by Howard Fast
“It’s not for the sake of a prize or money,” Granny said. “I do suppose that if there was something to be won or gained, it might be likened to a form of gambling.”
“What’s this about gambling?” my father demanded. He had finished his soup.
“If Sarah Livingston could win, not likely, since she can’t sew three stitches straight, we’d have the contest, she being married to the elder, be sure of that,” Mother said.
“Gambling?”
“Eat your supper,” Granny told Father. “What is a turkey shoot but gambling and sin? What is the lottery they hold each year in Boston?—and don’t tell me that only High Church buys the tickets.”
“Did I say that?”
I helped Mother take the empty dishes off and bring on the platters of meat cakes and potatoes and parsnips and boiled pudding.
“You were about to, Moses.”
“What is all this talk about gambling?”
“It’s woman talk. Pass me your plate.”
It did me good to see Granny treating my father as if he was half grown. She has an instinct about when he is preparing to bear down on me, and she figured that a little humility would lessen the blows. But he also saw where the wind was blowing and didn’t waste another minute. No sooner had he swallowed his first mouthful of donker than he said to me:
“How big are you, Adam?”
“Tall?”
“Do you know other ways of being big?”
I could have managed a clever answer to that one, but I saw the glint in his eyes and decided to accept the sameness of big and tall and not promote an argument. It has always been a wonder to me that anyone could work up a rancor toward anything while eating my mother’s cooking, but when something was on Father’s mind, it couldn’t wait.
“No, sir,” I agreed.
“Then what is your height, Adam?”
My mother knew that my father was most ominous when he indulged in innocent and obvious questions, and she pressed him to take more boiled pudding. He cut the ground from under her by accepting another helping, but Granny said:
“Whatever this is, Moses, it can wait until the meal is over. Adam won’t be any taller then than he is right now.”
Levi was too silent and expectant. I began to get the drift of things.
“Let me decide that,” Father said, “and suppose you answer the question, Adam.” He went on with the boiled pudding, and I decided that if we could get this all out while we were eating it would be less painful to everyone. I told him, very seriously, that I stood somewhere between twenty-three and twenty-four hands, most likely closer to twenty-four, since I was at least two inches taller than Ebenezer Coult, who claimed he just topped twenty-three.
“Tall as a man,” my father nodded.
“Some men,” I agreed, and did not think it wise to add that I was taller than most.
“And strong as a man. Then one would think that a man’s mind would go along with all that. Don’t you think so, Adam?”
“Yes, sir. I mean it appears to make sense.”
“Only appears so, Adam?” Father asked softly.
“Oh, have some donkers,” Granny said. “All this is going to interfere with your digestion. You know that, Moses.”
“I asked Adam a question.”
“Yes, sir,” I nodded.
“How long is a man supposed to watch his son and wonder?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Do you expect me to take you out and birch you?”
“No, sir. I’m a little large for that,” I whispered. “It wouldn’t be dignified. It wouldn’t do me any good either. It would get around.”
“I’m not sparing you for the sake of your reputation among your cronies.”
I nodded. “I know that, sir.”
“Just as you know why I am angry?”
“Yes, sir. Levi couldn’t keep his mouth shut.”
My father accepted a donker from Granny and took a large bite of the boiled pudding, and I knew that the worst was over and that for the moment I was saved. He had put punishment aside for the moment and would employ reason as his weapon. I don’t know which made me feel worse, and the only compensation was some speculation on what I would do to Levi. My father must have read my mind, because he said:
“I don’t want you to turn this on Levi, Adam. He did what was right. Don’t you agree with me?”
