Last Refuge of Scoundrels

by Paul Lussier

  In the heat of the moment I asked for her name, but she demurred: “You don’t need to know nothin’, ’cept I’m a whore who knows what’s up, what’s right and what’s wrong. You wanna call me something, just call me ‘friend.’”

  “Well then—friend—what’s this stuff of Revolution?”

  She plopped herself down on the riverside, tossed her hair off her face, and, cross-legged, back straight and tall, told me a story.

  She explained that the skeleton at the gibbet was a Negro named Ezekiel who had poisoned his master. Everyone who knew Ezekiel—white, black, rich, or poor—wanted his master, Captain Simpson, dead too. The captain was so fierce and bloodthirsty and venomous that it took three tries to kill him, so the story went, because his body thrived on the poison. But when it finally worked and Simpson croaked, white people rallied around, suddenly afraid of a black man who knew how to do what was right. So they hanged him. The end.

  Captain Simpson was her father, she told me. And she’d rather fuck men for money than her daddy for a beating any day of the week. At least until this Revolution of hers was won, when all this, of course, would change. Then there’d be fairness and good sense and no hypocrisy and people they’d be sweet and kind as all . . .

  Sounded good to me. Did this have anything to do with all this fuss about a Stamp Tax and the Yankee hostility toward our English king?

  She laughed. “Not really, but for now, it’ll do.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t—”

  Again she stopped me. “Never mind now. You will.” And she offered me her hand to shake.

  “I’m Deborah.”

  “I’m John.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Firedance

  Back in Boston: more bells, but by now the churches were involved, Old North and New North and Cockerel. And as they tolled, farmers, smiths, coopers, apprentices, and even slaves spirited forth in the night, confident that they had received their call. It was time to come out.

  Deborah was among those in the lead, at the head of a parade of hundreds on the march, down Beacon Hill, across the Common and on to the Liberty Tree. There, still more Bostonians were waiting anxiously for a party that was to begin with a beheading.

  When we joined them, it was one of the queerest sights I’d ever seen. Thousands of people had gathered about a raging bonfire, the flames almost two stories high. Beyond the fire stood what they all called a cathedral: the Liberty Tree. It was of solid elm, without doors or pews, and boasted a magnificent clerestory of long limbs that rose above Washington and Essex Streets, high above the rooftops and framing the sky. She was one of the oldest trees in America and, rumor had it, unfellable.

  People howled “Liberty!” and plied themselves with free-flowing ale that sprang from kegs, which I knew instantly was too expensive a brew for this particular crowd to legitimately afford in such abundance. The wine too was good enough for fancy soirees, the Charleston kind my father hosted.

  Some folks chanted like Indians and sounded drums, circling the giant bonfire. Other people were part of a performance with actors. Farmers and shopkeepers, drunk as pipers, were lining up to bring goods to be stamped by a mock stamp master. Objects of all kinds: ears of corn and baskets of fruit, porringers, chamber pots, and urns, naked buttocks, bare breasts, and plump thighs. It didn’t matter what—the stamp master, with his official mark (a nasty skull and bones) was only too happy to do his job, laughing all the while.

  There was an effigy, too, marked A.O. STAMP MASTER. Stuffed with straw, strewn with tar, he hung from the Liberty Tree, and a small girl with her one-eyed cat swung from his feet, shouting “Liberty!” The tree branches bowed with her call.

  “A goodlier sight who e’er did see? A stamp man hanging on a tree!” chanted the people as they circled the writhing fire. There, amid the rising sparks and roaring flames, the Green Dragon roosted, its head thrown back, its ivory teeth bared.

  Deborah wanted to dance. But I was in no mood. Maybe it was because I had seen parties like this before, thrown by my father for his slaves. “Good times to assuage the bad,” he used to say, but really to stave off the rash of rebellions that had become commonplace in the land.

