Last Refuge of Scoundrels

by Paul Lussier

  God knows Papa had tried everything else to induce me to take an interest: paying me to organize his files (I took the money and made one of our slaves do it for me); including me in grownup dinner parties (I’d crawl under the table and insist on being fed there, between the ladies’ legs); buying me my own little ship (which I gave to a Negro escaping north); whipping me into submission at least once a month.

  Nothing had worked.

  But my Lord, had I known in advance how glorious Boston was, I would never have resisted Father so. He never would have had to drag me out from under my bed and strap me to a trunk to get me to come along.

  I didn’t know life could be so exciting, so free-feeling, so good. Of course Father didn’t agree. He’d never been to Boston before either, and unlike me, he was frightened out of his mind.

  We could only take the word of the captain that we were in the midst of Boston Bay, as we could see no trace of the city in the deep, dense fog.

  But we could feel her.

  By the time we reached the portal to this, the world’s most bustling harbor, we had scraped against brass cannon perched on an isthmus, gouged our hull on a rock, and the Union Jack at our prow had snapped off and sunk to the bottom of the sea.

  Oh, wasn’t Papa taken by hysteria when that English flag was falling. Why, he nearly jumped into the roiling waves to retrieve it (it took six of us to hold him back!). As for my part, I was suddenly and strangely delighted to see it gone.

  And only too mystified by Boston from the start. More hodgepodge than harbor, Boston Bay was a circus of merchant seacraft—sloops, schooners, whalers, heel tappers, ferries, lighters, and fishing ketches—a variety greater and more diverse than I had ever seen before. There were large ships back from overseas voyages unloading tea and turpentine; skiffs attached to swimming cows being herded from one harbor isle to the next by small boys with poles; schooners loaded with lobsters bigger than I. A rowboat piled high with sea coal, eel pots, mussels, and clams. A whir of piers, shipyards, distilleries, warehouses, and racks of salt-dried cod.

  She was nothing like Charleston, South Carolina, my home. There wasn’t a single curved pilaster or high-walled garden or gate of fretted iron in sight. And unlike every other colonial city I’d visited (always reluctantly) with my papa, Boston’s appearance paid no homage to the Mother City of London either. For starters, there were virtually no brick houses (bricks were made in London); and her color scheme—shades of gray, sienna, and green—seemed uncultivated, unarchitectural, unmediated by man: like miles and miles of swamp grass that had run wild before growing preternatural heft, solidity, and height. There were no hurricane-proof tile roofs to protect her from the elements, as in Charleston. In fact, Boston’s windows and doors reached right out to the wrathful waterfront, the long tentacles of her wharves straining to embrace the briny green sea.

  And even more than that, in her outline I detected the shape of a creature, my tortoise Apollo, hunched and twirling, in fact. My beloved pet tortoise, who was forever at my side and whom Father had forced me to leave behind.

  “Leave the goddamned tortoise to its tub!” he had demanded. But as far as I was concerned she had come along anyway—here she was, rising through the mist of Boston Bay to greet me.

  Unable to suppress my delight, I hollered out, “Apollo! Papa, can you not see her in the city’s shape?”

  My father, already in a snit, was further annoyed.

  “I see nothing but dim sunshine upon a chaotic shore.”

  “But Father, can’t you see?” I asked eagerly, pointing out to him the ways in which the shape of my treasured tortoise could be detected in Boston’s north-south line, her shell in the nearest hill and her feral eyes in the vermilion coats of the two British sentries standing guard on the approaching dock.

  Over the course of the years I’d developed a habit of flinching whenever my father spoke French. Embarrassed by his lowly Huguenot origins, my father rarely spoke in his native tongue unless he was drunk and thus dangerous.

  So of course I was trembling after my discourse on Apollo, when Papa called me belowdecks: “Jean, viens ici.”

  Unfurling a map that flattened Boston’s incantatory landscape to a dirty, sallow green stain, “Pas assez grand que tu crois, n’est-ce pas?” he declared, slapping his palm down upon the map. “It’s not even as big as my hand.”

