by Paul Lussier
I wanted to help but was unsure of how, or even if, she needed it. I approached anyway and, instead of speaking, just stared, offering a soft, weak-at-the-knees “Hello.”
I found her to be beautiful.
“Sod off!” she spat.
Beneath a sticky mask of rotting vegetables, milk, and nails were two indomitably green eyes, like algae in the bay. Her lips plump and pink, the shade of a shell. And her hair, waist-length, multishaded brown, reflected the late afternoon light, this despite a scum coat of debris.
I found myself reaching out to touch her.
She bit me.
I didn’t say “Ow!” Instead: “I won’t hurt you,” uttered gently, soothingly, at which point a chicken carcass was slammed right into my back, the force of it pitching me to the platform floor.
“Damned cur!” a farmer yelled at me from across the way. “You’ll soon be seeing a pecker full of disease for bein’ sweet on that ugly whore!”
And with absolute mirth, her dimples deep and irrepressible, the girl shot back: “No chance of us fucking in this contraption! You can be sure of that, damn ye!”
By her face and saucy manner I was absolutely transfixed. I picked myself off the platform and floated a few paces toward the well. “I’m going to get water to clean you up,” I offered bravely.
Once I was at the public well, the crowd roared with disapproval and drew near. “Get that bastard!” I heard someone say; and next I knew, I was drowning.
Thrashing, gasping for air, I was oddly lucid. I thought through the forming of a fist (thumb outside the clamp) and before I even knew what had happened, the butcher boy was the one facedown in the freezing water. Had it not been for the pleas of the angel in the stocks—“Leave off!”—I would have kept him there, submerged under my boot, and killed him.
And so I stumbled back across the square to the stocks, water pail in tow, and began cleaning up the whore.
“You punch like a girl,” was all she said as I was wiping her face.
I took no insult, for the observation was true. “Lowlifes . . .” I muttered as I dabbed at her face with my linen handkerchief.
She bridled. “Lowlifes, hardly! Good men with heads whipped about the wrong way, is all. But we’ll be changing all that with the Revolution, we will!”
I was perplexed and knew not what to say. “‘Revolution’?” I asked, wanting clarification, for this was the first I’d heard the word used outside my academics—outside science, mathematics, or my study of the stars.
“There’s one starting tonight. You want in?”
“Why the devil not?” I answered, having no idea what I was agreeing to . . . perhaps some odd Yankee tradition I was too embarrassed to admit I didn’t comprehend.
“Tonight at ten o’clock, then?” she asked, further committing me. I nodded.
“And the devil take you if you come back here again and be acting all sorry for me. I’ll be fine. Now git. Meet me at the dock for Charlestown and I’ll take you across.”
And in the absence of sufficient mental wherewithal to ask Across what or to where? I assented, knowing nothing about this woman, this river, this Charlestown, or whatever she had planned.
“You want in?” she’d asked.
“Why the devil not?” I’d answered.
And that, for me, was how it began. A naive exchange that, little did I know, amounted to a declaration of war . . . an exchange that in its innocence was more to the point of the Revolution than anything I have since seen, heard, or read.
And so it was on a lark and a crush, knowing little and feeling much, that I was soon to be initiated into The Cause.
CHAPTER 4
Taking Flight
That night, I waited and waited for Papa to fall asleep. It was almost half-past nine before I could pull out the map and determine the best way to the Charlestown ferry.
It had been a tough few days for Papa. He hadn’t yet hit me, but with his frustration increasing over his failure to convince the Yankees to purchase his rice, I knew that it was only a matter of time.
For my part, Boston continued to distance me from my dad. I know I was supposed to be studying and learning from his entrepreneurial example, but this was difficult, as I began to view him in a different light. I saw few results from his rice-sampling seminars for prospective clients (I did the boiling), even combined with his latest spurious declaration that mildewed rice was an effective fertility enhancement.
What was it? Was Boston altering my perspective of my father, or Papa’s touch? Or had he always been this inept?
