The Lost Constitution

by William Martin

  “You know”—She measured a sip of coffee, a little beat before speaking—”you could give Peter a chance to look good, too.”

  Martin gazed to the east as the first crescent of sun appeared.

  Evangeline said, “This is about more than another lost document, isn’t it? It’s about ideas that matter today. It’s about the difference between what you believe and what … what that golfer believes … about guns, anyway.”

  “His name is Marlon Secourt,” said Martin. “And Paul thinks we should have nothing to say to you.”

  “We think someone killed that professor,” she said. “We think you know something about it.”

  Bloom looked out at the mountains again.

  Evangeline heard footfalls. Peter stepped out, coffee cup in hand. She caught his eye and shook her head. So he stopped where he was.

  Then she whispered to Martin. “In 1787, Will Pike was chasing a first draft of the United States Constitution. That’s what we know. And we have evidence.”

  Martin said nothing. The sun rose higher.

  Evangeline said, “I’ve taken the first step, Martin. Help Peter. Help me. Help Harriet Holden. And even if you don’t care about her, help us find the truth.”

  He turned to her, as if he could not hold it in any longer. “It’s the Holy Grail of American documents, a first draft of the Constitution, annotated by the New England delegates. We’ve been chasing it for thirty years.”

  In the quiet, even whispered voices echoed along the ceiling of the veranda.

  And Peter could no longer restrain himself. He came striding down the porch and said, “Where did you first hear about it?”

  Bloom jumped up. “Peter!”

  Evangeline made a face. Way to go.

  “In for a penny, in for a pound, Martin,” he said. “Where did you hear about it?”

  “From … from an old drunk in Portland … back in the early seventies. But it’s just a legend. It’s not worth getting yourselves killed over.”

  “Killed?” Peter looked at Evangeline.

  “Goddamn you, Martin.” Paul Doherty stalked out of the solarium. “I told you not to tell these two anything.”

  Peter turned to him. “We can pool our resources. We can try to find this together.”

  Doherty put his face close to Peter’s. “This is the work of a lifetime, Fallon. I’m not sharing it. And neither is Martin. For your own good, stay out of it.”

  Then Doherty turned on his heels. About halfway down the long porch, he stopped and said to Martin, “It’s me or them. Make your choice.”

  After a moment, Martin said to Evangeline, “Let me go and talk to him.” Then he jumped up and followed his partner.

  “So,” said Evangeline, “that went well … for a while.”

  Peter watched Martin and Paul retreat along the porch. “People in Portland call them the Old Curiosities. They’ve certainly piqued mine. Stay out of it? For my own good?”

  “Wrong thing to say to you. Even if you don’t think we can find it.”

  “Even if I don’t, we’d better make the most of Tuesday, which starts just … about”—Peter looked up at the sun, which was appearing full from behind the mountain—”now.”

  ELEVEN

  October 1787

  FROM A PALLET IN the great room of Horace Dewlap’s cabin, Will Pike watched the sun rise. He could just see it through a tiny window, a sliver of red coming up from behind the biggest mountain.

  He had spent the predawn hours writing two letters: to Rufus King and Caldwell P. Caldwell.

  He would ask Horace Dewlap to deliver them….

  Dewlap had proved to be a man of considerable independence.

  “It’s why I come here,” he had told Mary on the day after he found them, “to live free or die, like they say in New Hampshire.”

  “Live free or die … on two legs,” Will Pike had said through a haze of pain. “Too much to be doin’ to live on one.”

  “But son,” Dewlap had told him, “the leg’s already startin’ to smell. Wound’s putrefyin’. And long bones is hard to heal.”

  Dewlap had served with a surgical unit in the Continental Army. He had hacked off shattered limbs, dug musket balls out of bloody guts, dosed men with laudanum, but he had never proclaimed himself a doctor, just a “sawbones” who had learned how to tend people by treating livestock.

  And he was not one to go running forty miles to tell the sheriff about a small thing like two dead men in the Notch, or an even smaller thing like a man with shot-through leg, especially if the man was traveling with a good-looking woman who proved to be as strong as a horse, as strong-willed as a mule, and a good cook, too.

  Dewlap needed a woman like that, he had said, because his own wife had left him.

  “Couldn’t stand the winter. Got cabin fever somethin’ fierce. One night, with the snow bowin’ the roof and the cold colder than hell is hot, she said she wanted to boil the kids. I said I didn’t expect they’d be good for much of anything after boilin’. So she turned her mind to other things, like sharpenin’ knives whilst I et my supper. Worried me till spring.

  “But we made it. So I went down to Conway, to fetch supplies and fish the lake at ice-out. Three days later, I come home with a barrel of white perch, and my Bess was gone. Took the kids. Left a note sayin’ she couldn’t stand it no more. I thought to go after her, but I had livestock and plantin’ … figured I’d light out after harvest, if I could find someone to tend the place through winter.”

  Then Dewlap had offered them a deal: If Mary would see to his livestock, she and Will could live off Dewlap’s supplies until he returned in the spring.

  Mary had told Will that she still planned to pursue the men who stole her money, “But I had true feelin’s for your brother. So I’ll help you. If you heal, you can help me get back my money.”

