Lexington

The bell woke him, and for a moment Eli Wheeler lay under the eaves and tried to make it the Sabbath.

It was the wrong bell for that. The Sabbath bell went slowly, as though it had the whole morning, and this one was going as fast as whoever had the rope could pull it, and it did not stop to breathe. Under it, from the direction of the Common, a drum had started. Under the drum was his father on the stairs.

“Nathan,” his father said, not loudly. “Up.”

Eli’s brother was already up. Eli heard him on the boards across the room, hopping, one boot on, swearing at the other in the careful way he swore when their mother might hear. The candle came round the turn of the stair and showed the rafters, and the hams hung in the cold end of the loft, and his father’s face under it, which looked the way it looked at a sick cow.

“What is it?” Eli said.

“Regulars. Out of Boston, across the river, a good many of them. Revere came through from Charlestown an hour since and woke the parson’s house.” His father looked at him a moment longer than he needed to. “Mind the stock. If I’m not home, the milking’s at five, same as any day.”

“I can come.”

“You can mind the stock.”

Then they were gone down the stair, and Eli heard the gun come off its pegs over the kitchen door, and the little knock of the powder horn against the frame, and his mother’s voice saying something low, and his father’s saying something lower. The door. The yard. Two pairs of boots going away down the Bedford road towards the bell.

He lay for as long as he could stand it, which was not long. Then he got up and dressed in the dark, and went down past his mother, who was sitting by the banked fire with her hands in her lap and did not look round. At the door he stopped.

“The milking’s at five,” she said to the fire. “Same as any day.”

He was fourteen, and he knew permission when he heard it.

---

The Common was a triangle of rough grass where the roads to Bedford and to Concord came apart, with the meeting house standing at the near end of it like a ship aground. It was full of men. They stood about in the dark in their greatcoats, in knots, with their guns held any way at all, and their breath went up white in the lantern light from Buckman’s tavern on the east side. Eli knew every one of them. That was the strange part. He knew who owed whom for a load of hay, and whose daughter had been walking out with whose apprentice, and which of them fell asleep in meeting; and here they all were at one in the morning in the cold, looking like strangers because they were not talking about any of it.

Captain Parker was walking up and down with his hands behind him. He was a tall man and he had been coughing all winter, and he coughed now, turned away into his sleeve so as not to make a show of it. He had fought the French, in the last war, and the men went quiet near him in a way they did not for anyone else.

“Where’s the regulars?” Eli said to Nathan, when he had found him.

Nathan gave him a look that was about their father, and then decided not to waste it. “Nobody knows. Revere said they were coming. Parker’s sent riders down the road to see. Nobody’s come back.”

“Where’s Father?”

“Talking to Sergeant Munroe. Keep out of his eye.” Nathan was seventeen and had been on the company’s list for a year, and had a way now of standing with his gun that he had not had at harvest. “They’re after Mr Hancock and Mr Adams, Revere says, and they’re at the parson’s. Or they’re after the powder at Concord. Or both.”

“What are we doing?”

“Standing here,” said Nathan, “so they see us.”

Nobody meant to stop the regulars; there were not enough men in Lexington for that. They meant to be seen, and to let the soldiers go on to Concord, where the powder had been moved. Eli counted the men nearest the tavern. It did not seem enough, but Nathan had not said it would be.

The riders did not come back. After a while Parker told the men they might go into the houses near the Common and keep warm, and come when the drum beat, and most of them went into Buckman’s.

Eli went in behind Nathan and got into the corner by the hearth before his father could see him. The taproom was hot after the dark, and smelt of wet wool and rum and the tallow of too many candles, and it was full of men making the kind of jokes men make when they are waiting for something. Somebody said that if the regulars were coming all the way out from Boston for two gentlemen and a few barrels, it showed how much the King’s government valued Mr Adams, and somebody else said the King’s government was welcome to Mr Adams and would give him back within the week. Somebody said the regulars had turned back at Menotomy and gone home to bed, and that the rest of them might as well do the same.

“We’re the King’s subjects,” said old Mr Reed, from by the window, “standing on our own Common, and they’re the King’s soldiers, marching on the King’s road. If everybody remembers that, nobody has any cause to do anything.”

