April Morning (18 page)

“You go there, Ruthie,” she told her daughter, “and tell him we're here.”

“Shall I take him upstairs?” Mrs. Cartwright asked Mother.

Mother didn't respond, but the Widow Susan nodded, and Mrs. Cartwright took my hand and led me up the stairs and into the main bedroom, where Father's body was laid out on the bed.

At first, I was frightened to death and would have given ten years of my life not to have to go into that room. I held back at the doorway. Mrs. Cartwright cooed at me, “Come, come, now. Nothing to be afraid of. It's birth, marriage, and death. Always has been that way and always will. Some day your own children will look at you all stretched out and washed and combed, and how do you suppose they're going to feel? Now come right in here, Adam.”

It was poor consolation, but at least it turned my mind from my fear and reluctance to an old, established, and ever-increasing dislike of Mrs. Cartwright. I was able to assure myself that she was unquestionably the most repulsive and insensitive old lady in Middlesex County, and that was some small comfort. I walked into the room and looked down at Father.

“Pay your respects,” she cackled.

“Oh, get out of here and leave me alone, Mrs. Cartwright!” I snapped at her.

“What? Well, I do declare,” she began, and I interrupted her and told her in no uncertain terms to get out. Then she left, muttering and coughing with indignation.

I was left alone then with my father, who was not my father but a body, with all that was meaningful and important gone out of it. It was the ending of a day when I had seen many bodies, bodies of redcoats and bodies of Committeemen. All my life long, death had only touched me lightly, but I had lived all day with death today. I was too numb to be moved any more. I didn't even want to weep. Later and many times afterward, I would remember my father, but not the corpse on the bed.

I left the room then, closing the door gently behind me.

When I returned to the kitchen, Mother had composed herself, and Granny came over to me, took my hand, and squeezed it. All the other women had gone. I guess the Simmons women went to greet Cousin Joseph; even though he hadn't been killed, he deserved at least an acknowledgment of his return. Mrs. Cartwright must have stalked out in anger. Levi stood in a corner. He couldn't take his eyes off me.

“You must be hungry,” Mother said.

“I am, but I'm dirtier than I'm hungry. I just don't believe I'm home without you remarking on it, Mother.”

“I guess it could suffer to be remarked on,” Mother nodded, looking at me now the way she would normally regard her son, and not the way you look at someone returned from the dead. “I have seen you dirty before, Adam Cooper, but not this dirty. That's your new coat, isn't it?”

“It is. That's right, Mother.”

“How did you tear your shirt that way?” Granny asked me.

“Crawling on my belly through a windfall.”

“Indians have bellies,” Granny said, fighting her own battle with her own torment, and fighting it gallantly, “but in our family people have had stomachs for as many generations as we care to contemplate.”

“Yes, ma'am,” I nodded. “I would have said stomach. It was the excitement.”

“What excitement? As far as I know, the excitement is over. Where is the redcoat army?”

“Back in Boston, the way I hear it.”

There was a momentary, passing glitter in Granny's old eyes, and then civilization reasserted itself. “Back in Boston, you say?”

“Where we drove them. We drove them out—every foot of the way, and all the way back to Boston.”

“How many did you kill, Adam?” Levi cried.

“As for you,” Mother said to Levi, “there's more important things than shouting gibberish like a heathen. Take a pail and bring more water in here. Your brother's going to wash.”

Levi nodded, grabbed a pail, and ran out. I felt sorry for him. Not only did he have to bear the death of Father, which would weigh more heavily upon him than on me, but he must have experienced his first day of taking the kind of tongue-lashing that I considered a normal part of my existence.

“I want no talk of killing in this house,” Mother said to me. “The Committee will do what has to be done, and I am ready to accept that. But I will not have people in my home talking as if we had shed the last vestige of our Christianity and become barbarians. If the redcoats were defeated, it was because God willed their defeat and because the awful hand of Jehovah smote them—not because you and others were out there behaving as if you had never known the shelter of a decent Christian home. I will have no boasting and bragging over the death of any human being, whether our people or their people, and I will thank you to remember that, Adam Cooper.”

