Free The Transcendental Murder by Jane Langton

General Radio Glee Club sounded tinny, singing Emerson’s hymn—

    By the rude bridge that arched the flood ,
    Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled ,
    Here once the embattled farmers stood
    And fired the shot heard round the world.

    It didn’t matter much that the Governor forgot half of his poem. The instant he said, “Listen my children,” everybody stopped listening, and smiled around and visited. Grandmaw couldn’t hear, but she guessed. “It’s not Longfellow again?”
    â€œI’m afraid so,” said Mary.
    It was pleasant to stop one’s ears and just watch. Around the speaker’s platform the parade-marchers in their contrasting uniforms stood in orderly radiating clusters. Beyond them the disorderly citizens came in all shapes and sizes and moved here and there at will, pushing baby carriages over the bumpy ground, carrying infants on their shoulders. There were boys in the trees, there was the smell of spring, there were grandmothers sitting on the trampled grass, and somebody’s dog that shouldn’t have been let out nosing around and barking. There were jets going over, and now and then, thin occasional fragments of the Governor’s proclamation. “Whereas … and … whereas … do hereby proclaim this Patriot’s Day …” Below the Governor the color and confusion of the massed marchers reminded Mary of two paintings rolled into one, some grandiose Napolepnic battle scene and a picnic in the grass. There were the fringed flags lying at every angle, the dazzle of sunshine on a sousaphone, the glittering splendor of the glockenspiel rising out of the high school band like the standard of a Roman legion, and under the crossed flags the reclining figure of the dying general replaced by the tired pimply second trombonist eating a sandwich.
    The Governor finished and sat down, to a splatter of applause. Then a long straggling line of Scouts from Acton arrived, with more flags, and there were mutual felicitations. At last it was time for Charley. Mary craned her neck. There he was, right on time, accompanied by a shout that gathered momentum along Monument Street and echoed around through the field, “Here he comes!” Charley’s outfit had been scrounged from here and there, but he looked reasonably like an eighteenth century general practitioner arousing the countryside. His hair was hidden under an orange wig that was tied back with a ribbon, and he wore a skimpy purple tricorn, with cheap gold braid around the edges. He urged Dolly as fast as was safe through the parted crowd, giving an impression of speed, leaning forward, waving one arm, crying, “The Regulars are out!” Then he reined in and tipped his hat to the Governor. “In case you don’t know it, Your Excellency,” he said, handing him a scroll, “the British are coming.”
    Mary felt the old movie music grinding. It was queer the way a real event was apt to become lost in the pageantry that grew up around it. But there had been a real Dr. Sam, and for a moment Mary reveled in knowing it. “Put on,” he had said to Paul Revere, there on the Battle Road where the British had stopped them, and his horse had jumped over a stone wall and carried him and his burden of news to Concord, and on to Acton and Carlisle. It was Prescott’s ride that had helped to bring not only a few hundred Minutemen to the bridge but three or four thousand to the stone walls and hill slopes by the end of the day, ambushing the British retreat, turning it into a rout. A hero he had been, for sure, and a martyr before the war was over, dying in a British prison, so that he never got to marry the girl he had gone to Lexington to see in the first place.
    The Governor was reading the scroll out loud. It began with a “Whereas,” and went on with a rather tedious statement of general approval of the whole thing by the mayor of Boston. Mentally the