Cape Cod (61 page)
iv.
It was midnight when he pulled up at Ma Little’s tiny house on Wakeby Pond. Maybe Janice was sitting at the kitchen table, complaining to Ma and Samantha about men.
He left his car on the road and walked up the dark driveway. He guessed he looked suspicious, and somebody agreed, somebody who knew exactly where to hit the back of his neck to knock him out.
The ammonia capsule woke him up like a cigarette burning his nose hairs. He heard the good-natured laugh of Ma Little, echoing in her own kitchen.
“You shouldn’t be sneakin’ up on somebody’s house like that, Geoff. Massy and the boys are a little jumpy.”
“What are they doin’? Strippin’ cars?”
“I only ever stole one car.” Massy, who wore a blue bandanna around his head, took the ammonia capsule and gave it a couple of snorts. “Pretty good.”
Ma slapped it out of his hand. “Somebody been snoopin’ around. We was at dinner. The boys down at the pond seen him.”
“Yeah,” said Massy. “He was dressed like some kind of jogger, man. Let himself in the house. Almost got his ass shot off.”
“I don’t jog.” Geoff rubbed his neck. “Is Janice here?”
“She left you?” asked Samantha.
“She says it’s time for me to make up my mind.”
“Her or the island?” Jimmy was wearing pajamas and a monogrammed robe, a very upper-crust Indian, his finger jammed into a copy of
Presumed Innocent
. “She knows how to reduce things to the simplest terms.”
“And Bigelows know how to hit below the belt.” Ma laughed. “You want us to go and occupy their real estate office till they give you your wife back? Or maybe we could occupy Jack’s Island when the Conservation Commission goes there. We haven’t done anything like that in years.”
“Like, a demonstration?” said Massy.
Jimmy said, “Stop worryin’ about demonstrations and get a job.”
“Fuck you, big shot.” Massy grabbed a beer from the refrigerator and stomped outside.
Ma filled the teakettle. “Sometimes I wonder how I got such a smart son with one husband and such a… normal one with the other.”
“That’s not fair, Ma,” said Samantha.
Ma looked at Geoff. He realized he had stumbled into a family squabble. Ma was mad about something. “They’re leavin’ on Friday, goin’ up to her family’s house in Pride’s Crossing. More comfortable in a fancy house on the North Shore than here at Ma’s.”
“That’s not true,” said Samantha.
But it was. It was a small kitchen in a small house beginning to feel smaller. The table was covered with a red-check vinyl cloth, the same one Geoff remembered from their college days. The linoleum showed wood through all the holes. A bungee cord held the refrigerator door shut. Rustic verging on poor. Jimmy had more refined tastes now. But Ma looked as if she could have gone into the woods, built herself a
wetu
, and raised a few more Wampanoag
pinses
or Harvard lawyers without a bit of help.
She put a cup of tea in front of Geoff. “Find your wife and bring her around for some smoked bluefish. The size of my house never mattered to
her.”
Ma gave a squint at her daughter-in-law. “Janice, she’s good people.”
Samantha pulled her robe around herself and went huffing off to the bedroom where she and Jimmy slept with their two kids. Ma and Jimmy were left glaring at each other—the old woman who hunted squirrels in the woods, just because her ancestors had done it, and the young man who was her greatest pride and damnedest disappointment.
Geoff had enough problems without sitting in the middle of this, so he drained his tea. “Janice might be good people, but she’s not doing anything good for me right now.”
“She’s just trying to make you see the light,” said Jimmy. “Your first responsibility is to your family.”
Ma laughed at that, and Geoff headed for the door.
“Don’t forget,” called Ma. “Us Indians, we know all the enviramentalist troublemakers around here. They trot us out whenever they need to get a picture in the paper. I can get a hundred of ’em at Jack’s Island day after tomorrow. Raise holy hell.”
“Rake might have liked that.”
“It’s not worth it, Geoff,” said Jimmy.
“Mother Earth gotta be worth somethin’,” said Ma.
v.
Geoff worried all the way to Barnstable. It was one o’clock now. He parked on 6A and walked through the opening in the fence of Agnes Dickerson Bigelow’s house. The night breeze had kicked up from the southwest. Hiram Bigelow’s shingle was making such an annoying squeak it was a wonder anyone could sleep.