Nobody answered him. It was the sort of thing that was true and did not help.

By the door, a little apart, stood Prince Estabrook, with a musket like everyone’s. Eli had known Prince all his life in the way you know somebody who belongs to someone else: he was Mr Estabrook’s, and he was at the Estabrook farm, and he was at meeting in the back gallery on the Sabbath. Eli had not known he was on the company’s list. It seemed he was. He stood by the door holding his gun, and listened to the talk about the King’s subjects and their rights, and did not say anything, and nobody asked him to; and Eli, who was fourteen and warm for the first time since the bell, looked at him for longer than was polite, and then did not know what to do with the thought he was having, and put it away.

He slept a little, sitting up.

---

It was Thaddeus Bowman who brought it, a little after four. They heard his horse before they heard him, and then he was in the doorway with the cold coming in behind him, saying they were coming, they were on the road, they were close, not a mile off, and a great many of them.

The drum began before he had finished. It was William Diamond, who was sixteen and had been given the drum because he could keep time and nobody else wanted to carry it, and he beat to arms on the Common as if he had been waiting all night to do it, which he had.

Everything happened at once and very slowly. The taproom emptied. Men were pulling on coats and dropping flints and asking each other where their hats had got to. Eli came out into air that had gone from black to the colour of dishwater, and saw the company forming on the grass beyond the meeting house, in two ranks, not straight; and it was fewer than there had been. A good many of the men who had gone home to keep warm had not come back yet, and some who were on the Common had not got into the line and were standing about the edges with their guns, as though they had not decided. Eli counted without meaning to. Seventy, perhaps. Seventy-odd.

His father was in the front rank near the middle. Nathan was behind him. His father turned his head once and saw Eli by the corner of the tavern and looked at him, and Eli went back until he was behind the stone wall at the edge of the Common, and his father turned away again.

Then the soldiers came.

He heard them first. It was not a sound he knew. It was many feet on the road at once, not in step, and a jingling, and a kind of low mixed roar that was men breathing and talking and being shouted at. Then the road beyond the meeting house was full of them, coming out of the grey at a trot: a column of men in short coats and caps, and the coats were not red yet because there was no light to be red in, only dark, and the bayonets were the palest thing in the morning. Officers on horses rode beside them. They did not go by. Eli had been sure, the whole night, that they would go by, because the road to Concord went by; and instead the front of the column turned and came on to the Common, at the double, spreading out as it came, and the men in it were cheering.

It was the cheering that frightened him. He had thought about guns. He had not thought about the noise that a few hundred men make when they run at you shouting, all of them at once.

An officer on a horse came in front of them, shouting too. Eli heard him plainly across the grass. “Lay down your arms! Disperse, you rebels! Lay down your arms and disperse!” He was waving his sword, not at anyone, just waving it.

“Disperse,” said Captain Parker. He did not shout. Eli heard him because everyone near him had gone quiet. “Let them by. Disperse, and don’t fire.”

The line began to come apart. The men did not lay down their guns, but they turned and began to go, not quickly, some of them backing and some of them walking off to the side with their guns on their shoulders, the way they would go off the training field on a muster day. Eli saw his father turn. He saw Nathan turn.

Then somebody fired.

Eli heard a single flat crack. He was looking at the Common and saw nobody fire. It might have come from his left, or behind the soldiers, or from the road. Later people asked him. He could only tell them he had been behind the wall, and did not know, and that the one thing everybody on the Common had agreed about was that it would not happen, and it had.

The soldiers fired. It was not one crack; it was a ragged tearing noise that went along their front like cloth being ripped, and all the grey of the morning went white with smoke. Then another. Men were falling. It did not look the way he had supposed it would. They sat down, some of them, as if they were tired; one fell forward on his hands and stayed there like a man looking for something in the grass. Then the soldiers were running forward into the smoke with their bayonets, shouting again, and the men of the company were running away from them in every direction there was, and a few were not running.