“An aftertaste of mold!” the Yankees complained.
“Exactly!” my father buoyantly and triumphantly responded.
All I knew for certain was that the Yankees had Papa’s number and hated him, his rice, and his king.
His king. Was it possible that His Eminence George III wasn’t their king as well? Or was their king that Hancock fellow, the foppish charioteer?
This was one of the many questions I was storing up for the girl. Dammit, Papa! Go to sleep! Strike me, count sheep, do numbers on your stubby fingers and yellowing toes! Close your goddamned eyes!
“Go to bed,” I heard myself command—it just came out, before I’d even had a chance to work up my nerve.
Silence.
Papa appeared to fade, his figure flatten; his crooked nose, high brows, hazel, tired eyes, and bulbous upper lip retreating to single dimension, to a fading portrait of himself, hanging askew. Where had he gone? I wondered.
“Apollo, my eye!” he finally burst out. “How the devil could you possibly deduce a tortoise from a landscape?”
So he had wandered back on board our ship, replaying my recognition of Apollo in Boston’s profile.
“Answer me!” he boomed. And there it was: the telltale fist, preparing to strike.
“Father—”
“Answer me, sissy boy!”
In my father’s world, boys were men and tortoises were simply reptiles. Anything and everything he didn’t understand was the enemy. Whether it be a tortoise of indeterminate sex or a tender son who could parry his blows and knock him out in the process: which was exactly what happened this August night of 1765.
After making sure he was still breathing, I left, racing like mad to the ferry like a boy who suddenly had sprouted wings.
CHAPTER 5
The Green Dragon
One thing for sure: The combination of Boston and this girl was working wonders. I was changing. Suddenly I was trusting my own impressions to be true.
Yes, I had been hearing voices in the middle of the night coming from below our room—I hadn’t just imagined it. Furthermore, that was an actual fire-breathing dragon lurking about the hallway.
The Green Dragon was, of course, the mascot of our inn. Anyone would tell you she was just an image, hung on the iron branch above the door, hammered out of copper already green with verdigris and time.
Yet as I was flying out of my father’s room and down the stairs, there she was, roaming the hallways, eyeballing me as suddenly I was stopped in my tracks. I realized that the entryway wall was not perfectly seamless, that within the pattern of cracks running from floor to ceiling was . . . the outline of a door.
I’d imagined it as the threshold to another world, one replete with secret codes and furtive men conducting nefarious business, dangerous as all. And I was right.
Through one crack leaking traces of orange light, I took a peek. I caught bits and pieces: shadows; specks of maroon, chestnut, and deep green; billows of harsh yellow smoke; and an aroma, too, of stale ale.
Then voices: harsh, throaty, male. I recognized in them the violence with which I’d grown up. And I wanted to run.
But the Green Dragon had another idea.
I found my hand rising to push open the door, despite myself, as if guided to do so by something other. Of course, no History book would ever include me in an account of what was taking place in that room, despite the fact that my prese
nce there would change its course. And certainly no one would include the green dragon. But in fact, it was her breath of fire that got me into the room, and without it the Revolution may never have been won. So for those who say History and Imagination don’t mix . . .
Inside was a devil’s den.
Hearth ablaze despite the summer heat, the chamber was filled with men in midtoast cheering “Three huzzahs for the Stamp Tax!” and snickering that the king, with his latest salvo, had given them a gift from the gods. “What a blessing is the Stamp Tax!” cried a palsied man who stood near the hearth. I knew nothing of this tax, of course, except what I was given to believe: It was a curse. So why on earth were these men celebrating it?
The palsied man, tattered and filthy, suddenly noticed me.
“Who sent you?” he barked, grabbing me by the throat, his other hand poised to tear off my ear.
If it weren’t for another man—tougher, plumper, stronger—who emerged from the darkness to stop him, I would certainly have received my second thrashing of the day. “Adams!” my advocate barked. “He’s only a boy.”
