Johnny Tremain

  'I believe seven or eight of them were killed in that first volley.'

  'Do you know their names?'

  'No. But by the time the British got back to Lexington from Concord, the Lexington men were ready for them. And they fit 'em and harried 'em all the way to Charlestown.'

  2

  Johnny knew he had no chance of leaving Charlestown until the few hundred fresh men who had been rowed over to hold the Neck had been withdrawn. Next morning he watched them go and waited his chance. It was ten o'clock when he left the town. People were running about. Each had a story to tell. Many women, children, and timid folk had spent the night hidden in the clay pits. They, too, were coming out of hiding.

  Johnny, from sheer high spirits, jumped the now deserted breastwork the British had thrown up so hastily the night before. He had seen so much of the British army he had come half to believe that they were, even as they said, invincible. No Yankee farmers could stand up to them. He had been impressed with their perfection of equipment, discipline, grand gaudy uniforms, the pride of their officers. 'We beat them. We Yankees did. God was with us.'

  He took the road for Cambridge, crossing desolate Charlestown Common with its salt marshes, clay pits, gallows, and gibbet. Everywhere he saw signs of the retreat: The heavy tracks of cannon. The road itself beaten to muck under anxious feet. He saw lost hats, uniforms, muskets even, and he saw a group of men getting a horse out of a pit. The horse was taking the matter sensibly, not struggling, seeming to understand that the oxen being tackled would pull him out. It was Colonel Smith's Sandy. Johnny looked upon this as a good omen and walked forward whistling, but his whistling stopped abruptly. He had met his first burial party. He noted the faces of the men and women following the dead countryman. Next he saw a cellar hole with smoke and stench still rising from it.

  There was a tavern, and in the taproom men sat about drinking rum and boasting of their great deeds. Johnny did not doubt but they all had done as well as they said, but he was in no mood to listen. So, having bought bread, a handful of salt alewives, and asked if anyone knew where Doctor Warren was, he quickly left. They told him to try Cambridge.

  Here a strange thing had happened apparently overnight. Milling about were hundreds upon hundreds, perhaps thousands of Minute Men. They had come as they were from the plow, the shop, even from the pulpit. Most of them had guns in their hands, but there were hardly a dozen overcoats among them. No blankets. They had no food except the little their women had tied up for them—enough to take a man through one day's fighting. No tents, no extra munitions. What now was to be done with them? What were they to do with themselves? Should they go home now—having accomplished the mission for which they had been summoned—or were they to stay and undertake the siege of Boston? They had no cannon. Seemingly they had nothing but the guns in their hands and the fire in their hearts.

  A man, who told Johnny he was a colonel—he did have a pair of home-made epaulets sewed to his old hunting shirt—said that the Committee of Safety was sitting at the Hastings' house, trying to work out some way these civilians might be turned into soldiers. Doctor Warren was chairman of this committee. Johnny went to the Hastings' house, where he met Paul Revere, who told him Doctor Warren had left for Lexington.

  Lexington! It was to Lexington of all places in the world Johnny wanted to go. Now he had an excuse for it. This day like the one before was warm and beautiful. It was one of those silent, dreamy spring days when sunshine pours down upon the yet-cold earth and the earth turns in its sleep. No cloud in the sky. Not one cat's-paw of breeze.

  He stepped along rapidly. Not until he reached Menotomy was he once again following the tracks of the defeated British army. A parcel of folk were standing about a stout old grandame. Six grenadiers had surrendered to her and asked for her protection. She had no idea the battle was moving in so close. Old Mother Batherick had been out digging dandelions.

  In every house left standing, Johnny saw bullet holes and, once again, a burial party. Twelve men, hastily thrown upon an ox sled, were being drawn to their single grave. And there were British dead to bury. Where should they be buried? The minister said they were to be laid in the lot set aside for slaves, but all who had hats doffed them as friend and foe passed by. Johnny had no hat, but he stood with bowed head.

  He walked on. The sight of a young woman drawing water was too much for him. He stopped and asked her for a drink. As he sat on a wall and drank from a wooden bucket, she answered his questions. Was he now in Lexington?

