Between his divided loyalties, the violent nightmares of war that plagued him, and his taste for strong drink, Obadiah could not decide whether their present fight with the king was legitimate or not. The puzzle was slowly driving him mad.
“Tell him you haven’t seen me—that you came in from the henhouse and found the gun was gone.” Marcus didn’t want his mother or his sister to pay the price for his disobedience.
“Your father isn’t a fool, Marcus,” his mother said. “He’ll have heard the bells.”
They were still pealing—in Hadley, in Northampton, in every meetinghouse in Massachusetts, probably.
“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.