  So Dewlap and Mary had buried North Pike on a rise behind the house.

  Then, instead of cutting off Will’s leg, Dewlap had cut a certain patch of moss from the north side of a certain tree. He had dressed Will’s wound with the moss. Then he had trussed the leg in a three-piece splint fashioned from barrel staves and leather straps and fixed it to a piece of barn board.

  “No weight on this for twelve weeks,” he had ordered. “Normal bone heals in six, but this ain’t a normal break. If it heals at all, it’ll take twelve. Leastways, we’ll know ’fore I leave if the Injun moss-medicine works.”

  By late October, the infection had retreated, perhaps because of the moss-medicine, perhaps in spite of it. Dewlap’s crops had been harvested. And news had reached even that remote valley in those high mountains: The Philadelphia Convention had presented the states with a new Constitution. To become law, it would need the ratification of nine. In all thirteen, the fighting had begun.

  And Will had lain awake a whole night thinking of something other than the pain in his leg….

  To Caldwell, Will wrote that the document he had purchased was stolen and should “be returned via my agent, Horace Dewlap.” To Rufus King, he wrote another apology and promised to find the document so that “my failure in Philadelphia will not impact ratification.”

  That morning, he showed both letters to Mary.

  She said she doubted that Caldwell would return something he had paid for. And she did not think Will should apologize to Rufus King again. “Once is sufficient. Twice is a sign of weakness.”

  If Will were not so burdened by pain and the mortification of his own failure, he might have agreed on both counts.

  Instead, he asked Dewlap to carry a letter to Caldwell’s home in Lancaster, twenty miles away. Dewlap came back the next day still carrying the letter. Caldwell had gone south to the state capital and would not return until after the ratifying convention in the spring. So Will asked Dewlap to post both letters as soon as he reached “civilization.”

  With a final round of instructions, Horace Dewlap left for the winter.

  AND WILL PIKE and Mary Cousins were al
one, in a November landscape of bare trees and browning meadows. Three days later, the snow came. It fell for four days. Then it stopped. Then it fell for four days more.

  Inexorably the world around the little farmhouse closed in. The views to the mountains and down to the Notch became as illusions. By December, even illusions faded before the reality of blinding white days, bitter black nights, and bone-cracking cold.

  Mary worked hard outside and seemed to grow stronger with the work.

  Will stayed inside and tried to heal.

  To take his mind from his pain, he practiced loading Mary’s pistol as quickly as he could and throwing his brother’s knife so that it struck, nine times out of ten, in the center of a target he had hung on a wall. But he knew that until he could walk on two legs, neither pistol nor knife would aid him in his purpose. And if he spent much longer on a pallet in his snowbound prison, he might start looking for kids to boil.

  So he determined that on New Year’s Day, he would walk. By then he had put weight on the leg and could thump about with crutches. But it had come time to test himself. He sat on the edge of his pallet and untied the splint. Then he pulled on his breeches and levered himself to his feet.

  Mary stood by the fire, a shaft of sunlight slanting through the little window. “Walk to the square of sun on the floor,” she said, “and I’ll give you johnnycakes with Dewlap’s maple syrup and fresh-churned butter.”

  He took a first step, then a second, wobbling and hesitating because the muscle was gone and the leg felt like glass. For a moment, he did not think he could take another.

  Then Mary lifted the skillet from the hearth and passed it under his nose, and he followed all the way to the table.

  That was when he knew: Come spring, he would walk out of those mountains and resume his search. He was filled with such joy that after breakfast he asked Mary to help him back to his pallet.

  “Help?” she said. “After what you just did? You can walk.”

  But he begged her. He told her he was exhausted, that he might fall, and then where would they be? So she slipped a shoulder under him, and together they hobbled back to the pallet. And it was all a ruse, for when they got there, Will wrapped his arms around her, drew her down, and kissed her.

  She said she had been wondering what she would do when he finally tried that; then she kissed him back.

  And his newfound confidence became euphoria as she let him lower her blouse and caress her breasts, as he felt her flesh rise to his touch, as she wrapped her fingers into his hair and drew his face against her. He kissed one nipple, then the other, and that would have been pleasure exquisite enough for a young man who had spent far more time thinking about women than knowing them.

  But Mary pushed Will back onto the pallet and told him to slip off his breeches. Then she hiked her skirt above her waist and hooked a leg over his hip and lowered herself onto him, and Will Pike understood in an instant why his brother had spent his life either chasing women or running away from them.

  For the rest of the day, and for many days after, they did not notice the cold.

  And in the evenings, after Mary had done hauling firewood and mucking stables, after Will had exercised his leg, practiced with pistol and knife, and finished what small chores he could, they sat by the fire, Mary to spin yarn from Dewlap’s wool, Will to read from Dewlap’s Bible. And they shared their dreams.

  Will’s remained simple and grand: to make a mark among men who mattered.

  Mary’s was simple but realistic: to go back to the town where her father ran the grist mill and prove herself a respectable woman.