Jonas Parker was not running. He was the captain’s cousin, and he had said, all winter, at meeting and at the tavern and to anyone who would listen, that he would never run from a regular, and people had laughed. He was on one knee in the grass with his hat and his bullets on the ground beside him, trying to load, and he was hit, and he went on trying to load, and then the soldiers were on him. Eli saw the bayonet go in and then he did not see anything, because he had put his face against the stone of the wall.

When he looked up the smoke was thinning. His father was running towards the wall with Nathan by the arm, both of them bent over, Nathan without his hat. They came over the wall and fell down beside him, and his father looked at him, and then at Nathan, and then at him again, and did not say anything at all.

Across the road, Jonathan Harrington was crawling home.

His house faced the Common. His wife was in the doorway. He had been hit somewhere in the body, and he had got up once, and fallen, and now he was crawling across the road on his hands and knees, towards her, very slowly, with blood coming out of him on to the dirt. She came down the step. He got to the step. He died there, at her feet, with her holding his head, and Eli watched every bit of it and did not look away, because it seemed to him that someone ought to.

---

Then it was over, and that was the strangest part of the whole day.

The officers were shouting at their own men now, shouting them back, riding in among them and knocking up muskets with the flats of their swords. More soldiers came up the road, big men in tall fur caps, and a stout officer on a horse who looked angry with everybody. The soldiers were got into their ranks. They fired one more volley, into the air this time, over nobody. Then they took off their hats and gave three cheers, and the fifes started up, and they marched off down the Concord road in good order, with the sun coming up behind them and their coats red at last, as if they had won something.

It was very quiet after they had gone. Eli could hear a cow somewhere, wanting to be milked.

The women came out first, and then the old men, and then the men of the company who had run, coming back across the grass slowly, as if the Common might go off again. They found the dead one at a time, and each time it was someone, and each time somebody said the name out loud. Robert Munroe, who had been at Louisbourg. Jonas Parker. Sam Hadley and John Brown, cut down as they ran. Caleb Harrington, by the meeting house, where he had gone in for powder and come out into it. Isaac Muzzey. Jonathan Harrington, on his own step. And a Woburn man none of them knew well, Porter, whom the regulars had taken up on the road before dawn and had been marching along with them, and who had tried to run in the confusion and been shot for it.

Eight. Eli counted them twice. Ten more were hurt. Prince Estabrook was sitting on the meeting-house step holding his shoulder, and there was blood between his fingers, and nobody was attending to him yet, so Eli went to the well and brought him a dipper of water, and Prince drank it and said, “Thank you, Eli,” which was the first thing Eli had ever heard him say that was to him.

His father helped carry Jonas Parker off the grass. When it was done he came and stood by Eli and looked at the Common, at the trampled places, and the dark places, and Nathan’s hat lying in the middle of it where nobody had yet thought to pick it up.

“I told you to mind the stock,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

His father nodded, as if that settled it, and it seemed that it did.

---

The minister went among the houses. A company came in from Woburn, and around the middle of the morning people stood in the road listening towards Concord. Eli could not hear firing and pretended to. Then the riders came. At the North Bridge the regulars had killed two Acton men and had men killed themselves. They had found hardly any powder. They were coming back along the road, and every town was out after them.

At noon Captain Parker called the company again.

Parker stood where his cousin had died and told them they would go out to the Lincoln line to meet the regulars returning. He coughed. Eli had thought they would bury the dead and go home. Instead the men who had run at dawn came back into the ranks, and there were more of them now.

“I can carry the powder,” Eli said.

His father looked at him for a long time.

“Stay behind me,” he said at last, “and keep your head down, and if I say go home, you go home.”

---

They waited on a rough hillside above the road, where it ran between woods and pasture a little way short of the Lincoln bounds. There were rocks there, and a few trees, and the men got down behind them and waited. It was warm now, strangely warm for April, and there were flies. Eli lay behind his father with the spare horn and a bag of cartridges, and looked at the road, which was an ordinary road that he had driven the cart along a hundred times.

They heard the column long before they saw it. It sounded like rain on a roof: a steady, spattering noise that never stopped, a long way off and coming nearer. Then there was dust over the trees to the west, and smoke with it, and then the head of the column came round the bend.

