The Lost Constitution

by William Martin

  “Not me.” Shays shook his head.

  “We’ve asked him,” said Doc Hines “He’s been to debtor’s court himself, so he knows how humiliatin’ it is. And he went from private to captain in Washington’s army, so he knows how to lead—”

  “I’ll back no rebellion till the state answers our petition,” said Shays.

  He had always reminded Will of a bull—big-headed, brawny through the chest, with eyes that bespoke more stubbornness than brains. But if Daniel Shays kept to his present line of talk, Will would have to raise his opinion.

  Doc Hines said, “We’re just back from the convention in Hatfield.”

  “Aye,” added Shays. “Farmers from across the county. Wrote a petition to Boston. Told ’em we need paper money, debt relief, tax relief, and the closin’ of the Courts of Common pleas, so we can get out from under the lawyers—”

  “You sound like my brother,” said North. “He wants to be one of them lawyers.”

  Shays gave Will the once-over. “I’d say your brother’s a smart boy, then.”

  “I’d say this”—North drained his mug and slammed it on the bar—”we tell the legislature we want no taxation without representation. Then we have an uprisin’.”

  And that was what they did.

  IN THE SMALL hours of August 29, the Pikes rose in the bedroom under the eaves in their father’s home, dressed, and headed down the hill.

  At the meetinghouse, they joined with twenty or thirty more who had gathered under sputtering torches and lanterns.

  “Fine day for an uprisin’,” North announced when he spied Daniel Shays.

  “State rejects our petition,” said Shays, “we need to make ’em listen.”

  With their torches and lanterns bobbing above them, they headed out the west road toward the Connecticut River. Some carried muskets, others had clubs or axes, and a few, like Daniel Shays and Will Pike, carried nothing at all.

  Will had told his brother that he disapproved of mob action, but North had insisted he march, because a boy who dreamed of becoming a barrister should see what happened when lawyers and judges denied the people their rights.

  By dawn, they had reached the Connecticut and joined other bands from other towns. A great coming together it was, of angry farmers crossing fields and forests to march with that column from Pelham and protest the injustices heaped upon them since the end of the Revolution.

  At full daylight, they took formation behind fifes and drums and began to parade eight abreast, like a Continental regiment, with muskets in the van, clubs and shovels in support, unarmed men bringing up the rear.

  Will admitted that there was something stirring in the sound of the fifes trilling out one marching tune after another—”Yankee Doodle,” “Banish Misfortune,” “The Road to Boston.” He could feel the drums beating in his belly, urging him on. And for a moment, he wished that he had brought his own musket after all.

  The music must have moved Daniel Shays, too, because he snatched a post from a split-rail fence, shouldered it, and joined the men marching behind the muskets.

  Will stayed at the rear and told himself that he was stronger than the momentary power of the music. A young man who hoped to become an officer of the Massachusetts court should not be seen laying siege to a Massachusetts courthouse.

  The farmers had determined to close every courthouse in the state, so that no debt cases would be heard anywhere and no farmer could face foreclosure because he did not have the money to pay his taxes and his bills both.

  When three justices arrived in Northampton to convene the Court of Common Pleas for Hampshire County, they were met by fifteen hundred men.

  Will heard his brother say to Doc Hines, “Looks like the odds don’t favor the justices today, but I’d say they favor justice.”

  And the justices agreed, at least in part, because they continued all cases and galloped back to Boston as fast as their mounts would carry them.

  His brother’s uprising, thought Will, had begun

  BUT WILL DID not march home with the Pelhamites. He might not have marched at all had they not been going to Northampton, because the House of Correction was there, too. It sat on a rise looking across the valley toward old Mount Tom.

  Will took some comfort in that, for a well-sited jail might also be well-kept. But as he drew closer, the wind shifted, and the smell that rose off the roof and wafted from the windows was worse than a dungpile in July.

  He should not have been surprised. The jails were packed in those days of foreclosure and debt crisis. So many farmers had been imprisoned at the behest of creditors who believed that they still could pay, or at the whim of a state that sought to make an example of them, that the practice of separating debtors from criminals had been suspended.

