April Morning by Howard Fast

Author:Howard Fast
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC

“God have mercy on me,” I said to myself. “I am losing my mind, and soon I’ll be no better than Halfwit Jephthah in Concord, who is sixty years old with the brains of a five-year-old, and now I, myself, am hearing voices.” I was hearing voices. I heard a thin, cracked voice wailing, “Adam! Adam Cooper—are you around? Are you alive.”

I opened the door of the smokehouse, and there across the yard was my brother Levi.

“Levi,” I whispered.

He jumped like a startled rabbit and looked all around him.

“Levi! Here in the smokehouse!”

Then he saw me in the open door, ran to me, and threw himself sobbing into my arms, hanging onto me as if I was the only thing left in the whole world. He was crying now fit to break his heart, and that dried up the tears in me. I have noticed that when you have two brothers in a difficult situation and one begins to cry, the other usually contains himself. That was the way it happened to me. I pulled him into the smokehouse, closed the door behind us, and said:

“What are you doing out here?”

“Looking for you.”

“Well, who sent you to look for me?”

“Granny did. Adam, Father’s dead.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw him dead,” he sobbed. “He had two bullet holes in his chest. They shot him dead, Adam. Those lousy rotten redcoats shot him dead. That’s my father. They shot him dead, Adam.” He was shivering and shaking. I shook him until he had calmed down and was crying evenly again. Then I put my arm around him and squeezed him, the way Father had done to me, to show him that I wasn’t angry.

“Where did you see Father?” I asked him.

“Out on the common. Granny and Mother ran out there and I went with them. First the redcoats tried to stop us, but Granny was so wild and terrible angry that they let her go, and she fell down on her knees where Father was lying and began begging him he shouldn’t be dead, because out of five sons, he was the last one. But Mother just grabbed onto me and held me and looked at Father, and just wailing and wailing quiet, like a little girl—oh, it was terrible, terrible, Adam. It was just more terrible than anything, just more terrible, Adam, I tell you. Then a redcoat soldier came over, and he said something to Mother about could he help—I don’t know exactly what he said, because you can’t understand them so good the way they speak, and Granny stood up and spit in his face and said things to him like I never heard her say before. Goody Simmons was there and her sister, and the four of them, they picked up Father and carried him into the house. And there were dead people all over the common, with the women crying and wailing, and the redcoat soldiers all over everywhere—”

“Who else was dead?” I whispered.

“I don’t know all of them—I didn’t look.

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