Last Refuge of Scoundrels

by Paul Lussier

  And the talk on the street wasn’t inflammatory, wasn’t about “tyranny” or “taxes” or railing against Parliament or the king. It was about “making a go of it on our own.” Releasing ourselves from the onerous burden of British influence, policy, and law definitely was part and parcel of the plan, but not the be-all and end-all. Freedom was.

  Where broadsides announcing a “massacre” or denunciation of yet another tax once were posted, there were signed agreements posted by and for ladies not to consume or purchase English tea. Not just because tea was British and taxed, but because our love for it “inveighed against the new ideal,” which was self-sufficiency. Literature was given out celebrating the housewife as the model Patriot because in her duties she actively contributed to this overall goal.

  To do a job, faithfully and well, was all that was required to be included in The Cause. Anyone who worked, belonged: women, children, slaves, Jews, Indians, half-breeds, mulattoes, farmers, sailors, fishermen, even whores—the differences seemed blurred.

  The spirit of the Boston Tea Party, it seemed, had taken hold. Right under everyone’s nose.

  No wonder I hadn’t seen Deborah for all that time after the harbor uprising. While I was giving French lessons; while the ladies and gentlemen with two left feet were learning—and failing at—the minuet (“Too many tiny steps”); while the Sons of Liberty were harassing small boys and men: Otis’s jack-tars and whores—of which Deborah was only one—were silently making the Tea Party a reality, duplicating Venus’ trajectory into the sun.

  The Suffolk Resolves, I soon would learn, had been but one tiny manifestation of this shift. Shortly after the Tea Party (Deborah would later tell me all this), political power in Boston had shifted almost immediately to include those normally shut out. This happened for one reason only: They showed up at town meetings, the unpropertied did, and demanded to be heard.

  At these meetings, Sam Adams was dwelling on his usual bugaboo: the enforcement of the boycott, blah, blah, blah.

  The people got smart. “Fine—you want our help? You give this damned fool boycott some teeth, and you prohibit not only importing, but exporting and the distribution, consumption, and stowing of any British products at all. Put us all in the same boat, on the same footing as the rich, living on our native wits and agriculture alone, and we’ll back this boycott and make it work.”

  A document called the “Solemn League and Covenant” grew from these demands and, needless to say, it went nowhere at all. Sam Adams supported it and promoted it, but only—of course—because he saw opportunity for himself in the proposal: The chance to be a “hero of the people” was too good to miss, irresistible, you understand.

  The Suffolk Resolves were indeed testament to the rising influence and ability of “the lesser sorts” to organize and bring about change, but pulling off the hoax was its crowning achievement. Had it not been for the momentary camaraderie occasioned by the hoax, the significance of the Suffolk Resolves might never have been understood, and the American Revolution, let alone the war, might never have followed.

  Small wonder none of us expected Boston to be turned on its ear by the adoption of the Resolves. None of us, including me, understood them to be the genesis, the foundation, of anything more than a hardening of our stance against England.

  Yes and no.

  I remember sitting at Hancock’s dining room table that afternoon, staring down at my pallid, congealing, tepid soup. Still in a state of confusion as to exactly what was going on in Boston, I was thinking of Deborah, confident that she’d be able to explain.

  I understood nothing at this point, except one thing: that these men before me, and the melodramatic one upstairs, looked pathetic, exhausted, worn out, silly, and old. Not unlike my father at the Green Dragon that night nine years ago.

  Of course, their bickering did nothing to help this perception. Finally it took Samuel’s soup-slurping noises to provoke John Adams’s wrath.

  “It’s neither hot nor thick, Samuel—must you do that?” John whined.

  “I rather think it’s better this way!” Samuel retorted, wiping his mouth with a sleeve that for some reason had been giving off the smell of horseshit since Philadelphia.

  John held his nose in disgust. “And that’s another thing. I’ve been insisting that you learn to ride a horse, to straddle his back, not wipe yourself against his ass. Why on earth do you smell so sour?”