  As for the man brought out to see his son, he looked as if he had aged a year in a fortnight. His hair hung around his face and snagged in the stubble on his chin. And his pallor was more than the prisoner’s shadow. Sickness and despair had turned him as gray as gravel.

  “Don’t worry, lad.” George North Pike sat at a rough table, under the eye of the jailkeeper. “ ’Tis the thin gruel we get thrice a day that has me lookin’ like an old hag.”

  “But Pa, you’ve lost another twenty pounds.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said again, then asked, “Where’s your brother?”

  “He said he couldn’t stand to see you like this.”

  The old man nodded. “I can’t stand to see myself.”

  Will reached into his sack and produced a loaf of bread, sausage, and three apples.

  George Pike looked at the food. “Our apples?”

  “Aye. One thing Nathan Liggett didn’t take.”

  The prisoner ran his hand over the apples, as if to convince himself that they were real. Then he touched the bread, then the sausage. But he sampled nothing. “You should be sellin’ them apples. Not bringin’ them to me.”

  Will ignored that and said, “Would you like a slice of sausage?”

  The answer, from a man who looked like he was starving, was a shock to his son: “No, Willie. I … I reckon I’m not hungry.”

  “Not hungry?”

  George North Pike laughed. “A place like this can kill a man’s appetite.” Or his spirit …

  An hour later, Will stood to leave in the lowest spirits of his own life. But he would go with one promise. “We’ll get you out of this place, Pa.”

  “I’ve labored hard all my days, son, because I believe that good things come to good men. And I give this country six years of service, but when I come home, I was loaded with class-rates and lawsuits, saw my livestock sold for half its value, had to pay when no one would pay me, got hauled off by the sheriff, and—” Whatever else he had to say, he could not go on. He simply stopped and buried his head in his hands.

  Will Pike touched his father’s shoulder. “We’ll get you out.”

  “I’ll serve my time. Then we’ll pay our bills. That’s how I’ll get out.”

  THERE HAD TO be a better way, thought Will.

  “There’s better ways,” said North that night at Conkey’s. “Ain’t that so, Dan’l?”

  “Better ways. Aye.” Daniel Shays took a swallow of flip.

  North elbowed his brother. “Dan’l’s agreed to lead us after all.”

  “I’ve set my hand to the plow.” Shays sounded more resigned than committed. “Though it be hard ground. Neighbors don’t make the best soldiers.”

  The uprising would soon be called Shays’s Rebellion, but there were many leaders in many towns. And while the rebels would be called “Shaysites” by their enemies, they called themselves Regulators, after farmers in England and the American South who had taken the law into their own hands in earlier days.

  That fall, they put sprigs of evergreen in their hats, like the men of the Revolution. They marched behind old soldiers like Shays. And they struck fear into the elected officials in Boston.

  The governor implored the legislature to
take “vigorous measures to vindicate the insulted dignity of the government.” So they passed the Riot Act, calling for the Regulators to forfeit “their lands, tenements, goods, and chattels,” and to be whipped and imprisoned if convicted.

  But in Pelham, men took an oath: “We do each one of us acknowledge ourselves to be enlisted in Shays’s Regiment of Regulators for the suppressing of tyrannical government in Massachusetts.” And men took oaths in the other towns, too.

  They closed the courts in Worcester, then in Taunton and Concord. When the governor sent militia to protect the court in Great Barrington, the Regulators handed out evergreen sprigs and brought the militia to their side. In Springfield, hundreds of merchants surrounded the court to protect it from the Regulators, but no one answered the jury summons, so the court did not open.

  While North marched, Will stayed at home, did chores, read what law books he could find, practiced the handwriting that a good legal apprentice needed, and continued to seek a better way to free his father. When he heard that Henry Knox, his father’s old commander and the Secretary of War, was visiting Springfield to investigate the uprising, Will saw his better way.

  GOIN’ TO SPRINGFIELD are you?” said Shays.

