Cape Cod (5 page)
“… solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and one another, Covenant and Combine ourselves together in a Civil Body Politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid….”
“I’ll bind meself to nuffin’,” added Jack. “I wants a free hand.”
“Give a man like thee a free hand, Jack Hilyard, and afore long it’ll be down every dress in sight.”
Kate was near twice as wide as her husband, and more than once had she laid him out when he grew too ardent or too drunk. She might once have been beautiful, but life in the London streets did naught to preserve beauty. Her skin was reddened by beer and wind, except in the dirt-caked creases around her neck. Her nose bent strangely where her father had broken it with a shovel. And she was missing several teeth. But whenever Jack returned from the sea, she laughed with him and drank with him and surrounded him with her love. And she had given him the strong son now perched in the ratlines above them.
“ ’Tis a fool’s bargain,” Jack said louder.
“Then thou be the one to make a mark on it,” said Kate.
“ ‘And by virtue hereof to enact, constitute and frame such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions and Offices, from time to time, as shall be though most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.’ ”
“
Them’s
the words I don’t like.” Jack now spoke out for all to hear.
Elder Brewster stopped reading and looked up. Heads turned all around.
“What words?” demanded William Bradford.
“ ‘Submission and obedience.’ Those ain’t in me”—Hilyard wiped the film of mist from his beard and thought after the right word—“lexicon.”
“They are in the lexicon of any man who wishes to see the face of God,” said Ezra Bigelow, who stood near Bradford.
Jack Hilyard pointed into the gray sky. “There’s the face of God”—he pointed to the hook of sand that surrounded them—“and there”—his hand shot toward the bay, where two humpback whales were spouting—“and there most of all.”
Ezra Bigelow came off the half deck and pushed his way through Saints and Strangers. “ ’Tis because of thy voice that this has been writ.”
“I won’t sign,” said Jack Hilyard.
“Thou wilt,” ordered Ezra Bigelow, in tone as cold as the mist, “in the name of God.”
“We compel no one.” William Bradford threw off his heavy wool cape and hat and came down the deck.
He was one of the youngest of the leaders, raised and trained by Brewster, nurtured by Scripture, a scholar of Hebrew and Greek, yet as tall and rawboned and hardheaded as one of Jones’s own seamen.
If this plantation had a future, thought Jones, it rested with Bradford.
“Let it be Goodman Hilyard’s choice,” he said. “A community is well served that has an outsider to look upon and pity.”
Kate Hilyard jumped in front of Bradford. “We’ll take no pity from no one, Will Bradford, whether Jack signs or not.”
“ ’Tis his own decision.” Bradford turned his back on Hilyard and looked at the others. “His fate is in the hands of the Lord, within our community or without.”
“You’d like it if I didn’t sign, wouldn’t you?” shouted Jack Hilyard.
But Bradford did not respond. Nor did Bigelow, who followed Bradford back to the half deck.
Christopher Jones knew the Saints to be courageous men of simple faith and true innocence. Only men of faith and innocence would hope to plant a colony in the wilderness with so few skills. But here was the skill that would hold them together. When it came to defending their power, they could be as shrewd and hardheaded as English bishops. William Bradford knew instinctively the way to bring Jack Hilyard into the fold. Ezra Bigelow, for all his declaiming, knew precisely when to be quiet.
And Jack Hilyard was left shouting like a fool. They hoped he would not sign so they could exclude him and his family, was that it? Well, he was as good as they. And what right did they have to compel any man to sign? He would sign only if he felt like it.
“Jack!” cried Jones, to save him further embarrassment. “Act as thou wish amongst the elders, but on me ship, act the seaman.”
“What be you tellin’ me, sir?”
His wife whacked Hilyard on the shoulder. “He’s tellin’ thee to sign the agreement.”
“A pledge of submission and obedience?”
“ ’Tis done by every seaman on this ship,” said Jones.
“ ’Tis done by every woman on this ship on the day she marries,” said Kate. “A woman knows what’s needed to build a life.”
That drew murmuring approval from several of the women, and Bradford’s wife Dorothy said, “Well spoken.”
“If thou don’t know that, Jack,” Kate added, “thou be a bigger fool than I thought for bringin’ us here.”