  I stopped listening, for I was back on Samuel and his “rather think,” a mannered expression which he had adopted for the Continental Congress; part of his campaign to enhance his overall image and quell fears he wasn’t to be trusted because he didn’t have “class.”

  “‘Rather think’?” John Adams continued. “How teddibly, teddibly British of you, Samuel.”

  “Perish the thought!” he shouted with a scowl, brandishing his spoon like a mace, soupy drool dribbling from the corner of his mouth.

  I knew then that his era was over.

  John Adams didn’t stop there. “Such a scuttle rat you are! I pray, cousin, that you’d never gotten me involved in this mess. We’ve done a fine job stirring up the rabble now, haven’t we? Suffolk Resolves, indeed. They imagine war, they do, because they imagine themselves kings! Such folderol! I don’t doubt it shall be necessary to call in a military force to do that which our civil government was originally designed for. That would be, to quote that dastardly sentinel at the gate, a fine mess now, wouldn’t it? An army just to control our own? My, my.” He laughed bitterly, pushing away his untouched soup.

  The plate-smashing routine, from which we’d received momentary respite, had resumed. The shattering noise too grating to bear, I climbed the stairs to see what I could do to stop it. And there he was, wigless and gaunt, coughing consumptively and rubbing his eyes.

  “Mr. Hancock, are you all right?” I asked.

  “Never.”

  Wrong question.

  “Are you ill?”

  “Worse than that. I’m afraid this might be farewell.” (Cough, cough, hawk . . .)

  “Should I run for the doctor?” I offered.

  He flung a vase at me in response.

  “They hate me now. The people hate me. I have to dress like a farmer to get any kind of love. What on earth did you louts do down there in Philadelphia to cause me such harm?”

  “I don’t think it’s directed at you, sir, not in particular. I think it’s those Suffolk Resolves—they seem to have aroused quite a stir.”

  “You wish to help, little demon? Fine, then you get your ass out onto the street and you spread the word that I’m fabulous. Toss coins, send flowers, offer them French lessons at my expense. Make them love me again or I shall die. . . . And get those Adams cousins out of my house at once! I hate them, always have!”

  I left—to spread the word, I guess, figuring at the very least there were probably a few pounds in it for me.

  Just how dangerous this mission felt upon my stepping foot into the street was an indication of how much things had changed. To shout Hancock’s praises would be to take my own life in my hands. This was especially surprising given the deep regard in which Hancock had been held by the masses for so many years.

  So what was it, then, this new life in the street? It was the din of chatter I was so struck by when I first arrived in Boston back in ’65, come of age. Yes, that’s what it was. It was talk parlayed into action, chitchat into community. From “each man for himself” to pitching in with the tribe.

  “It’s a start,” Deborah reiterated later that night at the Green Dragon.

  It was half past eight that evening when a child knocked at my door. “Tonight at midnight. Knock twice on the window and whisper ‘Grape,’” she advised me without so much as declaring herself, her affiliation, or her name.

  But I knew instantly who she was. Not more than eight or nine, sweet face prematurely lined, front teeth chipped, riotous hair thick as puckerbrush with berries tucked inside: Clearly she was Deborah’s daughter, beg
otten in Hutchinson’s cellar in ’65. I could tell from the smile. And who else but Deborah’s flesh and blood would be inviting me to a “top-secret, dangerous meeting—beware!” in a party dress, a little cobalt frock to which she’d pinned what had to have been at least a hundred silk ribbons in various mismatching shades of red, white, ochre, lime, and blue. A rainbow in the flesh, come to light up the sky.

  As instructed, I appeared at the Green Dragon at the appointed time and knocked on a window which had been entirely blacked out with coal dust, whispering, somewhat embarrassedly I’ll admit, “Grape.” (How on earth did they come up with that for a secret code?)

  The first thing that struck me when I saw Deborah was not her glowing green eyes, but the fact that she was sitting where Samuel Adams once had sat, back in ’65, when the Dragon had led me down the stairs and into this chamber. And at her side—not Hancock, of course—instead was Job, a black man, who I could tell from the scraping, suspicious way he met all eyes was obviously a fugitive slave.

