Cape Cod (44 page)

“Fifteen. We’ll make Wellfleet the greasiest town in Massachusetts, or we should be tried out ourselves.” Wellfleet: Billingsgate town had grown so rich—or “greasy,” in whalers’ talk—that it had broken away from Eastham and renamed itself. There were some who feared that the colonies might try to do the same thing. But what man would wish to see the dispute with England erupt into war? What hope, Ned often asked his mother, would whalemen have, or coastal towns, if the British warships that seemed so stately and swift when viewed from the foretop were put to the use for which they had been built?

Ned pulled out a small paper sack. “I brought you molasses candy. Horehounds, they’re called.”

Little Sam put one on his tongue. The only thing sweeter was the company of his father after so long.

“Ned!” called the boy’s mother. “Welcome back.”

Then Grandma Serenity said, “Just in time to sail ’round the bay with a new broadside.”

“I’ve been six months at sea. I’m not ready to play messenger boy.” He stalked into the house and snatched a broadside from his mother’s hands. “ ‘Troops in Boston are a desecration… the customs administration of Solomon Bigelow an obscenity.’ ”

Little Sam sat in his sand hill and listened.

“All truth.” That was his grandmother.

“Stay out of this!” shouted his father.

“No one can stay out of it, no one with principles.”

The boy scooped sand into his hands and let it run through his fingers.

“Your principle is to taunt the Bigelows. But they can come and take the
Serenity
if you make ’em mad enough.”

“They’ve already taken our past and our future.”

What did this mean? the boy wondered. Who were these Bigelows that they could do all that his grandmother said?

“My future’s out there playin’ in the wet sand when he should be at the warm fire. I’ll do nothin’ to endanger him.”

“You’re doing nothin’
for
him.”

“I challenge sperm whales for him.”

“Give him a
country
, if you’re man enough. Teach him principles. If not, we’ll put up the broadsides ourselves.”

“You’ll put up no more slanders on the Bigelows!”

The little boy covered his ears.

“You can’t burn those!” shouted his grandmother.

But the sparks swirled out of the chimney. Then the door swung open and his father marched out. “Let’s go fishin’, son. We’ll put food on our table while those damn fool women worry about taxes and… principles.”

The little boy hurried after his father, stumbling over the dune grass and struggling through the deep sand like a gosling chasing the gander. After they had walked some distance, his father stopped and the boy nearly ran into him.

With a sound that they felt as much as heard, an osprey passed over them and swept out over the bay, solitary and serene, until she saw her fish. Her talons glanced off the surface as delicately as a tailor’s needle on fine silk. Then she rose to the top of the rickety tower, where Jack Hilyard had once scanned the bay for whales, and she fed her chicks a fine meal of fish.

“She’s a brave old bird, and she knows a good principle. Stretch your neck for those you love. No one else.”

v.

But Ned stretched his neck, if only a little, and if only to keep peace in his family.

When he was not whaling, he sailed the
Serenity
around to the bay towns to put up his mother’s broadsides. And little Sam went along. His father was already teaching him how to handle the forty-foot sloop, and he relished the company of his father’s whaling mates, Square Henry Stubbs and Charlie Kwennit. Stubbs was, quite simply, square—square head, square body, legs no longer than his upper torso, and a character as sharp-edged and solid as a building block. He said little and spat a lot and hauled line faster than any man alive. Kwennit was the great nephew of an Indian named Keweenut and, at twenty-three, the youngest harpooneer in the Wellfleet trade.

In some towns, the Hilyards were greeted warmly by those who had taken to calling themselves patriots. In other places, they met unfriendliness. But the unfriendliest place they ever visited was the British Coffeehouse in Boston.

For months the customs commissioners who frequented the coffeehouse had been writing to London, questioning James Otis’s motives and slandering his character. Otis considered himself a loyal subject of the king, honestly attempting to improve the governance of the empire, and he had responded to the commissioners’ letters by placing a notice in the
Gazette
in which he called them liars and all but called them out. When Serenity heard of the dispute, she lettered fifty broadsides in support of Otis, whose behavior, it was said, had grown more volatile as the struggle between Crown and colonies had grown more intense. She told her son that Otis of Barnstable needed all the friends he could get. Then she pressed the broadsides into his hand and begged him to deliver them to the coffeehouse where Otis often went to debate.

