The calamity which cast the world into flame occurred early on an April morning, when all was still black night. We awakened to the ringing of the Meeting House bell, the firing of warning muskets. We heard shouting in the main house.

My mother moaned and rustled her sheets. I told her I would ascertain the situation.

I dressed quickly and crossed the yard. Two of the Young Men stood by the back door of the house, watching me approach. They each held a fowling gun at ready.

Inside, the ladies were in high panic. They all sought seats away from the windows. The men called up and down the stairs. A Young Man dashed down two flights, a musket clamped in each hand.

Dr. Trefusis sat amidst the tumult, sketching a snakeskin.

I stood against the wall, awaiting instructions.

“The King’s Army have marched out of Boston,” said Dr. Trefusis, without concern. “It appears they plan on seizing munitions from our militia.”

“By God!” said Mr. Gitney, who was walking by. “We shall not be moved by this!”

“When Syracuse fell,” Dr. Trefusis offered, “Archimedes the engineer did not flee, but even as he was run through with a sword, sat in his own house, working out geometric equations with a stick in the sand. His last words were, ‘You may attack my head, but stay away from my circles.’”

“Precisely!” said Mr. Gitney. “We shall not be chased from our own house!”

“We have been already,” Dr. Trefusis noted. “We live in Boston.”

Mr. Gitney, however, was moved on to another room, shouting out commands and flapping the arms of his banyan-robe.

We heard the whistle of fifes on the green and the rattle of cheap drums.

Mr. Sharpe descended upon me and sent me to the kitchen. Two Young Men with guns were posted there to watch the slaves. We began cooking their breakfast, somewhat constrained for space, with so many in so small a chamber, and the fire burning large within the hearth.

During the day, people ran by upon the road that passed the house. Many were men with guns.

The Young Men shouted to them from the windows, but few stopped. We could get but confused accounts of the engagement. A few men from Acton, the next town over, had been slain; the British were marching in the thousands. At one moment, the British were in retreat; an hour later, the word was that they were triumphant, that they were upon us.

There is no need to animadvert to the deeds of that day, which shall resound, for weal or woe, as long as this terrestrial globe has habitation.

Suffice it to say the British expedition met with resistance at Lexington, and fired upon the local militia. I have heard that a woman watching from her house saw her husband hit; that he crawled, dying, across the grass while Patriots stepped over him and fired at the regiment; that he made it to the door of his house, to the arms of his wife, where, liberty quickened, he expired.

Suffice it also to say that brave men faced each other across the bridge at Concord; that more blood was spillt; and that the British retreated then towards Boston, hounded all the way from behind stone wall and smokehouse, from the garret windows of great houses and the dooryards of small ones. The atrocities were countless: At Concord Bridge, a Patriot boy swollen with ire saw that a Redcoat had not died with sufficient haste, and as the man screamed, scalped him with an axe. Fearful of all windows, of any door, of walls and banks and gullies and wells, the grenadiers and light infantry shot indiscriminately as they ran for hours along the road, starving, parched, covered in mud from the waist down from having waded through swamp to reach the mainland. Muzzles were leveled at them from every side. A soldier paused to bind an old man’s wound, and the old man, revived, shot him. Soldiers ran a bayonet through a woman in labor. The final casualty of this sanguine retreat was a little boy who paused by a window to see the brave coats and flashing gorgets of the army-men; glimpsing a head there by the glass, they shot him in the face.

Outside, the British Colonies of America detached themselves with infinite lumbering care, while within our enclave I thought on nothing that day but my mother. I did not mark the sobbing in the street, though I saw, when I passed by a window, that a hay-wagon laid with three corpses rolled past.

Her cries were a fine trickle. They leaked from her without cease, as the pox mobbed her face and ravaged her gullet. Her agony was continual.

I looked on the appalling irruptions that bubbled across her forehead now, her cheeks, her chin, her eyelids, and I knew that I should never see her again as once she was. She knew it, too, and in the silence when only her breath rasped, we regarded this fact, both of us, as if together admiring a portrait painted of her on the wall.

I could not hold her hand without causing her irritation so great that she writhed. I wished to comfort her, but there was no comfortable action I could take; I desired to console her, but there was no word that could be a consolation.

Her fever grew worse in the evening, as it did every evening. No one marked much my absence from the house. There was too much rushing about from window to window, too much stacking of arms in the bedrooms, too much muttering of strategic niceties as men smoked in the attic, for the presence or absence of one boy to be noted.

A silence and immobility came upon her in the evening-tide.

“A death-bed’s a detector of the heart,” the poet Young has written. “Here tired dissimulation drops her mask.”

I sat by her side.

“I was born,” she whispered, “half a world away.”

I could not imagine what skies she saw, what men and women gathered about her, what childish scenes crowded in upon her. I could not imagine the face of my grandfather, my grandmother, whom I have never seen. Perhaps an image of my father, blank to me, beckoned in her fancy in a house where I might have grown. I drew my chair close upon the edge of the bed.

“Tell me,” I said, “of your country.”

“I have told you before.”

“I do not wish to . . . I will not question you, but . . .” I stopped, unwilling to make my first foray into filial disobedience with one who faced her Maker — but could not refrain from saying, “I ask you not to tell me children’s tales of panthers pulling chariots.”

“I never spake of panthers.”

“And there was no orchid throne. Tell me what you sat on.”

“Octavian . . .”

“I beg of you,” said I, “tell me of the Empire of Oyo.”

“That would gain you nothing,” she whispered. “It is all gone.”

“Gone?”

“Not gone. Lost.”

“When you sat, what did you sit upon?”

She sighed, and in a cracked voice, said, “This is no time . . . for telling stories. . . .”

“Tell me one true thing. I will know one true thing. Tell me what you sat on.”

She did not speak to me.

“The ground?” I demanded. “Did you sit sometime upon the ground? A stool?” I pushed aside my chair and squatted, placing my palms upon the floorboards. “I want to touch something. Tell me of an object! Tell me something I could have touched!”

She did not respond. Her breath was heavy. There was a stench in the air. Her hands lay before her.

We stared at one another. Our heads were on a level.

Whether there is some transmission of knowledge through the ether, or whether physiognomy and expression have some linguistic virtue so subtle that we do not remark its operation, the eyes may indeed speak.

And so, for a while, for perhaps some ten minutes, I was not looking at my mother, but at a woman who knew me, and I was a man who knew her; she was a girl of thirteen, newly arrived in a frigid, alien country; a woman who had been that girl; who had given birth in bondage, while men with devices and pencils had observed. She had played the harpsichord and painted. She was a woman who had known desire, and who had danced upon the knolls by Lake Champlain. She had flirted with the New World’s great virtuosi. We stared at one another, and in that moment, we knew each other for the first and last time.

And then, this she offered to me, my one truth: “Our language,” she said, “is not spoken, but sung. . . . Not simply words . . . and grammar . . . but melody. It was hard . . . thus . . . to learn English . . . this language of wood. For the people of your nation, Octavian, all speech is song.”

We watched each other’s eyes. We were as strangers, in that moment — as intimate as strangers — for strangers know more of us, and can judge of us more without reproach than ever those we love.