I nodded, not trusting myself to look at Levi; and my father, now enjoying his food and digestion and the soft whip hand he had established over me, continued:
“Why am I angry, Adam? Is it because you repeated some foolish childish doggerel when you drew the water from the well? Hardly. I hate and despise superstition, not because it is blasphemous but because it is a display of ignorance.” He let the food go as he warmed up to this; my father was a fine talker, and I guess he derived more pure pleasure from it than from any other habit. “We are plain people,” he continued, “not poor—for we are blessed with more than a necessary share of the world’s goods, and we have a good house with good furniture and good food on our table, for which we thank the Lord in His mercy—but plain and thrifty people. Yet we, your mother, myself, my father, and my grandfather—we have always prided ourselves that we are in a sense the people of the Book. My brothers and I were raised, and I make every effort to raise my own children, not as blackguards and loafers, not as soldiers or tavern sots, but as thoughtful and reasoning creatures, men who honor the written word, who respect intelligent writing, and who, like the ancient philosophers, look upon argumentation and disputation as avenues toward the deepest truth. I am a farmer who tills the soil to earn his daily bread, but there are three hundred and odd books in this house, well thumbed, well read. Nor are my neighbors unlike me. This is why, Adam, we are what we are. We came to this land in the beginning because savagery and superstition were an abomination to us; and in the midst of a new savagery, we planted our own seed of culture and civilization. Do you understand me?” he finished.
“Well, he may but I don’t,” Granny put in decisively, and I could see that she had decided to take the bit in her teeth. “To make a fuss like that over the foolishness of a fifteen-year-old just passes my understanding, it does. Why, believe me, I never did see a man to sit at his own supper table and be faced with the kind of food Sarah Cooper puts down in front of you, Moses Cooper, and be that ill-tempered.”
“Now, please, Mother—”
“Don’t stop me in the middle of a sentence, Moses Cooper.”
“I didn’t stop you in the middle of a sentence.”
“Not to mention pride,” Granny went on. “It goeth before a fall, or doesn’t it? And if that wasn’t the most prideful statement I ever listened to, then I don’t know what was. A spell may be un-Christian and ignorant, but let me remind you what the Testament says about pride—”
“I know what the Testament says about pride, Mother.”
We were interrupted at that point, or I don’t know where it would have gone on to. My mother was nervous and upset over the whole thing; Levi was sunk in gloom, brooding on what I might do to him later, and very disturbed that Granny had gone after Father the way she had; but I was enjoying it the way you enjoy running on the edge of a high stone cliff. It’s exhilarating while it lasts. It finished because Joseph Simmons, our neighbor and kin, came in and gave his greetings, and said that he would just sit down in the empty chair and watch us while we finished our evening bread.
But he wouldn’t have a thing to eat. A mouthful would be too much, as he had just finished his own supper. But then he saw that we were having donkers, and he admitted that he might try one, he was so inordinately fond of them, and since it didn’t go alone, he’d have a mouthful of boiled pudding on the plate. Mother gave him hot meat from the fire, and it was a pleasure to see his face when he took the first bite. He was a big, heavy-set man, and I never saw anyone to match him for straightforward pleasure in food.
“Goody Cooper,” he said t
o my mother, “I don’t recollect a more delicious meat than your donkers. But neither do I recollect any home but yours where they’re favored.”
“They’re not proper English food,” said Mother. “They’re Dutch food.”
“Now what do you know!”
“You see, my grandfather Isaac, he was in the coasting trade.”
“I’ve heard about your grandfather Isaac, indeed,” said Mr. Simmons. Unlike my father, he did not have to stop eating to talk; he did both at once. He said it respectfully, but nevertheless it gave my mother a twinge. She pretends not to know how many have heard and gossiped about her grandfather Isaac, who kept one wife and family in Boston and another wife and family in Philadelphia, but the knowledge was widespread. The fact that the Philadelphia wife was one half Shawnee Indian and had never been baptized—as the story went—gave the gossip an added fillip. While her grandfather Isaac was alive, she couldn’t bear to speak of him or listen to him being spoken of; but when he died and left her two hundred sovereigns, Father said that his sinfulness took a back seat to his generosity and thoughtfulness. In addition, a sea captain was never judged by the same standards we used to measure a landsman.
