“I’ll be home before you know it,” Marcus assured his mother. He kissed her on the cheek, shouldered his gun, and headed into town.
He met up with Joshua Boston and Zeb Pruitt outside the town’s burial ground, where Zeb was at work digging a grave. It was ringed with tall trees, and the burial stones popped out from the ground at all angles, moss covered and worn from the weather.
“Hey, Marcus,” Joshua called out. “You joining in the fight?”
“I thought I might,” Marcus replied. “It’s time King George stopped treating us like children. Freedom is our birthright as British subjects. Nobody should be able to take it from us, and we shouldn’t have to fight for it.”
“Or die for it,” Zeb muttered.
Marcus frowned. “Don’t you mean kill for it?”
“I said what I meant” was Zeb’s quick answer. “If a man drinks enough rum, or someone stirs up enough fear and hate in his heart, he’ll kill quick enough. But that same man will run from the battlefield the first chance he gets if he doesn’t believe what he’s fighting for, body and soul.”
“Best think hard about whether you have that kind of patriotism, Marcus—before you go marching off to Lexington with the militia,” Joshua said.
“Too late.” Zeb squinted into the distance. “Here comes Mr. MacNeil, and Josiah with him.”
“Marcus?” Obadiah stopped in the middle of the street, peering at him through bloodshot eyes. “Where are you going with my gun, boy?”
It wasn’t Obadiah’s gun, but Marcus felt sure this wasn’t the time to argue the point.
“I asked you a question.” Obadiah advanced on them, his steps irregular but still menacing.
“Town. They’ve called up the militia.” Marcus stood his ground.
“You’re not going to war against your king,” Obadiah said, grabbing at the gun. “It’s against God’s holy order to defy him. Besides, you’re just a child.”
“I’m eighteen.” Marcus refused to let go.
“Not yet you’re not.” Obadiah’s eyes narrowed and his mouth tightened.
This was usually the moment when Marcus capitulated, eager to keep the peace so that his mother didn’t intervene and get caught between her husband and her son.
But today, with Zeb’s and Joshua’s words ringing in his ears, Marcus felt that he had something to prove—to himself, to his father, and to his friends. Marcus stood taller, ready for a fight.
His father delivered a stinging slap across one cheek and then the other. It was not the blow you would give a man, but a woman or a child. Even in his anger, Obadiah was determined to remind Marcus of his place.
Obadiah wrested the gun from Marcus’s hands.
“Go back home to your ma,” Obadiah said contemptuously. “I’ll see you there. First, I need to have a word with Zeb and Joshua.”
His father would beat him when he got back to the farm. From the expression in Obadiah’s eye, Zeb and Joshua might receive a thrashing as well.
“They’ve got nothing to do with it,” Marcus said, his cheeks red from his father’s blows.
“Enough disobedience, boy,” Obadiah barked.
Joshua jerked his head in the direction of the farm. It was a silent request for Marcus to leave before things got even more heated.
He turned his back on his friends, on the war, and on his father and moved down the road toward the MacNeil farm.
Marcus promised himself it was the last time his father would tell him what to do.
* * *
—
IN JUNE, Marcus kept his word by running away to Boston. He had been beaten, several times, since the Lexington alarm. The violence usually began after Marcus questioned his father about something small and innocuous—whether the cows needed to be milked, or if the well was running dry. Obadiah took his questions as further signs of rebellion.
Each blow that his father gave with the folded leather reins seemed to make him calmer, his eyes growing less frantic and his speech less angry. Marcus had learned long ago not to cry while his father beat him, not even when his legs were covered with excruciating welts. Tears only made his father more desperate to exorcise Marcus’s demons. Usually Obadiah kept going until Marcus collapsed with pain. Then Obadiah took to the taverns, moving from one to the other until he collapsed, too, in a drunken heap.
It was after one of those beatings, while Obadiah was still out drowning his sorrows, that Marcus had packed a pail of food and the family almanac that outlined the towns on the Boston road so that he could mark his progress, and started walking east.
By the time Marcus reached Cambridge, Harvard Yard was buzzing like a hornet’s nest. The college had been emptied of its students, and militia from all over New England now occupied their rooms. When the college halls were filled up, the soldiers erected tents outside without much concern for their relationship to one another, the cobblestone streets, the lampposts, or the flow of sewage. The result was a makeshift encampment, crazed with narrow footpaths like the cracks in old crockery that wended their way between the flapping sheets of canvas, linen, and burlap.
Marcus entered the tent city and what had been a steady hum of activity became a din that rivaled the pounding of British artillery. Regimental musicians roused the inexperienced soldiers for the coming battle with a steady beating of their drums. Dogs, horses, and the occasional mule barked, neighed, and brayed. Men freshly arrived from towns as far away as New Haven to the south and Portsmouth to the north discharged their weapons at the slightest provocation, sometimes deliberately and more often accidentally.
Marcus was following the scent of burned coffee and roasted meat in search of something to eat when a familiar face turned toward him.
“Damn.” Marcus had been spotted by someone from back home.
Seth Pomeroy’s shrewd eyes settled on him, dark and deeply set over prominent cheekbones divided by a sharp nose. The Northampton gunsmith’s forbidding expression proclaimed that this was not a man to meddle with.
“MacNeil. Where’s your gun?” Pomeroy’s breath was foul—there was a decayed tooth in the front of his mouth that wiggled when he was angry. Tom Buckland wanted to pull it, but Pomeroy was adamantly opposed to dentistry, so the tooth was destined to rot in place.
“My pa has it,” Marcus replied.
Pomeroy thrust a musket at Marcus, one of his own and much finer than Grandfather MacNeil’s old blunderbuss.
“And does your father know you’re here?” Pomeroy asked. Like Mrs. Buckland, Pomeroy knew that Obadiah ruled his family with an iron fist. Nobody did anything without his permission—not if he valued his own hide.
“No.” Marcus kept his responses to a minimum.
“Obadiah isn’t going to like it when he finds out,” Pomeroy said.
“What’s he going to do? Disinherit me?” Marcus snorted. Everybody knew the MacNeils didn’t have a penny to bless themselves.
“And your mother?” Pomeroy’s eyes sharpened.
Marcus looked away rather than answer. His mother didn’t need to be part of this. His father had pushed her out of the way when she tried to stop their last argument, and she’d fallen and injured her arm. It still wasn’t healed, not even with Tom Buckland’s salve and the ministrations of the doctor from Hadley.
“One of these days, Marcus MacNeil, you’re going to find someone whose authority you can’t wriggle out from under,” Pomeroy promised, “but today isn’t the day. You’re the best shot in Hampshire County and I need every gun I can get.”
Marcus joined a line of soldiers. He filed into line next to a gangly fellow about his age wearing a red-and-white-checked shirt and a pair of navy breeches that had seen better days.
“Where you from?” his companion asked during a momentary lull in the action.
“Out west,” Marcus replied, not wanting to give too much away.
“We’re both country bumpkins, then,” the soldier replied. “Aaron Lyon. One of Colonel Woodbridge’s men. The Boston boys poke fun at anyone who lives west of Worcester. I’ve been called ‘Yankee’ more times than I can count. What’s your name?”
“Marcus MacNeil,” Marcus said.