I hastened to add, in my most proper and obliging I’m-not-scared-to-death-despite-the-hand-clutching-my-windpipe fashion, “Forgive my discourtesy, gentlemen, it was an accident, I assure you. I’m afraid I lost my way.”
Adams held me fast.
“I said, who sent you?”
“I—I couldn’t sleep and—”
Then another man came forth, one who had been blocking my view of the table until now. He was the man in the red coach: “King Hancock.” Tall, languid, graceful, with pearl-white hands graced with a gold signet ring and silken ruffles cascading from his wrist, a walking waterfall.
“You say you are a guest of the inn, sir?”
I gulped and nodded. “As a matter of fact, good sir, I was on my way out—”
“A little late, is it not? What business takes you? And you’re here with a guardian, I assume. Where is he?”
“Upstairs, sleeping. I’m—I’m supposed to meet a girl—”
Another man—swarthy, portly—spoke sharply, but with a trace of amusement.
“A little rendezvous?”
Hancock smiled sweetly and turned to my feral captor, the dark man, and an aproned man.
“Adams, Revere, Dr. Church—all we have here is a little Romeo. Clumsy, perhaps, but hardly dangerous. I say let him go to his doxy!”
I stole a glance at the table, a slab of gnarled white pine, upon which lay a huge map stuck with pins. Their little gray bobs littered its surface. And drafts upon drafts of letters and articles and broadsides took up what room remained. The seats not occupied around the table were filled with newspapers.
Adams protested, “We can’t take that chance. What if—”
Hancock shot back, “Tell me then, Samuel, where will we be when this is over if we cannot exercise a little trust?”
“Well . . . just . . . not quite yet,” Adams insisted, relaxing his grip on me only slightly.
Revere stepped forward. “If not now, when? Damn if you’re not mad, Adams.”
And a melee ensued. Adams shoved Revere to the wall, but Revere quickly caught him in a hold. Adams could only slap out blindly, while Church struggled to pull the men apart.
This, then, was my introduction to the Founding Fathers. As John Jay would later write: “Dear me, I think History must needs be rewritten, some circumspect revision is in store, for we were not heroes as much as we were men, and History, nay posterity, might not be braced for that, not at all.” From the disturbed faces of the frenzied men wrestling in the chamber before me, to the grave expressions of their polished alabaster busts lining the corridors of History . . . what a journey, what a fraud!
Hancock, having had enough, rapped on the floor with his ivory-tipped walking stick and, when that didn’t work, applied it to the backs of his colleagues. “Stop it, stop it, you hear? Like children!”
In the confusion I skedaddled off, with Adams, stopping to catch his breath, calling after me, “Swear by God Almighty that you were never here tonight!”
“I swear it,” I declared. And then I ran.
Through the narrow, jagged alleys of the night I lunged, making fast tracks toward the dock I’d learned was at the mouth of the Charles, where muddy effluent met the torpid, brackish sea.
It was two minutes to ten and I was in a panic. “Oh, Lord, please don’t let me miss this chance! Please don’t take her away!”
Winding around Back Street, dodging and weaving through flocks of crazed chickens and the random cow, I was struck by the drum of my heels echoing in the streets.
Suddenly my shoes felt too damned light, thin, delicate, effete for whatever it was I sensed in that moment I was meant to do. I stopped to remove them and my stockings.
And in those few seconds I suddenly heard it: a palpable silence. Similar to what I’d experienced in the swamp, reminiscent of the quiet which had followed my confrontation with my father, but more of it and thicker, denser somehow, carrying with it the blank sensation of something very big about to turn.
Barefoot now, I pushed on, as a whole new world unfolded to my zigzag path.
People were hiding everywhere, crouching behind bushes, ducking inside smokehouses, stooped behind barrels of dried cod. Tiny groups in haphazard formations were racing from tavern to hitching post and back again, speaking never above a whisper and only among themselves.
Otherwise, unbroken silence—not even the night watchman to wish Boston “good night” or a reassuring “all’s well.” Perhaps he was sleeping or was wiser than we knew, for although evening was well on, actually it was morning, and the Dragon of Revolution was awake, breathing fire, preparing to pounce.
