Cape Cod (75 page)

Elwood looked at the carriages and carts clopping past the Harwich town green. It was a bright day in March 1891. The sun poured down through the bare trees, as though scrubbing the world clean for spring. He took off his monocle, polished it, and looked hard at Heman Bigelow’s spectacles. “You lent Levi Snow a substantiated sum to build his inn last summer, right here in Harwichport.”

“The word is
substantial
, you fool. He’s a man of substance. You’re nothin’ more than a peddler, with pretensions. And what’s wrong with your left eye? Why don’t you wear spectacles like everybody else?”

Elwood stood and tugged on the points of his vest. “There
are
other lenders.”

“But
no
other neighbors. You try to build a hotel on that island, you’ll have to get ’round
me
. Good afternoon.” He-man swiveled his big oak chair and looked at the painting behind him, an enormous print of Boughton’s
Pilgrims Going to Church
. Copies hung in all the offices of First Comers Cooperative, to remind the customers of just
who
was granting them their loans.

Elwood tried not to look at the faces of the other customers, but before he reached the door, he heard the voice of Widow Sears: “Say, we need one of them newfangled can openers. You sellin’ ’em these days?”

A few hours later Heman’s son Charles rose from his chair. “A hotel! On Jack’s Island?”

Heman had taken the afternoon train to Barnstable and gone straight to the 1700 house, Hannah’s runaway stop. There his son Charles now kept a law office. “Every generation, they come up with somethin’ to bother us. I’m too old to have strangers sneakin’ around my duck blind. Ignorant swamp Yankees!”

“At least they’re Cape Codders. Maybe they’ll listen to reason.”

The next day Charles Bigelow, Esq., rode the train to Wellfleet, a journey of almost forty miles that took not much more than an hour. Progress was a magnificent thing.

Yet the miseries of travel on Cape Cod—rolling packet runs and spine-pounding coach rides—had protected it before the coming of the trains. Charles recalled that, in his boyhood, there were almost no strangers in Barnstable. Contentious people, to be certain, but the faces you saw at town meeting, at church, at the wharf, had been there from the beginning. American faces they were, English faces, the stock that had founded a nation.

Now there were bravas arriving on the whalers and fishing boats. Negroes had been intermarrying with Indians in Mashpee since before the Underground Railroad. Portagees were taking over the Provincetown fishing fleet. And the papist Irish, who bred like rabbits and voted with one mind, were slowly moving into Barnstable County. The train that rocked Bigelow through the pine groves, across the winter-burned bogs, and over the open wastes of Eastham now brought strangers from every point of the compass. A hotel would only bring more. Perhaps an artist might object to a hotel on his ancestral island.

“Nope,” said Tom Hilyard. “Did at the beginning, but that was before I thought about it.”

Bigelow sat in the ancient cottage at Billingsgate, in a shaft of sunlight from one of the south windows. Unlike his father, he had a full head of hair and features that were large and expansive rather than hard and precise, a Saint Bernard to his father’s terrier. His widening paunch and gold watch fob looked distinctly out of place among Tom Hilyard’s stick furnishings.

“Rembrandt and the Dutch preferred the north light. Cool, indirect. I like Cape light. It reflects off beach and the sea, seems to come from everywhere.” Tom mixed gold and brown and spread the oil across the canvas. “This is Thoreau.”

“He wouldn’t have liked another hotel.”

“He came here when there were forty thousand people. Now there’s less than thirty. What with the end of shippin’ and salt makin’ and such, the Cape’s shrivelin’ up. Young folks are movin’ off.” Tom limped back and forth before the canvas. A little blue, a little more gold. A little bird flying over Thoreau. “A hotel would bring folks in.”

“Cooks and maids and porters. Off-Cape immigrants, taking work from our own.” Bigelow came over to the canvas and pretended to study Tom’s technique. “I’ve bought some of your paintings. They’re excellent.”

Tom had grown hard doing a job where “well done” meant a life saved and seldom less. But there had been few compliments for his painting. “What have you collected?”

