My Brother Sam is Dead (9 page)

“Not on just Sam. Can't you see? He found out about Sam and the commissary officer buying beef, and now he's sending news to the Lobsterbacks so they'll know where to find them and kill them and steal the cows. Give me that letter.”

She snatched at my shirt, but I ducked back. “Don't, Betsy. It's Mr. Heron's.”

“Tim, you're going to get Sam killed. They'll set up an ambush for them and kill them all.”

“No, no,” I said.

“It's true, Tim, figure it out. You can't deliver that letter.”

“I have to,” I said.

She stood in front of me, kind of begging. “Tim, let's open it and see. If there's nothing important in it, then you can deliver it.”

“I can't break the seal, Betsy. It's Mr. Heron's letter. I could be put in jail for that.”

“Tim, it's your brother they're going to kill. Just throw the letter away and say you lost it.”

I didn't know what to do. I felt awful—sick and scared. I didn't say anything.

“Tim, give me that letter.”

“Betsy—”

Then she jumped me. She caught me completely by surprise. She just leaped onto me and I fell down backwards and she was lying on top of me, trying to wrestle her hands down inside of my shirt. “Goddamn you, Betsy,” I shouted. I grabbed her by her hair and tried to pull her head back, but she jerked it away from me. I began kicking around with my feet trying to catch her someplace where it would hurt, but she kept wriggling from side to side on top of me and I couldn't get in a good kick. I hit her on the back but in that position I couldn't get much force. “Get off me, Betsy.”

“Not until I get that letter,” she said. She jerked at my shirt, trying to pull it up. I grabbed at her hands and twisted my body underneath her to turn over so I would be on top, but she pushed her whole weight down on me, grunting. So I slammed her as hard as I could on the side of her head.

“You little bastard,” she shouted. She let go of my shirt with one hand and slapped me as hard as she could across my face. My nose went numb and my eyes stung and tears began to come.

“Damn you,” I shouted. I let go of her hand where she was clutching my shirt and grabbed her by the shoulders, trying to push her off me. She jerked my shirt up, grabbed the letter and jumped to her feet. Without rising I kicked out with my feet at her ankles. I got in a good one; she stumbled, but she didn't fall. By the time I got up she was running down the Fairfield Road as hard as she could, opening the
letter as she went. I started to run after her, and then she flung the letter over her shoulder onto the road and disappeared out of sight around the next bend. I ran up to the letter and picked it up. It was rumpled and dirty. All it said was, “If this message is received, we will know that the messenger is reliable.”

T
HE SUMMER OF 1776 CAME AND WENT. I TRIED TO KEEP
away from Mr. Heron. If I saw him coming into the tavern, I'd go out to clean the barn or down to the woodlot to do some chopping. But a few times he took me by surprise before I could get away. He never said anything about the letter at all. He'd just say, “Hello, Timothy,” or “It's a fine day, isn't it, Timothy?” and I'd say, “Yes, sir,” or something like that and get away as soon as I could. I couldn't figure out what he thought about the whole thing, and finally I just forgot about it.

The war went on. It didn't seem to have much to do with us most of the time, aside from Sam being gone. Of course food was short, and other things, too. The men who still had their guns had trouble getting powder and shot. Cloth was getting scarce, and leather, because the Continental troops needed them for clothing and shoes. But nobody was really desperate.

Sometimes we'd be reminded of the war when militiamen marched through. Or we might see a soldier who had been wounded or whose enlistment was up walking back to his home. But mostly the war stayed away from us.

Twice we got letters from Sam. Or rather, Mother did. One came in August of that year and another one in September. The first one told about the fighting in New York. The Rebel troops had been beaten there, and the British had taken over the city, but the way Sam wrote about it, he made it seem like a glorious victory for the Rebels. He said that his regiment had made a magnificent retreat, and the British were lucky they'd got out of it alive, but it sounded the other way around to me. The second letter didn't tell so much, except that they were encamped someplace in New Jersey and probably would stay there for the winter. He was living a hard life. A lot of times they were on very short rations, eating just hardtack and water day after day. They didn't have proper clothing, either. Some of the men had no shoes and went barefoot: in cold weather they wrapped cloth around their feet to keep from freezing. I guess there wasn't much glory in it a lot of the time, but Sam said that their spirits were high.

Mother and Father had a fight over the letters. When the first one came Mother decided to answer it. Father said no, she shouldn't encourage Sam in his recalcitrance. Mother argued with him, but he wouldn't give in: let Sam feel our disapproval until he comes to his senses. But then when the second letter came she said she was going to write an answer regardless. They had an argument about it when I was supposed to be asleep. I kept hoping Mother would win. It made me sad to think of Sam writing letters and nobody writing back, although I guess Betsy Read would write back. But Father didn't feel that way. “The boy has to learn a lesson, he's far too headstrong.”

“He isn't a boy anymore,” Mother said.

“He's sixteen years old, that's a boy, Susannah.”

“He's seventeen, Life. How old were you when you left home?”

“That was different,” he growled. “There were eight of us, remember, too many mouths to feed as it was.”

“Still, you went off at sixteen, Life.”

“Sam's too headstrong.”

“And you're not?”

“I'm his father, I don't have to be questioned on my
behavior.”

Mother laughed. “You hate having anyone tell you what to do, yet you expect Sam to let you order him around. I'm going to write to him, Life. He must surely be worried that we're all right.”

“I don't want you to do it, Susannah.”

“I know you don't, Life. But I'm going to do it anyway.”