  To Job’s left were what looked like three Mashpee Indians, nicknamed Max, Joe, and Tan. And then seven white men: a distiller, a smith, two farmers, a barber, two dockworkers. Several women were also in company: a black nursing a child, an indentured adolescent who stunk of the gutter, and a dotty old dame muttering to herself “Someday—no, now!”

  At the opposite end of the table . . . yes, that was indeed a British soldier. A deserter he had to be, with his arm about a drunken punk I’d met before, a farmer named Dawes.

  And at the hearth, children making bullets, among them Deborah’s daughter, her pretty dress already black as pitch. “Hey, you there, glad you could come, I’m Alice!” she said (the only one so far to have acknowledged my entrance) with an excited air that promised soon there’d be gifts, cakes, and lemonade.

  The smoky chamber, in stark contrast to the vulgar morbidity I’d witnessed there in ’65, seemed absolutely buzzing with happy, hot-blooded signs of life.

  Indeed, in the weeks ahead it would seem as though the pulse of Deborah’s meetings increased in inverse proportion to the Provincial Congress’ decreasing power, vitality, and nerve. As her secret plans for war advanced, the more it seemed that the Provincial Congress dithered.

  Oh, there was some pale talk in sessions about raising an army: yes, but then no. Endless discussion of how Boston must at all costs avoid alienating the other colonies by keeping on her best behavior. Lots of rhetoric about minimizing hostile exchanges with England in the press and keeping threats of war exclusively defensive in nature so as to avoid censure by Parliament (don’t want that, no, God forbid we be censured by a country on which for all practical purposes we’d just declared war).

  War? Now, when that subject came up there was admittedly some activity generated or, rather, a congressional semblance of action: the setting up of task forces to investigate the possibilities, assess the ramifications of war. A seemingly limitless number of committees were devoted to exploring every possible angle on the subject, except one devoted to actually making it happen.

  One committee was appointed to nominate delegates to the Second Continental Congress coming up in May, even though everyone knew full well who the delegates would be—the same four plus Hancock. Another committee was charged to devise means to pay the delegates, and still another was charged solely with coming up with ways to reimburse a certain delegate who had accidentally “lost” the equivalent of forty-six pounds from his pocket en route to Philadelphia for the last powwow.

  Ironically enough, the only evidence of life on the congressional floor during this period was Dr. Church, the undercover British spy who, to put everyone off his scent, was consistently and enthusiastically urging war. And, of course, Dr. Warren wanted war too, but everyone knew what his dream really was: an army to call his own.

  But by far the most pressing issue of concern to the Provincial Congress was that of its own absenteeism. Nobody who was anybody showed, and those who did spent a good chunk of their time catching up on their sleep—a disastrous situation that left Samuel Adams wondering aloud “why the epidemic of bowel disorders, agues, rheums that seem to have hit Congress are confined exclusively to those of the Gentlemen [congressional] class.”

  Of course, John Hancock, his excuse still being his proximity to death, never showed up at the Provincial assembly at all. Or, for that matter, his scheduled French lessons with me (“How dare you ask a dying man to conjugate?”). Instead, he paid me handsomely to attend the few congressional sessions in his stead, my task being to note, track, and report back on any activity perceived as potentially threatening to Hancock’s leadership and fast-disappearing influence (“in the unlikely event” of Hancock’s survival, of course).

  These days, however, mostly what interested Hancock were my daily reports chronicling my vast and far-reaching search to procure him smoked salmon (a rare commodity those days), which he’d decided was “just the cure” for what was ailing him. “I’ll pay anything, even for just one little taste. A mere crumb will suffice to put off the Reaper, of this I’m sure!”

  There were no ague or rheum or do-nothing committees or napping attendees at the Green Dragon. That much was clear to me from the start, that very first night.

  Again, as in ’65, there was a map spanning the oaken table, only instead of Boston it was of Massachusetts entire, with a single pin inserted into the town of Concord (famous for its hybrid “grape”—hence the code word).

