My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier

“Your family ought to be more important than your friends.”
    He looked embarrassed, but he didn’t say anything.
    â€œI think you’re a coward,” I said. I didn’t really think that—anybody who joined the army to fight couldn’t be a coward, but I was still angry at him.
    â€œNo, I’m not,” he said.
    To tell the truth, it was me who was being the coward. Now that I’d got calmed down a little, I was afraid of what I might findwhen I went home. Suppose I walked in and found Father lying on the floor with a hole in his stomach bleeding to death, and maybe Mother dead, too. “All right, Sam, if you’re not a coward, come home with me and see if everything is all right.”
    He thought about it. “I’ll go as far as the barn with you.” Swiftly he loaded up the Brown Bess, with powder from the horn slung around his neck and pouch of shot he had dangling from his belt, and rammed it home with a ramrod.
    It impressed me, the casual easy way he did it. “Did you ever kill anybody, Sam?”
    He looked embarrassed again. “We haven’t done any fighting yet.”
    We set off across the snow fields, uphill and down, the way I’d come. Sam set a pretty good pace. He was hard and strong and used to it, from all the marching he’d done, and I had a hard time keeping up; but I was glad to go fast because I was so worried about Father. In fifteen minutes we came to our road, crossed it, and circled around back of the house. We ducked into the barn and stared at the tavern. There was smoke coming out of the chimney, but that was all—no sounds, no sign of men, no horses.
    â€œNothing happening,” Sam said.
    â€œCome on in with me and see,” I said.
    â€œIt’s risky, Tim.”
    â€œThere’s nobody around,” I said.
    He stared at me. We both knew it was his job to go in because he was the older brother. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”
    We darted across the barnyard and into the kitchen, and all of a sudden there was Father standing there, the line of blood drying on his face. He and Sam stood five feet apart, staring at each other. Then Sam turned and ran. “Sam,” Father shouted. “Come back, Sam.”
    But Sam raced across the barnyard and then began pounding over the snowy field toward the woodlot, the Brown Bess under his arm. Father and I ran out into the barnyard and watched him go. Father knew he couldn’t catch Sam. We watched him until he got to the stone wall at the edge of our pasture. He jumped up on it and stood there looking back at us. Then suddenly he waved, jumped down from thewall, and disappeared into the woodlot.

U P TO THAT TIME THE WAR HADN’T BEEN VERY REAL. I MEAN I knew it was going on because of stories in the Connecticut Journal, and from tales we heard in the tavern—stories travelers would tell us about somebody being killed or suddenly coming across some fresh bodies in a field. One man who stopped with us had been at the Battle of Lexington and had been wounded in the knee there. He walked with a limp, and he had the ball that wounded him on a string around his neck. And of course Sam wasn’t the only one from Redding who’d joined the militia; there were others, and every once in a while you’d hear about this one or that one having been in a battle and maybe having been killed or wounded.
    But none of them were people I really knew and so the war had always seemed to me like a story—something that happened in some faraway place or faraway time, and didn’t have anything to do with me. But after the search for weapons, I had a different feeling about it: it was real and it could come home to me, too.
    Luckily, the troops hadn’t really hurt anybody: a few of the men who’d put up a fuss like Father had got punched around a little, and Father had that cut which left a very thin scar you could hardlysee. But