“
Sunset at Nauseiput, Jack’s Island Clam Diggers
—”

“I’d been studyin’ Millet before
Clam Diggers.
”

“It shows,” said Bigelow, though he hadn’t the foggiest idea who Millet was. “Jack’s Island clam diggers. That’s how the banks think of the Hilyards, Tom, rightly or wrongly. Not many banks lendin’ money to clam diggers. Tell your cousin that. Tell him, so he doesn’t waste his time.”

And Tom did. Nevertheless, Elwood wasted his time until every Cape Cod bank had proven the Bigelows prophetic. Then he went back to peddling and dreaming. Zachary fished, raked clams, impregnated his wife. And out on Billingsgate, Tom painted Cape landscapes and scenes of Cape life. He sold them to friends and businesses. He sold them in shavings shops, beside whittled windmills and hand-carved weathervanes that visitors bought to remind them of Cape Cod. He sold them wherever he could.

But soon his friends had all the art they could hang, and summer visitors were as fickle as April winds. It was not too many years before Tom could no longer support himself with his painting. So Zachary—steady, stolid Zachary—came each week with fish. Elwood, wandering Massachusetts in his four-button suits, butterfly collars, and peddler’s pack, could send only letters about his hotel, his turreted, gabled, flag-festooned dream.

Finally, on a June day in 1896, Tom came to the bottom rung of artists’ hell. He ran out of paint. He still had canvas, paper, and when all else failed, scavenged cedar shingles to paint upon. But he had no paint.

And he had to paint. If he did not, he would come to meditate on his loneliness, on the pain in his foot, on the impulses he had denied since the day at Cold Harbor, on his inability to create anything to remain after him. Every morning, when he looked at the play of light upon the water, he wanted to give permanence to the ineffable beauty of it. But if he had no paint…

Or was it inspiration that he lacked? Weren’t sea and sky inspiration enough? Could it be that he lacked talent?

They said the Indians had made paint from berries, from animal blood, from bark and squid ink and seaweed…. Tom ground pigments with mortar and pestle and created watercolors to keep painting. He painted the tide flats with a seaweed paint because tide flats were a muddy green. He painted an ocean with blueberry-based paint and created a blueberry-colored ocean.

He prayed for a stranding, so that he could make paint from whale oil. But no whales came. So he tried to make new paint from old paint and simply made a mess. He took a piece of red cloth and soaked the color out of it, then he painted with the pink water, which faded on the paper.

One gentle June evening, he sat in the little cottage, soaked his foot in hot water, and read a newspaper he had found blowing along the beach, dated May 5, 1896:

Barnstable attorney Charles Bigelow, a Republican, has announced his intention to run for the State Senate. He says it is time to return to the values of hard work, honesty, and good Protestant faith that founded this country.

Said Bigelow: “I believe that my Pilgrim ancestors would agree, if they could come to the Cape today, that she is changing. It will be the job of the next state senator to see that the change is for the better in the birthplace of America.

Tom cursed. If he’d had something to drink, he would have drunk. He and his beloved Jack had fought a war to prove that all men were created equal. Now men like Charles Bigelow waved the flag of nativism, when in simple truth, they hated outsiders. And hadn’t they all been outsiders once? Tom dried his foot on the old newspaper, then threw it into the kettle of water and wondered if he could make paint from newsprint.

Then he put his head back and studied the evening light filling his room. The light was his friend, and the light of the summer sunset seemed as certainly alive as the terns darting across the tide flats. And on June evenings, the red light reached deeper into the room than at any other time of the year, so that its rays met the red of the fireplace bricks, creating a color that Tom Hilyard yearned to paint. And perhaps it was a color he could turn
into
paint.

He got out a hammer and chisel. He placed the chisel on the corner of the fireplace and made a single, gentle tap. To his surprise, the whole brick popped free, as though the mortar had been weakened… or perhaps replaced.

Behind it should have been another course of brick, but instead, there was a piece of metal. He tapped it with his hammer. It sounded hollow. He tapped a few more bricks, and the mortar around them crumbled like sand. He pulled them out, so that the shaft of red sunlight now illuminated a box in a little space inside the chimney.

At first, Tom was merely curious. An iron box? With the initials TW in the corner? A strange house this was, with surprises everywhere.

He recalled the broken-off barrel of the blunderbuss that he had found behind a wall. It had contained a dozen ranting broadsides, antiques of Revolution and a long-lived family feud. He had dried them in the sun, read them, and painted a woman in tar and feathers.