  Yes, he had just crossed the town line.

  'Those Lexington men. How many were killed on the Green yesterday?'

  'Eight,' she said.

  As he asked his next question, his voice sounded unreal, to himself.

  'Happens you know their names?'

  She turned a stony face and stared at him. 'These are their names,' she said. 'Let them never be forgot.' She stretched out her hands and counted on her fingers. 'Jonathan Harrington,' she said, 'and Caleb, too. Robert Munroe, Jonas Parker, Samuel Hedley, Isaac Muzzy, Nathaniel Wyman, John Brown.'

  Rab's was not one. Johnny smiled.

  'Do you know how the Silsbees fared?'

  She said the women and children had, like so many others, gone away to hide. She believed they had gone to Woburn, but by now they might be back again at Silsbee's Cove.

  'And the men went out fighting?'

  'Of course. All except Grandsire. He wouldn't hide with the women and farm animals and he couldn't go fight. He was sot on sitting it out under his own roof.'

  Then Johnny went on his way passing Munroe Tavern where Percy had joined Colonel Smith—he could see the marks of the cannon and the destruction they caused. So he was in the village. The first thing he noticed as he stood looking down at the Green was that the old meeting house had been knocked into a cocked hat by a cannon ball.

  3

  So late in the afternoon of the gentle April day, Johnny came down upon Lexington Green. The smashed meeting house with its tiny wooden belfry was before him. Buckman Tavern was to his right. The Green itself was laced over with the shadows of new leaves. It was here the men had stood; here upon this Green they had formed a thin pathetic line, a handful of farmers to resist the march of seven hundred British regulars. Here they had died. Oh, it was so hopeless and so brave, you might laugh. And you might cry. The inside of Johnny's nose began to prick and he brushed his arm across his face.

  But it was his duty to find Doctor Warren—not to stand gawking at the little battlefield. Thus far he had had no luck at all in locating the Doctor, but at last his luck turned. He recognized his chaise and that rabbit-ear little pacing mare of the Doctor's, hitched before the Harrington house. The Doctor was standing on the steps, and about him were a group of women all crying. Johnny knew why. Jonathan Harrington, wounded in the skirmish, had been able to drag himself thus far to his own house and die upon that threshold. Doctor Warren was leaving them now.

  He had on no hat, but a bandage about his thick fair hair. The bullet had grazed his scalp. Johnny went up to him and handed him the lists he had had time to write down during the night at Charlestown. The Doctor read it, nodded, and put it in his pocket. He was too tired to say much, but there was one question Johnny had to ask.

  'Doctor Warren ... when the Lexington men stood here ... and the British over there and fired at them ... I know the names of those who were killed. But when the British came back from Concord and the fight went on all the way to Charlestown and the Lexington men went after them ... I don't know who was killed then.'

  'You are hunting for Rab?'

  'Yes, I've got to find him. Nobody seems able to tell me.'

  'I'll tell you, Johnny.' Tired as he was and surfeited with the sight of blood and suffering, he broke the news as best he could.

  'Rab stood here ... just about where we are standing now. He did not go when Major Pitcaim told them to disperse, he kept on standing—with the other men—his musket in his hands.'

&n
bsp; Johnny could see him, clear as in the flesh. Rab standing un afraid in the cool gray of earliest dawn, the musket in his hands, the 'look' in his eyes—that fierce sudden look.

  'But after that. Did Rab follow the British to Charlestown?'

  'No. He was wounded in that first volley. He got it pretty bad.'

  'You mean very bad, don't you?'

  'Yes, very.'

  'I see,' but Johnny saw nothing. The fresh spring world turned black before him, but even in this darkness he could still see Rab, chin up, shoulders squared—not afraid.

  'Where?...' he asked.

  'He was carried to Buckman's Tavern. I saw him yesterday. I was about to go there now. But ... don't expect too much.'

  'No.'

  'Rab played a man's part. Look that you do the same.'

  'I will.' He knew the Doctor meant he wasn't to cry or take on. He'd got to take it quietly.

