Dreams of Glory (18 page)
Authors: Thomas Fleming
ONE MINUTE WE'RE UP TO our eyes in the bracken, these damn green fronds so thick in our faces a man couldn't see an inch ahead of him. Jesus, they were like hands, women's hands lulling us to sleep there in the twilight, the dry, dead hands of ghost women, who came back no matter how many times you pushed them away. Then I heard a chunk and I knew only one thing made such a sound, a tomahawk going into a man's skull. The Indians were all around us. I dropped flat and saw a pair of painted legs a step away from me. I gave him both barrels in the belly and yelled. “Down, down, for God's sake. Shoot for the belly and go for the balls with your knives. Cut off their goddamn red peckers.”
The woods exploded with shots and shouts, whoops and screams. We slashed and fired, fired and slashed, and the bracken fell around us like wheat sheaves scythed by our buck and ball. In five minutes it was as still in those woods as in a midnight church. Not an animal, not a bird, much less an Indian, breathed lest he die. I whistled the lads to me and we counted noses. All were sound except Gus Pearce. We found him not ten feet away from me with the tomahawk still in his skull. Near and around we found ten dead Indians, whom we scalped and gelded, so their friends would know we had their souls in our packsâthe scalp knot, I meanâand their courage in our bellies. Yes, we ate their private parts, just as they ate ours. The only difference was we waited until they were dead to take them. They'd roast a man living and eat them in front of his eyes. The British regulars couldn't bear such fighting. A single war whoop turned their legs to jelly. Only born Americans could meet the Indians in their native woods.
Hannah Cosway Stapleton lay in her bed at Great Rock Farm, listening to a dead man. She did not understand why or how Malcolm Stapleton's voice continued to echo in her skull. The stories he had told her from his warrior years fighting the Indians and French in the north woods were invariably gruesome and barbaric. One would almost think he had been going out of his way to revolt her Quaker soul, with its inherited disapproval of war. But she had abandoned Quakerism to marry Hugh Stapleton. She had listened to her father-in-law's tales of horror and heroism with a guilty fascination. Gradually she had begun to see them as a kind of initiation; the old man's way of telling her she was now a member of the family. The grisly details, the specific, sexual words that soldiers preferred, were also a kind of compliment, a way of telling her he believedâor at least hopedâshe would be as brave, as steady in the face of war's brutality, as a man.
She had tried, she was trying. Hannah thought, turning on her back to stare into the cold darkness of her bedroom ceiling, thicker than the windswept darkness outside the window. She was tryingâand failing. It was so hard to control her fear. It came in waves, like a flood engulfing the farm, the house, the bedroom; finally lapping up through her body, spuming into her throat. Nothing could stop itâwill, wish, not even desperate, beseeching prayer. Hardly surprising, the last failure. Prayer depends on faith. In the world around her, in her own heart, God had become an absent stranger.
The Bible said that God was love. Perhaps when love died, God vanished with it. A kind of death. No. Hannah struggled to defend herself against that enormous conclusion. Love was not dead. It was wounded, perhaps in danger of expiring. But it was not dead.
More and more, as Hannah thought about her life through half and sometimes all of a sleepless night, it divided into two dreams, one good, one bad.
The good dream began at Peachfields, her father's estate near Burlington, on the Delaware. There she had been surrounded
by love; the great house, its guardian trees, the very earth had seemed to abound in affection. As the oldest daughter, she had been her mother's favorite. Her father's double success as a merchant and farmer had made their lives affluent and easy. Visiting cousins, uncles, aunts from Philadelphia, all fellow Quakers, added zest to their country lives. On Sunday there was a quiet communion with a benevolent God at the meeting house in Burlington town.
by love; the great house, its guardian trees, the very earth had seemed to abound in affection. As the oldest daughter, she had been her mother's favorite. Her father's double success as a merchant and farmer had made their lives affluent and easy. Visiting cousins, uncles, aunts from Philadelphia, all fellow Quakers, added zest to their country lives. On Sunday there was a quiet communion with a benevolent God at the meeting house in Burlington town.
That part of the good dream had ended like a novel, those delicious books that she and her sisters were forbidden to read but smuggled into their bedrooms anyway, to peruse by candlelight and compare with sighs and smiles. The handsome, well-born scion, who always solved everything by finally offering his hand to the virtuous maiden, had appeared in her own life at precisely the right moment, when she was nineteen. Hugh Stapleton had strolled up to her at the ball the town of Burlington gave for the annual meeting of New Jersey's legislature (his father was on the governor's council) and had boldly written his name on every line of her dance card.