Jack was no fool. He had pulled after enough whales to know the need for a firm covenant among men in dangerous places. But he had come to America to make his fortune, and he had served on enough whalers to know that the firm covenant at sea most often enriched those who stayed on land and wrote it.
He tenderly brushed the droplets of mist from the hair around his wife’s face. “I’ll sign if the master and me wife thinks it’s wise,” he said. But I’ll obey, he thought, only if I think the same.
And Elder Brewster lost no time completing the reading. “ ‘In witness whereof we have hereunder subscribed our names at Cape Cod, the eleventh of November, in the Year of the Reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth. Anno Domini 1620.’ ”
July 4
Whatever the Pilgrims faced, they never had to go through this: driving to Cape Cod on the Fourth of July.
And not in a million nightmares could they have seen themselves as wellspring of faith for this cataract of tourists, vacationers, weekenders, day-trippers, campers, swimmers, boaters, fishermen, artists in oil, in water, in Day-Glo on velvet, and lovers… of seafood, sun, surf, sex in the sand, art in oil and Day-Glo on velvet, antiques and old houses, condos with clay courts and pools by the beach, tide flats and salt ponds and sunsets at sea.
The first Pilgrims crossed an ocean in misery. Their successors came from every corner of the continent in every kind of conveyance and convenience. And Geoff Hilyard often wondered if they hadn’t all been seeking the same thing. But on summer holidays, sitting in traffic a mile north of the Cape Cod Canal, watching through the heat waves as the cars crossed the Sagamore Bridge like ants on a distant log, he couldn’t quite remember what the “same thing” was, because these latter-day pilgrims created a steaming, smoking, vapor-locked misery all their own.
“We could have come yesterday and missed this.” Janice did not look up from her book.
“I had blueprints to finish.”
The Winnebago ahead of them rolled forward. Geoff inched up to close the space so that none of the smart guys sneaking along the breakdown lane could cut in front of him.
“You could’ve finished down here. Boston’s only a two-hour drive… unless you go on the weekend.”
“From now on I want to be like the old Cape shipmasters. They knew the sea route to Hong Kong better than the land route to Boston.” He shut off the air conditioner to keep the engine from overheating. He rolled down the window and was hit by a blast of rock and roll and exhaust from the Ford pickup idling beside him.
“The shipmasters had to
go
to Boston to get their ships.” Janice turned a page.
“They went by boat. Open your window.”
A car zoomed by in the breakdown lane.
“Look at that bastard,” said Geoff.
“In a hurry to get to the promised land,” said Janice, so calmly that the sarcasm seemed to float on the surface of her voice like duckweed.
He glanced at her book. “Joan Didion or P. D. James?”
“Improving Your Sales Approach
. To keep us eating.”
In the backseat, eight-year-old Sarah told six-year-old Keith to cut it out. Keith told Sarah to cut it out herownself. Geoff told them both to cut it out, whatever it was.
“They’ll be happier on the Cape,” said Janice.
In the bed of the pickup beside them, a kid in a B.C. baseball cap was sitting on a lounge chair. A girl in a Body Glove bathing suit was sitting on his lap. They were, as the college students said, swapping spit. Later they’d be swapping a lot more, which made Geoff a little envious. Of what? he wondered. Their freedom? Their youth? After riding out a traffic jam in a flatbed, they’d be too sunburned to swap much of anything. The way they were going at it, even their
tongues
would be sunburned. And Geoff was about to remake his life, or so he told himself.
“Our kids
will
be happier,” he said, “and if things get bad, I can always sell my piece of Jack’s Island to your father.”
“Which would kill your uncle Rake.”
“Nothing could kill him.” Geoff tuned the radio to the same station playing in the pickup. The group was U-2, and they still hadn’t found what they were looking for.
“Neither have you,” muttered Janice.
Sarah told Keith that eight-year-olds knew everything and six-year-olds were dumb.
“Last summer,” said Janice, “it was seven-year-olds who knew everything and five-year-olds who were dumb.”
“I thought we were finished with this,” said Geoff.
“You mean dumbness?”
