“I laid it across his face,” said Higgs, clearing his throat. “Afterwards. It seemed more decent-like, somehow.”
Gerry sat down on the grass beside the little fire, there being nothing else to do. The moon had risen and was shining wanly down on the hills and pastures, on the roofs of Charlestown village. It made a path of silver across the black bay, a path to the lighted shores of Boston. Lanterns flashed in the midst of it, lanterns on the prows of the boats that were carrying the badly defeated British back to the town they had left so proudly the night before.
Gerry thought how he himself and the rest of the Twenty-third had marched out that morning, fifers playing “Yankee Doodle,” and colors lifting on the spring wind. They had marched inland by way of the Neck, through Roxbury to Cambridge, and so far, it was all a game. But the sport ceased near Lexington where they met their fleeing comrades who had gone to Concord to raid the Yankees’ powder magazine. Powerful grenadiers dropped exhausted and lay like dogs after a hunt, panting, their tongues hanging out. The Marines and Light Infantry scattered helter-skelter across the countryside, while the farmers fired at them from behind every wall and tree.
“Cover the retreat,” his regiment had been ordered, and they had done so, in a running battle all the way back to Cambridge. It was there that an officer had detailed him and his sergeant to help get the wounded away.
And now one of those wounded was dead, Captain Blakeslee. Why should it matter to him, when he had known the captain such a little time? But it did matter. A lump swelled and stiffened inside his throat. Then he looked down towards Charlestown and thought of Sally Rose. But she wouldn’t be there, of course. She had gone to visit her kin in a town called Newburyport, a town in the country somewhere. Her father had sent her away because he thought she was too good for a captain of the Welsh Fusileers. And if he felt that way about a captain, how would he feel about the private who tended a goat in stable and led it out on muster day? How would Sally Rose feel if she knew the truth about him? And then somehow Sally Rose began to dwindle in his mind, and for the moment she did not matter any more. He remembered that he had fought his first battle and come out alive, but Captain Blakeslee was dead, and maybe tomorrow there would be another battle, and he would be the one to lie under the locust tree, under some comrade’s tattered coat.
“Open your haversack, lad,” said Sergeant Higgs, his voice cheery again. “I found a spring on the hillside a bit of a ways off, and I’ve been fetching water to the men in the wagon there. They be all somewhat easier now, and the boats will have us in Boston before long.” He threw another armful of dry branches on the fire. “You’ve salt pork and bread, like the rest of us, so eat up your supper. ’Twill taste little worse for the fact that good men be dead, and we lost the day.”
“I know we were driven back,” murmured Gerry, obeying the sergeant and taking out his small parcel of food. “But didn’t the troops get the Rebel stores they went for? Didn’t they get to Concord before...?”
Higgs nodded. He had run the point of his bayonet through a lump of thick, greasy-looking meat and held it over the fire. “Oh, they got there, all right,” he said. “But they’d been better off if they’d stayed in barracks, according to the way I heard. They broke up a couple of cannon, rolled some powder kegs into a millpond, and burnt a house or two. Then they was routed. But ’twould be a different story if the Yankees would come out in the open and fight like men.”
“They seemed to be in an almighty rage about something,” said Gerry, beginning to toast his own meat, keeping his eyes away from the shadow under the locust tree. “And they had no sort of uniformed army. Men in shirts and leather breeches, just as they’d come from the plow or workshop. Well, all spring we’ve been sure there was fighting ahead of us. Now it’s begun.”
“Yes,” said Jack Higgs, looking out at the dark shapes of the rescue boats that crossed and recrossed the moonlit water. “It’s begun, and it took two to begin it—we and they. But at the end—there’ll be left only one.”