Rabble in Arms, page 4
We arranged with the captain of the Beau Soleil to carry all nine of them to Newport in return for Hawley’s pilotage, and knew, somehow, that in one short hour we had made a better friend in Hawley than we had made among all our French companions in a month.
Our one regret, as we prepared to go ashore in York, was that we had not become better acquainted with our silent companion, Mr. Leonard; but when we began to speak of this to him, he surprised us by saying in his unnoticeable way that he would like to accompany Nathaniel and me as far as Arundel. When we made sounds of acquiescence, he at once resumed his silent blandness—became again little more than the shadow of a man.
We, thinking ourselves happy to have him with us, promptly forgot him in the bustle of departure, and were almost perplexed to find him beside us in the coach. In this forgetfulness he seemed to encourage us, so that we came to treat him as an unconsidered trifle—one which the winds of chance had blown across our paths.
IV
IT WAS early May when our heavily laden coach lumbered from the forest between York and Wells to skirt the long marshes and the tumbled sand dunes that showed us we were nearly home at last.
Nowhere is spring so vivid and refreshing as on the coast of Maine in May. The dunes are brilliant green and gold against the smooth blue ribbon of the ocean; and up from the marshes drift the sweet odors of young grass and newly-turned earth. Maples, shamed by their long nakedness, blush a little; while willows, wakening from their winter’s sleep, clothe themselves in a fragrant gauze of green. Over everything there seems to hang a web of song woven by the blackbirds, robins, bobolinks and plovers that nest along the marshland.
I am impatient for home, always, when I reach that strip of sea and marsh and ragged dunes; and on this occasion there was such activity along the road that I was doubly impatient; close, even, to leaping from our clumsy coach and running the remainder of the way.
Carts, loaded with provisions and livestock, creaked southward along that dusty thoroughfare—carts bound, our driver said, for Boston to feed the army. Between the carts were knots of men with muskets, packs on their backs and kettles tied to their belts with string—shoeless, some of them; disreputably clad, and all moving south.
In Wells, where the inland road branches off from the sea road, there was a sizeable gathering of men and women before Littlefield’s Tavern, listening to a behemoth of a man who stood on the steps bellowing at them. His face was round and red: his garb a loose smock of dirty brown cloth, with a high pointed hood that gave him a look of a person from another world. The smock was belted at his waist, and below it were Indian leggins ending in moccasins the size of a punt.
From time to time he hesitated in his bellowing to rub his face with a hand like a bundle of sausages. Whenever this happened, a man who sat near by, dressed similarly, made a quiet remark, at which his hulking companion coughed portentously and resumed his bawling.
I recognized the quiet one as Steven Nason, who owned all the land at the mouth of our river, and maintained a tavern and garrison house behind the dunes across from Cape Arundel—a tavern which for food and cleanliness was the equal of any I knew.
Unable to pass because of the crowd, we sat and listened to the bellower. “Look here, now!” he roared. “We got eleven men agreed to go back to Canada, but that ain’t enough! We got to have twenty! What’s the matter with you, anyway? You’re rebels, all of you, just the same as me and Steven! If the British ain’t drove out of Canada, they’ll come down here and hang every damned rebel there is, and that means the whole kit and caboodle of you! Ain’t it better to go off on a nice long trip, that you’ll get paid for making, and have a pretty uniform to wear, and free rum, and learn to talk French? Ain’t it better than getting hung? I hope to die if it ain’t!”
In the midst of his noisy discourse, his eye fastened on mine. He hesitated, rubbed his forehead with vast hands as if to clear his mind of cobwebs: then pushed toward us through his audience.
He thrust his head and shoulders in at the open window of the coach, darting his eyes from our faces to the packages at our feet. “Where you from, brother? What’s your name? Where you live, and what’s your father do?” His breath was so redolent of rum that a whole distillery seemed to be crowding into the coach with us.
