April Morning by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online

to know.”
    â€œAt least, I know a little something about guns. Why, you couldn’t even load a rifle—you got to hammer the charge home. And then, when you do that, what are you going to find around here that you could hit with a rifle? Chicken hawks? Squirrels? Partridge? Rabbit? Why, if you had any sense at all, you’d know that is precisely why a fowling piece was invented.”
    â€œI know one thing I could get with a rifle.”
    â€œYou tell me.”
    â€œA redcoat soldier,” Levi said slowly and seriously, and Mother turned to us from where she was sewing at the table with Granny, and said somberly:
    â€œLevi, that’s not the way anyone in this house talks!”
    â€œAll I said was—”
    â€œI know exactly what you said. We don’t talk about killing people in our house. We don’t speculate upon it. We don’t derive satisfaction from such inhuman speculation.”
    â€œMy goodness, you’d think I was the only one!” Levi cried. “There isn’t a boy in school don’t keep score of how many redcoat soldiers he’s going to get himself when the war comes!”
    â€œThat’s enough,” Mother said. “I haven’t raised my children by the yardstick of boys in school, and I don’t intend to begin now. We are not savages or barbarians, and we do not go to church to seek instruction in the art of killing. Now both of you put that gun away and march up to bed.”
    â€œI never opened my mouth,” I protested.
    â€œBoth of you, Adam. It’s close enough to bedtime in any case.”
    â€œI’m four years older than Levi. What sense does it make for both of us to go to bed at the same time?”
    â€œI’m not disposed to argue,” Mother said. That way, she was different from Father. He would have proved that it was right and proper for both of us to go to bed at the same time.
    As we walked upstairs, I told Levi, “Among a dozen other things wrong with you, you never know when to keep your mouth shut.”
    I was a long time falling asleep that night, and lying there with the door open, I heard Father come in, and I heard his report to Mother concerning what went on at the Committee meeting. I have already set that down. When he finished talking about the Committee, she told him about the incident with the gun.
    â€œI shouldn’t have said what I said,” Mother sighed. “At least, not that way. Adam is still a boy. Just because he’s so tall and strong, we get to thinking about him as a man.”
    â€œIt’s time he thought about being a man,” Father put in.
    â€œWe could both help him toward that.”
    â€œHow? We’ve given him a good home, good food and good clothes, and an education. And if all goes well, he can go to college and board out with Aunt Martha in Cambridge. It doesn’t seem to me that you can give a boy much more than that.”
    â€œPerhaps it isn’t enough, Moses.”
    â€œHow?” my father demanded indignantly.
    â€œWell, he seems to have gotten the idea that you hate him.”
    â€œHate him!” my father exploded. “Of all the crazy notions! Of all the idiotic ideas! There a boy, my first-born son—why, how could any man love a son any more than I love that boy? Now where could he have gotten an idea as unreasonable as that?”
    â€œHe could have gotten it from you,” Granny said.
    â€œNow see here, I won’t have both of you turning against me. It doesn’t mean a thing. You know the way boys are. I was somewhat sharp with him at the table, but boys get over that kind of thing. I’m old enough and wise enough now to thank the good God that my own father never spared the rod and spoiled the child.”
    â€œAge and wisdom don’t go together as often as you might think,” Granny said, “and as for your own father, Moses Cooper, I knew him better than you ever will.