Sarah Bishop Read Free Page B

refuse, as they've been doing up in Boston and other places."
    "The sergeant told me that I'd be in the commissary," Chad said. "Since I've been working in the kitchen up at the Lion and Lamb. I'll ride in a wagon stuffed with food and I'll have plenty of it to eat."
    "Chances are," Father said, "that you'll not ride so much as you'll walk. And be hungry more than you're not. And freeze your tail."
    Chad peered at his friend David Whitlock for help.
    "We signed up for only six months," David said.
    "Long enough," Father replied, "to have your skulls split. By the Hessians, probably. YouVe heard of them. They're professional soldiers. Mercenaries, they're called. Come from Germany. The fiercest fighters in the world."
    Old Lady Ryder's clock cleared its throat and struck the hour of one.
    David Whitlock glanced at the clock through his thick glasses, which made his eyes look twice as big as they really were. He grasped my brother's arm and informed him that it was past time to be on their way.
    Chad was eyeing the clumsy musket that Father hunted wild fowl with. He walked over and picked it up and made a sighting on an imaginary foe.
    "I need a weapon," he said. "I'll return it when my enlistment's over. If you don't mind, sir."
    "I do mind," Father replied. "It will kill no mother's son in this barbarous war. Put it down."
    Chad did as he was told. There were tears in his eyes. I ran into the house to get him a loaf of bread to take along, but when I came back he was gone.
    I watched the boys cross the cornfield, marching like soldiers. At the stream Chad stopped and waved. I waved back. Father shouted, "We'll pray for you, son."
    And we did pray right there, kneeling on the stone floor while the boys came to the rise near Purdy's mill and disappeared among the trees.
    That night I lay awake and thought about Chad. I wondered if he'd had anything to eat. I'd cooked his favorite dishes, succotash and Indian pudding, for supper, and he wasn't there to eat them. I wondered, too, where he would sleep. Most likely on the ground. He had a soft mattress on his bed in the attic. It was stuffed with duck feathers.
    I thought about the pamphlet that Father had torn up
and thrown on the floor. I remembered some of the words David Whitlock had recited: "This New World has been the asylum for the persecuted..."
    We had not fled from persecution, but we had been dispossessed of our farm and its belongings, our sheep, our plough, our scythe and butter churn. Still, it wasn't the King's fault that we lost everything. It was the law's fault.
    I was thinking about this and why some people were rebelling against the King and some were not and some didn't care one way or the other so long as they weren't bothered. I was thinking hard when I heard an explosion. It was a musket shot. The sound came from upstream in the direction of Purdy's mill.
    Next morning Clovis Stone, one of our neighbors, came by to say that Purdy had shot a cat, a big one, big as a catamount and black. The cat somehow got away but had left a trail of blood behind. Purdy was sure that it was the cat that had caused the mill wheel to stop every day exactly at midnight.
    Then a curious thing happened. Old Lady Ryder came in that afternoon for her clock, with her hair flying every which way and her green eyes, which never looked straight at you, peering around.
    It was a hot day but she had a shawl thrown over her shoulders. When she went to pay my father for fixing the clock, the shawl fell back and I saw that she had
her left hand wrapped up in a rag. Father asked her how she came to hurt herself.
    "It's a sprain," she said in her wheezy voice. "Fell on a cobble over in New York."
    It was then I noticed that there was a bloodstain on the rag she had wrapped around her hand.
    I hadn't believed in witchcraft and witches since I was ten years old, but it gave me a start, nevertheless.

5
    T HE NEXT MORNING was Sunday. We usually went to church on foot, but it had rained hard in