I heard Father make a grunting sound, and then the door banged, and he stomped out to the barn. In the dark I clapped my hands. I was glad that Sam was going to get a letter.

But by that fall of 1776 I didn't have much time for pondering over Sam or Mr. Heron. Father was planning his usual trip to Verplancks Point, and this year for the first time I was going with him. It was pretty nearly forty miles. I'd never been on so long a trip in my life. Sam used to go to help Father, and after Sam went off to college Father got Tom Warrups to go with him. But Tom was busy, and so this time Father had to take me.

Verplancks Point was on the Hudson River, just south of a town called Peekskill. Boats from New York City and Albany stopped there for trading. The idea of our trip was to drive cattle to Verplancks Point where we could sell them, and then use the money to buy supplies we needed for the tavern and the store—rum, cloth, pots and pans, needles and thread and all sorts of things. The traders brought these things up the river from New York and sold them to merchants at towns along the way, like Verplancks Point. And of course the merchants there wanted cattle to ship down to New York where there was a need for beef.

In October Father began gathering cattle. Some he got from farmers who paid their bills to him with cattle every year. Some he just bought, knowing he could sell them at a profit. It would take us three days to drive the cattle over and three days to come back. On horseback you could ride it in a day, but we'd have not only the cattle but the wagon drawn by oxen with us. Going over we'd have a few pigs in the wagon; coming back we'd carry the things we bought in it.

On the way we'd stop at places where Father knew people. One night we would spend with those cousins of mine I'd never met. Father always stopped at the same places. They expected him every
year: it was a good chance to catch up on family news.

The trip was planned for the end of November. It was best to go as late in the year as you could, because the closer to winter it was, the scarcer beef was and the higher the price you could get. But if we waited too long, it would snow and then we would have trouble. Most of the time it was easier to travel when the snow was on the ground. You just hitched a horse to a sledge and slid over the packed snow. But it was hard to drive cattle in snow, and it was hard to pasture them along the way, too. So about the beginning of November Father began keeping a sharp eye out on the weather. He'd consult some almanacs, which usually disagreed, and he'd ask certain farmers who were supposed to be good judges of weather when they thought the snow would come. But the weather judges didn't agree any more than the almanacs did, so in the end Father would go out and frown at the sky a dozen times a day, and then make a guess.

The truth is that Father didn't really want to take me. “I don't think you're big enough yet to handle the wagon,” he told me.

“I know how to handle the wagon, Father. I've done it lots of times.”

“Around here, yes. But not with thirty cows to look after as well. Besides, the woods are full of those cow-boys over there. They claim they're patriots gathering beef for the troops, but really they're nothing more than thieves. And we don't have a gun anymore.”

Father was right about the thieves who people called cow-boys. We'd heard all kinds of stories from travelers about them. All of that part of Westchester County, from the Connecticut border over to the Hudson River, had gotten to be a kind of no man's land, with roving bands wandering around plundering people on the excuse that they were part of the war. “I'm pretty brave, Father,” I said.

He shook his head. “I don't like taking you, Tim, but I have no choice. There's nobody else to do it.”

I was glad there was nobody else to do it. It was pretty boring hanging around the tavern day after day, making fires and chopping wood and cleaning up and looking after the chickens and Old Pru and the pigs. There would be a lot of exciting things on the trip—meeting
my cousins and seeing the Hudson River which they said was a mile wide, and watching the boats sail up and down it. Besides it would get me out of school for a few days.

So Father collected cattle and watched the weather; and on the twentieth of November he came in from his weather look saying, “It's cloudy and getting chilly. I think we'd better start off in a day or two.”

It was a good guess. When we started out two days later there was a half an inch of snow on the ground which had fallen during the night. The sun came up later on and melted it, making the roads muddy, especially after the cattle had churned it up. I walked alongside the wagon guiding the oxen and keeping them moving when they slowed down. We had four hogs in the cart, with their feet tied together. They were always trying to get out, and I had to make sure they didn't get loose. Father rode our horse Grey along behind the cattle to keep them moving. We went pretty slowly. There wasn't much to do except to look around at the hills and fields. It seemed pretty exciting when we passed a house, especially if there were some people there. A couple of times there were children staring out the windows as we went by. It made me feel proud of myself for being a man while they were still children, and I shouted at the oxen and smacked them on their rumps with my stick, just to show off how casual and easy I was with oxen and how used I was to managing them.

Father's plan was to go up through Redding Ridge to Danbury, and then turn a bit southward to go through Ridgebury and across the border into New York, where we'd spend the night in North Salem with our cousins. We'd spend the second night with friends of Father's at their farm near Gulden's Bridge. It wasn't the straightest way over to Verplancks Point, but Father went that way because it took us past our cousins' place.

We reached Ridgebury around lunchtime. We didn't stop to eat, but chewed on some biscuits and drank some beer for thirst as we walked along. We couldn't have a conversation, really: the cattle made too much noise as they tromped along mooing, and we had to shout to hear each other. And that was why we didn't hear the men riding up on us until they came in sight over a little hill in front of us.

There were six of them, and they were carrying weapons—mostly old muskets, but one or two of them had swords and pistols. They were dressed in ordinary clothing—brown shirts and trousers and muddy boots. As they came toward us, I began to turn the oxen to the side of the road so they could pass. But they didn't go on by. They charged up to us, surrounded us, and stopped. I knew they were cow-boys. I pulled the wagon's long brake lever and whoa-ed the oxen. The cattle stopped going forward and began milling around. I turned and looked back at Father.