  Yet no matter which way Papa angled his hand, Boston seemed to protrude out from under it, its wharves like little fingers wiggling their way out of his attempt to quash them.

  So Papa switched tack. Jabbing at various Boston locations with his thick, broad thumb (“This is Cambridge, where we’ll find Harvard. And over here—take note, boy—the name of this river is the Charles”), he attempted to reduce Boston to simple geographics which “a little later,” he warned, he’d be testing me on.

  But it was no use: The more Father poked and prodded the map, the more Boston, even in single dimension, radiated life that seemed to deaden Papa’s gout-stiff fingers; to age him in some irrevocable way. Enough to make me wonder, for a fleeting moment, his mere forty-four years notwithstanding, just how it was that I’d come to be so afraid of such a puny, wrinkled man.

  “So . . .” he said, sighing deeply, his impatience mounting, “is she a peninsula, an island, or an isthmus? You tell me!”

  She’s Apollo, is what I wanted to say, with her neck outstretched and feet splayed in the sun. But I didn’t, of course. I played dumb: “I haven’t a clue, Father, you tell me!”

  “It’s really an isthmus connected to the land by means of a fragile, tiny neck that, right here, you see”—jab, jab—“when it descends into the water each day at high tide, Boston is entirely at sea, cut off and away. My feeling is that this is the source of her legendary mad, independent streak. From time immemorial Boston has had to . . .”

  He droned on and on, ending on a high note, with the likelihood that Boston would one day be submerged and would wind up rotting at the bottom of the sea (along with all those damned independent-minded and unruly Yankees that the king, God bless him, found so hard to please).

  At which point Papa released me to the upper deck, without hitting me. “Vas-y . . .”

  He was speaking French, hadn’t touched ale, and hadn’t hit me. It was Boston—I knew it. Papa didn’t dare raise his hand or insult me for fear that somehow Boston would protect me.

  The only other place I’d ever felt protected was in my swamp back home, where I’d not only be free of Papa but, just as much to the point, the noise and bustle of downtown Charleston—the fishmongers’ cries; the slave auctioneer’s call; the carriages; the dustups; even the music of my father’s lavish balls—all of it, once I was nestled in the reeds, was left behind. Just one mile and a half from our house, Mepkin Plantation, but another world away.

  As we prepared to disembark the ship, I was feeling plain fine about everything. But as I went bounding along the gangplank, leaving Father to teeter and totter his way down on his own, I had the thought that perhaps Mother’s death somehow had been necessary: a sacrifice of sorts, without which I might never have made it to Boston at all. Perhaps her death, more than a loss, was her final gift to me, her way of putting me in the world where I belonged—even if the journey here had been roundabout and tinged with hatred for my dad.

  The hatred started the night of Mama’s death, specifically during the moment that Papa—after witnessing Mother’s flailings for air—clutched me to his chest, held me in his arms, and sobbed. He was so close, so tight, so near, his hot breath had me sweating and his tears were dampening my hair. Holding fast to each other, together we helplessly watched my mother die: gasping, spitting, screaming, kicking, tearing her hair out, clump by clump. This went on for hours and hours and hours.

  Even then, however, the true source of my misery was not my mother’s ugly demise. It was the way Father disentangled himself from me seconds after Mum expired; the way his face went to stone; the way he turned to me and begged m
y forgiveness for having “behaved abominably,” referring not to a lifetime of the mania to which my mother and I had been constantly subjected, but to that “regrettable, unmanly moment” of his: “that hideous embrace” he and I had shared. Further, warning me that if I ever dared speak of it he’d lay a switch to me but good.

  I, of course, had no intention of talking about what had transpired, but hardly because I was ashamed. Quite the opposite. I wished to remain quiet simply because speaking of just how good it felt to bury my tears in Papa’s chest wasn’t possible without trivializing what had been, to date, the finest moment of my life. “Not a way a man can be seen behaving,” my father thought. Very well then, Papa, be not a man: Be my dad.

  And it was in that moment that the journey to Boston, that is to say, my journey to Rebelhood—began.

  For with Father’s embrace I’d felt something new. Sweet. Something I’d never felt before: love.