  “Goin’ to see Henry Knox,” said Will.

  “You’ll be goin’ to the arsenal, then,” said North.

  “I reckon.” In truth, Will did not know where in Springfield he would find Henry Knox. He supposed the arsenal would be as good a place as any.

  It was early in the day, so the taproom at Conkey’s was mostly empty. Sunlight slanted through the front door and the windows. Old Man Conkey was sweeping up. His wife was stirring a pot on the fire. Mugs of tea sat on the table.

  North scratched at the stubble on his chin and looked at Shays. “An honest lad, bringin’ a petition to Henry Knox at the Springfield arsenal …”

  Shays looked at Will. “You could do us a service.”

  “Service?” said Will.

  “If you get onto the grounds of the arsenal, keep your eyes open, watch the guards, where they are, when they change, what—”

  “I’m goin’ to help my father.”

  Shays leaned closer. “The day may come when the government heeds nothin’ we say. Then we’ll need guns, new guns, guns to arm every farmer who marches. Nothin’ makes a politician concentrate better than the barrel of a gun.”

  “And they keep the guns in the arsenal,” said North.

  Will sipped his tea and said, “It’s my intention to obey the law.”

  “Our intention, too,” said North, “till we’re forced to start shootin’.”

  Will looked from one face to the other, from those wide-apart eyes of Daniel Shays to the rock-hard gaze of his brother. This was not something he wanted. His family was in trouble enough already, but he told them he would do what he could, because they had taken a stand on principle, and his father always told him that the principles made the man.

  Then he left on the family’s swaybacked mare to meet Henry Knox.

  TWO

  BY FALL, THE GUN debate decibels were drowning out just about every other political discussion in America.

  But life went on.

  For Peter Fallon that meant a cross-country drive with his son, who was entering law school at Boalt Hall, Berkeley. Peter spent three days in San Francisco, exploring the bookstores and the restaurants. Then he flew home to proof his fall catalogue.

  His theme for the season was American history. Some of his offerings: a 1930s pamphlet on the life of Washington, published by an insurance company, for ten bucks; a first edition of U. S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs for $895; a signed copy of Hawthorne’s Campaign Biography of Franklin Pierce for $8,500; and a beautiful three-volume 1815 edition of Lewis and Clark’s Travels to the Source of the Missouri, a steal at $22,500.

  Soon private collectors, dealers, librarians, and museum curators would be poring over the pages, and his phone would be ringing. Peter never worried that one of his catalogues might inspire thefts, forgeries, or frivolous lawsuits. And he never imagined that something in the Fallon Antiquaria catalogue might lead to murder.

  But on an afternoon in early October, a black Chrysler Sebring stopped in front of an old house in Millbridge, Massachusetts.

  The driver watched the house for a time, then smoothed his hair, straightened his tie, and got out.

  On the passenger seat was a copy of Antiquaria, open to page twenty-five. The item circled: “A letter from Henry Knox to Rufus King RE: William Pike of Pelham, Massachusetts.”

  BUSTER MCGILLIS WAS on the telephone when his murderer came to the door.

  He didn’t hear the bell. After a life of working in a noisy mill, he didn’t hear much of anything. After a life of breathing cigarette smoke whenever he wasn’t inhaling the cotton lint floating in the mill, he didn’t breathe too well either.

  So he wore two hearing aids and took his oxygen through plastic tubes attached to a tank. He coughed all the time and talked too loud on the telephone.

  “Yeah,” he shouted into the receiver, “a professor from Dartmouth. He came right here to the house….

  Asked all kinds of questions … I told him the same as I told that bookseller. I don’t know anything.” Buster coughed and spat into the tin can beside his recliner; then he said, “Hey, the Sox are up…. See you later.”

  Buster turned to the television: bottom of the sixth, fifth game of the American League Divisional Series, Red Sox 6, Angels 2. If the score held, there’d be another showdown with the Yankees in the play-offs. Just what every New Englander wanted, whether he lived in a seaside mansion in Maine, a dairy farm in Vermont, or here in tired old Millbridge, Massachusetts.