“Of course.” Mother nodded. “Well, one day at sea, his cook died of the ague, and he put into New York harbor and engaged a Holland cook, and after that he never would sail with anything but a Holland cook, and he got a taste for Dutch cooking in his own home. It was the Holland cook taught Grandmother Zipporah things like donkers, and I got the recipes from her.”
“One more, Cousin Simmons,” Granny said. He was a second cousin on the Cooper side.
He said he didn’t have the strength or the lasting power for another meat cake, but Mother knew as well as I did that he was saving himself for a piece of her pie. He explained that he had come by to walk with my father to the extraordinary Committee meeting they were holding tonight. Two weeks before this, the Committee had appointed him to write a statement on the rights of man, to which they would all put their names, and which would be posted in Boston. In my opinion, which nobody asked, Joseph Simmons was a poor choice. He was a nice enough man, but when it came to the fine points of disputation, he simply wasn’t there. He had been working on the draft of his statement for two weeks, and most likely he’d work on it two weeks more. It would have been more natural for the Committee to select my father or Deacon Loring or Mr. Harrington for the task, but my father was a Company Captain and all sorts of positions and titles had been handed out to the others. That left Cousin Simmons for the statement.
He took his draft out of his pocket now, and told Father he had been waiting for an opportunity to have his considered opinion.
“Go ahead and read it, Joseph,” Father said.
Cousin Simmons cleared his throat and read, “We, the undersigned, holding to the positive and practical position that the rights of men are derived from Almighty God and sealed by His holy hand and will—”
He was watching Father’s face, and his voice died away. “Well, Moses?” he said tentatively.
“Go ahead and read.”
Granny and Mother were dishing the pie and putting the plates on the table. Cousin Simmons couldn’t resist tasting it.
“Go on and read, I said.”
“Well, what’s the use of reading? Why don’t you come out and say what’s on your mind. I can’t go on reading with your face all screwed up in disagreement.”
Granny said, “I can’t see what’s to disagree with when you’ve hardly begun.”
“I wasn’t disagreeing,” Father said. “I was just thinking that when you leave church, theology won’t hold water. I don’t argue against a man’s religion. And I don’t want him to dispute me with his religion.”
“For heaven’s sake,” Granny said, “Cousin Simmon’s no more than read the preamble.”
“Just as important as any of the rest of it.”
“And how have I been disputing you with religion, Moses? I’d like you to make that plain.”
“Rights derived from God! That’s no argument—that’s a swamp. You’ll get neck-deep in that. Fat George doesn’t blow his nose without it’s a God-given right, clear and simple. Why, I think the meanest, lowest thing about these wars they fight in Europe is the way both parties to the affair have God marching shoulder to shoulder with them.”
“Now if that isn’t blasphemous, I don’t know what is!” Granny snapped.
“Nothing of the kind! I respect my Maker, I don’t invoke Him. We wouldn’t have the Committee, or need it either, if God just handed out His rights left and right. When God made man, He gave him a mind to consider with and two hands to set things right.”
“I was just putting it in a manner of speaking,” Simmons protested.
“We can’t afford to put things in a manner of speaking, Joseph. We have got to set out our line clear and proper, and prove it all the way. Oh, yes, the pastor will hold that our rights derive from God. That’s his business. He has to. But you and me, we know well enough that it was only because of a lot of stiff-necked people like ourselves that we have got a knowledge of rights. You consider my Uncle Cyrus in the rum trade. He says he’ll die and see his ship and fortune sunk before he hands his trade over to the British. He has the right to trade with the islands because he backs up that right with his life. Same way, I hold this house of mine a castle inviolate—but that’s pure boasting unless the Committee backs me up. Do you see?”
But Cousin Simmons was slow to see, and they went on discussing it over the pie and afterwards as they were preparing to leave the house. I stopped my father in the kitchen as they were leaving, and I said to him:
“I want to go with you to the meeting, Father.”
