Prelude to Glory, Vol. 9

by Ron Carter

  “I’ll help with your load of cheese,” Dulcey said, and the old man bobbed his head once as he walked out of the milk shed with the bucket of milk, toward the low, log house. He stopped at a root cellar and set the warm milk to cool, then went on into the weathered log house with Dulcey following.

  “Your clothes still wet?” the old man asked.

  Dulcey set his seaman’s bag against one wall. “No. They dried this afternoon.”

  “Supper’s on in five minutes.”

  Dulcey could not remember anything tasting better than steaming beef stew that was too salty, with brown bread hardened by spending two weeks in a drawer, and a steaming mug of apple cider. With the meal finished and the table cleared, the old man gestured to the stone fireplace that dominated one wall and spoke.

  “Set a spell and talk, if you’ve a mind. Name’s Angus. Call me Angus.”

  Dulcey saw the need in the old face and sat down on a straight-backed chair while the old man settled into a battered rocking chair. He rocked back and forth with the old chair quietly groaning, hands clasped on his paunch, staring into the dancing flames of the fire. Minutes passed while the only sound was the popping of knots in Maine hardwood in the fire and the tick of the old clock on the plain mantle. Finally the old man spoke.

  “Spring storm we had. Put some moisture in the ground. Good for the crops.”

  Dulcey nodded. “You grow crops?”

  “Potatoes. Turnips. Cabbage sometimes. Apples. Maple syrup. Goin’ to be hard this year, without Phoebe. Doin’ all that.”

  Dulcey could not find the right words to say and remained silent, staring into the fire while the old man continued. “Might have to sell out. Go to a town somewhere.” He shook his head. “Things is getting crowded around here. Towns growin’. People comin’.”

  Again he fell silent, and Dulcey did not interfere with his thoughts while the fire popped and sparks danced, and the dusty old clock continued to tick.

  Dulcey cleared his throat. “Who takes care of your livestock while you’re gone? Milks the cows? Feeds the sow? Collects the eggs?”

  The old man raised one hand in gesture. “Neighbor up the road. Name’s MacIver. We trade. I take care of his when he goes, he takes care of mine when I go. He’ll be here day after tomorrow, early.”

  The fire dwindled and left the room in twilight before the old man stood. “I’ll show you my boy’s room. Name’s Albert.” He shook his head as he crossed the parlor and opened a door. “In here. I get up at five o’clock. I’ll have hot water to wash. Breakfast before six. Outhouse is in back. Got morning chores and then fifty-two rungs of cheese to load. Thirty-six pounds each. Eighteen-hundred-seventy-two pounds. Near a ton.”

  That the old man kept such figures in his head surprised Dulcey. He said, “I can help with the morning chores. Where’s the root cellar?”

  “West side of the house. I’ll show you in the morning. I’ll bank the fire while you get the lamp goin’ in Albert’s room. Then I’ll turn out the lamps in here. If you need the outhouse you better go now.”

  The old man returned to the fireplace and reached for the small shovel and poker to bank the fire while Dulcey closed the bedroom door and dropped his seaman’s bag beside the bed and lighted the lamp on the simple dresser. He waited until he heard the footsteps fade and the soft closing of a door before he lifted the bag onto the bed and drew out the two ledgers. For nearly half an hour he studied the entries of each. In the larger one were the names of more than sixty-five companies, with a registry of dates of contracts, cargoes, points of origin, and points of delivery. The cargoes were generally gypsum going north and produce or tea going south. The ports of origin and destination ranged from the West Indies northward to Quebec, and west to Amherstburg, on the western tip of Lake Eric, in British Canada. The second ledger, the smaller one, was a line-by-line accounting of money; where it originated, and where it went.

  Dulcey’s breathing slowed. Here it is! The names of all the men connected with this scheme! Half of them are representatives of governments—ours and Britain’s! Millions! Millions of dollars changing hands to keep them quiet!

  His brow wrinkled in puzzlement. Gypsum. Gypsum that smells like sulphur. Why sulphur going north?

