Last Refuge of Scoundrels

by Paul Lussier

  “Feeling what?” I asked.

  She sighed. “Oh, you know, feeling what it’s like to be together, like all one, kinda like it could have been if I’d had brothers and sisters and a father I didn’t have to see killed. Never having had that, I dunno, and having it right then and there under the light of the moon, it kinda made me grateful . . . for tea, actually. So I wanted it, all of it, with me, on me, in me . . . the smell, the sensation, the feel of that memory of the night we spilled the tea—so I wouldn’t forget. Nah . . .” She paused to reconsider her words. “So I’d be sure to remember, that’s it.”

  She uncrossed her legs, no more sitting Indian-style for her. She’d had enough of that. And no more feather headdress either. She removed it. And no more war paint, to boot. She began rubbing her Mohawk marks away.

  “That was it, John, you know. Tonight. That was it. What we both want. Do you know what I’m saying?”

  I did know.

  I must have fallen asleep because suddenly she was gone. Actually, that’s not so, she was still there, outside the haystack, in what she’d left for me: a long, thin zigzag trail of tea. A path for Revolution.

  CHAPTER 14

  The British Get Serious

  A breadwoman, her basket full of hot baked goods cooling in the sea breeze, was sitting on the shore, weeping, not making her morning rounds. Watching the sailors trudging through the sea lanes clogged with tea, sweeping, sinking, dispersing, siphoning up the “damage” from the night before. Sad she was to lose that tea. Something about its eager removal had her mourning in advance about losing the love her husband had brought home to her last night, fondling and nibbling at her breasts as though they were still plump, pinkish, and firm.

  She was afraid that the moment was just that, a moment. A fleeting dream that would be no more. That she’d have to forget it ever happened or, worse, that as with my father and his embrace of me the night my mother died, she’d be asked to lie. No, no, the tea affair had been a party, not a crime, and on her breast was a hickey proving her point.

  That’s what I imagined the weeping breadwoman was thinking as she and I sat together in the sand (I’d been wending my way home from the haystack when I’d spotted her), watching sailors trudge through clogged sea lanes in what appeared to be a futile effort to rid the harbor of its tea.

  And these weren’t official British sailors at work, mind you: These were Yankee sailors, working for Yankee mercantilists, fortunate men who wanted to remain so and toward that end wanted this event forgotten and the evidence gone. So what had happened, I wondered, to warrant this shift in attitude? After all, most of these men—through to last night—had not only been supportive but had participated in the tea-dumping plan. My goodness, I’d even spotted Hancock done up as an Indian. So what of this clean sweep, then?

  Well, not entirely clean. Weren’t the breadwoman and I cheered now by the sight of huge, sodden floating dunes of tea (some looked more than five feet tall and as wide!), refusing to go away, using the currents to slip from their would-be captors’ shovels, picks, rakes, and nets? Thousands and thousands of pounds of wet, black tea shining in the sun, enjoying an early morning chase.

  “Guess the tea’s meanin’ to stay,” the visibly cheered breadwoman explained.

  “Seems so,” I replied, tipping my headdress (I was still outfitted from the night before), bidding her good day, and resuming my journey home.

  Crossing the Common, however, I came across, or rather was accosted by, a scared-to-death young man, not more than fifteen, with bits of last night’s war paint still dotting his ears which he was only too desperate to remove, scrubbing, scratching, tugging at his ears like a dog fending off fleas.

  “Go home, sir, and out of the street, don’t be dressin’ like an Indian, don’t you know?” At which point, seeing a Son of Liberty coming, he shoved me out of his way and continued on, wanting nothing to do with me.

  The Son of Liberty, one Cameron, didn’t lose a moment to order me off the street, threatening me with bodily injury if I so much as dared strut about in broad daylight in last night’s garb.

  “I don’t understand where there’s a problem.”

  “Just get out of my sight by the count of ten, and the feather headdress out of sight on three, and there won’t be one.” He began counting. “One, two, three . . .”

  I fled.

