Cape Cod

by William Martin

  Three-one-three, three-one-three. Faster now, faster.

  Eyes on the rearview, eyes on the road. Here he comes. Bang!

  And now a flash to the left—a reflector. A bicycle! At eleven o’clock! Shooting out of the fog like a PT boat at a Jap destroyer. Can’t hit a bicycle!

  Hard a-starboard… Rake’s 1968 Oldsmobile Cutlass bounced over the shoulder. The grill struck the bridge abutment, and the engine burst through the dash.

  iv.

  The glow had faded. The wine was wearing off, there were dirty dishes to wash and mussel shells to bundle before they began to stink, and Rake had reminded them both that this problem wasn’t going to go away because Geoff had drawn a few sketches.

  It was just as well. Geoff’s balls hadn’t relaxed yet. A cold wind or a good scare always pulled them tight. He was still cold and now a little scared of this Serenity and what she might pull him into.

  There were broadsides on the Stamp Act, the king, the coming of rebellion, and one called “Tar and Feathers and Comeuppance.”

  Begin at the top of the pile. “Hey, history major,” he called to Janice, who was still banging around in the kitchen, “the Writs of Assistance? What and when?”

  “They were 1760 or ’61….”

  CHAPTER 20

  April 1760

  Comeuppance and Rebellion

  The great whales were gone.

  It was true that the blackfish still came. Cape Cod farmers rowed after them and slapped the water with their oars and drove them, in great lowing herds, onto the beach. But a blackfish carried no more than a barrel of oil while the humpback and finback were huge living casks—thirty, forty, even fifty barrels in a single beast—and they had been hunted from the bay as surely as the wolf from the woodlands.

  To men weaned on thundering flukes and cedar-boat sleigh rides, herding pilot whales was a landlubber’s life. But there was another whale—faster, meaner, far more powerful—who took the whole Atlantic for a feeding ground and in whose battering ram of a head was an oil so white it resembled sperm. Sometimes he rode the sea currents close to the back shore, and sometimes he sailed as far as the African coast.

  And Cape Codders were the first Americans to lash try-works to the decks of their ships and go after him. And the first Cape Codders were from Billingsgate town. And among them was a man named Ned Hilyard, who wore a whales’-tooth necklace and could stick a harpoon in a half-guinea coin at a hundred paces, which skill far outweighed the tales told about him and his notorious mother.

  In her youth, said the good people of Billingsgate, in her wild youth, they said, eyes ablaze with indignation and jaws slack with excitement, before her hair went gray and her teeth began to fall out, Serenity Hilyard had been a Smith’s Tavern whore, and one of the best, a quim that could service a dozen dirty whalers in a night and a smile that could steal a dozen souls.

  Few who damned her whoredom knew that she used her body to provide for her child, then to buy law books in which she sought what she had once dug after in a Truro sand hill: comeuppance for the Bigelows of Barnstable. She had read in the law as voraciously as any Harvard prince. She had taught herself complaints and torts, land transfers and deeds, and had found nothing untoward in the sale of Jack’s Island or the Eastham farm.

  So she gave up her dream of regaining her land, but word spread through the meaner taverns and meeting places of Cape Cod that Serenity was one who would help. Men in need sought her out when they wished to word themselves well before the court or comprehend a complaint brought against them, and she turned none away, neither thieves nor smugglers, Indians nor niggers, nor the forlorn French Acadian girl who appeared that spring. Her name was Marie Reynard, and she asked Serenity to bring suit for the return of the ship that was confiscated when she and her band of exiles were washed up on Cape Cod.

  Serenity laughed and reminded her that there was a war between the French and English. The Acadians were unfortunate victims. Then she invited this exile to sup with her and her son Ned in their Billingsgate house.

  Goody Daggett’s ghost must have put some strange potion in the cod muddle that night, because Ned and Marie fell in love at the table. It was called the Age of Reason, but Serenity could find no answer beyond witchcraft for the attraction of such opposites.

