Coming of Age Theme Analysis

Fetching water, sweeping, helping in the kitchen, tending the annealing furnace in the shop were the unskilled work the boys did. Already Johnny was so useful at the bench he could never be spared for such labor. It was over a year since he had carried charcoal or a bucket of water, touched a broom or helped Mrs. Lapham brew ale. His ability made him semi-sacred. He knew his power and reveled in it. He could have easily made friends with stupid Dove, for Dove was lonely and admired Johnny as well as envied him. Johnny preferred to bully him.

He sat at his own bench, before him the innumerable tools of his trade. The tools fitted into his strong, thin hands: his hands fitted the tools. Mr. Lapham was always telling him to give God thanks who had seen fit to make him so good an artisan—not to take it out in lording it over the other boys. That was one of the things Johnny ‘did not let bother him much.’

This was Johnny’s world, but now he walked through it an alien. They knew what had happened. They did not envy Johnny’s idleness. He saw one nudge another. They were whispering about him—daring to pity him. Dicer’s master, the herring-pickler, yelled some kind remark to him, but Johnny did not answer. Seemingly in one month he had become a stranger, an outcast on Hancock’s Wharf. He was maimed and they were whole.

So Johnny ate as little as he could, and did not come home at noon. But someone would usually slip a piece of hard bread, cheese, jerked beef, or salt fish and johnnycake in the pocket of his jacket as it hung on its hook. He knew it was Cilla, but he never spoke to her about it. His unhappiness was so great he felt himself completely cut off from the rest of the world.

Then Johnny began to talk. He told all about the Laphams and how he somehow couldn’t seem even to thank Cilla for the food she usually got to him. How cross and irritable he had become. How rude to people who told him they were sorry for him. And he admitted he had used no sense in looking for a new job. He told about the burn, but with none of the belligerent arrogance with which he had been answering the questions kind people had put to him. As he talked to Rab (for the boy had told him this was his name), for the first time since the accident he felt able to stand aside from his problems—see himself.

Rab was obviously a Whig. ‘I can stomach some of the Tories,’ he went on, ‘men like Governor Hutchinson. They honestly think we’re better off to take anything from the British Parliament—let them break us down, stamp in our faces, take all we’ve got by taxes, and never protest. […] But I can’t stand men like Lyte, who care nothing for anything except themselves and their own fortune. Playing both ends against the middle.’

The idea that Goblin was more scared than he gave him great confidence and so did Rab’s belief in him and his powers to learn. […] But one day he overheard Uncle Lorne say to Rab, ‘I don’t know how Johnny has done it, but he is riding real good now.’

‘He’s doing all right.’

‘Not scared a bit of Goblin. God knows I am.’

‘Johnny Tremain is a bold fellow. I knew he could learn—if he didn’t get killed first. It was sink or swim for him—and happens he’s swimming.’

This praise went to Johnny’s head, but patterning his manners on Rab’s he tried not to show it.

Of all these things and people Cilla knew nothing, nor could he tell her, yet he tried to show interest in what she had to tell him. Once he would have been very interested. Now he felt like a hypocrite, and because he was uncomfortable he blamed it in some way on Cilla.

‘You don’t want me to look at it?’

As long as it might take to count ten, there was complete silence. Then the boy said, ‘No, sir—thank you.’

‘Was it God’s will it should be so?’ Doctor Warren meant was it crippled from birth. If so, it would be harder for him to help.

‘Yes,’ said Johnny, thinking of how had ruined it upon a Lord’s Day.

‘God’s will be done,’ said the young doctor.

He thought of Doctor Warren. Oh, why had he not let him see his hand? Cilla, waiting and waiting for him at North Square—and then he got there only about when it pleased him. He loved Cilla. She and Rab were the best friends he had ever had. Why was he mean to her? He couldn’t think.

Rab, for instance, all that spring had been going to Lexington once or twice a week to drill with his fellow townsmen. But he could not beg nor buy a decent gun. He drilled with an old fowling piece his grandsire had given him to shoot ducks on the Concord River. Never had Johnny seen Rab so bothered about anything as he was over his inability to get himself a good modern gun.

‘I don’t mind their shooting at me,’ he would say to Johnny, ‘and I don’t mind shooting at them… but God give me a gun in my hands that can do better than knock over a rabbit at ten feet.’

Even Mrs. Lapham now did not seem so bad. Poor woman, how she had struggled and worked for that good, plentiful food, the clean shirts her boys had worn, the scrubbed floors, polished brass! No, she had never been the ogress he had thought her a year ago. There never had been a single day when she had not been the first up in the morning. He, like a child, had thought this was because she liked to get up. Now he realized that there must have been many a day when she was as anxious to lie abed as Dove himself.

‘It’s no good to me. We’ve… moved on to other things.’

‘But it isn’t stealing to take back what Mr. Lyte stole from you.’

‘I don’t want it.’

‘What?’

‘No. I’m better off without it. I want nothing of them. Neither their blood nor their silver… I’ll carry that hamper for you, Cil. Mr. Lyte can have the old cup.

‘But your mother?’

‘She didn’t like it either.’

‘Rab! How’d you do it? How’d you get away?’

Rab’s eyes glittered. In spite of his great air of calm, he was angry.

‘Colonel Nesbit said I was just a child. “Go buy a popgun, boy,” he said. They flung me out the back door. Told me to go home.’

Then Johnny laughed. He couldn’t help it. Rab had always, as far as Johnny knew, been treated as a grown man and always looked upon himself as such.

‘So all he did was hurt your feelings.’

‘Each shall give according to his own abilities, and some’—he turned directly to Rab—‘some will give their lives. All the years of their maturity. All the children they never live to have. The serenity of old age. To die so young is more than merely dying; it is to lose so large a part of life.’

He took one of [the smocks] from his sea chest in the attic. It was a fine light blue. He had never noticed before how beautiful was the stitching, and it hurt him to think he had been too proud to wear them, for now he was old enough to appreciate the love that had gone into their making. How little his mother had known of the working world to make smocks for a boy who she knew was to become a silversmith! She hadn’t known anything, really, of day labor, the life of apprentices. She had been frail, cast off, sick, and yet she had fought up to the very end for something. That something was himself, and he felt humbled and ashamed.

Johnny put his hands to his face. It was wet and his hands were shaking. He thought of that blue smock his mother had made him, now torn by bullets. Pumpkin had wanted so little out of life. A farm. Cows. True, Rab had got the musket he craved, but Pumpkin wasn’t going to get his farm. Nothing more than a few feet by a few feet at the foot of Boston Common. That much Yankee land he’d hold to Judgement Day.

‘Will it be good enough to hold this gun?’

‘I think I can promise you that.’

‘The silver can wait. When can you, Doctor Warren? I’ve got the courage.’

‘I’ll get some of those men in the taproom to hold your arm still while I operate.’

‘No need. I can hold it still myself.’

The Doctor looked at him with compassionate eyes.

‘Yes, I believe you can. You go walk about in the fresh air, while I get my instruments ready.’