  Buster decided to celebrate … with a cigarette.

  People with emphysema weren’t supposed to smoke. Neither were people on oxygen. But there wasn’t enough life left in him to matter, and all his friends were gone, and the mill had been closed for twenty years, and he had lived long enough to see the Red Sox win a World Series already.

  So … what the hell? He put the Lucky Strike on his lower lip, turned off the tank, scratched a match … and heard the pounding at the door.

  Who was this, interrupting his ball game on an October afternoon?

  He levered himself out of the recliner, grabbed the handle of the oxygen tank, and rolled it ahead of him. He avoided the pile of newspapers in the living room and the one in the foyer. Someday, he was going to have to recycle those….

  As soon as he peered through the sidelight, the guy outside straightened his tie and started chirping, “Mr. McGillis? Mr. McGillis?” as though he was afraid Buster might not open the door.

  But Buster did; then he rolled his oxygen tank into the way so that the guy couldn’t just step into the house. “Yeah?”

  “My name is Walter Stanley.”

  Buster looked him over—hair carefully parted, blue blazer and red tie, big smile, cheery manner—one of those guys in his late thirties who decides to become a real estate agent after he’s failed at everything else, then goes looking for old folks and talks them into selling homes they’ve lived in for decades. Guys like that were always knocking on Buster’s door, once they knew that he lived alone in the biggest house in town, a decrepit old place with floor-to-ceiling windows and grand Greek Revival pillars, built by Buster’s great-great-grandfather in the 1830s.

  Then the man held out a business card. “I’m a book scout.”

  “A what?”

  “A book scout. I look for books.”

  “To read?”

  “To buy. Sometimes I buy whole libraries from estates. Sometimes I buy a few boxes from someone like you.”

  “Then what?” asked Buster.

  “Sometimes dealers buy them for a flat fee. Sometimes I get a percentage.”

  Buster started to close the door. “The Red Sox are up. I got to go.”

  “There’s money in it for you.”

  Buster held the door. “How much?”
>
  Walter Stanley put his foot on the threshold. “Twenty-five cents for every book I take, hardcover or paperback.”

  On television, the crowd roared. Buster’s eyes shifted toward the living room.

  The guy said, “I can see you’re a hard bargainer. Fifty cents. I’ll take your books home, look them over, and any I sell, I’ll share the profits.”

  “I don’t think so.” Buster tried to close the door again.

  But Walter Stanley’s foot was in the way. “I’d love to see the last few innings. I … I played in minor leagues, myself.”

  “You did? Where?”

  “Made it to Triple A. Played half a season for Pawtucket.”

  “The Pawtucket Red Sox? The Pawsox?”

  “I got some great stories.”

  So Buster let Walter Stanley, book scout and ex-minor leaguer, into the house.

  But Walter Stanley wasn’t always his name, and he was no baseball player, and he wasn’t looking for a book but a document he had reason to believe Buster knew about. He was also the last person that Buster McGillis ever saw.

  The next day, Buster’s friend, Morris Bindle, found him.

  Buster was dead in his recliner, his oxygen tank empty, his ashtray full of cigarettes, and a rerun of the Red Sox game playing on television.

  By then, the man who called himself Walter Stanley was in New Hampshire, observing the habits of a certain history professor from Dartmouth.

  THE PROFESSOR’S NAME was Stuart Conrad. And he liked to imagine ice.

  Even in the calm October dawn, when his breath was a wisp in the air and winter was just a shadow beyond the northern mountains, he imagined ice, because ice had shaped New England. Ice and ideas.

  Professor Conrad knew more about ideas. But each morning, when he and his dog explored the world together, he thought more about ice.

  The dog, a yellow Lab with a powerful head and gentle jaws, scampered out of the house ahead of him and leaped onto the backseat of the Volvo.

  The professor took a sip from his coffee mug, gave the wipers a quick turn to clear the dew from the windshield, and off he went.