Before I could answer, his head and shoulders were withdrawn from the window even more suddenly than they had been inserted. Beyond him I saw Steven Nason, his hand still clutching the bawler’s shoulder. “Cap,” Nason said, “you got to be more careful around here! I know these people. They’re from Arundel.”
“Where they been?” Cap demanded belligerently.
Nason ignored him, gave a glance to sleepy-looking Mr. Leonard, and shook hands with Nathaniel and me. “I’m glad you’re back,” he said. “We need people like you. These people around here, they won’t fight unless you guarantee ’em half a dozen cows bounty, and sometimes not even then.” He smiled at us apologetically. “It’s made Cap Huff kind of fretty. He’s peaceable enough when he’s marching or fighting.”
He eyed Cap benevolently and added, “Or when he’s drunk. Once you get to know him better, these little ways of his won’t mean a thing to you! Not a thing!”
He stepped back, motioned our driver onward, and said, “We’ll be over to see you later!”
So the last five miles of our travels were thoughtful ones, and we were happy indeed when our coach rolled along the edge of the plateau that lies above the marshy, winding valley of the Arundel River, and we caught once more the smell of oak chips and marsh mud that rises from the shipyards at the river s edge.
From the look on Mr. Leonard’s face, when we bumped to a stop before our front gate and the door flew open to reveal my sister Jane, saucer-eyed with amazement, I could see he had expected no such house as ours.
That’s the way of it with Englishmen and Frenchmen, I’ve found, to say nothing of people from Virginia, New York and Boston. They think we’re savages in our Province of Maine, living in log huts with dirt floors, dipping our fingers into one iron pot at meal-time, and talking a strange and unrecognizable language; whereas the truth is that most of us learn our English out of the Bible through being made to read it aloud when young; and we live about as well as anyone anywhere—some poorly, and some in style, but for the most part sensibly and quietly.
… It is for the sake of folk who know nothing of us that I tell here a few things about the howling wilderness in which Maine men live. Half the wars that are made would never be fought if those who have the directing of affairs, like George Germain, should know the truth about the people and the country where the fighting must be done.
Our Province of Maine is larger than all of England; it has fine harbors, rivers and mountains; exhaustless rich forests, and a wealth of game. Our people are willing and enduring—friendly when treated properly, but the very devil when put upon and their rights disregarded: as much so as Virginians, though garrulous Virginians have talked the world into thinking bravery is almost exclusively restricted to Virginia—along with chivalry, honor, hospitality and other virtues that Virginians imply are non-existent elsewhere, especially in New England. But Maine men can fight, too, if properly led; for it was mostly men from Maine who sailed to Louisburg, in 1745, and took that granite fortress from the French—as handsome a piece of fighting as any soldiers ever did anywhere.
Nor are our towns to be sneezed at. Falmouth was as beautiful as any seaport I know before the British Captain Mowat sailed up to its unprotected and undefended wharves and set the place ablaze. It’s true our towns are poor, because of the wars our people fought for England against the French and Indians for so many years; and there’s a deal of rum drinking in them, and over-much prying from behind curtains at the doings of others. We don’t have the palaces and churches and statues that dot the English countryside. But neither do we have the trulls and rakes, footpads, debtors’ prisons and diseases with which England is peppered; so all in all I think our towns are better than most.
Our home in Arundel stands a mile and a half from the sea, at the double curve in the river, where my great-great-grandfather settled when he removed from Ipswich because of being deprived of his vote by that enlightened community as punishment for harboring a Quaker.
It’s a square house of two stories, painted red, with three gables protruding from each side of the four-sided roof. Perched on the top is a cupola with windows on all four sides, from which my father can look down into the shipyard behind the house and shout at any shirking adze-man or carpenter. From this vantage-point, too, he can train his glass on the mouth of the river, and know what vessels are making port, and how they are progressing with their loading and unloading as they lie at anchor beyond the bar.
