by Paul Lussier
And that was the last straw.
CHAPTER 21
Planting Guns
Clearly word had gotten around that there was to be war. Normally, all night long, this being planting time, the road to Concord would have been clogged with oxen bound for market, peddlers, farmers with produce and jam, and laborers searching for work to carry them through until the coming harvest. But tonight, midnight, April 17, 1775, the road was overrun with farmers toting not food, but pounds and pounds of musket balls and cartridges, cartridge paper, loads of tents, pickaxes, spades, hatchets, wheelbarrows—a trail of carts twenty to thirty long loaded with ordnance and covered with dung (to conceal the contents). The smell—shit and sulfur—was rank, yes, but enlivening. Many a farm field was seeded with oiled metal, black flint, and powder that come summer would yield not crops, but guns.
The branches of the trees on either side of the road—tall, white pine, maple, and elm—had entwined over time, forming a kind of roof, filtering the light of the moon and showering the faces, the carts, the weapons, and my cannon (yes, another one stolen from the Common) with shards of white light. From high above, I’m sure we looked like moving stars, a new, earthbound constellation: Minnows Swimming Upstream.
Concord was the perfect spot to launch the Revolution and I was certain Deborah had decided to stockpile arms there not only because it was situated at a crossroads between two protective ranges of hills with vantage points to spot invaders as far as two miles away. But also, it was beautiful: rich soil, glacial rock, brisk streams.
I had sensed beforehand that Concord—like Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Byzantium before it, fertile river valleys all—had it in her to foster civilization anew. For here, it was said, people and seasons and life were all one. The preponderance of Concord citizens were Sagittarians, conceived during planting time, born around Christmas, most likely to die in the dead of winter. Sagittarius: the sign of fire, of war, engaging every generation of Yankee here since 1630, from Indian ambushes to innumerable expeditions to Canada against the French. And now, the Revolution.
Spring it may have been elsewhere, but not so in Concord, where the only season now acknowledged, in the words of the Reverend William Emerson himself, was “the season for wartime preparations”—the season for planting guns. Warmer than usual.
The Charles never froze that year, and the temperature, for the first time in recorded history, never saw freezing, not once.
As we trudged into Lexington, en route to Concord (ten miles farther up the road), two hundred farmers, a six-pound cannon, and I were directed to the center of the town green by the same kindly Reverend Emerson. There townsfolk had gathered amid tootling fifes and rolling drums to applaud the arrival of this latest weapons cache.
The ladies as well as the men carried guns.
The supplies were immediately commandeered, taken to locations organized by Deborah and the committee of fourteen. Gunpowder was carted to silos, farmers with ox teams dragged the cannon to common land and hid it in a huge hole, sacks of saltpeter were concealed in gristmills, and guns were stuffed into hay or buried in furrowed fields between plantings of corn.
Under the protective cover of night Minutemen, the youngest and strongest of militia boys trained to be called out on a minute’s notice, presented arms on the green under the command of Colonel Barrett, an old-time citizen whom everybody knew. Most of the militia, numbering some 265, knew each other well, coming as they did from not more than fifteen different local families. And indeed, there on the lawn, marching proudly in their homespun breeches and hunting jackets, they looked more like a family reunion than a drilling army.
Deborah winked at me from the line’s left flank. On the field she was a man named Buttrick, presenting arms and marching to the drum. And to Buttrick’s right and front was his “son,” Robert, a.k.a. Alice, as a drummer boy.
“War’s here,” Buttrick/Deborah said. “Just a matter of hours.”
“Not if Congress has anything to do with it,” I retorted, because I was getting the picture.
She shot me a look. “They don’t. You do.”
Uh-oh.
“Just make sure Gage gets here. Enough of the letters. Enough of collecting guns. This is where it begins. Here and now. We’re ready. We’ll be here. And we’ll wait. On you.”
It was as if she’d just asked me to fetch her an apple or some other trifle.