  Oh, weren’t the Sons making themselves hated now, randomly stopping innocent men and boys on the street, checking faces and ears for remaining traces of Mohawk red paint, warning even women and children to talk to no one of last night’s affair and ordering those who could not be trusted—such as young apprentices beholden to inquiring Tory masters—to flee from town. And underground Patriots who had partaken of the event—those who were publicly pro–Tory but in private defiantly Patriot—although vouchsafed clemency, were kept under close surveillance and tailed.

  All of these security measures were allegedly for the “people’s benefit,” put in force to protect the identities of those who had participated in the “tea affair” from arrest and prosecution. And while I didn’t have a better explanation, I didn’t trust it—or like it—any more than I did the sight of tea being sucked out of the bay.

  And in the ensuing days my sense that something was very, very wrong, that fears of British retaliation were exaggerated, only became more clear. While Governor Hutchinson wasn’t exactly racing through the streets swearing revenge, he did, in fact, arrest a few men, so, to be fair, the Sons of Liberty weren’t entirely wrong on this score. Actually, I reverse myself: They arrested one man—randomly, it seemed—an unassuming barber named Eckley, who, after a brief, perfunctory interrogation availing nothing, was released.

  Now, everyone knew Eckley had said nothing, if for no other reason than he probably knew nothing. Indeed, Eckley had doubtless spent all of his life knowing nothing. Swift, old Eckley was not. Did you see Adams, Warren, Hancock there? he might have been asked. To which he would have replied, Who are they? . . . What riot? . . . What ship? . . . Did you make mention of tea brewing in the harbor? My, my, I must help myself to a cup!

  Yet after Eckley was released by the authorities, he was borne naked through the cold streets, strung up on a narrow pole with a placard that read INFORMER! and spat upon.

  The fear was irrational. And when I realized that, I had an epiphany: that the Boston Tea Party itself—the vision, the model it represented—was what was feared most. The possibility—nay, plausibility—of a whole new world. More than anything else, more than a tax revolt, the experience of the Tea Party was what was historically significant, for silently and under the light of the moon, a way of being that to date had dared exist only in people’s hearts came to life. A way of being in which differences among men and women, rich, poor, Jewish, black, Quaker, Baptist, retarded, fey didn’t matter, except in the talents and skills they brought to the Party.

  In the silence something eerie, something strangely intimate, had crept up and caught us unawares.

  It was beyond language.

  It was “Me know you.”

  It was finding Deborah.

  It was love.

  You could see it in shoemakers like Joseph Robert Twelvetrees Hewes (you read that right), who suddenly, the very next day, claiming to have worked side by side with Hancock while dumping tea, with a bounce in his step and a flower in his lapel, shared with anyone who would listen thoughts of revelation: that Hancock, all in all, Lord be, was just a man! So giddy was he that he knocked on Hancock’s door.

  But Hancock was not to be found.

  Dressed like Indians, we’d touched America, which, before the Tea Party, was a concept not yet born.

  Before the Tea Party, we were simply . . . not–British.

  Well, not anymore.

  Now, in the cold morning after, we were also not–American. Not-equal. Not-homespun. Not-indigenous. Definitely not–Indian, and not welcome at Hancock’s door.

  In light of this discovery of m
ine, the fads that developed in this post–Tea Party era made considerable sense to me. Trading the war cry of the Mohawk for the classical oratory of Rome, educators, priests, and pulpit hogs developed a way of public speaking that would have bored Caesar. Sons of Liberty took on nicknames like Herodotus and Demosthenes. Benjamin Church, in his Boston oration on the anniversary of the Massacre, came clad in a Ciceronian robe. John Adams spoke of the Boston Tea Party as “epochal,” as one of the grandest events in the history of the world, its sublimity unsurpassed. Fine, then, spare us the high rhetoric of British tyranny, give us instead blunt proclamations of equality, of fairness, of love. And good old Sam Adams: His diatribes these days were addressed to his “fellow Romans,” exhorting us to remain strong, to seek inspiration in these hard times from the “Virtue of our Ancestors” (by which he most certainly did not mean the Indians). Additionally, he spoke of America as the “imperial Mistress of the World.” Imperial . . . us? You bet.

