by Howard Fast
“And as far as my Uncle Ishmael is concerned, there’s not a word of truth in that story about him having a colored wife in Jamaica.”
“Who cares!” she cried. “And who ever gave you the right to snap at me fit to bite my nose off?”
“I didn’t snap at you. You—”
“He could have seven wives—he could be living with every loose woman in Kingston, for all that I care. Just make certain of that, Adam Cooper. I’m not like some folks I could name who will say the first thing they hear about someone else behind his back.”
“Meaning me?”
“No, not meaning you. You don’t have any more sense than a dry pumpkin.”
“It was you called him a smuggler and a bigamist, wasn’t it?”
“I did not. I simply identified him. For all I know, you could have five Uncle Ishmaels.”
“It’s not likely.”
“Maybe it isn’t. But it’s a fine thing to have friends who can’t trust you not to be a bigot!”
That was when I kissed her. We were standing alongside of the Hyams’ well house, which sits behind their herb garden, and there was just enough starlight and night light for me to see her face, and it was hazy and lovely and only half real, and for that moment it appeared to me as the most beautiful woman’s face I had ever seen in all my living days, not a girl’s face, not the face of Ruth Simmons or anyone else I had known all my life, but the lovely face of a lovely stranger. When I kissed her, I felt that my heart would tear through my chest for excitement and wonder, and then I felt a good, empty sickness, if you can speak of anything in such contradictory terms.
“Why did you do that?” Ruth whispered.
“I don’t know.”
“Adam Cooper, if you aren’t the strangest boy! First you’re yelling and screaming at me as if I were heaven only knows what, and you’re like to tear me to pieces. Then, without so much as by your leave, you kiss me.”
I nodded, and she asked me why I was looking at her that way.
“What way?”
“The way you were looking at me.”
“I just don’t know.” I wanted to tell her how beautiful she was, but how can you tell a girl something like that? And it didn’t explain the way I was looking at her because I didn’t know how I was looking at her.
“You seem to have forgotten all about your Uncle Ishmael,” she said.
“Oh, no. No.”
At that point, Mrs. Hyam opened her back door and called out, “Is that your voice I hear, Adam Cooper? I should think you’d have something better to do with your evenings than poking around well houses!”
So we walked again, and the moment that had come over me before faded, and Ruth was Ruth and looking pretty much as she had in her mother’s kitchen. I told her how my Uncle Ishmael had offered me a place on his ship.
“Of course he would. He’d be glad to get you, instead of the trash he picks up on dockside.”
“That’s not a very flattering thing to say.”
“Adam Cooper, I was just teasing you, if I must spell it out. You surely can’t be serious about going to sea?”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Well, you can’t. Your father never would let you.”
“Maybe it’s time I just went and did something without my father letting me or not letting me.”
“Adam!”
“Why not? Would it make any difference to you?”
“Yes,” she replied slowly. “Yes, it would. I suppose I’d be the loneliest girl in Massachusetts if you went away.”
When she said that, I felt warm and good and content for the first time in days. I took her hand in mine. Her hand was small and soft, and the fingers twined themselves into mine. We walked down to the end of the lane and then back to her house.
When I got back to the house, I went into the kitchen, and there was my brother Levi sitting in front of the hearth and cleaning my fowling piece with an oily rag. I let him know what for, and who gave him the right to touch my gun, much less clean it? Didn’t he realize that he didn’t have enough sense to clean a gun?
“I told him he could,” Mother said.
“Well, suppose it was loaded? He could blow his head off.”
“Wouldn’t you like that,” Levi grinned.
“It wasn’t loaded,” Mother said. “And if it wasn’t dirty and gathering rust spots, Levi wouldn’t be cleaning it. It sometimes seems to me, Adam, that you could take better care of your things. Your shoes will rot on your feet before you take some grease to them, and if I left it to you to change your shirt and pants, I don’t think you’d take them off from season to season. I hate to scold you. I really do.”
“It would be interesting to see what it would be like here if you enjoyed scolding me.”
“Adam, I don’t appreciate sarcasm.”
“I’m sorry, Mother.”
“The point is that Levi was trying to do something for you. He felt that you blamed him for what happened at the table, and he was trying to make it up to you.”
“That’s the blessed truth,” Granny put in.
Levi sat on the edge of the hearth, looking downright virtuous. I shrugged and sat down next to him, and showed him how to clothe the ramrod properly for full cleaning.
“Adam,” Levi asked me, “what would happen if you loaded this here gun with a musket ball instead of bird shot?”
“I don’t know. I never thought of that. It’s got a large bore that a regular musket ball wouldn’t fill, and if you put an extra large ball in it, you’d have to put in an extra large powder load, and the skin of the gun maybe isn’t strong enough to bear it. You might just blow yourself up.”
“That’s the trouble with a fowling piece. When I get me a gun, it’s going to be a rifle.”
“Ha! That’s just like you, always talking when you don’t know a thing.”
“Of course not. You know everything, so there isn’t anything left over for anyone else to know.”
