Arundel

by Kenneth Roberts

  To me, however, she spoke her mind about those who pursued her, saying that my father had been the only man in all New England, she believed, who would not hurry out to get a new wife within five minutes after his previous wife died; and that there was no distinction in men’s minds between a shirt and a wife; almost anything would do; and they were to be worn out, both of them, and replaced at once if lost; and few cared whether or not they were ever washed so long as they were serviceable.

  When, therefore, Phoebe Marvin came to the inn one morning and asked to be allowed to work for us for a dollar a week, with some instruction in letters thrown in, I could not make the protest I would otherwise have made.

  She was less unendurable than she had once been, but I still found her capable, at times, of trying the patience of Job. She was thin, but with a compactness about her thinness that came, I think, from the hours she spent in the water during the warm weather, when there was scandalous talk about her because her swimming garment was an ancient gingham dress, cut off above the knee and sewn at the bottom so that it ended in pantalettes instead of a skirt. Scandalmongers had trouble seeing her because of her persistence in remaining under water when onlookers were about, swimming on her back so that nothing showed but her nose and chin, and emitting derisive jets of water from time to time between pursed lips; but those who had seen her complained that she went about in the sun with the top of her dress unbuttoned.

  All the day she was in the water or on it, fishing from a crazy skiff she had dug from the mud and patched with pitch and rotten canvas, and calked with rags and old rope. In this fearful craft she sailed in and out of the river and around the reefs until every seaman in the place threw up his hands and swore that by rights she should have been drowned ten times each month. Because of this, doubtless, she was a golden color on those portions of her that could be seen, as well, I suspected, as on several portions that could not be seen: a most unmaidenly color, wholly unlike the beautiful whiteness of Mary.

  She had recovered from her hellish manner of bursting into eldritch screams or hoydenish titterings at her own rude remarks; and she had even learned to be silent in the presence of her elders and betters. Yet there came often into her eyes, which were gray and could seem as hard as the ledges that crop out in our pine forests, a look in which was concentrated all the rudeness and jeers she had been wont to express aloud.

  One evening I came on her looking out of a window into the red clouds in the west and weeping silently. Being, as I have shown, of a forgiving nature, I put my hand on her shoulder and asked her why she cried. Since she did not move, and since the twilight bent me to gentleness, I reached around her and turned her against my breast, repeating my question. She was as taut in my hands, when I turned her, as a bowstring, and as unyielding as a quiverful of arrows; and her eyes examined me as though from a distance, with a scoffing look in them that made me take my hands from her and cry, “Don’t you say that!” Not with a torrent of words and eldritch screams of laughter could she have sneered at Mary more effectively.

  She wished to work for us, she said, because she must have schooling which she could not get elsewhere; but I think it was because she knew my father had liked her father, and was sure I would give her rum for him—rum he needed for dulling the pain in his arrow-pierced shoulder, but could no longer buy. Otherwise I doubt she would have worked for anyone; for our girls are so independent that some of them will starve rather than take orders from strangers. In a way I counted myself fortunate to have her help, though she irked me so sorely, with her jeering glance, that I often longed to hit her with my mother’s wooden pestle.

  We put her to helping in the gathering-room of nights; and her squirrel-like quickness stood her in good stead when the men tried to maul her. She knew more tricks to escape from a man than any wench I ever saw. If it had not been so my mother would have refused to let her stay there, just as she refused to let my sisters go into the gathering-room when the men had commenced on their rum.