“It’ll have a life of its own,” she continued. “We just need to make sure it happens, that Gage gets his men under way to Concord by the full moon, tomorrow night, April the eighteenth. Not before. Not after. Just then.”
“Oh.” I grunted. What else could I say?
A voice came from within the line: “Later, I’ll tell you how—you’ll be at Buckman Tavern, no?”
It was Alice—excuse me, Robert—who, in drummer-boy blues, a too-large liberty cap falling into her eyes and her face smeared with powder from a busted cartridge, looked like she should have been toting not a drum and a gun but string and a ball. Turning this little girl into a boy soldier, I thought . . . well, this was all just one step too far.
I shooed Robert/Alice away like a fly, and he/she didn’t like that one bit. “Is it a date?” he/she commanded, stomping his/her tiny foot.
Well, didn’t I find myself agreeing to meet this little girl less than half my age well past her bedtime—and mine—at two o’clock A.M. “Sorry I can’t do it any earlier,” she apologized. “Way too much to do. In fact, you’ll forgive me in advance if I’m a little late.”
She smiled, knowing full well I couldn’t help but take pleasure in her precociousness, and I was as good as there.
To think that History regards Lexington and Concord as a spontaneous uprising of farmers in revolt against taxes. That’s like saying a bird learns instantly how to fly for no compelling reason, rather than what actually occurs. An instinct for survival, generations old, pressing at and preparing the baby chick for this moment since birth, pushes her from her nest. Preordained. Just a matter of time.
At Reverend Clarke’s invitation, Hancock and Samuel Adams had been “lodging” (hiding out) for some time at the Clarke parsonage in Lexington, just south of Concord, because Boston had become “too dangerous” for them—there was a royal warrant out for their arrests. This wound up being wonderful for The Cause because John Hancock, even as a fugitive, wanted what he wanted when he wanted it (usually now!). So I was given a perfect excuse to be in Concord to keep track of weapons depots for Gage via Deborah via Church (the goal being eventually to force Gage to action), while also collecting a paycheck from Hancock (“Here’s the fine hose you requested, sir, and your sterling eyebrow tweezer, too”). Not to mention the clever hiding places it afforded me for the few messages it was decided could not be intercepted.
I had big news on this day. After six months of looking, I had finally found Hancock his precious smoked salmon (a little dirty, as I’d stowed it inside the stolen cannon’s bore, knowing full well there was a greater chance of this delicacy being confiscated than the big gun itself), even though—for credibility’s sake—he’d long since stopped claiming his life depended on the salty fish. Lately the perfect antidote to death were luscious, ripe, red, off-season strawberries.
I had also managed to sneak out of Boston his massive, godforsaken wooden trunk which he held so dear, filled with mysterious items he swore the world would never see (heavy as cannonballs, but most likely the contents were personal effects such as books, letters, and jewels—I can’t believe I never peeked).
“So where is the trunk?” he asked, clearly aroused.
“Safe with me in my room at the inn,” I replied. It was thanks to Hancock’s purse that I was “stored” (his word, not mine) at Buckman’s Tavern whenever he “needed” me to be in town.
I tried to share with him how truly challenging it had been to lug the trunk up the inn stairs, but he didn’t care to listen; he was cross-eyed with distracted pleasure over his smoked fish.
The country on the brink of war and there they were: the militia drilling just down the street, Hancock, Adams, and their entourage, gorging on cod and oyster pie, fresh hot biscuits, and buttered squash. And, for their amusement, a game: truth or dare. Will you run—the truth now!—if Gage or any of his troops come to Lexington? Answer: Faster than you can say “Tax!”
Hancock’s ladies too had fled Boston: his fiancée, Dolly Quincy, and his hideous Aunt Lydia, both of whom he hated and was forced to pander to, the latter because he owed his fortune to her now-deceased husband, and the former because the latter loved Dolly and thought she was “plumb perfect” for John.
