Penn's Hill

The guns began before it was light, and Abigail Adams, who had not been asleep, knew them at once for what they were.

It was not the first time she had heard guns that spring. In May the regulars had come out in boats to Grape Island for the hay, and the whole coast had gone down to the shore at Weymouth with muskets and fowling pieces and pitchforks to shout at them across the water, and there had been firing then: a little, flat and far away, like a carpet being beaten in the next parish. This was not like that. This was heavy and slow, a great soft blow, and then a wait, and then another, and it came from the north, across the bay, and the glass in the window hummed with each one in its frame.

She lay still and counted them, because counting was something to do. At twenty she stopped, because there was no end to it, and got up and dressed in the dark without a candle, and went down past the room where the children slept.

John had been gone since April. He was in Philadelphia with the Congress, three hundred miles and more away, and his letters took ten days to come and hers took ten days to reach him, so that every letter between them was an answer to a question the other had long since stopped asking. She had got into the way of writing to him in her head from the moment she woke. It was the only kind of conversation they had now that did not have to wait for the post. The guns began before it was light, she told him, going down the stairs, and then thought that he would not read it for a fortnight, and that by then it would be old news, or the only news there was.

The yard was grey. Over the bay the sky was the colour of pewter, and the islands lay on the water like sleeping animals, and to the north, beyond the long shoulder of Penn’s Hill, where Boston was, and Charlestown across the river from it, there was nothing to see at all. Only the sound, coming over the hill and across the fields and into her chest.

The hired man was at the barn door already, with the milk pail, looking north.

“Ships’ guns,” he said. “Big ones.”

“Firing at what?”

He did not know. Nobody on the coast road would know for hours. She sent him down to the road to ask anybody who passed, and went and did the milking herself, because the cows did not care who was firing at what, and because her hands wanted something to do.

---

By the time the sun was up the children were awake, all four of them, and the house was full of the question nobody could answer.

Nabby, who was nine, and had lately decided that she was a woman and therefore not frightened of anything, went about setting the table with her mouth pressed shut. Charley, who was five, wanted to know if the guns would come to Braintree, and was told they would not, and asked again ten minutes later. Tommy, who was two, liked the noise and banged a spoon in time to it until Abigail took the spoon away.

Johnny did not ask anything. He stood at the window of the front room with his hands on the sill, looking north at the hill, as though if he looked hard enough he could see through it. He was seven, and would be eight in July, and he had his father’s way of going still when he was thinking and his father’s way of thinking about the thing nobody else would say.

“It’s the regulars,” he said at last. “Isn’t it.”

“We don’t know yet.”

“It’s the regulars shooting at our men.”

“We don’t know yet, Johnny.”

He turned round and looked at her, and she saw him decide not to believe her, and then decide, with great politeness, not to say so. It was a look she knew. She had married it.

The news came in pieces through the morning, as news came everywhere that spring, carried by men on horses who knew one piece of it each and gave it out at every gate. In the night the provincials had gone over the Neck into Charlestown and dug themselves in on the heights above the town, a thousand men with picks and shovels, and at first light the men-of-war in the river had seen what they had done and begun to fire on them. That was the sound. That was all anyone knew. The provincials were still there. The regulars were still in Boston. Something would have to happen, and everybody on the coast road agreed about that, and nobody knew what.

She went about the work of the house. There was bread to set, and the garden, and the account book, which she kept now that John was gone, and kept better than he had. There was the letter from him that had come on Thursday, which she had read four times and would read again tonight. It was full of the Congress: who had spoken, who was a fool, who was a greater fool than he appeared. It was full, too, of Mr Dickinson of Pennsylvania, who wanted the Congress to send one more petition to the King, humble and loyal and begging, and who had half the Congress with him. John thought it a waste of paper and a worse waste of time. He had written three sides about it, and she had read them all, and then turned the page to see if there was anything about the children, and there was a line.

The King had been sent respectful papers and had answered with regiments. She could not see what another sheet would do. But Dickinson was in Philadelphia and she was in Braintree, with the milking done and the bread to set. Nobody had asked her. She had been told since childhood that politics were no business of hers, and had read more of them since than most of the men at meeting.

In the afternoon the guns redoubled.