What surprise might this box contain? He peeled away the wax seal and pried off the top with a knife. He pulled out a thin brown notebook on which was written the name Lemuel Bellamy in different scripts. Beneath was a thicker book, like a ledger. “Log of the
Dragon
. Southampton, June 21, 1808. Have taken a large load of lumber, which will show on manifest. Have also taken aboard Morley Milt and his crew of ‘Africa hands.’ Milt will use the lumber to build three new decks into the
Dragon
while we make for Africa. This is not a proud day, but my grandmother yearned for the book of history, and now it is mine.”

The book of history. Tom knew of it from the broadsides. He took a third book out of the box. This one was bound in brown vellum and very old, much older than the others. The paper was heavy, tight-fibered, a pleasure to touch, especially for a man who knew the quality of such things.

Only after he had familiarized himself with its feel, shaken its hand, in a way, did he read the first entry: “
July 15, 1620
. At Berth in Thames. This day have been engaged by agents of the London Adventurers….”

The book of history. The perspiration from Tom’s fingertips soaked into the paper. He wiped his hands on his shirt and read on through the names of history—Brewster, Bradford, Standish—and the two families from which he descended.

The red of sunset seemed to linger far longer than usual. The wondrous Cape light lit Tom Hilyard toward his future. He read in the gloaming and into the night. He read through the first entries, the descriptions of winter, to the final words: “I agree to give over the log to Thomas Weston. I consider that I have no choice and little strength for dispute.”

And sometime during the night, Tom knew he had found his inspiration. When the sun poked through the front windows, its rays struck the broken spot in the chimney, as though its setting and rising formed latitude and longitude of America’s conception.

He could not guess at the value of the book. It would easily be worth as much as the famous Bradford manuscript. But he would not sell it. Instead, he would draw it, every scene.

He did a sketch and sent a letter to
Frank Leslie’s
. “I have tried, these last few years, to be a Cape Cod Impressionist, capturing light that vibrates with life. But I now see that there is no better vibration than that of humanity, without which the Cape light would have no meaning. In that I descend, on both sides, from those who gave birth to American history, I propose to give light to them. Herewith, a pencil sketch called
First Light
. It shows my ancestor, Christopher Hilyard, in the crow’s nest of the
Mayflower
, sighting Cape Cod after two months at sea.”

Tom labored longer on the letter than on the sketch to convey the proper tone of calm confidence at a time when he feared he might starve. And it worked. Leslie ordered half a dozen more.

In short order, Tom delivered the
Mayflower
riding the waves; the Pilgrims shoring up the main beam; something called
Saints and Strangers, Psalms and Slop Buckets
, which was not used;
Reading the Compact; The First Encounter;
and
The Gravediggers
.

After his sketches had filled his belly, he bought oils and brushes and went back to working in a medium that would last. Paintings were his alone, not part of an assembly line. But he painted only from the book—of Pilgrims, Indians, men and women bravely facing the wilderness.

On December 21, celebrated among Pilgrim descendants as Forefathers’ Day—the day the
Mayflower
reached Plymouth—
Frank Leslie’s
Pilgrim edition was published. By then, Tom had completed two dozen Pilgrim paintings. He sold all of them through a Boston dealer, and most were engraved by license in Leslie’s studio or reproduced in garishly tinted mass editions. One,
Reading the Compact
, was bought by Charles Bigelow, new state senator, for his Beacon Hill office. Tom charged him top price.

The critics considered his depictions energetic but crude. The public found them irresistible. They showed the Pilgrims as human beings with human foibles, and that was something that Pilgrim art had not done before. But Tom never forgot sentiment, handmaiden to popular success, and always cast the eyes of
someone
piously toward heaven.

By spring he felt he could go beyond the Pilgrim tale. But he went with caution. He took out the box once more and read the stories of Lemuel Bellamy and Sam Hilyard. These were tales not of human greatness but of depravity. Even the worst of the Pilgrims redeemed themselves through courage. Lemuel Bellamy had known no redemption in life and deserved none after death. Sam Hilyard had died bravely, but no death could make amend for the lives lost on the
Dragon
.