“Oh?”
“I know that the Committee made a rule about sixteen years before a man enters—”
“Are you a man now, Adam?”
“I’m tall and strong and only nine months away from my sixteenth birthday.”
“The proof of a man is the will to work and the ability to use his mind and his judgment. Can you offer that proof, Adam?”
I stared at him in silence.
“Talk to me when you can, Adam.”
Then they both left.
Granny said that there was more pure nonsense connected with a Committee meeting than a body could bear, and she didn’t see why I would want to waste the evening hours there. My mother put her arm around my shoulders.
“Why does he hate me so?” I asked them.
“Hate you?” Mother said. “Adam, he loves you. You’re his son.”
“Then I got love and hate mixed up.”
“What a way to talk!”
“How do you expect me to talk? Has he ever said a kind word to me? He chops at me like I was an old, dry pine for him to temper his ax on. Whatever I do, it’s not right, and no matter how I do it, he finds fault.”
“That’s just his way.”
“Is it? Well, it’s not my way to like it.”
Granny said gently, “Oh, Adam, Adam, what a fuss to make over a cantankerous man who’s enamored with the sound of his own voice! Moses Cooper is your father and I suppose he can’t ever be anything else but that to you, but to old Goody Cooper here, he’s just a son, just the same as you are, and he’s never been any different but the way he is now, pigheaded and full of his own notions. Do you think poor Cousin Simmons could ever have written that statement to suit Moses Cooper? No, sir. Cousin Simmons might be the nicest and most delicate writer in all the county, but that wouldn’t satisfy Moses Cooper. He’d find fault.”
“All I ever asked from him is one kind word. Just so he’d look at me once as if I wasn’t dirt scraped out of the barnyard.”
“He just expects more than a soul can deliver,” Granny said.
I pulled away from Mother and started toward the door.
“Where are you going, Adam?”
“Out.”
“Adam, don’t press it. Don’t go over to the church. If your fa
ther sees you there after he ordered you not to come, he’ll be very angry.”
“He’s always angry. Anyway, I’m not going to bother their damned Committee—”
“Adam!”
I stalked out to the yard, and there was Levi crouching in the shadows. It was dark now.
“Adam?”
“Go to hell, you little rat,” I told him.
“You going to lick me, Adam?”
“Did I ever lick you?”
“No. But there’s always a first time, Adam.”
“There will be if you don’t stay out of my sight.”
The Evening
I HAVE TOLD more or less what happened in the afternoon, through the mealtime—and I suppose it is for the most part what happened to me, or what I heard or what I saw. As far as the afternoon is concerned, I don’t think that it makes too much difference, because allowing for our family’s characteristics, everyone else in the village was eating their supper at about the same time. It is true that most of them were having chicken or salt pork, but we can accept the fact that in half of the homes, pie was taken for dessert, and you could safely say that three-quarters of them had boiled pudding. There was a sharp dividing line in our town between those women who cooked their boiled pudding in the old-fashioned English way, out of fine wheat flour and suet. The other half used ground yellow maize. We had stopped using flour after my father somehow connected English pudding with a conciliative point of view—something which Mother’s sewing circle regarded as the highest achievement of logic during the past year; and you may believe that we saw some high moments of logic in our village. If it had been up to Granny, she never would have budged an inch, but Mother gave in, partly because deep down under everything, she admired Father’s gift for argumentation. I once heard her state that she was quite proud of the fact that while Father could have argued any girl in New England into being his wife, he had chosen her to persuade. But there was also the fact that most of Mother’s friends had already switched to maize. You would hardly believe this, but the maize-flour controversy reached such a pitch of philosophical excitement that there were a few days when half the women in the village just stopped talking to the other half. If the Reverend hadn’t taken the situation in hand and preached one of his hottest sermons on the relationship of the fruits of the earth to plain, downright human foolishness, I don’t know where it would have all ended.