  When it seemed as though the unrest and cantankerousness of our farmers and fishermen could grow no more, there began to be even louder rantings over a damnable business called the Stamp Tax, and bitter complaints concerning press gangs from English ships of war, which were coming into any port and snatching up our seamen to round out their crews. In talking of these things the talkers raked up all the other matters concerning which they had been ranting since the fall of Quebec—the need of paper currency; the Sugar Act; the damned Virginia and Rhode Island land speculators with their Ohio Company and their Susquehannah Company, sending colonists out to countries so wild that armies had to be maintained to protect them; the special privileges of the great merchants; the King’s trees, set apart for masts for the King’s navy and so not to be cut by the settlers on whose lands they stood, though most of the settlers persisted in cutting them because they were the best trees; the senseless English law against making hats or iron goods in our colonies. It seemed as though every man had a bitter grievance for which he longed to bash someone over the head; and through all the talk there ran the moan that our liberty was being taken from us, and that no nation or people had the right to steal liberty from other people.

  I could not help but see that those who talked the loudest about their loss of liberty were those who had lost the least, or had the least to lose, being the poorest and wretchedest of our people, with little land, less money and no vote. Yet I learned from travelers that this was the way of it throughout New England.

  In the spring of my eighteenth year, when all this hullabaloo about liberty was swelling like the incoming tide in a creek, there came a warm, glittering day with the wind in the southwest, and a flight of sickle-bill curlews, large, slow-flying birds, near as big in the body as a partridge. Moved to hatred of the inn and all its works by the soft odors of marshland and sweet grass and mallow, I took my musket and old Ranger and his young wife Ginger and went to the beach to kill a few curlews for supper and speak to Eunice, who had grown so fat from a surfeit of salmon, pollock and bluefish that she could no longer come to the house, but lay in the wash of the breakers and barked hoarsely for me with tearful eyes.

  While I stood on the beach, kicking Eunice gently in the side and making her groan with pleasure, a traveler rode up over the high land at the far end of the beach, and along the white crescent of sand toward me. There was something about the hugesome manner in which he towered over his horse and bulged out on each side that made me think of Cap Huff, though years had passed since I had seen him. As he drew near I saw it was indeed Cap Huff, as enormous and jovial and sweaty as ever, his buckskin shirt so wrinkled and stained that it might have been the same one on which he wiped his hands after throwing Guerlac in the creek. But in place of his ancient coonskin cap he was wearing a three-cornered hat with gold lace on it, and beautiful jack boots where once he had worn leggins tied with eelskins.

  He told a strange tale when he had done bawling curses at me and roaring his pleasure at seeing me again. There was, he said, a secret organization called the Sons of Liberty spreading through Massachusetts and Rhode Island and Connecticut. Recently the Sons of Liberty had been formed in Portsmouth, and he was one of the leading Sons—so much so that the Portsmouth Sons had now sent him to Arundel to select and instruct other Sons in their secret duties.

  “By God, Stevie,” he roared, banging me on the shoulder, “there’s none of these damned merchants can put me in gaol any more, because if they do, my Sons of Liberty’ll tear their old hell’s gaol to pieces, and tar and feather ’em into the bargain!”

  When I asked whether the secret duties of the Sons of Liberty were to keep him out of gaol, he became mysterious.

  “Stevie,” he said—and I knew from the way his eyes turned inward that he was fishing out words he had learned from other folk—“it’s this matter of the Stamp Tax. If the English can take a shilling in the pound from me without my will, why not twenty shillings? Why not my liberty or my life? If anything of ou
rs can be taxed, why not our lands? Why not the produce of our lands?”

  “Since when have you had lands?” I asked, but he waved my question impatiently aside.

  “If these things can be taxed,” he continued, becoming fiercely virtuous, “why not everything we possess? Why not the kettles in your kitchen or the coat on your back or—or—” he cast around vainly for other taxable articles, and finally ended, weakly—“or your little dog, playing on the sand?”

  “Well, why not?” I asked, watching Ranger scratching at the back of his neck and looking with lackluster eyes at Eunice. “I wouldn’t have to pay it, would I, any more than I pay taxes on our smuggled rum?”

  “Ah ha!” Cap shouted in a great booming voice, “then the English could run their ships into the mouth of your river and make slaves out of you, if they saw fit. There it is, Stevie! Sam Adams says that’s what we’ll come to: slaves! We’ll all be slaves, unless we look out! That’s the reason for the Sons of Liberty!”

