April Morning Read Online Free PDF Page A

traveled to us—that is, they belonged to the Committee—a nice way of saying that they were stolen. There were five dragoon pistols, but these were the kind that a family bought to show off on the mantel in the sitting room, and it was questionable whether they would work. All the rest were fowling guns for pepper and salt shot.
    Hodley wanted a central shot and power depot organized in the village, because he had read somewhere that any place under siege should have an ammunition depot; but since we were not under siege and most likely never would be, bis point was voted down.
    Then Clarence Pinckney brought up his pet notion about drilling, but April was the wrong month to ask hard-working farmers to come out into the sunshine and drill, so the matter was put off for a fortnight. Cousin Simmons gave a progress report on the statement he had in preparation, and then the Reverend said a few words on tyranny, taxes, the moral condition of the High Church, the proper place of Oliver Cromwell in history as opposed to his current slanderers and detractors—and finished by paraphrasing the first two books of Maccabees.
    Some of the more orthodox held that it was presumptuous of the Reverend to push Maccabees the way he did, since those books were more properly apocryphal than divine, but the Reverend would have none of such criticism. We were the brothers of Simon, he said, and if God put such a weapon as Maccabees I and II into his hand, he would strike with the weapon or shame the gift of the Almighty. I don’t remember a case where the Reverend got the worst of that kind of an argument.
    Next, they took up the discussion of a newspaper. No one really believed that a community as small as ours could actually support a newspaper, nor did anyone ever really sit down with it and try to figure out where the capital for beginning the venture would be found, the round sum of money needed for the printing press, the type faces, the ink and the newsprint. Instead, the discussion always turned into a hot debate between the pro-Samuel Adams radicals and the anti-Samuel Adams egalitarians, since it was Adams who again and again stated that a newspaper must be the connecting link between the Committees and the people. As far as our village was concerned, within a few hours after a Committee meeting was finished, every soul in the place knew every word that had been spoken—so I failed to see Mr. Adams’ point.
    But such a discussion did provide the philosophical content without which no Committee meeting was complete, and it gave my father, who had always dreamed of himself as a newspaper editor whose flaming words would arouse thousands to action, an opportunity to plunge into the fray. I never could understand whether he enjoyed the points Samuel Adams stood for or simply looked upon him as a kindred cantankerous soul.
    My father rose to speak to this point, and while he repeated to my mother, word for word, everything he had said and good summations of what his opponents had said, I see no purpose in setting it down here. Father hated guns and only accepted them as a burden we had to bear; closer to his heart was the war of ideas at a time of decision. I think that he deeply believed that if you could win an argument, you could win a war.
    The final argument, as with almost all Committee meetings, revolved around the question of whether or not minutes should be kept.
    As usual, after the timid ones—or sensible ones, depending on your point of view—had said their say to the effect that it was one thing to put your head in a noose and something else indeed to be your own hangman, my father rose to the occasion:
    â€œI am a man of peace [so he told Mother, but it always appeared to me that he was the most belligerent man of peace I had ever encountered] yet on this point I rise in anger, indignation—and disappointment. Yes, disappointment! Are we slaves who plot and skulk in secret? Are we