  Bone-weary, he closed the two ledgers and replaced them in his seaman’s bag and tied the strings. Slowly he dropped his shoes, changed to his nightshirt, and got into the bed, mind still puzzling. Gypsum? Sulphur. Why sulphur? These were his last thoughts as he drifted off to sleep.

  * * * * *

  They ate steaming oatmeal porridge and drank thick Jersey buttermilk for breakfast and walked to the milking shed in the gray of dawn. They finished morning chores a little after nine o’clock, and the two of them moved a great cart with seven-foot wheels to the root cellar. They stopped loading the large, yellow, wax-coated rounds of cheese at noon and ate hot ham and boiled potatoes, and the old man lay down before the fireplace and snored for twenty minutes before they went back outside in the chill sunlight to finish loading the cheese. By dusk they had finished with the livestock and carried the milk and eggs into the root cellar. They were in bed before eight o’clock.

  Frost came in the night to turn the world into a sparkling wonderland in the first arc of the rising sun. MacIver came rumbling up in his wagon, pulled by a single horse, while they were gathering eggs and emptying a bucket of whey mixed with grain into the pig trough, where the old sow grunted and nosed her nine weaner pigs aside to bury her snout in the thick mix.

  MacIver walked to meet Angus. “Loaded?”

  “Yep.”

  “Go on. I’ll take over here.”

  Angus and Dulcey loaded their personal gear into the big-wheeled old cart and climbed up to the driver’s seat. Angus slapped the reins on the rumps of the two horses, called “Giddap,” and the wagon lurched into motion. The morning passed with the cart rumbling and lurching on the rutted road steadily southwest. With the sun high overhead, they stopped near a clear stream where the horses dropped their muzzles to drink, and the two men silently ate dried fish and cold, boiled potatoes, and drank from the stream while the horses pulled dried grass. Talk between the two was sparse as the afternoon passed. In early dusk, Angus pulled the team off the road to a small grove of maple and white pine trees. While Angus kindled a small fire, Dulcey unhitched the horses and led them to the stream to drink, then hobbled them in the trees, where they began pulling the high, dry, brittle grass. There was little said as the two men ate ham warmed on a spit, and potatoes sliced and fried in a cast-iron frying pan that was blackened by fifty years of hard use. They broke evergreen boughs to sleep on, and sought their blankets beneath unnumbered stars in the black heavens.

  They broke camp and had the cart back on the narrow, rock-strewn, winding dirt road before the first arc of the sun cleared the eastern horizon. They nooned near a large lake to the east of the road, then pressed on. When Angus stopped the cart for evening camp, Dulcey caught the scent of the sea, far to the south, and at daybreak the following morning they were once again rolling, this time due south. Before ten o’clock they crested a gentle rise and there before them, far in the distance, was Port Machias, on the rocky northwest shores of Machias Bay. It was two o’clock before they reached the northern end of the small village and Angus clucked the horses down to the docks.

  Dulcey waited with the wagon while Angus went to an office on the waterfront with a faded sign that read O’BRIEN & O’BRIEN. Minutes later he returned with a short, heavy man dressed in winter clothes, with the stub of an unlit cigar clenched between his teeth. The man climbed onto the back of the cart, jerked the knots from the ropes, and threw back the tarp that covered the cheeses. He examined half a dozen of them before he turned to Angus.

  “Unload. Come to the office and I’ll pay.”

  Angus moved the wagon to a warehouse at the west end of the waterfront and dropped the tailgate, and the two men began transferring the cheeses, one at a time, inside the cavernous room, wh
ile an agent of O’Brien and company counted them. At five o’clock, Dulcey placed the last one onto the carefully arranged stacks, the warehouseman made his receipt, and Angus and Dulcey walked back to the big cart, where Dulcey unloaded his seaman’s bag and helped Angus raise and lock the tailgate.

  Dulcey faced the old man.

  “I think that finishes it.” He saw the sense of sadness in the old, gray eyes, but there was nothing he could do. “Will you be staying here in town tonight?”

  Angus shook his head. “Still good daylight. I’ll make two, three hours yet today.”

  Dulcey didn’t know what to say, and felt his face flush, embarrassed.