It relieved me enormously to hear Mother talk that way in just that tone. It meant that she was becoming her old self again, that she would pull herself out of her grief, and that our home would be more than I had hoped for. As for the hand of Jehovah, that was not anything to provoke an argument about—especially since the Reverend was bound to support her. For my part, I was so weary and confused at this point, and my recollection of the day was so chaotic, that I was willing to give credit due to anything that had helped us through it.

“Take off your coat,” Mother said. Granny, meanwhile, put wood in the hearth and filled another kettle with water. Mother stared at my shirt helplessly and asked Granny:

“Is it worth trying to mend it?”

“Shirts don't grow on trees, Sarah,” Granny replied. “We'll wash it and then we'll see. You can't judge a garment when it's dirty.” Then she said to me, “There's water heating. Get out of your clothes, boy, and scrub down. Levi will bring you your things.”

I stood in the wooden body tub in the kitchen, and soaped myself and scrubbed myself, while Levi brought me water and worked the scrubbing brush on my back. I had a long scratch against my ribs, and Levi wanted to know whether that was where a redcoat musket ball had nicked me.

“That's a real foolish question.”

“Well, it's a wound, isn't it?”

“Of course it isn't a wound. It's a scratch I got crawling through the underbrush.”

“It seems to me,” Levi said, “that if I had been fighting all day in a battle, I would have gotten myself a wound at least.”

“Just don't let Mother hear you talking like that,” I warned him.

“What's wrong with her, Adam?”

“Who?”

“Mother.”

“Well, how would you feel if you were married, with children and everything, and your husband was lying upstairs dead the way Father is?”

He began to blubber. I told him, as kindly as I could, “Now listen to me, Levi. Father's dead. That's all there is to it, and you might as well be a man enough to face it. You can't break into tears every time anyone mentions his name. We have very large responsibilities, you and me.”

“What kind of responsibilities, Adam?”

“Well, just every kind. Who's going to take care of Mother and Granny, if we don't? And what about the garden and the farming work? I know that we have some shares in some of the enterprises in Boston, but no one knows if there'll be any income out of that now. You know how Mother is. She wouldn't accept help, because help would be the same as charity, which is all right if you offer it to someone else.”

Levi nodded somberly.

“Bring me the towels.”

He brought me the towels, and I rubbed myself dry.

“Did you go up and look at Father?” he asked me.

“I did. I went up there with old Mrs. Cartwright.”

“I hate her.”

“I don't like her. But I guess she tries to do the best that she can.”

“They say she cuts open dead people and takes out their innards.”

“All the fool things you hear!” He handed me the clean clothes and I began to dress. “She's just an old lady.”

“She's a witch!”

“You just don't say anything like that. You ought to have better sense.”

“What is it like to be dead, Adam?”

“How do I know? I never been dead.”

“You don't have to scream at me.”

“I'm not screaming at you. But what do you want me to do when you ask all these crazy questions? How do I know what it's like to be dead? I don't know.”

“I only mean,” Levi protested, “that if you go to heaven, you're not here, are you? I mean Father's not upstairs there on the bed. It's just a body, isn't it?”

“What's the use of talking about that, Levi?”

“I was just thinking about ghosts.”

“I don't believe in ghosts,” I said. “There's no such thing.”

“Jonathan Crisp saw a ghost and talked to it. It was last December.”

“He was lying.”

“Well, how do you know? How can you say that he was lying, and be so sure about it? You weren't there when he saw the ghost.”

“All right. Believe whatever you want. Leave me alone.”

“I can't help it.”

“What can't you help?” I asked shortly.

“Being afraid.”

“Whatever is there to be afraid of now? The redcoats are gone.”

“Well, weren't you afraid? Didn't you run away?”