---

It came all at once, a little after three, as though a door had been opened on a storm. The ships’ guns were still there, the slow heavy ones, but now there were others under them, lighter and quicker, and something else that was not guns at all, a continuous crackling, very faint, like a fire of green wood heard from another room. The window glass did not hum now. It rattled.

Johnny was at the door before she could stop him. He did not go out. He stood in it, holding the frame, and turned and looked at her.

“Let me go up the hill.”

“No.”

“I’ll see what it is. I’ll come straight back and tell you.”

“No, Johnny.”

He waited in the doorway. If she kept him in, he would stand there all afternoon listening to the guns. She looked towards the hill, then at the bread. Nabby could mind it.

“Nabby,” she said. “Mind Charley and Tommy. Don’t let them out of the house.”

“Where are you going?”

“Up the hill,” said Abigail, “with your brother.”

---

Penn’s Hill rose behind the house, bare at the top, a great round shoulder of pasture and grey rock with the stone walls going up it like stitching. She had climbed it a hundred times, for the view, or for the blueberries, or to be alone for half an hour, which was the rarest thing in a house with four children and no husband. She had never climbed it quickly before. By the top she had a stitch in her side and her skirts were wet to the knee from the long grass, and Johnny, who had run the whole way, was waiting for her on the highest rock with his hand shading his eyes.

The whole bay lay below them. The islands, and the ships at anchor, and the long low line of Dorchester Neck, and beyond it Boston on its hill, with the steeples standing up out of it like pins in a cushion. She had lived all her life within sight of that town, and she knew every steeple in it. And to the north of it, over the river, where Charlestown was, there was a pillar of smoke going up into the afternoon.

It went up and up, brown and black and grey, and leaned over at the top where the wind took it, and spread out across the sky towards the sea. At the bottom of it, where it came out of the ground, there was light. Not the flash of guns. A steady light, orange, moving. She understood what it was a moment before Johnny did.

“The town’s on fire,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Charlestown.”

“Yes.”

“All of it?”

She could see small flashes from the ships and from the battery on the hill at Boston. Each sound came long after its flash. She counted between them, getting past fifty. She had read somewhere that sound was slower than light, and had thought it one of those facts that had no use.

Of the men themselves she could see nothing at all. It was too far. There were no soldiers, no lines, no flags, no redoubt. There was the smoke, and the fire at the foot of it, and the flashes, and the long crackle under the guns that she knew now was musketry, thousands of muskets, so many and so far away that together they made a sound as small as a kettle beginning to boil.

“Is Father there?” said Johnny.

“No. Your father is in Philadelphia.”

“Who is there?”

“Our men. The Braintree men, some of them. Men from all over the province.”

He was quiet for a long time, watching. Then he said, “Is Dr Warren there?”

She did not answer at once. Joseph Warren had been their physician in Boston before the troubles, and their friend, and John’s friend more than anyone’s, and he was the kind of man who would be wherever the danger was thickest, because he could not bear to send other men anywhere he had not been first. The Provincial Congress had made him a general only that week. She did not know where he was. She had a very clear picture of where he was, and she put it away.

“Dr Warren is a physician,” she said. “He’ll be where the hurt men are.”

Johnny held up his right hand and looked at it. The forefinger was crooked at the middle joint, and would be all his life. Two winters ago he had broken it so badly that the surgeon who first saw it wanted it off, and John had sent into Boston for Warren, and Warren had come out through the snow and looked at it and said that he thought they might keep it, and they had. Johnny was proud of that finger. He showed it to visitors.

“He’ll be all right,” Johnny said. It was not a question, and she did not treat it as one.

They stayed on the hill until the sun was going down behind them and the shadow of the hill went out across the fields towards the water. Towards the end the crackling stopped, quite suddenly, and a little after that the guns slowed, and she did not know what that meant, whether it was over or only resting, whether it had been won or lost or neither. The fire did not stop. As the light went the pillar of smoke turned red from underneath, and then the whole of the north was red, a long low glow over the water where Charlestown had been that morning, and in the glow she could see, very small and black, the steeple of the Charlestown meeting house, and then she could not.

“Come,” she said. “Nabby will be frightened.”

“Nabby isn’t frightened of anything.”

“That,” said Abigail, “is what frightens me about Nabby.”

He laughed, which was what she had wanted, and took her hand, which she had not expected, and they went down the hill together in the dusk.

