Citizen Tom Paine (2 page)

“—the bearer, Mr. Thomas Paine (and that was America for you, titled Mr. Paine, this dirty raggle-taggle, and not by nobody or anybody, but by Dr. Benjamin Franklin, the wisest man in the world) is very well recommended to me as an ingenious worthy young man—(and hear that, worthy young man). He goes to Pennsylvania with a view of settling there. I request you to give him your best advice and countenance, as he is quite a stranger there. If you can put him in the way of obtaining employment as a clerk, or assistant tutor in a school, or assistant surveyor, of all of which I think him very capable, so that he may procure a subsistence at least, till he can make acquaintance and obtain a knowledge of the country, you will do well and much oblige your affectionate father—”

“I want to do something,” Paine said. “No one was so good to me; I have no friends. If I thought to give you some money, you would laugh at me.”

“Give it to someone else,” Franklin said evenly. “Stop pitying yourself. Wash and shave off your beard, and don't think the world has knocked you harder than anyone else.”

2

AMERICA IS THE PROMISED LAND

T
HIS
was the great crossing, east to west for nine weeks, and then off the edge of the world, as the old folks back in Thetford believed, having never gotten more than a mile or two from their native heath. But he was Tom Paine the traveler and adventurer, not the staymaker and weaver's assistant, and he had sailed for nine weeks on a fever-ridden ship. Now he was dying; no one knew and no one cared, and the captain was too sick himself to be bothered. The ship gently rocked in the placid sunshine that flooded the Delaware River, with the red roofs of Philadelphia only a stone's throw off, while in the blackness of the sick-hold Tom Paine groaned away his life.

He didn't care, he told himself. Franklin had said, “Stop pitying yourself.” He cursed Franklin; well enough for Franklin, who lived like a fat old toad in England; the world was good for some, but you could count them on the fingers of a hand, and for the others it was a pen and a jail and a desolation. Like a pinned-down fly on a board, a man struggled for a time and then died, and then there was nothing, as in the beginning there had been nothing. Why should Tom Paine fight it? Why should he fight disease and hunger and loneliness and misery?

He wouldn't fight it, now he would die, and his pity was such an enormous thing that he was thrilled and amazed by the spectacle of himself. He wept for himself, and then wiped away the tears and allowed sunny memories of long ago to creep in. A child in Thetford walked on a flower-decked hillside. May Adams, who had long braids, ran before him into the vine-grown ruins and fell and hurt her knee, and he licked out the dirt and then kissed her. Wrong, she said, and when he asked why, only repeated, wrong, wrong; yet for all that they became lovers and no one knew. She died of the pox when he was not much older and he held the sorrow inside of him, sitting at his bench and making a corset for Jenny Literton, not eating, not stopping, his father saying, “There's a boy with industry, and a change from the rascal he was.”

Everything died; now he was dying because Franklin had sent him off to America.

The fever ship held the spotlight at the waterfront, and in the twenty-four hours after she docked almost half the people in Philadelphia came down to have a look at her. It was told how five bodies were dropped overboard during the nine weeks, though you wouldn't know it just to look at her; as the sickly passengers, the convalescing passengers, the tottering passengers came ashore, each told a different version of the lurid story. One of them mentioned a man in the hold who had a letter written by Franklin, and Dr. Kearsley who was trying to set up in the great city of America and having a rather hard time of it, smelled a fee.

“What's his name?”

“Paine, I think.”

“Did you see the letter?” Kearsley asked cautiously.

“No, I heard about it.”

“You?” the doctor asked someone else.

“No.”

A fee was a fee, but to go onto the fever ship for nothing at all was not part of a doctor's duty. “Did he come in the bilge?”

“Cabin passenger.”

The bilge had been full of indentured servants, among whom the sickness had first started, and already the still tottering captain was discussing their sale with a pair of prosperous Philadelphia merchants.

“Duty's duty,” the doctor said, and went on board. He went down into the stinking hold, and stumbling over bodies, cursing and regretting that duty bulked so large, yelled above the groaning for Mr. Paine.