  Angus broke the awkward silence. “Want to tell me the trouble you’re in before I go?”

  Dulcey shook his head. “No trouble.”

  Angus accepted it. “You be careful. You get up my way again, you come visit. Nice to have someone to talk to.”

  Dulcey was astonished. The old man had not spoken more than a hundred words in three days!

  “I’ll do that,” Dulcey said. “Good luck to you.”

  There was nothing else to be said, and the two men parted, Angus to the driver’s seat of his old cart, and Dulcey to the nearest tavern that had rooms for rent. The sign hanging on the wrought-iron arm above the door said RED DAWN TAVERN. Dulcey rented a small room on the ground floor for one night, locked his seaman’s bag inside, and hurried back out onto the waterfront, down to the ships that were tied to the docks and loading.

  The second ship, a two-masted schooner with the name Martha on her bow, flying an American flag, was finished loading, and her captain said he intended sailing for Boston harbor at high tide, which was four o’clock the next morning. And he had space for one paying passenger. Dulcey paid him in advance and returned to his room. He took his supper at the tavern and returned to his room to dig into his seaman’s bag for the two large ledgers. It was close to ten o’clock when he closed them, mind reeling with the scope of what they told him.

  For a time he sat still, concentrating on the single question—Why the smell of sulphur in the hold of a ship carrying gypsum?

  Suddenly he sat bolt upright, eyes wide, the hair on his arms standing straight up.

  Gunpowder! Gunpowder is made with sulphur and saltpeter and charcoal! They’re shipping sulphur north to make gunpowder, in crates marked GYPSUM! He jerked to his feet and smacked one fist into the palm of his other hand. “Of course!” he exclaimed. “The British are making gunpowder up north! They’re getting ready for war!”

  Sleep did not come easy for Dulsey, and he awakened twice in the night, mind racing with the sure conviction that he had stumbled into a massive, hidden plot by the British to attack and destroy the entire northern American frontier. How far west did it reach? Detroit? How far north? Lake Superior? How many of the American forts on the southern shores of Lake Ontario? Fort Niagara? Sacketts Harbour? Oswego? Buffalo?

  Dulcey was at the gangplank of the Martha in the four o’clock am darkness and was admitted to his tiny quarters. The northerly winds held, and the little schooner was fairly flying as she took her heading due south out of Machias Bay into the Atlantic Ocean. Dulcey spent hours in his tiny cabin, poring over the ledgers, mentally marking the companies involved, the tonnage shipped both directions, and the names of the persons who had signed receipts for money. He came onto the deck for a little while in the morning and again in the afternoon, to clear his head and feel once more the gentle roll of the deck of a solid ship running with the wind. But he took his meals in his quarters and spoke little to any of the crew.

  The second morning he sighted Cape Cod to the south and east and felt the little schooner lean to port as she turned to starboard, toward Boston harbor. By noon she had tied up to the docks, and Dulcey waited with his seaman’s bag over his shoulder while the crew lowered the gangplank. The bos’n checked his name off, and he descended the gangplank in four steps and trotted through the men and cargoes on the docks to the office marked DUNSON & WEEMS, and threw open the door. Inside, three men raised their heads and stood instantly, the tallest of them trotting to seize Dulcey by the shoulders.

  “John! Are you all right? We were . . .” Matthew Dunson clasped his son to his breast for a moment, and John threw his arms about his father.

  “I’m all right,” John answered. “Fine. Are things all right here?”

  Matthew stepped back, checking his son from head to toe. “Yes, but we were worried.”

  Billy Weems stepped from behind Matthew and thrust out his hand. John grasped it and then threw his arms about Billy for a moment. “Good to see you. You can’t know how good.”

  Captain Pettigrew thrust out his hand from behind Billy, and John shook it warmly.

  “Laura?” John asked his father. “The baby?”

  “Couldn’t be better. Anxious about you.”

  “Mother?”

  Matthew clenched his jaw for an instant. “Ailing a little. But fine.”

  Billy interrupted. “Any trouble up there?”