“At least, I know a little something about guns. Why, you couldn’t even load a rifle—you got to hammer the charge home. And then, when you do that, what are you going to find around here that you could hit with a rifle? Chicken hawks? Squirrels? Partridge? Rabbit? Why, if you had any sense at all, you’d know that is precisely why a fowling piece was invented.”
“I know one thing I could get with a rifle.”
“You tell me.”
“A redcoat soldier,” Levi said slowly and seriously, and Mother turned to us from where she was sewing at the table with Granny, and said somberly:
“Levi, that’s not the way anyone in this house talks!”
“All I said was—”
“I know exactly what you said. We don’t talk about killing people in our house. We don’t speculate upon it. We don’t derive satisfaction from such inhuman speculation.”
“My goodness, you’d think I was the only one!” Levi cried. “There isn’t a boy in school don’t keep score of how many redcoat soldiers he’s going to get himself when the war comes!”
“That’s enough,” Mother said. “I haven’t raised my children by the yardstick of boys in school, and I don’t intend to begin now. We are not savages or barbarians, and we do not go to church to seek instruction in the art of killing. Now both of you put that gun away and march up to bed.”
“I never opened my mouth,” I protested.
“Both of you, Adam. It’s close enough to bedtime in any case.”
“I’m four years older than Levi. What sense does it make for both of us to go to bed at the same time?”
“I’m not disposed to argue,” Mother said. That way, she was different from Father. He would have proved that it was right and proper for both of us to go to bed at the same time.
As we walked upstairs, I told Levi, “Among a dozen other things wrong with you, you never know when to keep your mouth shut.”
I was a long time falling asleep that night, and lying there with the door open, I heard Fath
er come in, and I heard his report to Mother concerning what went on at the Committee meeting. I have already set that down. When he finished talking about the Committee, she told him about the incident with the gun.
“I shouldn’t have said what I said,” Mother sighed. “At least, not that way. Adam is still a boy. Just because he’s so tall and strong, we get to thinking about him as a man.”
“It’s time he thought about being a man,” Father put in.
“We could both help him toward that.”
“How? We’ve given him a good home, good food and good clothes, and an education. And if all goes well, he can go to college and board out with Aunt Martha in Cambridge. It doesn’t seem to me that you can give a boy much more than that.”
“Perhaps it isn’t enough, Moses.”
“How?” my father demanded indignantly.
“Well, he seems to have gotten the idea that you hate him.”
“Hate him!” my father exploded. “Of all the crazy notions! Of all the idiotic ideas! There a boy, my first-born son—why, how could any man love a son any more than I love that boy? Now where could he have gotten an idea as unreasonable as that?”
“He could have gotten it from you,” Granny said.
“Now see here, I won’t have both of you turning against me. It doesn’t mean a thing. You know the way boys are. I was somewhat sharp with him at the table, but boys get over that kind of thing. I’m old enough and wise enough now to thank the good God that my own father never spared the rod and spoiled the child.”
“Age and wisdom don’t go together as often as you might think,” Granny said, “and as for your own father, Moses Cooper, I knew him better than you ever will. Abraham Cooper had many fine qualities, something I will not deny, but he was just as pigheaded and stubborn and enamored of the sound of his own voice as you are.”
“Granny, you’re being too hard on Moses,” Mother put in.
“Oh, no—not at all, Goody Cooper. Like yourself, I was married to a Cooper, so I had double experience. Now you two can go on and make anything out of this that you wish. I shouldn’t be interfering anyway, because it’s provoking enough to have a mother-in-law in the home without her telling you how to raise up your children. I’ve said my say. Good night to both of you!”
They knew better to interrupt or stop Granny when she began to talk like that, and they sat quietly while she stamped upstairs. When she passed my door, I whispered:
“Granny?”
“And you, Adam Cooper,” she hissed, “don’t go thinking that because I scold my own son, I’m on your side.”
“I love you anyway,” I whispered.
“When I was young, a boy had modesty and decency, two qualities that seem to have disappeared today.” She went on past into her room, and everything became so silent that I could hear the ticking of the big old clock on the staircase. Then from below, his voice considerably chastened, my father said:
“Well, Sarah, she is my mother.”
“I don’t see how it gives her the right to talk to you the way she does. You’re a grown man, not a boy.”
“She doesn’t mean anything by it.”
“Well, it’s disrespect. I will not budge an inch from that. You’re the man of the house. I said before and I say again—it is certainly disrespectful.”
There were a few minutes of silence after that, and then Father said, “Come to think about it, I have been hard on the boy. That doesn’t mean I don’t love him. You know how much he means to me.”
“Of course I do.”
“I mean I got to disabuse him of that notion.”
“Moses, if you keep building it up in your mind that way, you won’t sleep a wink tonight.”
“I just don’t understand how he could form a notion that I don’t care for him.”
“You said yourself that those things don’t last. Now give me a book and I’ll read to you.”
I heard Father get up and go into the sitting room, and a moment or two later, in that high, clear, school-marm voice that she uses for reading aloud, Mother began chapter four of Pilgrim’s Progress, which rated almost as highly in our house as the Bible, and most of which I knew by heart.
I fell asleep to the sound of her voice. My eyes were wet and my throat thick and full, but I think I felt better as I fell asleep than I had felt in a long time.