Mr. Paine answered. The doctor had a candle which wavered and flickered in the foul air, but candle and all it was a task to pick out Tom Paine, and the search over, a thankless task it seemed to the doctor. The clothes were the same, the beard worse, the dirt thicker, the whole a disgusting bundle of rags and misery that whispered for the doctor to go away and allow it to die in peace.

“Ah, and die you shall,” the doctor said to himself.

“Go away,” Paine groaned.

“You have a letter from Franklin?” Kearsley inquired, clutching at one last straw.

“Yes, damn him!”

“Ah—and what money, my good lad?”

“Three pounds seven,” Paine whispered.

“Ah! And tomorrow you'll be up and walking! Got the money with you? Got any luggage?”

“Can't you see I'm dying?”

The doctor left and then returned with the boatman, who demanded three shillings before he would step onto the ship. Hand and foot, they took Tom Paine, dragged him out into the air, and then dumped him like a pile of rags into the bottom of the boat.

There was a last spark of defiance and consciousness in Paine, only enough for him to call the doctor and boatman a pair of bastards and ask why he hadn't been left to die. The doctor was equally frank, and as the boatman pulled for shore he leaned over his sweating, suffering patient and explained, “Because three pounds seven are not come by every day, not by a man who's starting in practice. I'm not a thief; I'll earn the money; you'll live, though God only knows why.”

“The Lord giveth; the Lord taketh away; blessed be the Lord,” said a Quaker lady who brought him a box of cookies and a scent bag to hang under his nose. She had heard that there was a homeless one living with Kearsley, and that he was profane and dirty, and that Kearsley had wagered the great Dr. Japes twenty pounds that the patient wouldn't die. That was blasphemous. Now Paine admitted to her that he had been born and raised a Quaker, while Kearsley snickered at the foot of the bed—which made matters worse.

“Pray,” she told Paine. “Beg the Lord's forgiveness and his everlasting mercy.”

“He's cured now.” Kearsley smiled.

“Pray, pray!” she called back as she fled from the room, and Kearsley leaned over the footboard, shaking with laughter.

“What a filthy devil you are,” Paine said.

“Call the kettle black! Didn't I give you your first bath?”

“Get out of here.”

“I came to remind you that you owe me ten pounds,” the doctor said. “You've been here six weeks, so that's reasonable. I've saved your life, for what that's worth, and altogether it's a small piece of gratitude you've shown. What is a man's life worth?”

“I'm grateful,” Paine muttered, “and mine's worth little enough. I'll pay you when I find work.”

“Doing what?”

Paine shrugged.

“I could throw you into jail for the debt,” the doctor speculated.

“You could,” Paine admitted. He was thin and worn with his sickness, white skin into which the twisted brown eyes were sunk like heavy question marks, bones stretching him like old clothes on a dryer. Kearsley said he was well, but he felt too tired to talk or plead.

“I'll give you a month,” Kearsley said suddenly. “You can leave here tomorrow.” And Paine nodded gratefully and closed his eyes.

He must have slept for a while, and now the doctor had gone, and the little room was mellow with twilight. There was a single dormer window that showed him, from where he lay, a half a dozen of the red-tiled Philadelphia rooftops. Beyond, a church steeple poked up against the gray sky, and as Tom Paine watched, the snow began to fall, clean, white, lazy flakes that drifted down faster and faster until a white curtain closed in the little window. The coals of a fire lay in the grate; Kearsley wasn't a brute, but a man tired of poverty and ignorance, all of which Paine could understand and even sympathize with now; Kearsley had cured him and given him back his life, and ten pounds wasn't such a stone around a man's neck. Less tired now, somewhat uncertain but finding his feet strong enough to hold him, Paine left his bed and went to the window. This was the America he had come to, and he was looking at it for the first time, a church steeple in the distance, some roofs flaked with white, some people walking on the cobbled street, the city of brotherly love, America, the land, the dream, the empire, that and much more that he had thought of once, the sum of it coming back to him as his will to live and be Tom Paine returned to him. There was a sweet quality in this winter evening, almost a nostalgia; the church bells began to toll faintly, and it seemed to Paine that the people in the streets were moving more quickly now.

