cursing was a sin.