He was not a Quaker, a fact that troubled her mother but no one else in the family. He candidly admitted that he was not religious but he wanted a wife who could give religion to his children. Her father was delighted at the prospect of an alliance with the Stapletons, one of the wealthiest families in East Jersey. So in 1767 Hannah had come to the mansion on Hackensack's green, a bride welcomed by her smiling in-laws. There the good dream temporarily faltered.
The Stapletons were not a happy family. The patriarch, Malcolm, New Jersey's leading soldier, was a huge, profane old man who drank too much and fretted over the mounting quarrel between America and England. He strongly disagreed with his frowning Dutch wife, Catalyntie Van Vorst Stapleton, who insisted a separation of the two countries was ineveitable and necessary. As a trained soldier, Malcolm warned her and everyone else that the British would fight ferociously to retain
the coloniesâand the Americans were doing little or nothing to prepare for such a struggle.
the coloniesâand the Americans were doing little or nothing to prepare for such a struggle.
Unlike most wives, Catalyntie was not impressed with her husband's opinions. She had a sharp tongue, which could goad him to fury at times. “You're too
English
for me,” she would say, an accusation that invariably enraged him. Later she would be full of remorse and do her best to tease him into a good humor. Hannah soon sensed that their marriage had a hidden history, full of dark passages both sought to forget, with only mixed succcess.
English
for me,” she would say, an accusation that invariably enraged him. Later she would be full of remorse and do her best to tease him into a good humor. Hannah soon sensed that their marriage had a hidden history, full of dark passages both sought to forget, with only mixed succcess.
Catalyntie was the founder of the Stapleton fortuneâa fact that enabled her to disagree with her husband with equanimity. A shrewd businesswoman in the Dutch tradition, she had abandoned Great Rock Farm for an opulent town house in Hackensack, overlooking the river. Malcolm stubbornly insisted that he preferred the farm and spent most of his time there, supervising its operation.
Most of the farm's workforce were slaves, which distressed Hannah until she learned that the Stapletons had a program that quietly freed two or three blacks each year and sent them to New York or Philadelphia. They could not stay in East Jersey, which was violently hostile to anyone who talked of freeing slaves, let alone those who actually freed them. Like all slave owners, the local whites lived in fear of an uprising, which free blacks might encourage. While Catalyntie provided the money that made this manumission program possible, she displayed little enthusiasm for it. When Hannah praised her generosity, Catalyntie brusquely replied she was keeping a promise she had made to a black woman named Clara Flowers, to whom she owed a great deal. They had shared years of Indian captivity when they were children. Catalyntie added that she did not feel she was accomplishing much. Free blacks would always be at risk until Americans decided to free all the enslaved blacks in the North and Southâsomething she did not expect to happen. The war had put an end to the program.
Catalyntie had made most of her fortune selling fine furniture, cloth, silver, and china to the Dutch farmers of Bergen County, the most prosperous plowmen in America. She invested her money in a copper mine, an iron furnace and several ships. She filled her Hackensack house with Oriental rugs, English silver, Chippendale furniture. If Catalyntie loved anything besides business, it was beauty. Hugh had inherited this enthusiasmâand applied it not only to fine furnishings, but to the female sex.
Catalyntie had a profoundâand, Hannah now realized, unfortunateâinfluence on her sons. Her personality was so powerful, she often negated their father's authority. Simultaneously, with her strong will and short temper, she tended to dominate them. Paul Stapleton had fled to Europe, ostensibly to study painting. Hugh announced that he was taking his share of the family fortune and moving to New York. Catalyntie had tried to forge an alliance with Hannah to oppose this decision. When Hannah had said she was ready to live wherever her husband chose, Catalyntie had eyed her with something close to disgust.
“You Quakers with your humility and meekness,” the old lady had said. “You'll find, before long, respect is more important than holiness. You'll never get it unless you let a man know a woman has as much right to it as a man.”
A year later Catalyntie was dead of an apoplexy brought on by an argument with a Yankee ship captain who tried to sell her a cargo of inferior British cloth at an inflated price. Hannah had felt guilty for months because her first reaction when she heard the news had been a sigh of relief.