He tightened his grip on the wheel. Her calm voice and serene expression reminded him of a martyr. And her short blond hair made a good halo. It always had. The first time she smiled at him, he thought she looked like an angel. But she hadn’t been smiling much lately.
In the rear window of the Winnebago, an old woman tied a ribbon on the head of her miniature poodle.
“Now,
that’s
dumb,” said Janice.
“What, Mummy?” said Sarah. “What’s dumb?”
“That lady is kissing her dog on the mouth.”
“Yech!” shouted Keith. “That’s worse than kissin’ Sarah.” And he began to laugh.
“I wouldn’t let you”—Sarah laughed right back—“ ’cause your breath smells like farts.”
“Ma-
ah
!” cried Keith, but Ma was laughing, too.
Dad said a dog’s mouth was cleaner than a human’s, which made everyone laugh harder, and the laughter rolled from kissing dogs to bad breath to Dad’s dumb theories while their Voyager rolled on to the Sagamore rotary, where three strands of traffic met and snarled under the sunglasses of the Massachusetts State Police. The silver framework of the Sagamore Bridge seemed close enough to touch, but it was still ten minutes away, and the laughter faded again.
Geoff and Janice had been crossing the bridge when he asked her to marry him. It was 1973, the first warm day of spring, which meant late May on Cape Cod. They had cut classes to sip wine and make love and read Victorian novels in the shelter of some sand dune, and he could still remember the conspiratorial glint in her eye when he asked.
“If I say no, will you drive through the guardrail?”
“I’ll have no choice.”
“Then I’d better say yes.”
He had reached out his hand to hers, and she had placed it on her thigh, at the cuff of her tennis shorts. His fingers had done the rest.
She was wearing tennis shorts this morning, and he still found her thighs irresistible. Halfway across the canal that separated the Cape, like a moat, from the rest of the world, he placed his hand on the smooth skin. “This isn’t dumb.”
She covered his hand with hers. “Not dumb. Daring.”
“And haven’t we always been daring?”
“Just ask our families.”
ii.
At one-fifty-nine, they parked in front of the house in Dennis where Janice had grown up. She glanced at her watch and put her fingers in her ears.
At two o’clock on the nose, a thunderous explosion rattled the windows of the house, then Dickerson Bigelow bellowed, “The bar is open. Let the glorious Fourth begin!”
When he saw Janice, Dickerson fired the brass starter’s cannon again. The blast nearly blew Grandma Agnes off her chair. Drinks spilled, Bigelows jumped, and inside the house, a picture fell from the living room wall. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he cried, “it gives me great pleasure to announce that my favorite Hilyards are here!”
Uncle Hiram, family attorney, thrust his hand at Geoff and said, for what seemed like the thousandth time, “Welcome, young Montague, to the house of the Capulets.”
Geoff answered, as always, “ ‘What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’ ”
“A rose by any other name would be my Janice.” Dickerson threw his arms around his daughter.
She kissed him and tugged at his beard, bringing the usual laughing yelp. A shopworn old greeting, something from Janice’s girlhood, had become a comforting tradition for both of them since her mother’s death.
Geoff tolerated it. He always tolerated tradition, even if the yelp was just another way that Dickerson attracted attention. And he tolerated Dickerson’s knuckle-squasher handshake, which didn’t squash quite so much since the heart attack. But he could never stand the stage whisper when Dickerson wanted the family to know how good he was to his son-in-law. “Come to my study in ten minutes, Geoff. I have a little proposal.”
“Hey, Grampa,” said Keith, “see my muscle?”
Dickerson squeezed the boy’s arm and let out a long, low whistle.
Geoff looked at Janice, “Proposal?”
She shrugged and shook her head.
And the Hilyards greeted the other Bigelows—Grandma Agnes, eighty-nine-year-old matriarch, Cousin Blue and his son, aunts and uncles, Bigelows by birth and Bigelows by marriage… all members of Cape Cod aristocracy.
Of course, on Cape Cod, aristocracy had little to do with money, achievement, or even education. Millionaires with Harvard degrees and waterfront houses might look down their noses at the natives. But the natives looked at them as little more than tourists. The natives might mow the tourists’ lawns or paint their shutters or pump their cesspools. But it was the natives who were the aristocrats, because they had been there since the beginning.