  My world opened. Now I had actual evidence that what in the quiet of night I’d barely dared dream of truly existed. Love was out there for the giving, and taking, and the only reason I hadn’t felt it before was because to me, heretofore, it had been denied. Well, no more. Suddenly I realized that it wasn’t that fathers didn’t hug their sons or heave with sorrow while they held them fast. It was that this particular father, Henry Lawrence, didn’t care to. And that the one time he did, he’d tried to turn it into a lie.

  From this realization there was no turning back. Yes, that sensation of tingling from the back of my neck to my toes was love, and I wanted it, was unwilling to live without it ever again. Even if it took my whole life, I decided I would get it. I would demand, extract, manipulate, extort, fight for it if I must. But someone, somewhere would give me my due.

  And so, not the soldier but the Revolutionary in me was born.

  I began defying my father almost immediately. After my mother’s funeral, I abandoned my studies, took to caning slaves, and started beating my horse. I set my tutor’s wig on fire. I shat in our rice fields in plain view of my father’s overseer, and for every stroke my father gave me, I pinched my governess.

  Papa, at his wits’ end, tried to straighten me out. Even a whorehouse to “move your adolescence along.” Gentlemen with great big whiskers and big black leather bags showed up at our door, poking and prodding and asking plenty of questions: “Tell me, little man, what’s wrong?” With luck, I’d have stored up a fart for a reply.

  What was wrong?

  Everything: the silk fineries that itched, the fine hose that fell, the fussy table manners (little finger up, tongue in, back straight . . . how about just chomping down?), the dumb quadrille, the grotesque fox hunt . . . on and on and on.

  I couldn’t have cared less that Austin and Lawrence, Ltd., Papa’s famed firm (hugely lucrative, with profit from tobacco, slaves, Madeira, cotton, and, normally, rice) could one day all be mine. Bah! All I wanted was an embrace from my dad.

  It was during this time that I developed my fondness for the swamp. Its stillness was all I craved. To doze in the moss, cradled by cattail and swamp grass; to listen, without moving, to the sweet warbles of bullfinch and the hushed footpads of lizard snake; to stare for hours at the fog while waiting for the landing of a loon or the leer of an alligator; to roll in the mud and think myself brine; to laugh with the sun and stretch myself into the shape of a cypress tree—this was what I craved.

  Father went berserk, particularly when I came home with Apollo; or rather, when Apollo followed me home. Mucky and blinky-eyed, she showed up at my doorstep one sunny afternoon and stayed.

  Standing there on the dock, I swear I could detect her presence in the howling of the ship’s crew at the capstan; in the roar of the captain’s voice; in the shriek of the bo’sun’s pipe; in the familiar chirps, croaks, and caws of mallards and kingrushes and gulls.

  Boston enfolded me.

  Porters in leather aprons shouting; clerks with ledgers bustling; fat merchants in gold lace and great wigs counting; dogs barking; slatternly girls whistling; wary Redcoats firing warning shots at a particularly unruly crowd. The egret grabbing the catfish and the catfish the worm, the bear the egret and the alligator the bear.

  Life in Boston: life in the swamp. I had found home.

  Mother’s death had been for good.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Girl with the Smile

  From now on, Papa, to better acquaint myself with how business is done, I wish to be your escort everywhere this business of selling rice in Boston should take you,” I said to my father, offering peace, an inner shift of some one hundred and eighty degrees. (All the way from Charleston on deck when I wasn’t cursing I had been silent or singing the hymns of the slaves.) “There’ll be no more trouble from me.”

  The truth was, I had developed a plan.

  My father looked at me as he did the day he forced me against my will to go fox hunting, then streaked my face with the fox’s warm blood.

  “As for our business here,” Papa asserted, jumping to the agenda at hand with great enthusiasm, “remember, we are only here to help.”

  He explained that since the Seven Years’ War with the French, Boston had fallen on terrible times. Merchants were foreclosing on their debtors, currency was scarce, and as I could see, people were starving in the streets. “Lying in the gutters, even too weak to be begging for food. . . . Smallpox is rife, although largely confined, and Boston’s citizens are restive—very. So caution must be exercised,” Papa said.