  Still I could not see what he was driving at, and said so.

  “Look here, Stevie,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and clearing his throat, so that I knew he was dry from talking, “everybody talks and nobody does anything. The merchants whoop and howl, but they don’t do anything, only write letters to each other and to the Boston Gazette. Well, to hell with that, Stevie! What we got to have is men that’ll do something when it’s time to do something, and not write a letter to somebody about it. By God, Stevie, if I had my way there wouldn’t be a man in the Sons that could write a letter!”

  He thrust out his right leg and gave his new jack boot a resounding slap. “See this boot, Stevie?”

  I could no more have overlooked it than I could have overlooked a brigantine in the river.

  “Last week,” he bellowed, “there was a merchant in Portsmouth who said the Stamp Tax was reasonable and all right, and he was in favor of paying it.” Cap slapped his boot again, thrust his hands in his belt, and eyed me knowingly.

  “What happened?”

  “Well, the Sons went down to his store and turned it inside out and pulled it down. Then they left a sign on the door saying Enemies of Liberty Beware.’” He took off his new hat and eyed it moodily. “It was a boot store, and it had a few hats, but there wasn’t a shirt in the place.”

  “What did the merchant do?”

  Cap replaced his hat. “I ain’t heard. He’s still getting the tar and feathers off him.”

  “Won’t he have you put in gaol?”

  “My gosh!” Cap shouted, “ain’t I told you? This is a secret organization, and anybody that lets out the secrets, like who’s in it, gets treated the same as a merchant or anybody else who’s willing to see Sons of Liberty made into slaves. Sam Adams says all we got to do is hang together, and we can get rid of England and be our own masters. Then nobody can make slaves of us.”

  “Get rid of England!” I protested. “What in thunderation would we want to get rid of England for?”

  Cap Huff jabbed me in the chest with a forefinger like a marlin spike. “You blamed idiot! Can’t you see there ain’t nobody around here any more that’s got a chance to make money or do anything, except the merchants? Sam Adams says if we take the government in our own hands, and everyone gets a chance to vote, we can stop the merchants from hogging everything and pick up a little something for ourselves. Sam Adams says we got to fight England to do it. He says it’s coming, sure as shooting!”

  “Sam Adams says!” I objected, befuddled by his talk. “Sam Adams! Sam Adams! Sam Adams! Who in hell is this Sam Adams? And what do we want to fight England for? I don’t know what you’re talking about! If you talked about fighting the French, now, it would mean something. They’ve been fighting us for a hundred years, and my father said there never was a bunch of dirtier, underhandeder, rottener fighters than the French! I’d rather fight the damned Virginians, with their high and mighty airs, and every cheap drunkard telling about being a Cavalier! I’d rather fight the Rhode Islanders! There ain’t meaner white folks anywhere than the Rhode Islanders, and everybody knows it!”

  “Listen, boy,” Cap said. “You’re living back in ancient times! Sam Adams is the biggest man in the colonies. He’s the people’s friend. He knows everything. He says there’s Frenchmen over here now smelling around to see if we’re willing to fight England, and he says France’ll help us whenever we’re ready.”

  “Well, if they come smelling around here,” I said, “I’ll treat ’em the way you treated the one that stole Mary.”

  Cap looked at me blankly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’ll tell you one thing: after I get the Sons of Liberty organized, you want to be careful what you say! Don’t get rambunctious with any Frenchmen! If you and your father weren’t friends of mine I could bring my Sons of Liberty over here and wreck your place, just on account of what you’ve said. Say, how is your father?”

  “He’s dead,” I said. “He died because he tried to save the life of a man who hated him.”

  “That’s the way it goes,” Cap said. “That’s the sort of thing the Sons of Liberty aim to change. We aim to kill off the ones that need killing, so the good ones can stay alive.”

  “You’re aiming pretty high,” I said.