  Ned was forty-three, Marie twenty-three. His hair was black, his eyebrows a scowling line across his forehead, his skin tanned brown as seaweed. She was blond and fair, with a complexion the color of clean sand. He had learned from his mother to expect nothing good of the world and went with his fists clenched. She had been an innocent, grown like a flower in the Acadian soil, now staring bewildered at all that had afflicted her people during the latest war between England and France. But a month later they were married.

  The people of Billingsgate town were scandalized that anyone would fall in love with a French papist. And they were shocked that one of the wildest men on Cape Cod would fall in love with anyone.

  After all, Ned Hilyard had darted irons not only into hundreds of whales but also into a few men. And he took his profits in whale oil, they said, so that he could defy the Crown.

  British law did not permit importation of molasses—basic ingredient of rum, basic manufacture of New England—from any but British ports. Molasses from the French and Dutch Indies, however, was of higher quality and not subject to the Crown’s ninepence tariff. So each winter, Ned loaded whale oil onto his sloop and sailed to the warm Indies. He sampled the whores, traded oil for molasses, and smuggled home a handsome profit. Come spring, he went a-whaling again.

  But in the year after his marriage, Ned kept close to Billingsgate. He had a family and a house to build, and in all his life, he had never known the purity of bliss he found in the arms of Marie Reynard, or the satisfaction in labor.

  He chose a spot protected by low dunes, dug holes for brick pilings, and built a four-room house that hunkered out of the wind like a battened hatch. He used cedar shingles for the roof and sides, but for sheathing and floorboards he stripped the wood from the abandoned whale house at the tip of the island. After all, without whales, there was no use for a house, and on the lower Cape, wood had grown as scarce as Indians.

  A man could stand on the Eastham tablelands and, looking east or west, see salt water with hardly a leaf to block the view. Along the bay, from Eastham to Chequesset Neck, stretched a sad swath of land where the First Comers had found forest, where their descendants had grown grain, and where the topsoil now swirled with the wind. In Province-town men had been cutting wood and grazing cattle for decades, and like Lilliputians loosing Gulliver’s bonds, they had freed the great dunes that now rolled across the landscape.

  Mother Nature, it seemed, had turned against Cape Cod just as Mother England had turned against the merchants and shippers of Massachusetts.

  That winter, the surveyor general of customs in North America requested renewal of the Writs of Assistance, enabling officers of the Crown to enter any premises and search for contraband without warrant. Given the growing debts from the French and Indian War, the Crown intended to prosecute the writs vigorously, especially against molasses smugglers.

  For Ned, this was a minor discouragement. He always had his harpoon. For Serenity, it was something more, because the customs inspector for Barnstable was named Solomon Bigelow, and it was said that he kept spies.

  ii.

  “The Serneriny’s comin’ out,” said Scrooby Doone.

  “The who?” said Leyden Doone.

  “The Serneriny, what cousin Solomon wants us to watch.”

  “It’s Seren… Seren… Serentity, you dumb fool.”

  Scrooby Doone was a gangling youth with a prognathous jaw and an Adam’s apple that hopped about like a three-legged dog when he talked. Leyden Doone was stockier than his brother and dumber than most four-legged dogs. They had sprouted from a branch of the Bigelow family tree, just below the limb from which both of their parents had sprung. Cape Cod was still an isolated place, af
ter all, and the grandchildren of Brewster Bigelow were not the first first cousins to marry and produce offspring of less than ministerial intelligence.

  The Doones were the keepers of Jack’s Island. They raised cattle, cut marsh hay, and grew corn, which they fertilized from the herring-black streams of spring. Simple tasks for simple men. And because they were simple, Cousin Solomon had set them a higher task. If they performed it well, none would suspect them.

  “We better follow her,” said Scrooby.

  “To the Indies? Don’t know the way.” Leyden was leaning over the side of their catboat. He had dropped the sounding lead to gauge the depth, but in the time it took him to haul it in, he had forgotten what it said.

  “She just goin’ into Rock Harbor, you dumb fool.”

  “Smarter’n you.”

  The Serenity tied up at Rock Harbor, unloaded nothing but a few pieces of paper, then ran up to Sesuit Harbor in Dennis and did the same. Then she made for Barnstable.

  “Should we keep followin’ her?” asked Scrooby.

  “Nobody smuggles pieces of paper. ’Sides, I’m hungry.”