The air was thick with tobacco smoke and the sweet smell of burned coffee beans that night. Ned took a table in the corner and ordered two cups of Cuban. Little Sam stared at the bright red coats and powdered wigs. The British officers stared back in amused fascination, as though the Hilyards were a pair of apes.

Soon an officer—who had even powdered his face—minced over and said, “Excuse us, old chaps, but what time do the offal pits open?” This brought a dose of hilarity from those within earshot.

Little Sam thought his father might break the man’s back. “Offal” meant “shit,” and Ned Hilyard never brooked an insult. But to Sam’s surprise, his father sat there and stared, as still as a figurehead.

The officer wrinkled his nose and sniffed the air. “I thought you’d know. It seems you’ve been there recently.”

When this pansy-face went back to his table, Ned whispered, “There’s nothin’ meaner than a British officer showin’ off for his friends.”

Just then a man appeared in the doorway.

“Otis,” whispered Ned. “A damn fool with a foul mouth, a short temper, and a lot of ideas we could do without.”

“Grandma calls them principles.” The boy looked toward the doorway as James Otis swooped, like the Billingsgate osprey, toward a table in the center of the room.

A thick-waisted man in a black frock stood and stepped away from the table. His name was John Robinson, chief customs commissioner. “You have a bloody nerve coming in here, after what you put in the
Gazette.”

“Hear, hear,” said the powder-faced officer.

“I answer calumny with truth. You wouldn’t recognize truth if it bit you on your p-p-prick, assuming you have one.” Then he looked at the others. “I demand an apology from all of you. Hutton, Paxton, Burch, Bigelow—”

Little Sam remembered that name. He looked at his father, who still sat motionless.

Bigelow stood. “I apologize for nothing.”

Sam thought Bigelow’s voice sounded like the cry of a scavenging gull, and he had the look of one, with his beaklike nose and prematurely gray hair.

“Solomon, I pummeled you when we were boys and I’ll pummel you now.”

“Physical threats, is it?” bellowed John Robinson. “You impugn our honor, you invade our good fellowship, and now you threaten us.”

“I demand satisfaction of you, sir.”

“What satisfaction would you prefer?”

“A gentleman’s satisfaction.”

“If it’s a fistfight you wish, it’s a fistfight you shall have.” Robinson unbuckled his sword, then reached out to tweak Otis’s nose, as though he were no more than a naughty boy. Otis raised his walking stick, and Robinson raised his in answer.

There was a sharp, violent motion—that was all little Sam could be certain of—and Otis’s hat flew across the room like a spinning kite.

A light went out in a corner. Red coats and broadcloth surged around Otis. Angry shouts struck little Sam like blows at the back of the neck. He turned to his father, but Ned remained in the chair, eyes shifting from the fight to the door to the broadsides on the table before him.

Otis lashed left and right and until a walking stick struck his head like a mallet driving a bung into a keg.

Now Sam felt his father’s hand, lifting him through the dark mass of men. Like a glimpse of hell, the boy saw into the middle of the brawl. Fists were flying. Blood and bone showed in the middle of Otis’s forehead. And the scavenging gull Bigelow was driving Otis to the floor.

“Papa, he needs help.”

“Yes.” It was powder-face. “Help the poor chap.”

“I’ll help
you
”—Ned drove a knee upward—“to be the girl you’d like to be.” The officer struck the floor and grabbed his balls while the Hilyards hurried out.

“Papa!” Sam shouted as they reached the cool September night. “You should help your friend.”

Ned grabbed the boy by the collar. “I told you, son. Stretch your neck for none but those you love. Now hurry. Stubbs and Kwennit are waitin’ at the pub.”

The boy pulled away. His eyes were filling with tears. “You’re a coward. You left your friend to be hurt.”

“He was
not
my friend, and ’tis
not
my fight.”

A fishmonger went by, pushing a smelly old cart. “Coffeehouse sounds like a rowdy pub.”

“My pa won’t help.”

“Can’t blame him. There’s redcoat officers in there.”