  4

  Doctor Warren whistled to his mare who followed him like a dog. Johnny entered the tavern on Warren's heels and to their right was the taproom, full and overfull. Johnny half-heard the same conversation going on here that he had listened to when he had stopped to buy food at that other tavern. Had they all been heroes? Or did they just talk—and do nothing? Rab never had said much, but he had done all a man might.

  The boy had been carried to a back chamber on the second floor. He was not in bed, but sitting up in an armchair propped with pillows. A woman of the inn had been sitting with him, quietly knitting. She got up when the Doctor and Johnny entered the room and left without speaking.

  Johnny had been fearful that Rab would be suffering, crying out, struggling like other wounded men he had seen: afraid that with death so close something of that aloof dignity he had always had would be shattered. He had lived with Rab a year and a half, and yet he had never really known him—not known him inside out as, say, he had known the hated Dove.

  But half-sitting as he was, Rab did not seem at first very different from always. His face was white but not drawn. The eyes very dark and wide. Rab smiled.

  'You got out all right?'

  'Yes.'

  'How's Boston?'

  'The British are furious that we licked them so.'

  There was a sudden trickle of blood at one corner of his mouth. Rab wiped it away. In these few hours his hands had grown white, weak, thin. And as he turned his face, the afternoon light fell across it. Johnny saw the flesh seemed translucent. There were lavender circles about the eyes.

  'I've had a lot of time to think,' said Rab at last. 'Just lying here. Do you remember that marketwoman who lost her pig? Its name was Myra and it could do tricks ... then I looked up and you were standing there looking like a robber-boy with your hand in your pocket?'

  'I remember.'

  Rab lay with his eyes shut for a little while, remembering other things—things perhaps Johnny did not share. Back into his childhood in Lexington—the important and unimportant things jumbled together. A favorite dog. The death of his father. The first day he went to school and the first day he drilled with the Minute Men. He moved a little restlessly and said, 'Colonel Nesbit ... remember. And he told me, "Go buy a popgun, boy." Well ... a popgun would have done me just as well in the end.' This idea fretted him a little. Doctor Warren wet a cloth in a basin of water and wiped his bloody mouth.

  'There's my musket—over there. It's better now than any they have. I was always kind of bothered to think I might have to stand up to them without a good gun in my hands. But I had it all right.'

  He was thanking Johnny for getting it for him.

  'But I never did get to fire it. They shot first.'

  The trickle of blood became a stream. Doctor Warren was bending over him, holding his shoulders. Johnny walked disconsolately about the chamber. He looked out the window. He picked up a pewter candlestick and examined the maker's mark. He heard Warren saying, 'Steady, boy,' and, after a moment, 'Is it better so?'

  'It is ... better so.' Rab whispered. But the next moment he said, quite naturally, 'Johnny.'

  Johnny went to him, sat on the floor beside his chair and put his hands over Rab's thin ones.

  'Yes, Rab?'

  'You can have that musket. I sort of like to think of its going on. I've put a better stock on it, changed the angle of the steel. Look at that flint. The one it had was too smooth. I've knapped it.'

  'I'll take good care of it.'

  'And there's another thing you can do for me.'

  'Anything.'

  'Go to Silsbee's Cove. See if the women have come back yet from hiding. Grandsire will be about ... he said he wouldn't go off hiding. He'd sit it out—in his chair.'

  'I'll go.'

  Then Rab began to smile. Everything he had never put in words was in that smile.

  But as he was leaving the room, Johnny saw that once more Doctor Warren was bending over him. He heard him say.

  'How is that? Is it better?'

  'Yes ... it is better so.'

  5

  At Silsbee's Cove there were no women, children, or farm animals about, except a couple of weaned calves in the calf pasture. When the warning came, it had probably been decided they were too hard to catch and cart. Johnny looked at the deserted barn. Hens were about. They could live for days on the spilled oats and rye. There were two dogs who came up to him, telling him they had not been fed. 'I'll bet they took you with them,' said Johnny, 'and you sneaked back home, eh, boys?'