Tonight, drunk and clearly obsessed with the fact that Hancock was still not married, Aunt Lydia was practically shoving Dolly into her nephew’s lap, insisting he “take a good, hard look and marry her now!” What cataract-plagued Lydia didn’t realize—plain as the mole on her crooked nose—was that the last thing to inspire a proposal would be Dolly’s looks.
It took till pudding, but finally Hancock did, in fact, touch Dolly, his velvet cuff brushing her lace sleeve. Aunt Lydia, breaking into an instant sweat, screamed “Thank God!” before reluctantly fleeing the scene, Bible in tow, to beg forgiveness from the Lord for having cursed.
In response to my soft query, “Uhm, well, does anyone think there might be war?” the remaining women looked at me as though I had just relieved myself on the table. Samuel Adams, from whom so far I’d heard little but those unimproved slurping sounds, wasn’t much happier. Only Hancock, eager as he was to get Dolly the hell off his lap, responded enthusiastically, reaching for his rifle and swearing he’d start polishing it and “toute suite” (in captivity I guess he’d caught up on some French).
“Someday we’ll have an army. Congress is just about there,” Hancock cooed confidently, rubbing his gun, which was stashed taut between his legs. “And I will run it.”
“Run from it, more likely,” I said to myself, perhaps even audibly (I couldn’t help it), but no one seemed to hear.
I figured out that, despite what the characters in this room thought, should Gage actually come to Lexington to arrest Hancock and Adams as rumored, he would be indulging in a pointless exercise. For Gage had no better understanding of “popular rebellion” than Hancock and Adams did. Otherwise, Gage would have realized that the removal of Hancock and Adams would have little or no effect on the real business of Revolution.
To Gage, as with the Founding Fathers, this conflict always would be, first and foremost, a gentlemen’s pissing contest.
Which is where I would come in: by getting Gage to commit, not to a mere police action or to a raid to arrest Rebel ringleaders, but to a war.
“And how on earth do you expect me to do this?” I asked, seeking the counsel of the nine-year-old girl come traipsing into my room, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, half an hour late at two-thirty A.M.
She was situated smack-dab on Hancock’s trunk, which once and for all I would have opened had she not helped herself to it as a chair.
“Fancy pants,” she called me, repeating the words over and over again only because the sound of it made her laugh. “Fancy pants, fancy pants,” she sang to a little dance which mostly involved sticking her buttocks out and shaking them as vigorously as she could while also talking “business.”
“Mum says we can’t rely on Gage’s stupidity or even his nerve to get him to Concord. She needs us to make sure he sticks to the plan.”
So Gage needed our help in mounting a siege against us. Would the illogic of Revolution never cease?
No. Illogic being a way to the heart, it was precisely to the point.
This is why Alice could act as if what she was explaining to me were perfectly sane. “All you’ll need to do is make certain he comes, by the night of the eighteenth.”
“And once I’ve done that?” I asked incredulously.
“We win. Ta-da!” And with that she resumed her little fanny dance, this time punctuated by a practice drill. “Poise your firelocks! Cock your firelocks! Present! Fire!”
“Listen to me, little one. Whatever it is you’ve been told to ask me to do, forget about it. I can’t do it.” I was losing my nerve.
I meant it as a refusal, but she took it as a sign of my lack of self-confidence.
“Mum and I know you can,” she said softly, as reassuringly as a nine-year-old could.
“I’ll be needing air,” I insisted, as I stormed out of the room, bounding down the stairs to get away . . . only to run into “Buttrick” downstairs, poring over a map with her fellow militiamen and discussing—what else?—preparations for Gage’s arrival in Lexington the day after tomorrow. That exact. That precise.
And from the top of the stairs came Alice’s confident response: “I’ll wait here. I’ve got all night.”
Deborah summoned me to the bar. “Revere and Warren have worked out a warning. He’ll just need to be told whether it’ll be by land or by sea that Gage will come. Got that?”
I said, “Uh-huh,” recognizing that in so doing I was committing myself, if only because I couldn’t say no. And if that sounds unheroic, then so be it: Remember, I’m not a historical figure, only a man.