  “So leave the Americans as they Anciently stood!” remonstrated one Whig in defense of America. And from the Tory side: “Delenda est Carthago [Carthage must be destroyed]!”

  Plain English, please.

  So it hardly came as a surprise to me that everyone in town with money suddenly wanted to be royal, not free; elegant, not frayed (hats were big!); and above all, to be fluent in Romance languages—and fast.

  Actually, this last development wound up being wonderful for me, as my expertise in French made my living possible after I ran out of Otis’s money.

  So there I was, in March 1774, teaching French to the socially inept but aspiring—sometimes as many as thirty to a class! Wasn’t I on my way, though! Happily contributing to the demise of America and pocketing all that cash.

  Lucky thing for America that the British finally retaliated in the way that they did—blockading all of Boston Harbor, thereby treating us equally, punishing all. As if to remind us that we could forget about playing aristocrat, that as far as the king was concerned we were his servants and, more importantly, that we were one and the same: a new species of man, albeit nasty little beasts, all in all. In addition, they replaced Hutchinson with a military leader. And laid down vindictive measures, the famed “Intolerable Acts,” forbidding town meetings and the like.

  The irony is that the British in their actions, not in their rhetoric, conveyed an understanding of the Tea Party that surpassed our own. For despite their declared intention to defend the principle of taxation once and for all (which, by the way, they were ready to concede if only they could get some cash back on that ruined tea), nothing they did in this period supported that position. They forbade town meetings and large gatherings of any kind and declared martial law. No new taxes were assessed and no additional arrests made for the “tea affair.” Indeed, Hutchinson said it better than any so-called Patriot could: that to prosecute the tea affair would be “to issue a proclamation against the whole community.”

  Right. Tell that to the Founding Fathers.

  Another irony of the British blockade was that it greatly contributed to our emerging sense of what “being American” actually meant, if for no other reason than Hutchinson was replaced by General Thomas Gage—a man entirely enraptured by everything American, from bean dinners to hunting getups. He held a mirror to the culture that suddenly we couldn’t help but realize was distinct, rustic, and true to the land. From day one, Gage was in the “Yankee swing.”

  Gage had spent the recent past in New Jersey, had taken a gossipy, sluttish Jersey wife (thank God for that, as you’ll soon see!), and campaigned for this new post as Boston’s military commander primarily because he wanted desperately to stay in America. He just plain liked it here.

  To get the job, the story went, he adopted the king’s ministers’ advice on how to ingratiate himself with his sovereign: bore George III unforgivably with conversation deadly dull, so as to keep the king from being interested in him, for George III would trust no one who stimulated him to think. Even Governor Hutchinson, after he was ensconced again in merry old England, in his one interview with the king, found it best not to discuss colonial unrest, but to stick to a tidy, monotonal brief on corn, the coarse bread it made, and the taste: “Well, rather odd, Your Majesty.” But even that proved too much for the king, who replied, with a twinge of excitement the entire court had learned well to dread, “How very strange.” Phew. That was all. This time Hutchinson would get to keep his head—consider yourself in luck this day, Governor.

  In any event, Gage must have done something right, because it was about this time that George III declared, “The die is cast,” and ordered Gage to “master them or leave them totally to themselves and treat them as aliens” (there’s mention of that new species again). An order, of course, that because it required Gage to be something he was not—tough and ugly (John Adams might have been a better bet for the enforcement of martial law)—he was doomed to fail from the start.

  Gage devoured baked beans, threw fabulous concerts featuring local artistes, and dined regularly with the men he was supposed to arrest.

  He befriended Dr. Warren completely.

  And to top it all, he sported a wig, custom-made in Boston, that left him looking exactly like Samuel Adams. A little older, perhaps, much cleaner, and more feminine, which was why we called him “Granny Adams”—a nickname the idiot not only didn’t mind but encouraged.