  As we trundled down Ship Street in our coach (a clunky, inelegant box with rusted iron wheels which gave off sparks), my father eagerly detailed his plan to help.

  Help, as he saw it, would be his offer to “select” merchants (that is, ones who owed his firm huge debts in bills of lading) a reduced wholesale price on “fine rice” which we couldn’t unload elsewhere and from which, because of the reduced cost, they could turn out big profits. For his “generous assistance,” he would receive repayment of debts owed him. And whatever precious little was left over would, of course, be theirs—“not to take advantage of all the suffering, rest assured, but to relieve it.”

  We were there to sell rice. Period. We had had a terrible season at the plantation. Too little rain, and my father’s fancy irrigation innovations had been, he believed, sabotaged by some renegade slaves. The end result was rice that was dried out, musty, and worm-infested, and needed to be unloaded quickly.

  I listened to my father and was amazed. Even by his standards, this was a crooked business, and the rationalizations that were sprouting from his mouth spoke volubly of his unuttered shame. Rice, he claimed, was the “new grain for the masses,” the “key to renewed prosperity,” the “only cure for dyspepsia,” and, better still, would surely cure the “agitated spirit” for which New Englanders were well known. And if I didn’t know it already, I would soon.

  The Green Dragon, the oldest brick tavern in Boston, was where we lodged. We were to keep to a rigid schedule. Each morning, I was to accompany him on foot to his business meetings, then lunch, followed by my studies during his nap, then back together for tea at four o’ clock, followed by touring about at six.

  As soon as lunch was done (slabs of bacon with beans and corn, served with drams of ale—all brown, even the vegetables, and always the same, no matter the eating house) and my father had retired to his nap, I would take to the streets.

  They were crooked, narrow, full of filth, at once both merry and grave, magical and mundane: rife with distractions and opposites. Rivulets of raw sewage coursed on each side of the lanes, smelling mostly of spoiled fish, but also blueberry and thatch. A clown found a rabbit in my waistcoat, and a gypsy woman read my palm—short lifeline, she advised. A crackpot exhibited his revolving model of the universe made of pins and steel next to where victims of smallpox, heaped in a cart, emitted muffled cries for help. A wax figure was made to walk as Redcoats uneasily stood guard. Lovers held hands—two even kissed!—while the poor stepped barefoot into the mir
e of the street, deferring to the privileged, who would pass unsullied on the sidewalk.

  In this setting, then, it was without any real surprise that one day on my rambles I beheld gold coins raining down from the sky.

  Actually, they were just pence (one hit me in the eye!) and they were coming from a glorious red- and gold-trimmed coach fitted with glass and beribboned horses that would with great impunity have run me down had I not leapt out of their way. Face first, I fell into the gutter, and for the rest of the day smelled of shit.

  Trailing the chariot was a parade, hundreds of folk screaming, “Hurrah for King Hancock!” and laughing and catching coins in their fists, while tucked away in the carriage there sat a man in emerald velvet, waving absently to the human effluvia swarming his coach.

  It was when lifting myself up out of the muck that I laid eyes upon a young girl nearly sixteen fastened to the stocks in the center of the square. To her, this clearly was no king passing by. To her, this Hancock fellow was a demon.

  And it was at the top of her lungs that she was expressing that view, pointing out to the ladies in the crowd the size of his cock, “a mere pin,” and that he deserved to “rot in hell and be set to ruin.” For she, as I was about to find out, was a whore, and Hancock a regular, who one day had up and decided to turn her in.

  A milk pail was hurled into her face. “Payment,” it was, “for disrespect of Sir John,” from an offended admirer clutching her scavenged copper.

  “Naughty slut!” shouted a small boy, climbing the platform to which the girl’s feet were chained, dropping a fistful of nails on her head.

  Pilloried wide, arms stretched to the limit, feet bound, the girl could do nothing to defend herself. But nor did she seem to want to. She smacked her lips and lapped what milk she could from her face and caught one of the nails in her teeth, grinning.