---

Nobody ate supper. She put it on the table and they sat in front of it, and the guns went on, not so often now, and every time one fired Charley looked at her and she smiled at him.

At prayers she had the children kneel in the kitchen, as they did every night, and she prayed as she always prayed, for their father in Philadelphia, that God would keep him and bring him home; and for the men on the hill, whoever they were, and whatever had happened to them; and for the people of Charlestown, who had no houses tonight; and for their friends, and for their country, and for themselves. She said amen, and the children said amen, and it was only when she was putting Tommy into his bed that she understood what she had left out.

She had not prayed for the King.

Her father had prayed for George the Second and then George the Third, and she had said amen. Even after Lexington she had kept the words. Tonight she had reached the end without them.

She stood by Tommy’s bed in the dark for some time. She thought that she ought to go back down and kneel again and put him in, since nothing was decided, since Mr Dickinson was writing him another petition, since John himself, for all his temper, signed his letters from a Congress that called itself loyal. She thought about it honestly. Then she went and sat by the window in the front room, where she could see the glow over the hill, and did not go back.

She did not sleep that night either. Most of Braintree did not.

---

The guns were still firing on Sunday morning. Fewer, and slower, but still there, as though the ships did not know what else to do. There was no meeting. Or there was, and she did not go, and afterwards she could not remember which.

It was her brother-in-law who came, Richard Cranch, her sister Mary’s husband, a little after two. She saw him from the window coming up the road on foot, walking fast, and then walking slower as he got near the house, and she knew from the way he slowed.

He told it in the kitchen, with his hat in his hands. The regulars had come up the hill twice and been driven back. On the third attack the provincials had no powder left, and the regulars came over the wall with the bayonet. They had the hill, at the cost of a thousand men killed and hurt, some said more. Of Charlestown there were only chimneys left.

“And Dr Warren,” Mr Cranch said, and stopped.

She waited.

“He was in the redoubt. He went in as a volunteer, with a musket, like a private man. He would not take a command. He was among the last out of it.” Mr Cranch turned his hat round in his hands. “He was shot in the head, sister. At the last. They say he could not have known it.”

She heard a sound behind her and turned, and Johnny was in the doorway. She did not know how long he had been there. He was not looking at her or at his uncle. He was looking at his right hand.

She went to him. She meant to say something, she did not know what, something about God’s purposes, or about how Dr Warren had died for his country, which was true and was no use at all to a boy of seven. She did not say any of it. She knelt on the kitchen floor and put her arms round him, and he put his face into her shoulder, and she found that she was crying, and that he was, and that neither of them was trying to stop the other.

---

At three o’clock she sat down at the table in the front room with the ink and the paper, because there was nothing else to do with it, and because John must know, and because if she did not put it somewhere it would break her open.

The guns were still going, far off. Johnny was asleep at last on the settle, on his side, with his crooked finger against his cheek. She dipped the pen and did not write anything for a long time. Then she did.

Dearest Friend, she wrote, and the date, and then: The Day; perhaps the decisive Day is come on which the fate of America depends. My bursting Heart must find vent at my pen. I have just heard that our dear Friend Dr. Warren is no more but fell gloriously fighting for his Country.

She looked at gloriously for some time. She did not cross it out. It was what one wrote. It was what he would want written, and it was what the country would say, and in a year there would be sermons about it, and a boy would grow up with a crooked finger and a dead friend and be told it was glorious. She let it stand.

She told him about Charlestown. Charlstown is laid in ashes, she wrote, and did not stop to mend the spelling, which she never did, and which John teased her for, and which she thought tonight she would never mind again if only he were here to tease her. She told him the battle had begun on Saturday morning, about three, and had not ceased yet, and that it was three o’clock on the Sabbath afternoon. She told him that the constant roar of the cannon is so distressing that we can not Eat, Drink or Sleep, which was true of every soul in the house except the one asleep on the settle.

She told him that she would stay in the house until their friends thought it unsafe, and that his brother had offered her part of his, if it came to that. She did not tell him about Penn’s Hill, or the King, or what she had not said at prayers. Those would keep. There would be time for them, or there would not.

Then she found she could not go on.

I cannot compose myself to write any further at present, she wrote. I will add more as I hear further.

She put the pen down. Across the water, very far away, the guns went on, and every flash she could not see from here arrived a long minute after it had happened, too late to be any use to anyone.