  Hardly a saber-rattler, one of Gage’s first military efforts was an order to his men to be nice, denying them sidearms and dressing them up in farmers’ outfits to cross the Charles for afternoons in the countryside. To be fair, these excursions were designed to be undercover reconnaissance missions to investigate stores of ammunition that were reportedly being secreted away by villagers.

  It’s just that his men would get a little distracted, and their outfits were, well, a bit over the top. Thinking they looked like Yankee day laborers, they wore gray greatcoats, leather breeches, blue mixed stockings, and silk “flag handkerchiefs” about their necks. Accessorize this ensemble with delicate walking sticks, with which they posed while asking for scones in taverns, completely forgetting not to speak in the best King’s English, and you have men whom you couldn’t pay enough not to give themselves away.

  And when one of Gage’s colonels, Leslie, proceeded to Salem to seize war stores and found that the bridge over the river had been drawn up by militiamen who were threatening violence if the Redcoats tried to cross, he backed right down and settled the matter amicably. Leslie swore that if they would only help him follow through with his order by letting the bridge down for an itty-bitty second, as soon as he reached the other side—just so he could say he had done his duty—he would turn back around and go home. Which is exactly what he did.

  And Gage later praised him for his good sense!

  Frankly, personally, I loved Gage. I loved having a father figure that I could imagine running circles around. Even though he possessed military might five thousand strong, soldiers quartered everywhere, and artillery and grenadiers all about, the “Americans” had Gage’s number and we were relentless in our reminders to him of that sorry fact.

  When the Provincial Congress gathered illegally in Salem to elect its representatives to the First Continental Congress (which it was decided would be convened in Philadelphia, in order to investigate the possibility of a “collective response” to the Boston blockade), Gage, of course, dutifully but halfheartedly sent emissaries to dissolve the assembly. To stop their interference, all Samuel Adams had to do was lock the door. When the emissaries knocked, he called out from the other side of the door, deep inside the hall, swearing he couldn’t find the key.

  As Gage’s men stood outside, politely waiting on our “search” for the key (as I was in attendance at this meeting, I witnessed this firsthand), we resumed our vote for the delegates to the Continental Congress and approved the illegal resolutions necessary to finance the expedition of our five “congressmen” (among them the Adams cousins, of course) to Philadelph
ia. Once that business was finished, Sam, presumably having “found” the key, and in “obeisance” to Gage’s order, dissolved the session and unlocked the door, welcoming the emissaries in just as he was bidding his constituents good night.

  And believe it or not, Gage was so pleased by Sam’s accommodation of his orders, he proffered him an invitation to dinner, convinced this “change of heart” of Samuel’s was a sign that finally the esteemed Mr. Adams might be open to a bribe. He offered one thousand pounds sterling annually for life to alter his course of action against the king, but Adams, valuing power and influence over money, declined.

  So—even with the port closed, the Charlestown ferry disallowed, business at a complete standstill, and Boston more depressed, depraved, and impoverished than ever before (unemployment at 30 percent and disease and filth taking its toll)—we were, some of us, having a great deal of fun. Six out of ten of Gage’s men were deserting, and not because they tired of being soldiers, but because they too got a kick out of life in America and wished to quit the military, settle down, and start a farm.

  Maybe being an American wasn’t all that bad.

  CHAPTER 15

  The First Continental Congress Convenes

  Exactly what Deborah did at Hancock’s each night I was yet to know for certain, but long before she confirmed it for me, I had the right idea. Deborah wouldn’t be fucking for money a man whom she wasn’t, in turn, betraying.

  She was, of course, a spy.

  And how this squared with what I saw in her eyes, in Ezekiel’s ashes, in the trail of tea, in her smile, remained for me to know. I only knew that it had to be all right. That a woman who was quite willing to risk her life to openly pilfer tea just so she could feel it on her body had to be (like Otis, who was neither Patriot nor Tory), too loving, too American, to be a simple thief, traitor, or whore.