  “There you go again,” Cap said, “talking too much! After the Sons of Liberty are organized you don’t want to say anything. Not anything! You want to keep your mouth shut so tight you can’t get a knife into it without hammering it in.” He eyed me appraisingly. “Of course, I could make you head of the Sons in Arundel; only, being as how you run the inn, I guess maybe you’d have to keep all the other Sons in liquor, and that wouldn’t help you any.”

  We went up to the inn, and at once Cap lighted on a worker from the shipyard above the upper ferry—James Dunn, who had come to town three years since, and lived mostly on ship’s bread and greens that he picked himself in the spring, putting them in a barrel with salt and pressing a board on them with a rock, so they could be eaten at any time, providing one had the stomach for them, though as for me I had as lief eat poison ivy.

  James Dunn was such a man as we have in most of our New England towns—grave and determined in appearance; tall and gaunt; kindly-looking, yet obviously a man of inflexible will and passionate intensity; a quiet man, smiling at times a little bleakly, as if disillusioned by clear judgment and profound wisdom; but underneath it all the greatest nincompoop that ever tried to puzzle out his left hand from his right.

  I don’t know where James Dunn got his nobility of face; but he looked wise enough to give advice to the King of France without half trying, whereas my dog Ranger could solve any ordinary question in less time than it took James Dunn to decide whether he should first take a bite of greens and then a bite of bread at his dinner, or first a bite of bread and then a bite of greens.

  I know well that if James Dunn could confront those given to talking about the character to be seen in people’s faces they would guess him to be a general or a governor, or the sagest of theologians, instead of a humble adze-wielder in a shipyard, and such an adze-wielder that Thomas Scammen, the master shipwright across the river, declared he often longed to hit him over the head with an adze, but dared not for fear the blade would be shattered and ruined.

  Cap selected James Dunn to be secretary of the Arundel Sons of Liberty, nor would he hear any word from me against his choice; so it may be he knew what he was about, and planned to use James for his own ends. For the rest of the members, he took all the noisy brawlers and table-bangers, so long as they had no property to speak of. He was especially pleased to get the wild and foolish fellows who had no vote and had sereamed the loudest for paper money; and he went so far as to send to the Upper Village to summon three other paper-money brawlers, so they too could be made Sons of Liberty.

  When he had made his selections, he herded them into our big upstairs room along with a barrel of French rum. As I passed back and forth between the gathering-room and th
e kitchen, I caught the rumble of such words as “Stamp Act” and “slaves” and “slavery” and “taxation” and “Liberty” and “Rights of Man,” all in Cap’s thunderous bellow, and such salvos of cheering as our inn had never heard before, not even on the night when my father told how Wolfe took Quebec.

  When the Sons of Liberty emerged from their secret meeting, flushed and noisy with rum, Cap Huff clapped me on the shoulder before them all and said I was doing secret duty for him, and must be guarded carefully, which was his way, I suppose, of keeping me from harm in case I spoke overfreely of subjects displeasing to the Sons of Liberty.

  It was that night that Cap, happy at his success with the Sons and feeling amiably disposed toward all, slapped at Phoebe as she passed him with a hot rum punch, thinking to strike her toward the base of her spine or thereabouts, according to his playful custom. In some way she whirled so that Cap pitched forward, and the hot rum punch fell down the back of his neck, almost as though she had studied how to do it. If I had not held him by the slack of his breeches and given her time to run into the kitchen, I make no doubt he would have caught her and squeezed her to death in good-natured play.

  That was my introduction to the Sons of Liberty. In the beginning they were the poorest and scurviest knaves that our village could boast, so that instead of being called Sons of Liberty, they were more often called Sons of something entirely different, when mentioned by respectable folk. Yet they were no different, travelers told me, from the Sons of Liberty in Massachusetts and Connecticut and the rest of our colonies, and I have no doubt it could not have been otherwise, if they were to do the work they did.