“His
friend’s
there, too.” The boy’s voice cracked, and he began to cry. He did not want to. His father always told him that brave men did not cry. But bravery no longer seemed in demand.

Then his father smacked him on the back of the head. “Stay here and stop cryin’.”

The boy sucked in his breath and watched his father stride back into the coffeehouse. Moments later two redcoats flew out the door like partridge flushed from cover. Then a chair exploded through a window, sending glass fragments glittering like jewels. A customs commissioner followed the chair and landed on the glass shards.

The little boy wanted to cheer, but the grunts and punches and shattering glass frightened him beyond words. Bravery was dangerous. Perhaps they should have left after the ball.

Then his father lumbered out the door with the unconscious Otis slung over his shoulder. “Run, lad! For the boat!”

A half-dozen men came stumbling out after Ned, and they would have caught him, but Square Stubbs and Charlie Kwennit were never far away. When they heard shattering glass, they left their beers in the pub and came running. The square head of Square Stubbs butted three royal officials into oblivion, and Kwennit’s harpoon handle carried away the rest. Charlie swept the boy into his arms and Stubbs took Otis and they ran for the boat.

ASSASSINS IN THE COFFEEHOUSE!

It has now been a month, and we can say it in truth: They did not kill him, but they gained their DASTARDLY GOAL! Royal customs commissioners lured James Otis into their British Coffeehouse and picked a fight. One man against many walking sticks. James Otis was SAVAGELY BEATEN, and would have DIED, but a BRAVE Cape Codder pulled him from the maelstrom.

He lives. His GREAT HEART beats. But his GREAT MIND is broken. The words of GENIUS resound no more. He is among us, yet gone.

DOFF your hats when you pass his Barnstable Home. Let him feel your LOVE as he watches the parade of HISTORY that now must leave him behind.

SPIT when you pass the Courthouse at Barnstable, where Customs Commissioner Solomon Bigelow spends his days when he is not lounging with the other assassins in Boston. He claims self-defense. He claims honor and constancy as a descendant of the First Comers. He is a HYPOCRITE.

James Otis opposes TYRANNY even now, by his very existence. Let his BRAVERY be our example. Let his FATE be our inspiration.

COMEUPPANCE awaits those who stand in the way of history. And for those who twist it, who hide behind it to protect their guilt, COMEUPPANCE will come in a book that proves their villainy from the time of the First Comers.

Little Sam Hilyard had recently learned to read, and he read this broadside many times. His grandmother said she had used his description of the coffeehouse fight and so he was one of the authors. Sam was so proud he decided to save the sheet in the broken-off barrel of the old blunderbuss, with which he stalked sea monsters and imaginary Tories on the dune.

One Tory, Solomon Bigelow, read this broadside in the small grocery that his aunt Nabby kept beside the Barnstable County Courthouse.

Widow Nabby was a big, fleshy woman, as opinionated an old Tory as there was. She often said that Solomon took his bad temper from her and it was the best part of him.

“ ‘A book that proves their villainy.’ What does the writer mean?” asked Solomon, whose eye was still bruised from a blow he had not even seen in the coffeehouse.

“Sail down to Billingsgate and find out.” Nabby measured three cups of tea leaves from an East India Company chest. She put the leaves into a sack. Then she began to shave sugar from a cylindrical loaf. “Do we even know who the writer is?”

“Benjamin won’t say, but Scrooby and Leyden think it’s the Hilyard woman.”

“So go and flog the old hag.”

Solomon pressed his finger to his lips and glanced toward his daughter, who listened to every word.

Nabby pulled a peppermint stick from a glass jar. “There you go, Hannah dearie. Take that out and watch the world go by.”

“Thank you, Aunt Nabby.” She was five years old, with chestnut brown hair and the look of a child whose knowing far surpassed her years.

Solomon tucked the tea and sugar under his arm. “A visit to Billingsgate may be in order.”

“No!” The door opened and Benjamin stalked in. “Tea and sugar, Aunt Nabby, and don’t be filling my brother’s head with notions of vengeance.”

“This Anonymous Outcast has been slandering us for years,” said Solomon.

“Addlebrained Otis has forgiven his assailants, except for Robinson. The next person you attack may not be so conciliatory. And conciliation is the order of the day.”