  Maybe it was those kegs of beer and casks of wine conspicuously initialed with the letters “J.H.,” just as I’d seen on the door of John Hancock’s glorious carriage and his ring. Or maybe it was the luxurious coffin out under the great tree, lined with silk and there to carry “A.O.” away to the funeral pyre in high style. Whatever it may have been, I sensed deception. And was certain of it, in fact, when a smattering of elegant gentlemen—faces dirtied, velvet waistcoats stashed in the shrubs, silken hose removed—wove their way through the drunken carousers.

  These were the men I had seen before in the stifling room at the inn—Samuel Adams, Hancock, Church, Revere, and some others. Their air was patrician, save that of Adams, who was base. And when they commenced to speak, their rhetoric felt just like my father’s when he explained that he had come to Boston on a mission to help: hollow and a little too loud.

  I tried to listen, but Deborah grabbed me for a dance. “Never mind the likes of them,” she whispered, tugging me toward the fire. I was shocked again, for she appeared to know exactly what I had been thinking. She warned me, “Boston is a dangerous place. You gotta be more careful.” Then, hand in hand, we started circling the fire, forked tongues of flame flicking at our ankles.

  But even with the clamor and the drums, I caught bits:

  “Before long it’ll be your tables, chairs, platters and dishes and knives and forks and everything else that will be taxed . . . just as you see up there on the stage!” shouted one man, his shirt too white and fine for his part. Deborah told me that one was a Dr. Warren.

  And another: “Nay, I don’t know that they wouldn’t find means to tax you for every child you got, and for every kiss your daughters receive from their sweethearts. God knows, they would just as soon ruin you, the English would.” This from a wild-eyed man Deborah said was an attorney named Otis.

  And from Revere, my shield: “The people will starve, for imports will be too costly. As it is, there is not enough bread to feed our children!”

  Hancock: “By the sweat of our brow, we earn the little we possess, and we shall not see it taken away. We will fight to protect what we know to be ours!”

  From Sam Adams, by far the most frightening prognostication: “First will be the fever, then the characteristic pustules with their revolting disfigurements. After, the odor, at which point the fever will rise sharply and then, oh shame!, there will be no medicines! For they will not have been unloaded because of that bloody tax!” This struck a chord in the seething, fearful mob.

  Not unlike my father’s sales patter. Only in this case, the message seemed to be working. Women screamed. Children cried. And men shook their fists and offered to take up guns.

  I didn’t know of this “tax,” or know these men. And I certainly didn’t know these Yankees. I knew only enough to be sure that things were not quite right. But still, as Deborah pointed out, again reading my mind, things were exactly as they needed to be, adding an optimistic, “You’ll see.”

  But though I’d only spent a few days in Boston, I had learned this much: The Yankees were not stupid. These were people who got what they wanted. For now, they were content to drink and wait . . .

  . . . Until after the effigy was cut down and carried by procession to the home of Andrew Oliver, the new stamp master appointed to levy the tax: namesake of A.O. . . .

  . . . Until after A.O.’s head was sawn off, crushed, and turned to ash by fire (just for the real Oliver to witness from his balcony) . . .

  . . . Until after Oliver, barricaded in his home, finally fled . . .

  . . . Until after the lieutenant governor, Thomas Hutchinson, arrived with soldiers, to be assaulted by a volley of stones . . .

  . . . And until well after the bevy of disguised gentlemen, scared as shit, would run from the soldiers, hide, and lat
er claim they had nothing to do with the ruckus. . . .

  Then the Yankees would attack. In plain view they would rip the railings off Oliver’s fence, the windows from casements, the cabriole legs from Queen Anne sofas, and the Copley portraits from their frames. All this they would destroy, along with A.O.’s English gardens and his croquet field—not just because it was English, or even because Oliver had elected to sell stamps, but because he was rich. And I would take part for the very same reason. Because, though I too was a mansioned fellow, I knew the harm that had been done me in our unhappy way of wealth.

  And with the havoc in full tilt and the fire burning high, licking at whatever drew too close, I picked up a broken cobble and pelted the lieutenant governor, who was chased away again, this time by me. And as I did this, I also knew why: I had had it with being my father’s son.

  And that’s when I kissed Deborah. And with the stamp man’s Madeira still on her tongue, she kissed back, fierce and for a long while, saying one more time, “Just trust me” and “You’ll see.”