As I was packing for my journey back to Boston, sweet “Robert,” tiny nipples trussed, hair shorn, watched me like a hawk to make sure I didn’t “go chicken” for as long as she could.
Even generals need their rest, I suppose. For as I prepared to leave I noticed she’d finally surrendered to sleep, curled and twitching atop the trunk, clutching her gun and her drum.
Still just a child, I thought. A child with a club fist. A child marked for squalor and rejection and early death, whose best hope had been and always would be her mother’s legacy: the capacity to dream, which she would live on for as long as she could.
And in that twisted fist of hers, I saw a note clearly intended for me, albeit crumpled and smeared with blueberry jam and bits of chocolate. On it were written details of my mission, and directions which Alice, still being a child, had just plain forgotten to share.
Clearly written by Deborah, it read:
My dear John,
The address is Province House, King Street. Throw pebbles up to the window first. Afterward, talk to anyone—WORD WILL GET OUT and we’ll take over from there.
Yours, Deborah
P.S. This is it—the Big Bang!
She had written My dear John.
Kissing Alice on the cheek, I tiptoed out.
I checked the note yet again. Yes, there it was, in her scrawl: My dear John.
Once outside, I took a look through the window at Buttrick, still hard at work with her men, slugging ale and chomping on bread. I wondered if her comrades knew she was a woman, or if they even cared.
In this moment, her commitment seemed so staggering to me it brought water to my eyes.
“My dear Deborah, I shall carry on. . . .”
CHAPTER 22
The Big Bang
She had big tits and wanted me from the moment she laid eyes on me.
On the night of the eighteenth I threw rocks at the window, as recommended, all the while terrified out of my mind because, yes, this was Province House, General Gage’s mansion and headquarters, where he and his aides and his wife—the powder-white slut at the window—lived, slept, and worked.
Gage was out, presumably plotting Hancock’s arrest. His wife had me brought in directly through the front door and mounted me almost instantly.
Having stripped off my breeches like an expert, she grabbed my cock and yanked it to her bosom, where it lay soft at first, between her breasts. She groaned with pleasure and asked me to suck the breast on my left (not her left). I did as told. It tasted of powder. Really not that bad.
She was almost instantly made jollier, and as she moved my lips from her right breast to her navel and, ultimately, her pussy, she started to speak, blunt and to the point.
“Ooh! He’ll be crossing the Charles, heading for Concord toni
ght—aaah . . .” And she seized my cock again.
“Not quite what I had in mind,” she complained, having a look at my appendage, “but it’ll do.” And she stroked it like a fusil, priming it for insertion.
I came as it was going in, but, thank God, she did too. At which point she shoved me out of her self and tossed me to the side.
“That was lovely. Now go.”
So there it was. I had lost my virginity to the honorable, venerated, and allegedly demure Margaret Gage. So was she a Patriot? Was she a spy? Was she one for the Rebels? Or just a horny dame who spilled state secrets for a good fuck (or in this case, a terrible one)?
I hadn’t a clue, and didn’t much care. But one thing for sure: Mrs. Gage’s motivation didn’t seem any more venal or selfish than anyone else’s I’d run up against since this business of Revolution began and certainly it wasn’t mean-spirited. Unless you consider betraying her husband and her king not a nice thing.
From entry to entry, exit to exit, a full five minutes had elapsed and I was back in the street. And that includes two of those minutes spent climbing the stairs up and then down, each way.
So all in all, I have to say my first experience with intercourse was rather dull, a thin sandwich compared to the feast I could conjure with my own hand. Certainly the earth never moved, the room didn’t spin, and ejaculation, the reputed high point, was a most definite low. (The memory of her chortle—“Oh, to eat you with a spoon!”—upset me for years.)
Gratified nonetheless to have successfully(?) executed step one, I referred again to my note for guidance: Talk to anyone . . . and we’ll take over from there.