  The cat stuck close to him. It was a big orange tom and Johnny knew it was Grandsire's favorite. It was mewing and rubbing about him. He picked it up. 'You wouldn't be bothered to go out and catch a mouse in the barn like other cats, would you?' he said. But if Grandsire had not gone away to hide like the other noncombatants, he wondered why he had not fed the animals. He entered the old house, which was unlocked. The tom, confident that now he would be fed in the elegant way he was accustomed to, began to knead his paws and his purring grew hoarse with triumph.

  'Grandsire?' Johnny called.

  There was no answer, and the red armchair, where the old gentleman usually sat since his game leg had grown so bad, was empty. Major Silsbee was not there. Johnny went to the larder and found bread and sour milk for the animals. He welcomed this small duty. It kept him from thinking. The tom he fed in the kitchen. The basin of food for the dogs he put in the yard. Where, where, was the old gentleman? Suddenly he had an idea, and he ran back into the kitchen and looked over the hearth. Grandsire's old gun was gone, and so was the powder-horn he had carried to Louisburg back in 1745. And so was Grandsire Silsbee.

  Johnny walked back to the village, his head bent and his hands in his pockets. A numbness, half-emotional, half-physical, was stealing up through him. His feet felt like lead. His mind seized upon little trivial things, like that orange tom-cat of Grandsire Silsbee's. He noticed a jubilant little girl with a grenadier bearskin hat on her head, half over her face. He could not help but notice the regimental number on the cap. The grenadier likely dead by now, had been a soldier of the Tenth.

  He saw Doctor Warren's chaise before Buckman's Tavern. In the lower entry Doctor Warren was waiting for him. 'Rab?'

  The Doctor dropped his eyes. 'Sometime,' he said, 'we will know how to stop bleeding like that. We don't now.'

  'He sent me away because he knew he had to die?'

  'Yes. He knew.'

  Doctor Warren moved into the empty parlor of the inn away from the noisy group in the taproom—telling over and over of their great deeds.

  'There's no need for you to go upstairs.'

  Johnny nodded. He had moved off into a strange lonely world where nothing could seem real—not even Rab's death.

  The woman of the inn came in on tiptoe. She had a tray of food for the Doctor. Tired out, the young man sank into a chair, his fair, bandaged, aching head in his hands.

  'You remember that night,' he said, 'that last meeting of the Observers. James Otis came, although we didn't want him. I can't remember much of what he said,
but I remember how his words made the gooseskin on my arms.'

  'I'll never forget it. He said ... so a man can stand up.'

  'Yes. And some of us would die—so other men can stand up on their feet like men. A great many are going to die for that. They have in the past. They will a hundred years from now—two hundred. God grant there will always be men good enough. Men like Rab.'

  The quiet woman came in again. She had tossed up an omelet for the Doctor and silently put it before him.

  'Will you go up and fetch down the musket from the back chamber?' he asked her. She nodded and did as he asked.

  Doctor Warren began to eat as doctors will even under greatest strain.

  'Can't you eat, boy?'

  'Not yet.'

  'Try and get some sleep.'

  'No.'

  Johnny was on his feet pacing about the room. He was too stunned to feel much now. Later, he thought. Tomorrow, next day. Then I'll know that Rab is dead. But it can't hurt me now. But next year, all my life...

  His eye caught on the musket. He took it up, holding it close to the light of the window, fingering and examining it to see those improvements Rab said he had made on it. Rab had not taken one shot with it on Lexington Green. Never had a chance. Doctor Warren was standing beside him.

  'Johnny, put down that gun. Here by this window. Lay your right hand down like that, so.'

  Johnny felt no more shame over his burned hand. He did as the Doctor bade him. He felt the cool, clean hands bending his fingers, twisting his thumb until he gritted his teeth.

  'Johnny, that hand is not as bad as you think. Burned, wasn't it?'

  'Yes.'

  'As you stood there holding that gun, it was the first time I've had a good look at it. Was it kept flat while healing?'

  'No.'

  'I suppose your master called in some old herb woman to care for it?'

  'A midwife. Yes.'

  'Bah ... these midwives! Any doctor in Boston would have known ... You see, the thumb is pulled about like that, not because of any basic injury, but by scar tissues.'