April Morning (19 page)

Cousin Simmons and the undertaker and the Fairview brothers, who were a sort of kin to us but distantly, came down the stairs, carrying the coffin; and Cousin Simmons suggested that I help them bear it over to the meetinghouse. I welcomed a reason to take me out of the house and away from the women, for the tears started all over again when they saw the coffin.

We cut across the common with the coffin. It was twilight now, the sun set, and the gentle pink light of evening lying low on the western sky, the color so pretty that it broke my heart to look at it, the air sweet and clean. This was the same place I had fled from twelve hours or so before, but the count of time had no meaning; and the April morning when I had departed properly belonged in a past so distant and different that it could hardly be evoked. Even if all the scars were healed, nothing would ever be the same again.

It was quiet on the common. The blackened ruins of the burned houses still smoked, but there was no sound of war in the air, no smell of gunpowder, no agonized screaming of the wounded, no curses of the enraged.

A cannon, spiked and dismounted, lay on the common, a British supply cart with a broken wheel, and a dozen or so smashed hogsheads. There were broken muskets, bent bayonets, powder bottles, knapsacks. A red uniform coat, torn and bloodstained. A lady's dress and a pewter pot, dropped by a looter. Caleb Harrington's terrier, dead, as if fate tirelessly stalked the Harrington family. A cocked hat, with the ugly mash of skin and blood inside it. No one touched such things; tomorrow, they would be burned. A half a dozen books, with pages torn out and fluttering in the evening breeze, as if there could be no barbarism without the destruction of a book. A child's bonnet—and a shoe. A strange, woeful, pointless litter, where a battle or a massacre had occurred, however it would be recalled and remembered.

I had survived it, but my father and other men had died here, and then the same army that killed my father had been driven back here, hurt and bleeding, to make a rendezvous with a relief army out of Boston. And while they swarmed all over this place, my brother Levi, and the other children of the village, ran among them with that incredible immunity of childhood. For myself, I had parted with childhood and boyhood forever.

“Don't you hear me, Adam?” the undertaker was asking me.

“Yes, sir—I heard you.”

“I mean that a man has some feeling about his profession. It's not just an ordinary profession. I like to think that the bereaved take comfort out of my work, but this isn't the best. Hardly. It's makeshift, that's what it is, Adam. The same kind of makeshift that I had to put together for the Parkers and the Hodleys and the Harringtons—and old Mrs. Fess, whose heart gave out. You wouldn't think so, would you, with all this fuss and calamity, and with Archie Hoggins from Watertown—they got dead of their own, believe me—begging for help, well, you just wouldn't think that an old lady would die at a time like this, I offer apologies. It's pine boards knocked together, and not even stained.”

“It's all right.”

“That's kind of you to say so, Adam. But your father liked the best. That was one thing you could say about Moses Cooper, he liked the best. The best quality. Now there's no reason why we can't change it later, but—”

I was pleading silently for him to shut up, and I was grateful to Cousin Simmons when he said, “Later is plenty of time for such things. Leave the boy in peace now.”

“I didn't mean to trouble the boy, Joseph. I just figured to tell—”

“Leave him in peace. You and I will talk about it if it needs talking about.”

When we came to the church, there was quite a small crowd standing around outside, among them a number of people whose faces I didn't recognize. I learned later that all the Committee in Middlesex had appointed representatives to obtain accurate depositions of what had happened on the common, and while there were certainly good intentions at work, I doubt that the clear and absolute truth will ever be known. Inside the meetinghouse were more people, at least half of the Committee, and a good many relatives of the deceased. We laid Father's coffin down next to the coffins that were already in front of the pulpit. It was quite dark now, and Hiram, the sexton, was lighting candles. The Reverend spread a black cloth over Father's coffin, an act which comforted me, for in all truth I had been depressed by the green-pine look of it.

A man who said he was from the
Advertiser,
in Boston, buttonholed me, and asked whether he could question me about what had happened on the common. I was past being able to think clearly, and I begged him to put his questions to someone else.