“So did everyone else run away. It's all right for you to talk, but you don't know what it is to stand there and have all those guns go off in your face.”

“I would have run away,” Levi agreed.

“Well, I'm pleased that you have enough modesty to admit it. I thought maybe that you were braver than the entire Committee.”

“Suppose the redcoats come back, Adam?”

“They won't come back. It was a battle, and we won the battle.”

“They came back here,” Levi said. “A lot of them were bleeding and dead. They carried the dead men. I saw a man whose hand was shot off, and they wrapped his hand in a jacket. He kept on screaming anyway. Saul Parker said he was sure to die. The whole common was filled with them, and they were mighty provoked. You should have heard the way they talked. They broke into the Fairfax place and took all the silver. Then they broke into Joshua Bond's shop and stole everything there, and they set his house on fire, and they set the Loring house on fire too, and Goody Mullikan's house. You never saw anything burn like that, Adam. One of them kicked Goody Fairfax, but then another one of them got mad and said that she was just an old lady, and what did they want to kick her for? Two of them searched our whole house, and Granny followed them from room to room, and she told them that if she were a man, they wouldn't come walking into our house like that. Then they cut the bell ropes in the meetinghouse. They took Mother's silver teapot. She never said a word. Granny ran after them, calling them thieves and cutthroats. They said we were all too rich for dirty gillies. What's a gillie, Adam?”

“Some kind of Scot farmer, I think. Did the other army come here too?”

“They came from Boston. You never saw so many redcoats as were here then. The whole town swarmed with them, and you could hear the shooting from the battle to the east. Did you shoot any of them, Adam—really?”

“I don't know.”

“Then they stole all the carriages. They took both our horses—”

“No, they didn't!” I cried.

“They did. They stole the Loring horses and Mr. Bedford's team of grays and all the horses in the livery stables, and the Hancock carriage and the Hodley carriage and both carriages from Buckman's place and all the horses from there—why, they were running around just like they were crazy—and one of them hit me on my head with his crop, feel it, right here.”

He pushed his hair aside, and I felt the lump on his head, and asked him, “What did he want to do that for?”

“He said I had no business snooping around, and he cussed me out. One of them threatened to stick his bayonet into Johnny Carver. He's only nine years old. Can you imagine? All we were doing was looking at the dead redcoats. They laid them out on the common—forty-two of them. Then they piled the bodies into the Loring freight wagon and into the other wagons, but you can still see all the bloodstains on the grass on the common. Then they marched out on the Menotomy Road, and they were hardly gone when the Concord Committeemen came running in from the East Road. You never heard anything like the commotion when the Concord and Sudbury men got here. There was such yelling and screaming and cheering, and all the women came running out—with just everybody kissing and hugging, you never saw such a thing, Adam. Really. Never. Then we thought we'd ring the bells, but the ropes were cut. Then I ran home, and Ephraim Colin, who has the mill outside of Concord, he said he saw you laying dead. But where were you then, Adam?”

“I was in the big old windfall down on the Menotomy Road.”

“That was a funny place to be.”

“It was,” I agreed.

While I bathed and dressed in clean clothes, the neighbors had been coming into the front room. A number of the women would have come earlier, but they were waiting for bread to raise or for pudding to finish, because you can't come empty-handed to a home of the dead. Others brought meat roasts, sweetmeats and maple-sugar crowns, until the dining-room table was loaded with enough food to last us a month. The women felt that they had to do a certain amount of weeping just out of respect, and since these things are contagious, Mother was crying again. I went over to her, and she took my hands and said:

“Adam, Adam—whatever are we going to do?”

I tried to tell her that everything would be all right, and that we would get along. It was worse for Levi. All the women were overwrought and distracted after the night and the day they had lived through, and they had to embrace Levi and cry over him to their satisfaction. But at least there was a wonderful closeness, the storm having swept over all of us, and I think that was a comfort to Mother.