  So the Doones let the Serenity sail on and didn’t report to Solomon Bigelow that she had been delivering Serenity’s first broadside to the bay-shore towns.

  WRITS OF ASSISTANCE are RUBBAGE

  PEOPLE OF CAPE COD! I WRITE because I am a lover of TRUTH, which comes not from acceptance but from dispute. In thought will we formulate our argument. In argument will we learn the TRUTH. Tell me that the WRITS OF ASSISTANCE benefit the commonality and I will tell you that they are the VERIEST RUBBAGE.

  With the KING HIMSELF will I argue, for I am determined to oppose with all the powers God gives me all writs of slavery and villainy, as these foul Writs of Assistance. King George says the rights of his people are dearer to him than the most valuable prerogatives of the CROWN. To that I say, DENY THOSE RIGHTS TO THE BRITONS OF AMERICA and we will choose to call ourselves AMERICANS!

  While certain Barnstable attorneys and customs inspectors lick their chops to do the Crown’s work, the people must WHET their BLADES!

  The Anonymous Outcast of Billingsgate

  “Who is this bloody liar?” Solomon Bigelow slammed one of the broadsides onto the table in his brother’s office.

  “Whoever he is, he speaks boldly.” Benjamin Bigelow thought he might know the Anonymous Outcast, but he had no intention of revealing his suspicions.

  Benjamin was forty-three, a man of great substance in the community, great probity in business, great girth in the belly. Solomon was twenty-nine, tall, scrawny, and already going gray. The elder brother had inherited their father Ezekiel’s legal practice, the younger their grandfather Brewster’s impetuosity. Benjamin had been appalled to learn why Serenity Hilyard hated them. If Solomon learned that she had written the broadside, he might sail to Billingsgate and burn down her house.

  Benjamin looked at Solomon’s reflection in the mahogany tabletop. “Whoever it is, he deserves not the least attention till he comes into the open and fights like a man.”

  Solomon tore the broadside into pieces.

  But there would be more, because Serenity had found a new weapon. Cape Cod had neither newspapers nor printing presses. To give an opinion, one stood before the tavern and declaimed it, spoke at town meetings, or lettered as many broadsides as writing cramp would permit and tacked them in places where they might be read. A woman shunned in public could find no better forum than the broadside, and Serenity’s pen soon poured forth vitriol against the writs. A mother whose son smuggled molasses could do no less.

  iii.

  A hearing was held on the writs in February 1761, in the council room of the Boston Town House. Arguing for the Crown was King’s Attorney Jeremiah Gridley. Speaking in opposition was James Otis, of an old Barnstable family, who had resigned as advocate general of the Admiralty Court in protest. All wore their finest white wigs, and the Boston Gazette told the story.

  King’s Counsel Jeremiah Gridley defended the writs as a loyal subject. “I urge the court to uphold them. They are the legally justifiable means by which Customs Inspectors may bring to an end the outrageous and injurious trade that permits smugglers to circumvent payment of duties that should benefit every soul in the colony.”

  But James Otis carried the day, beginning straight after dinner and concluding at six o’clock by the chime of the Old South bell. From exordium to peroration, his voice never faltered, the stentorian strength of it seeming to carry all the way to Cape Cod.

  He began by proclaiming, “I am determined, to my DYING DAY, to oppose, with all the powers and faculties God has given me, all such instruments of slavery on the one hand and villainy on the other as this Writ of Assistance is.”

  He concluded with the audience wrapt in silence. “Let the consequences be what they will, I am determined to proceed and to the call of my country am ready to sacrifice estate, health, ease, applause, and even life. The patriot and hero will do ever thus. And if brought to the trial, it will then be known how far I can reduce to practice principles which I know to be founded in truth.”

  On Billingsgate, Serenity Hilyard read the Gazette and heard not only an echo of her own words but the rumbling of a distant storm. If the former king’s advocate general turned against His Majesty, what might come next?

  A few days later, the former king’s advocate general and his slave ran a sailboat onto Billingsgate Island. The man was dressed in a fine cloak and tricorn hat, and his stockings were as white as a gull’s belly. Under his arm, he carried a broadside.

