My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier

Author:James Lincoln Collier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AudioGO
Published: 2012-10-17T04:00:00+00:00

HAVING FATHER GONE WAS STRANGE, THE TAVERN SEEMED cold and empty, the way it is when you wake up at night and realize that the fires have gone out. Mother didn’t cry, except right at the beginning, the night I told her what had happened. She went on believing that he was alive. “They had no reason to kill him, Timothy. I believe they’re holding him somewhere. They’ll let him go by and by.” But the days passed and he didn’t come home, and soon she changed her story. “He’s in a prison ship somewhere,” she said. “As soon as this terrible war is over he’ll come home again.”

I didn’t know whether she was saying what she believed or was just trying to keep me from thinking that my father was dead. Now half the family was gone and our lives were really changed. Mother and I had all the work to do, which meant that there was hardly any time off for either of us. We even had to work on Sunday, which was a sin. “God will forgive us, Tim,” Mother said. “Don’t worry about it, I’m sure of that.” I didn’t tell her that I wasn’t worried.

But the work worried me all right. There was so much to do—old Pru and the chickens and sheep to take care of and the spring, planting the corn and greens we needed for the tavern, and the cleaning and the cooking. And of course somebody had to be at the tap all the time to draw beer and serve the meals to travelers and make up beds for people who came through needing a place to sleep. There were a lot of people going through, too—messengers going here and there and people moving to different towns and commissary officers and such. So business seemed good, but actually it wasn’t, because a lot of people—the ones on official business—paid in commissary notes which were just pieces of paper that wouldn’t be worth anything at all unless the Rebels won. You couldn’t buy very much with the commissary notes: a lot of people wouldn’t take them, unless they were strong Patriots and felt they ought to in order to show faith in George Washington and the Rebel government.

Business was good in the store, too. Food was in short supply and so was everything else, and we could sell anything we could get our hands on—cloth, farming tools, wheat, sugar, rum, anything at all. We even started dealing in used goods. Farmers were desperate for everything—shovels, plowshares, candle molds, churns, and all the rest of it. Sometimes Mother would hear of a widow whose husband had died or been killed in the war, and couldn’t manage the farm anymore. She’d be willing to sell us the old farming tools, and we could easily resell them at a good price.

But even that didn’t help much. Prices kept going up and up, and depreciation of the paper money took a lot of the profit out of it.

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