  I did. And I saw.

  The next day, in the Gazette, these events became the “Stamp Act Riots,” plain and simple. And they would not stop until the dreaded tax was repealed. The people had spoken, it was pronounced, and “in a manner without design.”

  And while Samuel Adams disavowed all connection, he would secretly see to it that none would be arrested and that justice would ensue . . . and (hush-hush) that the lieutenant governor’s abode would be hit next. Hutchinson was the man to ruin to get rid of that tax.

  “Trust me,” she said. For even back then, Deborah alone knew who was really using whom. Different goals had they, the rich and the poor, but for the first time they needed each other. And in this need a new country could be born. Of this she was sure.

  “Does this have anything to do with all this fuss about a Stamp Tax?” I asked.

  “Not really—but it’ll do.”

  CHAPTER 8

  The Governor Besieged

  The next morning, Papa woke me in a state of nervous excitement. But it was not to discuss with me what had transpired between us the night before.

  The pleasure of your company is requested for dinner this day at six o’clock sharp. Father was beside himself. “This is it. All our troubles are over! Boston is mine. It’s a rice city now!”

  Judging from his reaction to the delivery of this invitation (upon his awakening earlier that morning), it might as well have been from the king himself.

  We spent the entire day shopping in preparation for the event.

  Funny, I never asked the identity of our host. I more or less didn’t care. And since Papa didn’t seem to care that I didn’t care, the combined lack of interest made for a very fine day. Father traded his traveling wig for a more formal bag replete with ribbon of indigo silk, and for me he insisted upon a new “cauliflower” wig, which on my head looked exactly like it sounds. He bought us new lace-cuffed shirts of the finest Holland linen and four-threaded Strawbridge knit hose. High-tongued shoes with sterling buckles and new silk waistcoats with buttons of agate, carnelian, and bloodstone completed the picture Papa wanted so much to compose: rich and full of class.

  Unfortunately, he had, in his mindlessness, forgotten the August heat, and while we looked handsome indeed in our layers of satin and silk, we sweltered. Our armpits dripped, our powder ran, Father’s cadogan wig slipped freely and frenetically about his sweating head.

  As we approached the house (a “palace,” my father called it, although it looked to me like a putty-colored cage), I was reminded at all costs to “remain impressive, look alive, and be smart”—on my life.

  But when we arrived, he was the one whose ankles were collapsing from his new, too-high-heeled shoes as we tiptoed (“Old money is light-footed,” Papa claimed) down a massive corridor filled with royal busts leading to our host’s dining room.

  I had never seen so many kings in one place. All the Georges, Queen Anne, “and over there, the Stuarts,” my father pointed out, before crashing to the floor. “Damn it to hell!” he cursed as his wig slid across the parquet, to come to rest a few inches from the diamond-buckled toes of our host.

  Dramatically posed, Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson stood reflected in the tabletop of highly polished black oak. He was still sporting the gash I had inflicted on his forehead from my volley of stone.

  While a servant retrieved and replaced my father’s wig, Hutchinson tendered me his hand. “How kind of you to come.”

  It was clear he didn’t remember me as the stone thrower. Not because he hadn’t seen me and not because his memory was weak, but because he hadn’t ever really taken me in. Hutchinson just wasn’t in the habit of looking upon the mob. To him, the lower orders were a malodorous mass of fuss and bother, comprising far too many unattractive earth tones, and he wanted as little to do with them as possible. Richer than my father he may have been, but dumber, definitely, than the Yankees he disdained.

  Hutchinson, you see, had heard my father’s pitch on rice as an “antidote for restlessness,” was interested, and hence issued the invitation to dine. In the spirit of noblesse oblige, he hoped to bring rice to Boston to “help the body politic with their unhappiness” of late. He wished to strike a deal with Austin and Lawrence, Ltd., at a price commensurate with an act of charity, if my father was sincere in his wish to help the beleaguered of Boston. This much was clear: These two deserved each other.