  Deborah introduced me. “Patriots, allow me to introduce John.” She stood to greet me, casting her shadow across the large map. “He will be helping supply us with guns.”

  What?

  The group applauded and raised their mugs to me in a toast. “Here, here!”

  Deborah continued: “John has just the access we need. And the influence. Anything you might be wanting in your towns—necessities like powder, brimstone, beans, molasses, tents, and the like—he can get it.”

  “I—I think you’re mistaken. . . .”

  Ignoring my hesitation, she cut right to the quick. “John, here’s what you do. . . .”

  She outlined a step-by-step scenario for all to hear. It was her plan to raise an army—or, rather, the guns for one—which she knew full well she couldn’t procure without “congressional aid,” which would come down, as all things would with Deborah, not to working with policy or tools of argument or idle threats, but to trafficking in what she, as a whore at the margins of life, understood best: a man’s heart, cock, and ambition confused with need.

  She was looking to me to throw a party for Congress. A rather fancy soiree to which she’d be invited. “Just get it all going, Johnny, and I’ll take things from there.”

  Fine. Consider it done. Why the hell not?

  CHAPTER 19

  To Arms

  Oh, it was glorious. A chilly February night, 1775. I’d pulled off the party Deborah wanted and was eagerly awaiting her arrival.

  It had been touch-and-go there for a while, as Deborah had absolutely insisted that Dr. Joseph Warren be there. But Hancock, the one I’d gotten to finance the party, hated him to such a degree that he made me promise that Warren would be excluded from the guest list—a condition requiring proof of execution before a single disbursement was made. This after three grueling weeks of bringing him around to the idea of throwing a party for the Provincial Congress at all.

  “I still don’t understand what there is in it for me.” I had to pitch it to him as an opportunity for Hancock to regain his “fast-fading prestige.” I insisted that Warren, in his sponsorship of the Suffolk Resolves and his recent advocacy of war, was set to steal Hancock’s thunder. Hancock could one-up Warren, I suggested, not only by coming out plainly in favor of the increasingly popular position of mounting an army (never mind that privately he detested the whole idea) but by intimating that he just might be open to financing it. Since the raising of an army was probably inevitable anyway, why not be its most aggressive advocate and thereby increase chance
s astronomically of one day being appointed commander-in-chief?

  Me: “You’d look so nice in epaulets.”

  Hancock, blushing: “You think?”

  So the cash flowed forth. Even as Hancock was in secret conversations with Gage regarding a lucrative contract to build barracks for British troops, he agreed to host the party to muster support in the Provincial Congress for an American army and the institution of a draft. As a member of the Committee of Safety (whose meetings he never attended), Hancock ostensibly had influence in such matters, so he didn’t think it’d be hard to get Congress to play along—especially if he first got the delegates good and drunk on the imported black market distilleds they shouldn’t be drinking. Damn the blockade . . . sign them up! Finally, it seemed we’d come full circle, with Hancock testing some of his Stamp Act techniques on his own.

  And as to the stipulation of snubbing Warren . . . not to worry. The night of his own party, Hancock pleaded cramps (or was it a distended belly?) and never showed.

  By the time Hancock realized that Warren had been in attendance (if ever), Deborah’s plan would already be well under way.

  It had been an unusually arduous day for the Provincial Congress, engaged as they’d been in vigorous debate over a particularly pressing sartorial concern that, due to a lucky eleventh-hour streak of bipartisanship, had been settled to everyone’s content. Resolved, “that in consideration of the season, and that the Congress sit in a room without a fire, all members who wish to do so may henceforth sit with their hats on while Congress is in session.” Needless to say, in the wake of such grueling legislative exercises, the delegates were more than ready for a stiff drink.

  He was a very good man, Dr. Warren was, kind to the indigent and diseased and, generally speaking, understanding of those who couldn’t pay. His interest in raising an army, however, didn’t come from this generous place, nor did his messianic dream of heading a mighty nation capable of fighting “fire with fire!,” bathing in blood if that’s what Destiny required. A loose confederation of states, democratic and plain, was not exactly what the visionary Dr. Warren had in mind.