The Night
I DON’T BELIEVE in dreams—that is, I don’t believe that dreams amount to any more than tossing around the things that worry and provoke a body during his waking hours. Other folk are different and set a great store by dreams, picking them apart and developing them to distraction. I don’t recall any event of importance, whether it was old man Higgens having a stroke, or the time a fox got in with the Phittses’ chickens and killed eleven of them, that didn’t produce a host of soothsayers, all claiming to have dreamed every detail in advance. I guess that if it proves anything, it only proves that what with everybody dreaming every night, there’s always something for any occasion.
And thinking about it, I will admit that this point of view came from my father. Father liked to describe himself as a Christian-Judaic materialist. He held that if he just named himself a Christian, it was likely to take on at least some aspects of partnership with the Church of England. The Church of England was one of the things—one of the very few things, I should say—that he couldn’t argue about. Not that he wasn’t willing; but ten words after he began, his face flushed, his neck thickened, and he became near apoplectic. His mind ceased to function, and, as Granny put it, the worst elements of his father and grandfather emerged in him. There was a time when he could hardly get started on any subject without dragging in the Church of England, but since Mother had some High Church relatives on her father’s side, he broke himself of that habit.
Granny said that to call himself Judaic when he had never actually met a Jew was impertinence, so when some family business took him to Rhode Island, he went out of his way to attend services at a synagogue. Father said that apart from the fact that they kept their hats on in church and read from the Bible in Hebrew—something he had always aspired to—they didn’t seem any different from Presbyterians. While there, he couldn’t resist getting their views on certain moot points of theology, such as the relationship of the Trinity to monotheism, and the balance of the first five books of the Bible against what follows. Not only did he emerge with a healthy respect for their powers of disputation, but he boasted of their admiration for his own powers of argumentation.
As for the materialism, Father held it was the only way to counter superstition properly, and high among the various superstitions that were an anathema to Father was the so-called interpretation of dreams. I remember an argument he had with Jonas Parker. Ever since Jonas Parker had been elected Captain of Militia for the township, things went less than smoothly between himself and my father—Father taking the point of view that the chairmanship of the Committee had precedence over all other titles of authority. Jonas Parker, with some justice on his side, said that a military situation demanded that the command of the militia be the supreme command at the moment of military crisis. You can imagine how my father rose to this; he hated all things military, and immediately accused Parker of desiring the prime goal of the enemy, to turn us into a garrison state. The argument was hot and heavy, with no clear-cut decision. Father awaited his moment. A day came when Parker announced militia drill for the following evening. My father reminded him that a strong, wet wind was blowing from the east, and that even in New England, where the weather was erratic enough to drive a prudent man mad, a steady, wet east wind meant rain. Well, up comes Parker with a particularly strong dream about the next day’s weather being as fair as feathers, with a blue sky everywhere you looked.
“Now if that doesn’t signify good weather, what does?” he demanded of Father.
“A dry west wind,” Father replied. It rained that night and for the two following days, and Father had a time rending every theor
y of dreams into shreds. I agreed with him about dreams, so when my brother Levi ran into my room and dived into bed with me, trembling with fear over a nightmare, I was not disturbed, except that I resented being awakened in the middle of the night.
“Calm down,” I said to him.
“The whole sky is red.”
“It isn’t.” I pointed to the window. “If it was red, we’d see it from here, wouldn’t we? Anyway, people aren’t supposed to dream in colors. They say you dream in blacks and grays.”
“I had a dream, Adam, that the whole sky was a terrible red, and I died.”
“You can’t dream you died. You’d never wake up if you did.”
“Then I almost died. Are you mad at me?”
“Not any more. Go to bed.”
“Why ain’t you mad at me?”
“Look, Levi,” I said. “I’m tired and sleepy. So why don’t you go back to bed.”
“Because I’m afraid.”
“I’ll tell you why you’re afraid. I’ll tell you why you dreamed that the sky was red. It’s because you and all those other crazy kids spend all your time playing war. Bang, bang! There goes another redcoat. You have red on your mind even when you’re asleep. That’s why you dreamed that the sky is red.” I got out of bed and pulled him over to the window. “Now look for yourself. Is the sky red or isn’t it?”
Levi pressed close to me at the open window. We became silent as we stared out into the night. A few shreds of cloud lay across the moon, but plainly enough we could see the treetops, the common, Cousin Simmons’ house, the Peabody house, and Buckman’s Tavern, where the road to Menotomy bent around the common. It must have been about an hour past midnight then, perhaps a little earlier, but already the time of the night when silence settles like a heavy blanket, and a voice above a whisper is cursed and interdicted. I took comfort in the fact that Levi and I were sheltered by a strong house, with our mother and father nearby and with so many friends and neighbors within call. I have heard our relatives from Boston talk with some disdain about the few cultural offerings of a little town like ours, and about the bigotry and narrow-mindedness that is inevitable in a village, but at this moment I wouldn’t have changed the security of my bedroom for all the wonders of the world. I can assure you that if you are thinking about going adventuring, or the sea and the wonders of far Cathay and the Indies, the middle of the night is no time for it.