He had seen them at dawn, marching out. He did not know them now. They were coming along the road at something between a march and a stagger, black in the face from powder, their coats white with dust, many of them bareheaded. Some of them were being carried. Some were limping. Out on each side of the road, in the fields, went parties of them in a loose line, trying to keep the woods clear; and from the woods, from every wall and every tree and every house along the road, men were firing into them, and they were firing back, and nobody on either side was in any kind of order at all. The officers rode up and down trying to keep them moving. They did not look like men who had cheered.

“Now,” said Captain Parker.

The company fired, and the smoke hid everything, and Eli lay with his face in the dry grass and passed the horn forward when his father held out his hand for it. He could hear bullets going through the leaves over his head with a noise like somebody tearing paper. Then the regulars’ flankers were coming up the hillside at them with the bayonet, and the company went back over the crest, and the column went by below.

Jedediah Munroe did not come back over the crest. He had been hurt on the Common that morning and had come out again in the afternoon, and he was killed on the hillside. Eli did not see it. He heard it afterwards, and thought for a long time that the morning had not counted him, and the afternoon had.

When they came down on to the road again the column was gone east towards Lexington, and a moment later they heard, from the direction of the town, a sound that none of them had heard before in their lives. It was a long, heavy, rolling thud that went through the ground and up into Eli’s feet. Then another.

“Cannon,” said Nathan.

There were more soldiers at Lexington. A whole new brigade had come out from Boston in the morning, with two field pieces, and had drawn up on the high ground east of the Common, and the beaten column had come stumbling in among them and fallen down on the grass to rest. The cannon were firing over the town at anyone who came near. When the Lexington men got near enough to see, there was a hole in the side of the meeting house. There was smoke over the Lorings’ place and over Mrs Mulliken’s. The soldiers were burning houses as they went.

They stayed an hour and more, and then about half past three they formed up, the whole great red mass of them, and moved off down the road towards Menotomy and Cambridge and the water, with the militia of twenty towns going after them on both sides, and the firing went away with them, east, getting fainter, until it was only a kind of grumbling at the edge of hearing, like weather over the sea.

His father put a hand on Eli’s shoulder.

“Go home,” he said. “Do the milking.”

“Are you coming?”

“We’re going on a way. Your brother and me.” His father looked down the road where the smoke was. “Go home, Eli.”

He went home.

---

The cows had been bawling since morning. His mother had let the calves in to them, which was not usual, and had done what she could with the rest, and when Eli came into the yard she came out of the barn and put her arms round him without a word, and then let go and went back in. He milked in the dark, by feel, his forehead against the warm flank of the red cow, and the milk rang in the pail, and it was the first ordinary sound he had heard since the bell.

His father came home some time after midnight. He was alone. Nathan had gone on with the others, all the way to Charlestown, where the regulars had got back across the neck at nightfall and were safe under the guns of their ships; and he was there still, with half the young men of the province, standing about in the dark on Charlestown Neck with nowhere to sleep.

His father sat down at the table and did not take his coat off. His mother put bread and cold meat in front of him, and he looked at it.

“Is it a war?” Eli said.

His father thought about it for so long that Eli thought he would not answer.

“I don’t know what it is,” he said. “It’s not for us to say. They’ll say in Boston what it was, and in Philadelphia, and in London, and then we’ll know.” He picked up the bread. “Go to bed.”

---

They buried the eight on the Thursday, in one long grave in the burying ground behind the meeting house, in the order they had been found.

On the Sabbath Mr Clarke preached on the text that the Lord is a man of war, and at the end, as he did every Sabbath, he prayed for the King. He prayed for His Majesty King George, and for the Queen and the royal family, and that God would give the King wise counsellors, and turn his heart towards his people. Eli, in the gallery with Nathan, who had come home on the Saturday with his feet in rags and a borrowed hat, looked down at the pews, at the men of the company in their places with their wives beside them, some of them with their arms in slings.

Nobody got up and left. Nobody said anything. They bowed their heads and prayed for the King, as they had every Sabbath of their lives, and at the end of it they all said amen.