“Don't you have an interest in the truth, Mr. Cooper?” He called me mister, anticipating that I wouldn't be able to resist the flattery.

“I'm too tired to know what the truth is.”

“A patriot always knows what the truth is.”

I stared at him dumbly, a big, bluff man in his forties, dressed in good black worsted and white linen, a broad, fleshy face, a deep, rumbling voice that made my own sound to me like a hopeless squeak. I shook my head and pushed past him out of the church.

The crowd outside in front was larger, and a man who appeared to know just about all there was to know was telling about the situation in Boston—that a siege of the city and the redcoats within it was being planned, and what the pledges of this Committee and that Committee were. I listened to him for a minute or two, and found myself dozing. Then someone took my arm and drew me away.

It was Cousin Simmons. “Come away from there, Adam, my boy,” he said. “After a day like ours, it is as hard to endure oratory as the measles. I wish that Moses Cooper was here. He had a most marvelous gift for putting a man in his place.”

I nodded, and Cousin Simmons went on, “Don't you think that it is cruel or insensitive of me, Adam, to talk about your father. But it seems to me that it is most harmful for a person to bury the dead in his own heart as well as in the cold earth. Goody Simmons would have the skin off my back were I to cast one small doubt on this question of personal survival after death, and if the truth be told, I know no more than the next one. But I do know that something important survives in our children. Your father was a hard man to know, Adam, and sometimes a body just had to grind his teeth and say, Well, that's Moses Cooper, and that's the way he is, and there isn't one blessed thing you can do to change him. But the way he was, Adam, was a most remarkable way. He was an educated man, like most of the men in our family. He was a prudent man. He put away for a rainy day, and you and your mother will be provided for, but he was not a miserly man. No, sir, he was not. He was a man of many strong convictions, and you had to suffer somewhat to be his friend—or his son.”

“I'm not complaining,” I muttered.

“I know you are not. Nevertheless, if you recollect him as a saint, you will lose him. Moses Cooper was no saint. He was just as stubborn as a Methodist preacher, but he was a brave man with fine convictions, and I don't think there was ever a day went by that I didn't feel pride and satisfaction in knowing he was my friend.”

“Is that true, Cousin Simmons?” I asked him.

“As true as the gospel.”

“I was so happy last night,” I whispered. “When we walked across to the common, he put his arm on my shoulders. I felt that he truly loved me. That was the first time I ever felt it.” My voice broke, and in another moment I would have been crying; but Cousin Simmons put his own big hand on my shoulder, and with the other indicated the houses around the common.

“There it is, Adam.”

“Sir?”

“We took up arms for our home place, and he died for it. That's an old, old way, Adam, older than you or me, remember. There are worse ways for a man to die, I tell you.”

I nodded. In silence, we walked along the edge of the common, the first of the evening dropping like a curtain all around us; and then Cousin Simmons pointed toward Buckman's Taver

“The Committee board meets there tonight, Adam.”

“Oh?”

“It was our feeling that we should issue some sort of a statement in regard to and respect for our dead. Some small tribute, which the Reverend could read from the pulpit tomorrow. I think the Committee must be heard on that. Don't you?”

“I do,” I agreed.“Father would have been the first to want that for someone else. He was very strong for the Committee.”

“Rightly so, Adam. God help us, today, was strange enough, but can you imagine what today would have been without the Committees?”

“I think so—yes.”

We walked a little farther, and Cousin Simmons said, “They'll be opening the muster book, Adam.”

“Sir?”

“It's the word on the siege of Boston. They'll want five thousand Gommitteemen at least. Every town.”

“Will you be signing it, Cousin Simmons?”

“I don't know,” he replied slowly. “This is one time I do wish to heaven that I had Moses Cooper's advice. I don't know what's beginning, Adam, or how and when it is going to end. I have three womenfolk at home, no sons, and a forge. A blacksmith's prime to a town, if you ever thought about it, Adam. No smith, no iron. No iron, and the town is going to dry up and die. So I got to consider it. I can't make any snap decisions, can I?”

