War Comes to Willy Freeman by James Lincoln Collier

Author:James Lincoln Collier
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: Library ISBN 978-0-7927-9095-2
Publisher: AudioGO
Published: 2012-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

9

I WAS TO STAY OUT in the barn with Horace. He said it wasn’t bad. There was horse blankets around that you could roll up in, and the horses kept the place pretty warm, even in the worst weather. There was cows in the barn, too, and chickens and ducks. I was to help out with the livestock and cleaning, and anything else there was to do. I’d get my room and board and maybe a few pennies, too, Mr. Fraunces said, if I did my work well. I wasn’t a slave, he said; I was free and ought to get wages for my services, even if it wasn’t very much. I knew I wasn’t expected to stay forever, but Mr. Fraunces didn’t seem in no rush to push me off.

So I moved in. It worried me some, being up in the barn loft with Horace. How was I to keep him from finding out I was a girl, unless I slept in my clothes? And then, my shirt might slip up or something. It wasn’t going to be easy.

Another thing I was worried about was getting a letter off to Aunt Betsy to tell her I was safe. Pa, he could write and cipher some, too, and was always intending to teach me, but never got to it. Horace claimed Mr. Fraunces had sent him to school and he could write. I figured I could get him to write me a letter.

So I settled in. I made up a story to tell folks, that I came from Long Island, my Pa beat me all the time and finally he died of the pox and I ran off to New York so’s I wouldn’t be put into slavery. I just had to be careful when I washed, or changed my clothes, that nobody was around. Horace was the main problem. He’d come up into the hayloft to go to sleep and strip off his clothes just as casual, and I’d have to fuss with my blankets so as not to see him naked. But he never noticed nothing. He wasn’t much of a noticer.

I’d found out from Mr. Fraunces all the places that my Ma might be. He said he didn’t think there was much chance she was on a prison ship, or one of the other prisons they had around the city. He said she might be there, but it wasn’t likely. The British didn’t usually put women into prison with men.

If she’d really come to New York, he reckoned, the most likely place for her to be was Canvas Town, over to the west side of the city. Just around the time the British were driving the Americans out of New York, there’d been a terrible fire. Nobody knew how it started. The British blamed the Americans and the Americans blamed the British. Mr. Fraunces, he figured it got started by accident. The wind caught it wrong, and it spread all around and five hundred houses burned down before they could stop it.

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