  John rounded his mouth and blew air. “No real trouble. But you aren’t going to believe what’s going on.”

  Matthew sobered. “What is it?”

  “Thousands of barrels of rum from the West Indies moving up to British ports and from there back down to American buyers. The barrels are marked as Spanish produce and India tea.”

  Matthew was incredulous. “What? Rum in barrels marked Spanish produce and India tea? Ridiculous!”

  “That’s not all,” John said. “Thousands of crates of sulphur marked as gypsum going north and staying there with British buyers.”

  The office went dead quiet for three seconds before Matthew exclaimed, “Gunpowder! The British are making gunpowder up there! They’re preparing for war!”

  John continued with every eye in the room boring into him, waiting. “Thousands of tons of cured white pine and oak. Peeled pine trees for ship masts by the thousand. All going to England. England is getting its navy ready!”

  Billy cut in. “All of this in breach of the embargoes? Against the law? President Madison and Congress intend to stop it all with a bill they’re working on. The Macon Bill.”

  John shook his head emphatically. “I know, but the Macon Bill isn’t before Congress yet. I know about the embargoes and all the talk of shutting down commerce with Canada—crippling England because she can’t get Canadian lumber to build a fleet. All I’m telling you is that right now, today, there’s at least five times the amount of lumber and other materials flowing into and out of Canada and the northern sections of the United States—as there ever was. Smuggling! Almost no one up there is paying any attention to all the embargo wars between England and France and the United States. Americans have left the United States to buy cheap land on the Canadian side up there. Right now Americans have built at least three hundred new Canadian settlements, and they’re producing lumber and potash and wheat, and making a fortune shipping it to England.”

  Matthew interrupted. “How strong is the French presence up there? Bonaparte intends being emperor of the world.”

  “Strong. The French stop ships of any nation on the high seas and confiscate whatever they want, just like the British. The only question is who is causing the most trouble, France or England?”

  Billy asked, “In what quantities? How much of this is going on?”

  John shook his head, eyes lost in disbelief. “At least fifty-two million dollars in the past twelve months.”

  Billy gaped. Matthew’s mouth dropped open for a moment before he exclaimed, “What are the port authorities up there doing about it?”

  John’s words came slowly, spaced. “Apparently, nothing. Not the British or the Americans. A lot of them—maybe most—are part of it. Getting paid for their silence. A few said no to the bribery and soon found out they had far too few ships or men to stop it. And some of them disappeared. No one knows what happened to them.”

  Matthew broke in. “Names? Do you have names
?”

  “I’ve got two ledgers with most of the names the president will need.”

  Matthew’s eyes widened. “How did you get them?”

  “Stole them. Broke into the office and stole them.”

  “Tillotson’s office?”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t he going to have a dozen men out looking for you?”

  “I doubt it. Think about it. Once he thinks it through far enough to know where those ledgers are going, do you think he’s going to be very quick to claim them? I doubt it. My best guess is he’s a long way from Eastport by now, headed for the West Indies or maybe England in the fastest schooner he could find.”

  Billy said, “You’re probably right. Even if he sends someone to get you, they’ll be looking for a man named Robert Dulcey. So is the law in New Haven.”

  John shook his head. “I think you’ll find out the New Haven authorities caught Robert Dulcey and hanged him about a month ago. That’s why I had to leave Eastport. Some seamen were talking about it. If Tillotson heard about that while I was still there, he’d have had me dead overnight. As it is, when he finds out Dulcey is dead, who will he go looking for? He has no idea who I am. ”

  Matthew blanched. “It got that close?”

  “It got a little tight there for one night.”

  “Where are those ledgers?”

  “Here in my bag.” He jerked open the strings and laid the two heavy ledgers on the counter. “Take a hard look at these and see if you can believe what’s there. And be sure you don’t lose them. If President Madison wants to know what’s going on up there, he’s got most of it right here.”

  “Bad?”

  John shook his head. “I doubt you’ll believe it, at least at first. There’s grounds for war in those ledgers. And I need to ask, how is President Madison getting along? I left just about the time he was inaugurated, and I haven’t heard.”