Our river is small—so small that we build our vessels parallel to its channel and slide them in sideways. Yet it’s large enough to accommodate a brig of two hundred tons, which is as big as a man needs, no matter to what part of the world he wishes to sail. I can stand on one bank and shoot a duck as she rises from under the opposite bank; and in the spring of the year, after the salmon have stopped running, I can cast a line entirely across the stream, as the tide turns upward, and take sea-run trout from their feeding-places under the edge of the foam that comes slipping along the shore, fresh from the ocean; so, in more ways than one, the very smallness of our river is an advantage.
Our house is large, as are the houses of most Maine shipbuilders. Upstairs and down the rooms are plastered; and painted on the plaster are imaginary scenes, done by one of the Germans who travel periodically through our section, coming from the German settlements on the Kennebec—scenes showing merchant brigs breaking bulk in the lee of ruined casdes, and scantily clad people performing on musical instruments in the front yards of Greek temples. Over the mantels in the dining-room and the front room is woodwork carved with jackknives by two of the best workers in our shipyard; while over the dining-room mantel is a painting of my mother, done the year after she and my father were married, by John Smybert—excellently done, too, although my mother thinks there is something wrong with the mouth.
We have nothing so elegant as Benjamin Pickman’s Salem house, which has a codfish carved on every stair-rise in the front hall; but our silver is good, part of it made by Paul Revere, and our feather beds can’t be beat anywhere, unless there’s some place where goose feathers are softer than in Arundel.
Under the house is a dry cellar, stored with crocks of mince meat made from properly cooked bear and venison haunches—which is to say scarcely cooked at all—mixed with French brandy and chopped apples from the tree that shades our kitchen windows: also smoked goose breasts, hams, smoked eels, dried apples, dried corn, salted codfish, pickled tinker mackerel, bags of onions and potatoes, racks of squashes, jars of brandied peaches, barrels of corned beef, cucumbers in brine, tubs of pigeon, plover and partridge breasts packed in melted fat, so they can be eaten when fresh meat is scarce in the winter.
… It was my middle sister Jane who saw us first; and she screamed fit to wake the dead. It brought my mother from the kitchen, my father up from the shipyard, and Judith and Susanah down from the bedrooms. There was warmth in their welcome, and more; but there was a cautiousness about them that was strange to me.
Instead of hurrying us into the front room, as they always did when I returned from a voyage, they stood in a row, looking at us, as though expecting an answer to a question they feared to ask.
“They treated you well in England?” my father inquired, after all the family had shaken hands with Mr. Leonard and had our explanation of the convenience he had been to us.
“It was wonderful!” Nathaniel exclaimed. “It was an education, the time we spent there.”
My father continued to stare at me.
“They treated us well enough,” I admitted, “but the only good thing I have to say of ’em is that they’re careful in money matters. The government’s a pack of blundering fools! If our ships and trade are going to be regulated by corrupt incompetents three thousand miles away, we might as well take to cobbling shoes.”
My father smiled sourly. “We didn’t know,” he said. “We didn’t know! We had a letter from Nathaniel, speaking highly of the English. It got around. Somebody saw it—somebody opened it. It’s easy to be misunderstood these days. Some of the best folks are Loyalists: some of the finest: but mostly they keep their mouths shut. We didn’t know—we didn’t know—”
Nathaniel laughed. “No great harm in seeing the good side of the English, I guess.”
“Well,” my father said, studying him, “outside of having all your property seized and being driven up to Halifax to five, there’s no great harm in it, unless somebody takes it into his head to tar and feather you.” He shot a quick glance at Mr. Leonard, whose eyes were almost hidden by their heavy lids. Mr. Leonard concealed whatever lack of interest he may have felt in our personal affairs by coughing pleasantly and making my father a polite bow.
“Don’t fret about Nathaniel,” I told my father. “He’s only being contrary, as he was taught at Harvard.”
My father sighed. “Let’s go into the front room,” he said, “where we can all sit down and have a thimbleful of something to better days.”