“No, sir. I don't think you can.”

“Any more than you can, Adam.”

“Sir?”

“A war has begun, Adam. Not just a battle. But a war. Haven't you thought about that?”

My heart as heavy as lead, I replied, “No, sir. I don't think I have.”

“You have to, you know. Now here we are, almost at Buckman's. You're mighty tired, so go home now, Adam. Think about it. I'll see you in the morning.”

I said good night to him, and turned back in the direction of my home.

The Evening

As I
WALKED
across the common in the darkness, my thoughts went back to my first awareness of a difference, a breaking away from the past into a future that became alive, self-shaping, apart—or so it seemed—from our own will. I was also bidding childhood farewell, an action not singular and definitive, but repeated many times until the nostalgia so thins that it is meaningless. But I was not yet at that point.

Because we played our game—the one we loved most—right here on the common, and it was only yesterday, my own yesterday; and up to the time when I became too old for games. I was twelve then. At twelve your hands are hard enough for work, but I do remember two more times, during the three years after that, when I played the game, in spite of my size, my long bones, my flat, strong muscles that could lift a plough off the ground.

We called the game Pontiac. Once, Pontiac had been a villainous fed Indian, but by the time I was old enough for the game, he had changed into a hero. We were children who knew little enough of what went on in the talk and minds of our elders, but we knew that Pontiac, who had been bad, who had slaughtered the men of General Braddock, was no longer bad. He became a valid hero, so as to say. The game was played this way. However many of us there were, we divided ourselves into two parts. The redcoats made an outside circle. The Indians were inside the circle. The redcoats had a ball, which they flung back and forth across the circle, attempting to hit the Indians. Each Indian hit was eliminated; he had to remove himself from the game, which he usually did after substantial argument—and in time, one Indian was left, a boy who could now avoid the ball easily enough, since he had no one to interfere with or confuse his movements. He was Pontiac, and he had the right to choose any redcoat he pleased for scalping. The scalp was by rule limited to a hank of back hair, no thicker than a small finger; but many a boy with an ugly gap in his back hair had some explaining to do at home. I, myself, was scalped twice, but I had been Pontiac at least a dozen times, and I had the scalps hidden in my room to prove it.

And now, as I walked home across the common, I remembered the game and childhood and clung to both, but hopelessly. By the time I entered my house, I had surrendered them.

The house was filled with neighbors. The widow Susan Simmons had taken charge in the kitchen, and the whole house was warm with the smell of good things cooking and baking. I think that then I was somewhat upset that so much attention should be paid to food and cooking and eating in a house where death had been, but as time goes on I appreciate the deep wisdom of it. Food is close to the meaning of life. There are tributes enough to the dead; the food is a tribute to the living, who are in need of it at the time. There could have been no better consolation for Mother than the need to feed hungry people, among them myself.

“Adam, I told you to eat before, and you never did,” she said to me. “I can't depend on you to take a crust of bread if my back is turned.”

That was certainly new, and a part of the difference; formerly, any reference to my stomach likened it to a bottomless pit. She used to say to the neighbors, “I don't know where the boy puts it. I just don't know. But it frightens me to watch what he does to pie or to hot bread.” Now, I was going to starve myself if she didn't feed me forcibly. For her, I had to be a man with terrible urgency; there was no time to dream about the games I had played on the common. She had taken a grip on herself, and now when she wept, she would weep out of the sight of others; but she had to tell herself that here was a man, Adam Cooper, fifteen years old, but overnight a man. But I wasn't. It doesn't work that way.

I sat down at the kitchen table, and the women fussed over me and set twice the amount before me than even I could consume. But once I began to eat, I couldn't stop until I was near to bursting with roast and pudding and hot bread and pie. While I ate, the women whispered about me: “Poor boy, he looks so tired.” “Such a fine boy.” “Such a dependable boy.” “I always said so about Adam Cooper, and I was right.”