William tore himself from sleep; he looked around and swallowed back his tears and panic.
Then he heard voices coming up from the kitchen. Many voices, low and angry. He climbed quietly down from the upper corner space where he slept beneath the roof thatch that kept out the rain and cold, and tiptoed down to the doorway of the kitchen. He stopped in the shadows at the dark rim of the candlelight.
A dozen tough farmers were huddled around the kitchen table. William’s brother John was among them, and William recognized the others. Some lived close by, a few lived several valleys over, but they were all men his father trusted; at one time or another he had seen his father walking and talking quietly with each of them. But he had never seen a meeting like this before.
Redheaded Campbell, scarred and missing fingers, was stirred up. “Wallace is right!” he barked to his friends. “We fight ‘em!”
But MacClannough, a slender man with fine features, was counseling caution and countered, “ Every nobleman who had any will to fight was at that meeting.”
“So it’s up to us! We show them we won’t lie down and be their slaves!” Malcolm Wallace said in a voice so hard and low that William felt chilled.
“We just can’t beat an army with just the fifty farmers we can raise!” MacClannough said.
“We don’t have to beat ‘em, just fight ‘em,” Malcolm said. “To show “em we’re not dogs, but men.”
Young William watched from the darkness as his father dipped his finger into a jug of whiskey and used the wet finger to draw on the tabletop. “They have a camp here,” Malcolm said, looking from face to face. “We attack them at sunset tomorrow. Give us all night to run home.”
The next day Malcolm and john saddled horses and led them from their barn; they were checking the short swords they had tucked into the grain sacks behind their saddles when William came out of the barn with his own horse.
“William, you’re staying here, “ his father said.
“I can fight,” William said.
These words from his youngest son made Malcolm pause and kneel to look into William’s eyes.
“Aye. But it’s our wits that make us men. I love ya, boy. You stay.”
Malcolm and John mounted their horses and rode away and left William watching them go. At the edge of their oat field they turned in their saddles and waved to him.
William waved back and watched them until they disappeared on the curving trail up the valley.
3
THE PEACE OF THE SUMMER TWILIGHT HAD BEGUN TO SETtle over the Wallace farm. The wind whispered across the straw thatch of the rooftops, and the chickens scratched lazily around the barn. All was strangely quiet.
Then William and this friend Hamish Campbell, redheaded like his father, ran from the rear of the house and ducked in beside the barn, breathless, gasping. The tow boy pressed their backs against the wall. William peered around a corner, then shrunk back and whispered, “They’re coming!”
“How many?” Hamish shot back.
“Three, maybe more!”
“Armed?”
“They’re English soldiers, ain’t they?” William demanded.
“With your father and brother gone, they’ll kill us and burn the farm!”
“It’s up to us, Hamish!”
Hamish leaned forward for a look, but William pulled him back and breathed hot words into his friend’s ear: “Not yet! Here he comes; be ready!”
They waited heard heavy footsteps. Then from around the corner three enormous, ugly hogs appeared. The boys hurled rotten eggs. The eggs slapped the snouts of the pigs, who scattered as the boys charged, howling.
The sun went down on their play. The boys walked toward the house, beneath a lavender sky. The house looked so much darker and emptier now. “Wanna stay with me tonight?” Hamish asked.
“I wanna have supper waitin’,” William said.
“We’ll get those English pigs tomorrow, “ Hamish said.
“Aye, we’ll get ‘em,” William grinned.
The sky had gone fully black and the stars were hard and bright above the house when William’s face appeared at the window and he looked toward the distant hills, where he saw trees and heather, but no sign of life. He turned back to the cook fire he had built in the grate and stirred at the stew he had made. He spooned up two steaming bowls full and set them out on the table.
But he was only hoping. He looked out the window again; he was still all alone. So he left a candle burning on the table beside the stew and moved up the stairs.
Night thawed into a foggy dawn, and William rose from his bed, where he had huddled, afraid to sleep, through a night that seemed to have no end. But now, with gray showing through the cracks of his broad windows, he rose, dressed, and moved down the hall. He stopped at the door of this father’s bedroom and saw the undisturbed bed. He moved on and passed the door of this brother’s room, also unrumpled.
In the kitchen he found the two cold bowls of stew beside the exhausted candle. He spooned up his own cold porridge and ate alone.
After his breakfast, William was in the barn loft, shoveling corn down to feed the hogs, when he glimpsed something coming. He saw an ox cart rumbling down the curving land. Its driver was Campbell, with MacClannough walking behind it. The farmers glanced up at William, their faces grim.
From his perch in the loft, William saw what the neighbors had brought: the bodies of this father and brother. The car stopped; Campbell, with a bandage around his left hand where more of this fingers ere now missing, studied the back to the ox as if it could tell him how to break such news. The butt of the ox seemed to tell him to be matter-of-fact.
“William… Come down here, lad,” Campbell said.
William looked away, he took quick breaths, he looked back, but the bodies were still there.
4
THE OUTSIDE OF THE HOUSE WAS NOW SURROUNDED BY horses, wagons, and neighbors. The undertaker arrived in his hearse, preloaded with coffins.
William sat at the kitchen table, weeping holding the bowls of stew, hugging them as if they were his family. A neighbor woman moved up beside him. “Poor dear. That’s cold,” she said. “Let me get you something hot.”
She reached for the bowls, but he held tightly to them.
“There now darlin’….”
“Get away from me!” William said.
“Now, now.” Suddenly he was fighting her for the bowls; the stew spilled over her skirt, and the crockery bowls shattered. William burst from the room and rushed out into the year, where all neighbors had gathered. His wild grief disrupted the solemnity; they gawked at him. He looked everywhere, instinctively trying to find his father and brother. He spotted the ox cart, empty now, standing beside the shed, and ran towards its open door. Campbell saw him going and yelled, “William!” but it was too late; the boy disappeared inside the shed.
There on a makeshift table lay the bodies of Malcolm and John Wallace. As William watched, the undertaker wrapped a cloth strip around his brother’s lower jaw and tied the ends of the strip into a knot at the top of his head. William’s father had already been bound for death this way.
Old Campbell, the big grizzled redhead, stepped into the door, following William — but what could he say now? The undertaker went on with his work. William approached the table; the bodies didn’t look real to him, certainly not like his father and brother. He saw the wounds the dried blood. The undertaker poured water from a bowl and scrubbed off the blood. But the wounds remained.