April Morning by Howard Fast Page A

it.
    His father was there, and I could see that he wasn’t pleased with the notion of his son standing in front, when all the rest of us were in the back. Father didn’t like the idea either. But Jonathan argued so hard and persistently that they gave way, and he took his place at one end of the front rank, just as proud as punch.
    We stood facing east, and it must have been past five o’clock in the morning now, for when you looked at the eastern sky and then at the western sky, you could see how the one was lightening and the other still a deep charcoal lit brightly with stars.
    The Reverend said to Jonathan Harrington, “Well, Jonathan, since your persistence has won your point, what can you play to ease our waiting?”
    â€œAnything you say, sir.”
    â€œWould you render ‘Old Hundred’?”
    â€œOh, yes, sir,” Jonathan grinned. We all of us smiled a little when the Reverend mentioned “Old Hundred,” just as we would have been disappointed if he hadn’t. It was his favorite hymn. He still had in his house—I had seen it once—the original parchment sheet music that his folks had brought over from Old Amsterdam a hundred and fifty years ago, and which was supposed to have been hand-lettered by Henry Ainsworth; and there was almost never a Sunday when he didn’t call for the singing of it. Now we took it up, all of us with full voice, so that they could hear it in the houses and know how high our spirits were, singing:
    â€œShow to Jehovah all the earth,
    Serve ye Jehovah with gladness;
    Before Him come with singing mirth;
    Know the Jehovah He, God, is!”
    It was strange, but after we sang the one hymn, a pall fell upon us. I know that I was thinking about Jonathan Harrington, and how he had been talking of marriage with Bessie Suderland, and I thought how terrible it would be if he should be struck down, standing as he was in the first row, and how would Bessie Suderland feel? It was a foolish way to think. I looked at the men and boys around me, and their faces were gray and drawn and old in the predawn. The whole eastern sky was gray now; we were a part of it; and the gray lay in dew upon the grass of the common. My belly was queasy, but out of fatigue not out of fear; and I told myself that the British would not come. Had we made fools of ourselves? How did the men feel, standing here in their lines on the common, with every manner of weapon, bird guns, muskets, matchlocks, rifles, and even an old blunderbuss that Ephraim Drake insisted was the best weapon ever invented.
    Then Father and Jonas Parker walked down our line and reminded everyone to see that their flints were not on cock. They didn’t want any accidents, they said. Father looked at me, and smiled and nodded, and that picked up my spirits a good deal. I took the bit of flannel off my flint.
    Far in the distance, shots were fired. We heard them. The sound was like twigs snapping in the winter frost. Everyone became tense, and men leaning on their guns picked them up and held them in both hands.
    In the west, the dark band of night washed away. The birds began to sing around the common, the way they do in the hour before dawn. A cloud high in the sky turned pink with the first reflection of the sun, but the east, the direction of the Menotomy Road, was still full of haze and mist.
    And then, after all the waiting, all the climax and the anticlimax of the long night, the British came and dawn came. Men who were talking dropped their voices to whispers, and then the whispers stopped, and in the distance, through the morning mist, we heard the beat of the British drums. It began as a rustle. Then it was the sound of a boy running through the reeds of a dry swamp. Then it was my own sound as I ran along a picket fence with a stick, and how did I come to be here, grown, with a gun in my wet hands? Fear began. I felt it prickle on my spine. I felt it like a weight in my belly. I felt it