"My Brother Sam is Dead" by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier, Chapters 1–3

It was April, and outside in the dark the rain whipped against the windows of our tavern, making a sound like muffled drums.

All right, the British troops. From the garrison in Boston. They marched up to Lexington looking for Mr. Adams and the rest, but they’d got away.

Somebody signalled them from some church steeple in Boston, so when the Lobst—British got up to Lexington there wasn’t anybody there, except the Minutemen.

“Damn it, that’s rebellion,” one of the fanners said.

Mr. Beach shook his head. “I think men of common sense will prevail. Nobody wants rebellion except fools and hotheads.”

Mr. Beach shook his head. “I think men of common sense will prevail. Nobody wants rebellion except fools and hotheads.”

“I will not have treason spoken in my house, Sam.”

“In my house I will decide what constitutes treason. What have they been teaching you at college?”

I think you’ll find that loyalty is a virtue everywhere.

These agitators can always manage to stir up the passions of the people for a week or so, but it never lasts.

“Free? Free to do what, Sam? Free to mock your King? To shoot your neighbor? To make a mess of thousands of lives? Where have you been getting these ideas?”

My mother hated it when Father hit Sam for speaking out, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it, and anyway, she believed that Father was right, children ought to keep a civil tongue in their heads.

And I guess most of his boasts were true: he was always bringing home some book in Latin or Greek with an inscription, saying he had won it for some telling point he had scored.

But he didn’t come, so I began to daydream about being older and going to Yale with Sam and scoring some telling points myself and Sam being proud of me—even though I know that daydreams are sloth and sloth is a sin.

“I wasn’t going to, but Mother said that idle hands make the Devil’s work.”

I giggled. “So is—what’s that word for girls? Lasviciousness.”
“Lasciviousness, stupid, not lasviciousness. I have a new song about girls, but it’s too lasvicious for you.”

The gun was about as long as I was tall, and had a bayonet around twenty inches long.

Father kept the bayonet hanging over the mantelpiece.

He used the Brown Bess for deer and sometimes when he went out with the other men to go after a wolf that was getting into the livestock.

Above the second floor is the loft where Sam and I sleep. There isn’t much in it—just a couple of beds. There are no stairs up to the loft—just a ladder.

“I will not have subversion, I will not have treason in my house. We are Englishmen, we are subjects of the King, this rebellion is the talk of madmen.”

“Oh God, Sam fight? Is it worth war to save a few pence in taxes?”
“It’s not the money, it’s the principle.”

“A man? You’re a boy, Sam, a boy dressed up in a gaudy soldier’s suit.”

“Go, Sam. Go. Get out of my sight. I can’t bear to look at you anymore in that vile costume. Get out. And don’t come back until you come dressed as my son, not as a stranger.”

“He wasn’t boasting, Tim. He’s going over to Wethersfield. The fools are planning to march up to Massachusetts to meddle in something that isn’t their affair.”

“That’s just college-boy wind,” Father said. He sounded pretty scornful.

Church was practically the only time we ever saw some of the farmers from farther out in the parish—places like Umpawaug.

They wanted to keep up with the news, and Father always spent some time with them—it was good business, Father said, to be cordial with people.

Covering the poles were hides and rags and in some places patches of straw thatch.

“Oh, we’re all Patriots. After all, my grandfather is head of the militia.”

“He’s too old. He said he would probably resign his commission to some younger man. Anyway he doesn’t think we ought to fight unless we really have to. He says there ought to be some way of working it out with the King and Parliament without having to fight.”

“He’s too old. He said he would probably resign his commission to some younger man. Anyway he doesn’t think we ought to fight unless we really have to. He says there ought to be some way of working it out with the King and Parliament without having to fight.”

Or if nobody was watching me, I’d sneak up into the loft and look at the old almanacs Sam brought back from college sometimes.

She came into the tavern pretty often to buy thread or cloth or something, and I noticed that when she did she’d linger around on some excuse and try to listen to what people were saying until my mother would say, “Betsy, I don’t think your mother intended for you to spend the day idling,” and she’d go.

So September passed and then October. The geese flew south in long, wavering V’s.