Now life was a sweet thing, like an old song. He began to tremble with eagerness, and then he went back to his bed, but he couldn't sleep that night.

If the place had a prophet, it was Benjamin Franklin; the letter he had given Paine was mildewed, creased and worn, but Bache, Franklin's son-in-law, spread it out, read it carefully, and said, yes, he would do something for Paine. Nothing big or special, but this America was a good place, Pennsylvania a good country, and Philadelphia a good city, God bless King George. Nobody had to starve, not if a man had any guts in him. He wasn't one to say anything about the old country, but in some ways this place was better than the old country.

“I think so,” Paine nodded.

Could Paine do anything? Was he a journeyman?

“In stays,” Paine admitted. But rather than make corsets, he could cobble a little, weave a little, good work even if it wasn't journeyman work. But he had been sick, and—his face reddening—if he could use his brain instead of his hands for a time it might be a good thing. Not presumptuously, because he hadn't anything in the way of scholarship. But he could spell and sum and he had a little Greek and a little Latin. Bache's face remained noncommittal, and desperately, Paine quoted,

“Faber est quisque suae fortunae.”

Bache, fat, prosperous, Paine's age, but a world above him in assurance, nodded, patted Paine's shoulder, and said, “Good enough, I'll find you some sort of place.”

With his first few shillings, after two days of near starvation, he went to a coffee house and had rolls and butter and a whole pot of viscous black fluid. Successful men, men like Bache, sat around him, and whereas in London the state of his clothes alone would have prevented him from going into any respectable eating place, here hardly a second glance was thrown at him. Hardly a glance—why, in the corner was a buckskin wildman from the backlands, with leather leggings and a fur cap, and his rifle between his knees as he ate with his hands, just as if he hadn't seen a fork or knife before. So what if his work was teaching the two Dolan children that one and one made two, that c-a-t spelled cat, and Mrs. Dolan came in midday and said, “Won't you have a cup of tea, mister?” and that tomorrow it would be the Smith children, two little girls and a boy.

Two months ago, he would have raged and burned, but this was America and he had been given back his life, and teaching was better than to be a journeyman staymaker. Or maybe inside of himself something had burned out, that he was content not even to look for tomorrow, but only to drift along, satisfying himself with the knowledge that he was Tom Paine, and no more.

A man changes; he wasn't old and he wasn't young, but even Kearsley, who was blunt and hard and could be neatly cruel, had a streak of pity for Paine, not the man, but the wreck. As shown so well when Paine came back to renew his promise on the debt, and Kearsley said, “Forget about it. I won twenty pounds on you.”

“I heard about that,” Paine admitted, without anger.

“I don't say you're not worth more,” the doctor temporized. “I don't know what a man's worth. I hear you are teaching.”

“That's right.”

“I hope you do well at it,” the doctor said, sincere this time.

Paine shrugged; a shilling a day was enough, and two shillings more than enough, and when Mrs. Cradle gave him her husband's third best pair of breeches, he took it. He didn't work hard, and there were whole days when he did nothing at all but wander around Philadelphia, almost childishly intrigued by the colorful, un-European pageant that passed along the streets. There were red Indians out of the wooded mountains, wrapped in their bright and dirty blankets, clay pipes clenched in their teeth; there were wooden-shoed Dutchmen down on their flatboats from the Jerseys, sharp-nosed Yankees from Boston, tall Swedes from the Delaware country, dirty leather-coated hunters from the back counties, carrying their six-foot-long rifles wherever they went, silk-and-satin Tidewater gentlemen up from the south with their slaves, black and white and red and brown, and gray-clad Quakers of the inner circle, Penns and Darleys and Rodmonts. Up First Street, down Spruce, round about the Square, along Broad, he could walk slowly and lazily, divorced from the world in a murky way, his past severed, his future non-existent, a shilling teacher, the butt of smutty stories, his home sometimes a room in one tavern and sometimes in another if the weather was bad, if it snowed and rained and the wind lashed; but if the day was good enough he wasn't averse to bedding into a pile of hay in some Quaker's stable, thereby saving sixpence, which was about the price of the cheapest room a tavern sold.