Excerpt:

Up 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 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 his 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 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 hardly see. But even if nobody got hurt, the people in Redding were good and angry about losing so many of their guns. Guns were valuable. It wasn’t so much a matter of hunting — there wasn’t too much game around, although some farmers occasionally got a deer or a muskrat for the pot. Mostly people wanted guns to go after the wolves that sometimes came down into the pastures after lambs, and for general protection.

The worst part of it was that food was already beginning to get short. Army commissary officers, like the one Sam was working for, were buying up a lot of the livestock to feed the troops. Sometimes soldiers would just take a couple of cows out of somebody’s fields without paying for them, too. Both sides did it — the Patriots and the Tories. They weren’t supposed to, they were always supposed to pay, but a lot of time at the end of a day’s march they’d find that there wasn’t anything for them to eat, and they’d just go out into a field, butcher a couple of cows, cut them up and carry them off to camp on their shoulders. It was a terrible thing to lose your milking cows because it meant no more milk or butter or cheese. There wasn’t anything anyone could do about it, though. Oh, whenever it happened the people would get up a petition and complain, but it never did much good because the soldiers were gone and beef was eaten.

By January of 1776 food was getting to be a real problem for us, too. It wasn’t so much that we were going hungry, but that the meat and flour and rum and beer and everything else we needed to run the tavern and the store kept going up and up in price all the time. This forced us to raise our prices; then prices would go up again, and we’d have to raise them some more.

But still, the worst part of the war was missing Sam. Of course he’d been gone at college before, so I’d got used to the idea of having to do his share of the work and all that. But when he was at Yale I didn’t have to worry about him all the time — worry that he’d be shot or get sick and die or something else. Although to tell the truth, I envied him, too. I could picture him in my mind standing on top of the stone wall by the woodlot, the Brown Bess cradled under his arm, waving at us.

He seemed so brave and grown-up, and I wished that I could be brave and grown-up like him, too. I didn’t like the idea of being shot at or wounded or killed very much, but it seemed to me that it must feel wonderful to be able to load up a gun in the casual way he did it. I knew that to a younger brother everything your older brother does seems wonderful. I remember being little and watching Sam milk Old Pru and admiring him and thinking how clever he was. And then it got to be my turn to learn how to milk Old Pru, and I found out that there wasn’t any glory to it; it was just hard work and made your hands ache. So I guess that being a soldier probably didn’t have much glory to it, either, that it was mostly just a lot of hard work. But still, I envied Sam, and I wished I were old enough to do something glorious, too.

So some time passed and the war went on. Sometimes we’d read about Patriot victories and other times about Tory victories. It all seemed confused. It was hard to tell who was really winning — partly because sometimes both sides claimed to have won the same battle. Father said, “The Rebels are damn fools, how can they expect to beat the whole British army? They can win these skirmishes in the woods, but as soon as the British catch them in pitched battle they’ll be done for, and no good can come out of it but a lot of men dead.” Sometimes Patriot militiamen would come through Redding, and usually the officers would come into the tavern for a mug of beer, but they never bothered anybody, they just went away again. I’d stand at the door and watch them go; and I wondered, if I went for a soldier, which army would I join? The British had the best uniforms and the shiny new guns, but there was something exciting about the Patriots — being underdogs and fighting off the mighty British army.