From the window above the shingle, Janice watched him go around to the back. He was looking for the Voyager, but he wouldn’t find it unless he went to the neighbors’ garage. He slumped out of the barn and gave the house another long look. And she heard Hannah’s words to Sam in France: “You are a silly, stubborn man. You do not remain in France for the money, but for the principle. And principles get people killed…. Make sure they are worth your head.” Janice glanced over her shoulder at the portrait of Hannah that hung on the landing.
Geoff was too sleepy to drive to Truro, so he made Jack’s Island his refuge for the night. At the causeway, he stopped. How beautiful the marsh was, almost iridescent in the moonlight, just as it must have looked to men a century ago.
July 1814
Wisps of fog scudded past the moon like rags of raw silk. It was a full moon, what the Indians called the corn moon.
Though the man traveled most of the time by night, he had not been here in many years and was thankful for the light to guide him. At the end of the causeway, the road forked, but a path still wound through the cornfield to the house in the middle of the island. The house was not lighted, and the man hoped it was not deserted.
From the elevation of the moon he guessed the hour to be about midnight. He traveled late, but time no longer mattered, nor distance, nor the way he looked to the world. His shadow on the moon-yellowed ground was the only image he had of himself. It did not show the sunken eyes, the whitening beard, the layer of filth that clung to him like moss to a tree. It showed only his shape, a fishhook hunched over the box he held to his chest.
When he was close enough to see the dentil molding on the house, he nearly turned away. It had taken him many years to bring himself this far, yet the blackness still beckoned. It would be easy to retreat into it, as he had done so often before. He even took a step backward.
Then, from somewhere in the house, a baby cried, new life come to brighten the blackness, and he pounded at the door. But no lights came on.
A mourning dove mourned in a scrub pine near the barn. A windmill was spinning and squeaking down by the saltworks. On the bay, a ship’s bell rang out the hour. He pounded again. And he felt the gun press against his neck.
“Be gone. You and your friend both.”
“I brung no friend.”
“I told you last year and the year before that, my brother’s dead. He ain’t comin’ back.”
“I
am
your brother.”
“Sam?”
The man turned slowly, so he would not be shot. Then he opened his ragged coat. Beneath it was a filthy vest on which two dragons spit fire across his belly.
That night Sam Hilyard saw his infant nephew Isaac asleep in a shaft of moonlight. In five years of wandering, he had seen nothing as peaceful, nothing so touched by the hand of God, nothing, anywhere, that spoke so certainly for the goodness of life.
Over cups of steaming tea, he talked. Will and Mary sat a good distance from him, perhaps because he smelled stronger than sunbaked mackerel, and most certainly because they felt they were in the presence of an apparition.
Sam Hilyard had last been seen by honest men when the
Dragon
cleared Southampton five years before. Of his own volition, he had then descended into hell.
He had prayed that the boat carrying him from his ship would become his coffin. But the swirling wind drove him into the eye of the storm, and by the time the blue sky had passed, his boat was run up on a deserted beach somewhere in the Leewards. He stayed there for many months, living on bananas and fish, before deciding to make for a larger island.
His travels took him to Jamaica, where he saw a bookseller and learned the value of his treasure. But unlike Solemnity Hilyard, he reaped no riches from the book, no earthly reward to compensate for his eternal damnation. In truth, he could not even bring himself to sell it.
He signed on with a coasting schooner, and when the work became familiar enough that his mind could once more dwell on the
Dragon
, he disappeared. He turned up in the French city of New Orleans and worked a Mississippi cargo barge, from which he disappeared six months later. In the village of Pittsburgh, he killed a man who tried to steal the box. And he disappeared again. Then from Baltimore, then Philadelphia did he disappear.
By now another war was begun with Great Britain. New England seafarers won glory for the fledgling navy, but New England politicians spoke of secession. In a newspaper, Sam saw a drawing of the king, sitting on a throne of blockaded goods, his arms outstretched to the four dithering gentlemen who represented the four seafaring states of New England.
Sam could not conceive of such an attitude among Cape Codders. But it burned there brighter than anywhere, because this new war had destroyed the commerce so painstakingly built since the Revolution. In a New York tavern, he met a Cape Codder and learned that once more, ships rotted in Cape Cod harbors while British men-of-war blockaded the coast.