CHAPTER 6
Ah, Ezekiel!
She was waiting for me. She knew I’d come. Ah, yes!
And when she reached for my palm without so much as a hello, we ran hand in hand toward the dock without needing or wanting to exchange a word, as though we’d been friends all our lives. Suddenly all the questions I had stored, all the talking I had planned, seemed beside the point. I didn’t even think to ask her name. Even twenty minutes later, with the city of Boston behind us, swallowed by riverbank fog, and the choppy black hills of Charlestown fully in view, still we’d shared nothing but . . . yes, silence, like that which I’d discerned on Back Street, carrying the hope that I would never, ever have to let go of her hand, intertwined in mine.
I finally tried to break the silence, but she stopped me by tapping gently at my lips. Her finger felt moist against my mouth, and substantial, like being kissed by humid night air. She shook her head no, forbidding me to speak, and I obliged, squeezing her hand. It was bigger than mine and scarred, the nails dirty and chewed.
Charlestown, Massachusetts, was marsh also, but unlike any I’d ever seen before, of the most forbidding kind—moors, clay pits, and thorny scrub that drew blood. It was dark as coal with not so much as a moon to guide us on our path, and I had only the sounds of her footfalls to follow—squish, squish—through the bog, as well as the rhythm of her breathing and the reassuring pulse I could feel in her palm.
We ended up at a lone gibbet, a gallows abandoned but standing tall on a dirt mound that somehow seemed to attract light from stars which could only be viewed from that very spot. They hung in the sky expressly to illuminate what was hanging from the gibbet’s arm: an assemblage of sticks and chain. No—it was the remains of a man, a ghostly skeleton, its bones clacking in the breezeless night.
I tried to run, but she refused to let go of my hand.
“Nothing here to hurt you. He’s one of our own. In fact, he looks out for us. That’s what I feel. I come to see him when I have a question. I need to know if tonight’s the night. If it is, he’ll let me know,” she explained.
“But he’s dead—an abominable horror.” True, the skeleton bore no resemblance whatsoever to the man I had to take her at her word he once was. Birds had picked at his eye sockets, and
the space between the two remaining shards of rib bone was the site of an abandoned nest, the eggs discolored, shattered, and dry.
“He’s been hanging here for six years, thereabouts,” she explained.
“Looks to be more like a century to me.” I shuddered.
“Touch him,” she advised, “then you’ll see.”
That, of course, was the last thing on earth I wanted to do, but she really wasn’t giving me the choice. She dragged my hand toward the vestige of his heel and directed me to stroke it.
“Do it,” she ordered.
I obeyed.
On contact, the heel turned to dust and tiny bone particles drifting into the air turned luminous, iridescent, twirling in the moonlight, their ballroom the sky. “Ahhhhh.”
It was a taste of the magic behind the Revolution, a hint of the dreams it would encourage, allow—require. No, this was not to be the last revelation she would share with me.
But for her, the girl whose name I still didn’t know, this dust of angels was the stuff of life and death and serious business indeed. I could tell that by the way she concentrated to read the pattern the bone dust was writing on the soil.
“A bit like reading tea leaves, only I find it easier, you see.” She pointed out the design the white dust made on the dark earth, seeing in the squiggly lines a circle that wouldn’t close, the tail of a minnow struggling upstream, refusing to alter its course.
And that was all she needed.
“Okay,” she said. “I guess then it’s time—let’s go.”
Of course I had absolutely no idea what was happening, and still I didn’t know the girl’s name, but at that moment I didn’t much care. I was caught up in her spell, in her wonderland: a world of omens, cadavers, and stars.
So back to the ferry we ran, the sea breeze encouraging our return while the clackety-clack, clackety-clack of the skeleton’s bones played friendly accompaniment to our flight. It felt so much like living a song that I wasn’t surprised when she stopped at the quay and urged me to “Listen up! For those are the bells! Let the Revolution begin!”