  As they prattled on interminably in the rice-as-medicine vein (Hutchinson’s mute, cross-eyed daughter taking notes for posterity all the while), my state of agitation grew to terror. For suddenly I remembered we were doomed.

  This was indeed the eve of the twenty-sixth of August, and I recalled that the mob was planning to chop down Hutchinson’s door tonight. Any second now we’d be running for our lives. . . .

  “Any second” had arrived . . . or so I thought. I heard a knock and screamed. “They’re coming!” I shouted, leaping up and knocking over my chair.

  Father’s face went red with embarrassment and rage. Hutchinson’s went white with consternation. His goggle-eyed daughter stifled a shriek. A servant, who had tapped politely before entering with the roast and inadvertently prompted my exclamation, hesitated at the open door, gulped, then deposited the meal on the table and scurried away.

  Servants rushed to pick up my chair and I shakily deposited myself back into it. Papa, a fine scarlet by now, wouldn’t even look at me and began stabbing at his proffered slice of beef. Hutchinson made a comment about the vintage of the wine as if nothing had happened. Silence descended.

  It was short-lived.

  A hacking sound ripped through the room. Cries of “Come out!” and “Hang the bastard!” rent the air and the sound of smashing glass reached us in our seats.

  Hutchinson, daintily dabbing his lips, vowed to stay. But the door crashed open, torn from its hinges, and dozens of men, dressed mostly as Indians, stampeded into the front hall. Hutchinson’s hysterical daughter clung to his legs, swearing she would die with him. But, dying not being exactly what the lieutenant governor had in mind, he rose and ran, managing as best he could with a braying, cross-eyed girl attached to his waist.

  “We’ll have him, we will!” the crew captain cried, giving chase with the rage of the devil, but without his wit. For he lost the couple at the first turn, in plain view, where the kitchen spilled into the garden.

  Father and I crouched hidden under the table as another contingent ran upstairs to do damage to the bedrooms. Some were content to stay downstairs and tear the wainscoting off the walls, but four other men, especially enthusiastic, could be heard scaling the mansion roof, razing the cupola, and yanking off the slates, hurling them down to shatter on the walkway below.

  As terrifying as all this chaos was, I was having a ball. Even while my father and I were hightailing it to the wine cellar, I couldn’t resist tossing a sconce through a broken bay window.

  But the fun didn’t last long. />
  In the cellar, though it was solid black, I could make out some shadowy figures in the corner: ruffians who had preceded us with the help of a torch and had found their way to the wine. Their eyes glowed red in the flame and they resembled bears, except with breeches, which were down around their ankles. Between them on the ground was a tiny woman, her legs spread wide.

  Judging from the homespun dress shoved high above her head and the absence of shoes, it was clear she was one of their own. But the bear-men had bashed her with a wine bottle and were taking turns with her. She was covered in blood and every available orifice was in use.

  I lunged. And was instantly cast back, a shard of glass in my forehead, my eyes sealed shut with gushing blood.

  I must have blacked out for a good while, because when I came to, in the morning’s wee hours, the rioting upstairs had dwindled to a growl. But the men in the cellar were still having their fun.

  Although I was in terrible pain, I didn’t dare move. I did, however, in the lightening gloom, finally get a bit of a look at the girl’s face, and she at mine. It was Deborah.

  She was smiling at me. Exhausted, and too frightened to speak, she could only mouth, Trust anyway and Go! before falling faint again.

  Smiling.

  But I did as she bade me and made a run for it. When I got upstairs (the house but a shell of what it had been, everything gone or laid flat), I realized I had lost my father. Or rather, he had lost me, for he had run and left me behind.

  Outside, scavengers were fighting over useless bits of debris—a shelf from a china cabinet, the broken handle of a vase. An old couple was bent in prayer, on their knees.

  Wary Redcoats stood guard—a little late.

  “What a blessing is the Stamp Tax.” The words of the palsied man from the secret chamber ran through my head. So for whom was it a blessing and for whom was it a curse? And what was this business of Revolution that felt so exciting one moment, so sickening the next? That had a father running for his life, forgetting altogether that he had a son? That had raped one of its own?