  At fifteen, she had been betrothed to a Millbridge boy, but he was killed at Yorktown. In her grief, she had allowed herself to be impregnated by the son of an Uxbridge barrister who then denied her, besmirched her character, and did not even offer condolences when the baby was stillborn. After that, she had fled the town gossips and gone to work, first as servant in Boston, then in Falmouth, Maine.

  That was where she met a fisherman named North Pike.

  “And now, I’m twenty-three, unmarried, destitute, couplin’ with a little brother who may love me or may just be happy to have a woman to screw when he’s snowed in.”

  Will said, “I love you. I may be younger but—” Mary simply smiled, an expression as inscrutable as a smile from Eve Corliss, a smile that told a man she was amused but that perhaps, the joke was on him.

  SPRING CAME AT first with a gentle melting, then with a cold rain that poured down on the snowpack. Soon the river began to roar and rise over its banks and spill in great sheets down the hillsides, washing away the last of the snow and flooding the lowland places wherever it went. Then it grew cold and everything froze. Then came a day when the sun gave warmth as well as light. Then it snowed. Then came a day that brought robins listening for worms in the softening ground. Then it snowed.

  Then a new season descended, neither winter nor spring. It was called mud. For almost a month, nothing moved, neither shod horses, nor wide-wheeled wagons, nor men with weak legs, for mud was harder to walk through than snow.

  If winter did not drive northern New Englanders to boil their kids, said Will, waiting for spring surely would.

  It was not until late May, when the buds had leafed out and green tinted the ridges and darkened the valleys, that the roads were firm enough for a man to drive a cart into those mountains. And it was another fortnight before the voracious black flies finished their business.

  Then Horace Dewlap returned. He brought two little boys who leaped from the cart and scampered joyously about. He brought a wife who looked as if she had been captured and brought back to prison. He also brought newspapers and a copy of the new Constitution.

  Eight states had already ratified it, he said, some unanimously. People north and south wished for a government to maintain good relations among the states and protect against troubles like Shays’s Rebellion. But many people, and sometimes the same people, feared that such a government would threaten a man’s right to live free or die.

  Will asked Dewlap, “Did you ever hear from Caldwell?”

  “No. Never.”

  Will was disappointed but not surprised. He took the newspapers and the Constitution and retreated to the rise behind the cabin, up where North was buried. The wooden cross had fallen. Will straightened it, then sat on a rock and read.

  Even in the warm sun, he felt a chill at the first words: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union …” It was a preamble, a statement of purpose as pointed and exquisite as anything he had ever read. “… establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

  It prescribed a government of three branches, with two legislative houses to balance the interests of large states and small. It would have the power to levy taxes, make treaties, and mediate interstate disputes. Most important, it contained the mechanism for its own improvement, an amending process to keep it flexible and growing as the nation grew.

  It took Will only a few minutes to read. The document was that simple and that pure, a collection of compromises that somehow rose to the level of first principles. And when he was done, relief flowed over him, as clear and cool as the river tumbling over the rocks nearby. The men of Philadelphia had done their work in a way that guaranteed success, no matter that a first draft—covered with the ruminations of a few New Englanders—had been spirited away six weeks before the final draft was signed.

  So, in a most positive frame of mind, Will turned to the newspapers.

  From the Boston Gazette, he learned that ratification had carried in Massachusetts but only by nineteen votes out of three hundred and fifty-five cast. Elbridge Gerry had appeared at the convention, explained his reasons for refusing to sign a constitution that did not have a bill of rights, then left. Rufus
King had stayed to do the politicking that made the difference.

  And what of New Hampshire?

  Will read that the state convention had adjourned before a vote, because it appeared that ratification would go down to defeat. “New Hampshirites want no one put over them. They value their freedom. It will take a bit more time to convince them that a federal structure, properly built, is meant to guarantee rights, not impinge upon them.”

  The word “federal,” Will knew, came from the Latin foedus, meaning a league or treaty. Those who supported the Constitution were now called Federalists. Arrayed against them were the anti-Federalists, one of whom was Caldwell P. Caldwell.

  Will feared that if Caldwell could find a way to use the first draft, with its unformed jottings on religion, free speech, and the possession of a musket, he might push New Hampshirites toward rejection. And if one state turned, others might follow, and a ninth state might never ratify, and all the work of all those men in Philadelphia, all the work of his father across all those years of Revolution, might still go for naught.

  So there was reason yet for Will Pike to track down Caldwell P. Caldwell.

  A FEW DAYS later, Will prepared to leave.

  And Mary prepared to go to with him. But she had begun to question their common purpose. Was it necessary to rescue the document? Would it not be better to turn their minds to a dream of solidity—a house, a home, that mill on the Middle Post Road?

  In the barn, where they had taken up residence after the return of the Dewlaps, Mary watched Will wrap her flintlock in an oiled rag and shove it into his canvas satchel. “Are you planning to shoot this Caldwell?”

  “No,” said Will, “but I must see him.”

  “It won’t do any good for your reputation, or for America, or for us.”

  Will took his brother’s knife and strapped the scabbard to his belt. Then he put on his brother’s buckskin jacket. It fitted him loosely but well. “A man once said to me that in America, we get up in the morning and go to work and solve our problems. After I solve mine, we’ll see to yours.”