  Serenity was accommodating a toothache at the time. It was a common affliction, but she suffered more often than most. Some said it was because of her taste for raw sugar. Others blamed her bilious opinions. She still had front teeth, but one canine was gone, the other nothing more than a rotted stump. Mostly she ate cornmeal mush, chowder, beans cooked to pulp, and sugar melted on the tongue. When her jaw began to throb around a tooth, nothing but seawater and rum passed her lips. The cold seawater soothed the throbbing momentarily. The rum dulled the senses more generally.

  This one was a molar, and unless Ned pulled it, her face would swell till the infection burst her skin and drained into the cloth tied around her jaw. Life could be misery.

  The man knocked on her door. “Good afternoon, marm.”

  “A damn sight gooder if you carry a vial of laudanum.”

  He was in his mid-thirties. He had a round, full face that had seen little sun, powerful shoulders, but the delicate hands of a scholar. “I seek the Anonymous Outcast of Billingsgate.”

  “Wouldn’t know him.” Serenity offered strangers suspicion and the sight of her blunderbuss before trust.

  “Some on this Cape think they know her by name. I would talk with her.”

  She squinted in the harsh sunlight. “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Otis.” He tapped the broadside. “I would tell her that I borrowed the terms ‘slavery’ and ‘villainy’ to describe the writs. Unusual yoking of words, yet most apt.”

  Serenity forgot her toothache. This formidable Cape Cod-der, written about in Boston papers, praised for his eloquence, a visionary, had come to flatter her. Ordinarily, those who praised her eloquence could not read or write, and those who flattered her other parts came less often as she aged. But he faced a test before she let him into the house. “What of the last paragraph? The one about Barnstable attorneys and customs inspectors?”

  Otis smiled, revealing even, straight, tea-stained teeth. “I grew up in Barnstable. I know the Bigelows well. And I tell you, marm, I’d rather see the writs in the hands of the French.”

  She flung open the door of Goody Daggett’s old shack and offered him tea spiked with rum.

  “Whence came the molasses for the rum?” he asked wryly.

  “The rum is a gift.” Ned stalked in the back door, and with no more greeting, picked up the bottle and splashed rum into Otis’s teacup. “ ’Tis impolite to refuse a gift.”

>   Otis lost neither calm nor wit, but raised his cup. “ ‘Deny those rights to the Britons of America and we will choose to call ourselves Americans.’ Heady sentiment. The time may come when others agree. And they will be called patriots.”

  “I’m a woman who’s spent her life lookin’ at things from the outside, the bottom, and the back-end-to. I speak for them like me. If that makes me a patriot”—she touched her cup to his—“then, to patriotism.”

  “A fool’s idea in a fool’s brain.” Ned took a swallow from the bottle.

  Otis pointed to Ned’s sloop, the Serenity, tugging at her cable in Blackfish Bay. “With a writ of assistance, a royal agent can search your vessel, your house, your mother’s house, even your w-w-w-wife’s budge for molasses.”

  “I’ve lived with the writs. I see no need for broadsides about ’em. And you’ll speak no more of my wife.”

  “This here’s an important man, Ned,” said Serenity. “Treat him like one.”

  “I treat him like any man.”

  “But will the Crown treat you like an English man?” asked Otis. “With the writs, a customs inspector needs no more than your bad reputation to search your house.”

  “He may need no more than the broadsides of the Anonymous Outcast.” Ned drained the bottle and headed for the door. “I say stretch your neck for no man.”

  “I’d rather stretch my n-n-n-neck than have it wrung,” shouted Otis, with sudden violence.

  It was said that he was given to strange fits and strange deeds, stutterings and inappropriate obscenities, sudden sea changes of temperament that passed as quickly as they arose. Who but an impulsive man would sail half the day to speak with an anonymous outcast, thought Serenity, when there was so much more of consequence to be done?

  Otis tugged at his waistcoat, then tugged again, as though his anger twitched outward to every finger. Then he was calm and smiling. “Miz Hilyard, you stretch your neck, and I’ll stretch mine, or we’ll all swing in the wind of the king’s farts. That’s what I’ve come here to say.”