Life in New York had been a shock to a country girl from Burlington. To Hugh the city had long been a second home. He was untroubled by the violent contrast between rich and poor, the parading prostitutes, the drunken sailors. He loved the “ton,” as he called the high life, with its round of dinner parties and balls. He insisted on an absolute end to his wife's Quaker inhibitions about expensive clothes and Hannah soon
had one of the most dazzling wardrobes in the city. When her mother came to visit, she took one look at the array of silk dresses, lace petticoats, the dozens of bonnets, and the drawers full of silk stockings and gloves, and murmured, “Oh, my dear child, I fear for thy salvation.”
had one of the most dazzling wardrobes in the city. When her mother came to visit, she took one look at the array of silk dresses, lace petticoats, the dozens of bonnets, and the drawers full of silk stockings and gloves, and murmured, “Oh, my dear child, I fear for thy salvation.”
How silly, how ridiculously old-fashioned those words had sounded in 1770, only ten years ago. Hugh's business was thriving, his ships were ranging the seven seas, she was about to give birth to their first son. For all his love of elegance and style, he was a devoted husband. He often confessed his amazement at the way he enjoyed married lifeâan oblique reference to his parents' unhappy marriage. He used to call her his country titmouse and joke about the way she had learned to live with the city titmouse. Sometimes he talked bawdy. It was both shocking and thrilling to her. “How's my favorite country tit?” he would say, catching her from behind to kiss her on the neck.
“Really, Mr. Stapleton,” she would whisper, “where do you think you areâin the Holy Ground?”
“It's where I hope to be later tonight,” he would say, slipping his hand over her breast. She would spring from his grasp, blushing and crying, “One blasphemy at a time is all I can stand.”
She had totally forgotten the life of prayer that had been such a central part of her country days. Her husband had become her god, so violent was her love for him, so complete her desire to please him.
I want an amorous wife,
he had said, and she was soon as amorous as Madame de Pompadour.
I want a beautiful wife,
he had said, and she was ready to spend eight hours a day enduring the tortures of the hairdresser, lacing her whalebone stays to the point of anguish, prowling the shops in search of new skin creams and lotions. She saw herself as redeeming him from his faithlessness, his doubts about married love. When he chided her for being too shy, for acting like a bumpkin at their first dinner parties, and forbade her to use the Quaker “thee” and “thou” except in the intimacy of
their bedroom, she had been as humble as a penitent under rebuke from the monthly meeting, indeed from all the monthly meetings of all the Quakers in the world. She had forced herself to become as forward, as blase before the “hells” and “goddamns” and wenching talk that were the staple of New York parties, as the most loudly and proudly self-proclaimed women of fashion.
I want an amorous wife,
he had said, and she was soon as amorous as Madame de Pompadour.
I want a beautiful wife,
he had said, and she was ready to spend eight hours a day enduring the tortures of the hairdresser, lacing her whalebone stays to the point of anguish, prowling the shops in search of new skin creams and lotions. She saw herself as redeeming him from his faithlessness, his doubts about married love. When he chided her for being too shy, for acting like a bumpkin at their first dinner parties, and forbade her to use the Quaker “thee” and “thou” except in the intimacy of
their bedroom, she had been as humble as a penitent under rebuke from the monthly meeting, indeed from all the monthly meetings of all the Quakers in the world. She had forced herself to become as forward, as blase before the “hells” and “goddamns” and wenching talk that were the staple of New York parties, as the most loudly and proudly self-proclaimed women of fashion.
Then the bad dream, the war, had begun. It had been hard to believe its reality at first. It had gone so swiftly from rioting and mobbing to regiments of grim-eyed Yankees parading New York's streets with muskets on their shoulders while the King's ships-of-the-line loomed above the town, with their tiers of cannon. Hugh kept saying it was all madness begun by Boston fanatics. He and other merchants had tried to be voices of moderation, of peace, and were soon suspected and reviled by both sides.
She was pregnant with their second child when the trouble started. Hugh had sent her out to the family mansion in Hackensack, where old Malcolm Stapleton sat morosely drunk most of each day, bemoaning the idea of opposing the King and destroying the British Empire he had helped to found by drubbing the Spanish and French and their Indians in previous wars. Yet he was ready enough to roar defiance of Parliament at committee meetings. He was a born fighter and Hannah shuddered at the thought that her children might inherit his warrior blood.
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