V
MY MOTHER sat on the sofa, with Nathaniel’s hand in hers; and my father made small talk with Mr. Leonard, while my sisters mixed flip: Judith holding the pitcher of beer and stirring, Susanah adding the rum and the sugar, and Jane holding above it the red-hot poker from the kitchen stove, so to plunge it, hissing and rumbling, into the mixture.
“Look here,” I said to my father, when we had sampled the flip, “we saw Steven Nason in Wells. He said he’d be over later. In case there’s anything we ought to know before he comes, you’d better let us hear it.”
My father’s eyes strayed from me to Mr. Leonard, who rose to his feet at once. “Perhaps I may go to my room,” he said. “I am not as young as I once was; and this journey—”
We protested; but he was firm, in his smiling, silent way; and so my mother showed him to his room—the southeast room, facing down river. That was our best room, the walls painted with hunting scenes by a German painter from Dresden on the Kennebec. He must have been colorblind; for he painted a yellow sky on the hunting scenes; but we liked the yellow sky, all of us, and the room was called the yellow room, which shows that one can become accustomed to anything, no matter how strange it may be.
“It’s just as well,” my father said, when Mr. Leonard was gone. “Let him get rested up. He’s all right, of course, being such a helpful friend of yours; but we’ll all feel more comfortable with him out of sight and sound. You get in the habit of being careful after what’s happened.”
“Happened where?” Nathaniel asked.
My father drank his flip, went to the window and looked both up and down the road: then resumed his seat. “I don’t know whether you heard what happened to the Bostonians that sympathized with England when the English left Boston six weeks ago.”
“We’ve heard nothing,” I said. “Nothing.”
“They had to crowd aboard sloops and schooners and pinks,” my father said, “men, women and children—thousands of ’em—not a stitch of extra clothes or a mite of food or furniture or anything—and put to sea that way. Taken to Halifax, they were, and pushed ashore to live as best they could; and every last scrap of their property in Boston seized by our folks. Every last scrap!”
We stared at him.
“Over at York,” he went on, “Judge Sayward, Judge of Probate, talked too much. You ought to do things according to Constitutional forms, he said: not go against law and order the way our folks were doing. They mobbed him—manhandled him! He can’t go out of his house. He isn’t allowed to leave town. Folks won’t speak to him. Folks won’t speak to his family. He just sits and shakes for fear they’ll mob him again.”
“You mean he wasn’t allowed to say what he thought?” Nathaniel demanded.
My father smiled grimly. “Why, no! He was allowed to say what he thought, but he was encouraged not to keep on saying it.”
Nathaniel looked incredulous. “I’ll be damned if I’d let—”
“They got close to home when they came after Adam McCulloch,” my father interrupted. All of us knew Adam McCulloch. He was another shipbuilder who lived almost within spitting distance of us. “Adam thought we could never whip such a powerful nation as England, and he said so. So the mob came down here and stood in front of his house.”
My mother held Nathaniel’s hand against her breast. “We could see them from the window,” she whispered.
“What did they do?” Nathaniel asked.
“Not much,” my father said. “They stood there and made a noise like a gale growling in the rigging of a ship. Then the leaders pounded on the front door and talked to Adam. He had to crawl. He had to crawl in writing. He had to apologize to all friends of America. He had to ask humbly for forgiveness—promise never to do it again—generally squirm around on his belly.”
“But,” Nathaniel protested, “you used to think there was nothing so foolish as for us to try to fight England.”
My father ignored him. “Dr. Alden over in Biddeford sent lumber to Boston to be sold to the British troops for barracks. Cap’n John Stackpole carried it down. A mob from Biddeford, Saco and Arundel called on ’em. Alden and Stackpole had to get down on their knees and ask the mob’s pardon. Down on their knees!”
“But—” Nathaniel said.
“There’s no ‘but’ about it, son! You remember Dr. Ebenezer Rice, who lived in the village? He thought the rebellion could never succeed. He thought everyone who took part in it would be hung. Well, he’s gone.”