“I heard things were bad, so I come back to help,” he said in the scratched-over whisper of one who seldom spoke.
“You’re nothin’ but another mouth to feed,” said Mary. “We got all we can do to keep the kids in cornmeal and clams.”
“Now, now,” said Will, “he’s my brother. Without him, we wouldn’t even own this island.”
“Can he work?”
Sam looked at Mary’s salted-cured face and bony body, on which nursing breasts seemed as misplaced as teats on a tree. “I can work. And I brung this.” Sam slid the box across the table.
“The book?” Mary’s eyes narrowed to angry slits.
“You know of it?”
Will’s face matched his wife’s, line for line. “Two men come lookin’ for you every summer—”
“And they always ask ’bout the book. They always says they want the book back.”
“Englishmen, they are. With this war, they must sneak down through Halifax.”
Mary touched the box. “What’s in it?”
“Comeuppance,” said Sam, “for the Bigelows.”
Will and Mary both sat back, as though hearing at last the blasphemy they expected from this creature.
“You won’t find many who think that’s a good idea,” said Will. “Bigelow and Dickerson ships have kept Cape Cod goin’ all durin’ this war.”
“Privateers,” said Mary. “Without the prize money, folks in Brewster could never have paid the British.”
“Paid
’em?” said Sam. “For what?”
“The saltworks. The British commanders said they’d destroy the saltworks of any town that didn’t pay ransom. Eastham paid fifteen hundred dollars. It cost Brewster four thousand, on account of more board feet.”
“We
fought
the British,” muttered Sam.
“Maybe
you
had less to lose.” Will wrapped his hands around his teacup. They were big, muscular hands, nicked with tiny nail cuts and splinters, the hands of a man who kept his eyes close to the job in front of him. “Countin’ the Bigelow works, which we been runnin’ since the Doones died, and what I built, we have sixty-one hundred feet right here on Jack’s Island.”
“Hilyards workin’ for Bigelows. Times do change.”
“Don’t you come steppin’ out of the past and start to criticizin’ us for gettin’ along in a hard world.” Mary looked at Sam with a cold eye. “The Bigelows pay us good for what we do. Better than we could do by turnin’ against ’em.”
Sam looked at the flames on the hearth. He had once made love to a Bigelow woman before that fire. He could not fault his brother for doing business with Bigelows now. So he drew the book back and wrapped it in his ancient vest.
ii.
Word soon spread that a bearded stranger now lived in the hay crib of Will Hilyard’s barn. He was seen many times that summer, lost in the work of Jack’s Island. When the weeds grew up, he hoed the corn rows. When thunderclouds rose, he rushed out and closed the roofs on the salt vats. And when the tide ran out, he built a weir on the flats, so that the Hilyards would not risk British capture and impressment to catch fish.
Will told the townspeople that he had hired a new man. Mary said they had taken on another mouth to feed, but God would provide. And God did, though he did not see fit to free Sam from his guilt.
Sam told no one the nature of the
Dragon’s
cargo or the bargain he had made. He had wandered thousands of miles, but his sins haunted him still, and only forty miles of the easternmost peninsula in America remained to him. Somewhere between here and Provincetown, he would have to find his peace.
But there was no peace on Cape Cod.
This latest war found only four of fourteen towns in support of the American government. On the Upper Cape, Barnstable and Sandwich could afford to defy British ships because they were protected by barrier beaches and salt marshes. Falmouth supported the government but was open to the deep water of Nantucket Sound, so her ships were seized, her buildings cannonaded, and her local militia tested by British landing parties.
On the Lower Cape, only the town of Orleans remained loyal to the United States. Wellfleet had gone so far as to instruct the Committee of Safety to negotiate with the British and “at all times to keep in as much friendship with the enemy as possible, making the Constitution and laws of the United States… their guide as far as they can with safety to the particularly exposed position of the town to the enemy.”
Sam did not admire this attitude, but Cape Codders had learned to compromise with what surrounded them, and the Royal Navy remained a force of nature. So Cape Codders remained rebels, standing for independence, even if it was only their own.