A Bloodsmoor Romance (35 page)

 

THE EIGHT-YEAR-OLD BOY,
precociously wise, seemed to know upon the instant of his startl'd awakening not only
what
was happening in the village, but
to whom
it was happening; and tho' he fully grasped the nature of the danger to himself (both as the pedlar's son, and as a witness from the outside world to the crime), and was shivering and whimpering with sheer animal fright, he nonetheless ran after the boisterous mob, calling over and over
Father! Father!
— a more piteous and heartrending spectacle, one cannot wish to imagine.

Alas, the child did witness his father's ignominious death—the aftermath of the tarring and feathering, which involved a clumsy attempt at hanging, and the setting aflame of the limp (and perhaps, by then, lifeless) body, to the noisy satisfaction of the crowd. He heard, he saw, he cried out “Father—!” but there was no help for the doomed man, and no help for the child, who very narrowly escaped with his own life when certain members of the crowd turned their attentions upon him, and quickly calculated, despite their drunkenness, the threat he represented.

There is a tale of my illustrious compatriot Hawthorne's, set in remote Colonial times, in which a youth seeks a wealthy kinsman only to discover that the elderly Major has been tarred and feathered, in protest of British authority, and dragged along in an uncovered cart by a torchlit procession; the persecuted old man is described by Mr. Hawthorne as possessing, even in his humiliation, a “tar-and-feathery dignity.” And so absurd is the spectacle, so infectiously merry, that the ingenuous young kinsman joins in the crowd's laughter! One cannot fault Mr. Hawthorne for the precision of his prose style, here as elsewhere, or for the stern wisdom of his vision, but one must question whether “dignity” of any sort is available when one is in excruciating agony from burns to the flesh; or whether laughter, however infectiously communal, is an appropriate human response, to so lurid a sight.

Surely few amidst even that crowd of wretches laughed with true merriment at the death throes of their victim, a bizarre sight in the flames—so erratically covered with white goose feathers, his face seemed hardly human. And the victim's young kinsman, stricken with terror, had no thought now but to escape with his life, his father's life being lost.

And so, pursued by several burly louts, including a beardless drunken youth not many years older than himself, John Quincy ran into the woods—he ran, and ran, and ran—deep into the woods—deep into the chill eerie gloom, where the moonlight could not penetrate, while behind him shouts and whoops rang out, as if it were all a game. He ran until his breath came in shreds, and his small heart beat madly in his chest; and at last, after a very confused space of time, the shouts behind him grew fainter, and dissolved into the night; and a forlorn
whooooing
that must have been the call of an owl, was all that sounded.

In a virtual convulsion of shivering, of both cold and terror, the pathetic child crawled into a thicket to hide; and, when he believed he had brought his trembling under control, he scrambled out, and climbed a tree—a many-branchèd oak—clumsily and yet with great industry he climbed, and climbed—until his hands, though callused, began to bleed—and still he climbed the great oak—the vision of his defiled father behind him—and the start of the licking flames—and the shouts and whoops of his tormentors—and still he climbed, panting, near-sobbing, until, like a fairy child in one of the old legends, he emerged at last from the gloom of the forest, and entered into the moonlight's realm once more, dazed and exhausted, yet withal not without a sense of animal relief, judging himself (however prematurely) safe from his father's murderers.

So John Quincy Zinn climbed the great oak, his nails torn and his fingers bleeding, and did manage to save himself, the spark of life being so courageous within him. At the top of the tree he secured himself into a kind of cradle, and, clinging to the rough-bark'd trunk, he drifted off into a light, chaotic sleep, waking some time later—how long, he could not hope to judge—to a renewed commotion of voices and footsteps, and an occasional crashing in the underbrush. A lone high-pitched voice arose, a stranger's voice: “Little John Quincy,” the voice called, “your father is asking for you, your father wants you by his side, where are you hiding,” the voice approached, and then faded, “are you in the bushes here, are you up a tree, come down, little John Quincy,” the voice drew nearer suddenly, “come down, I say, come out of hiding, don't you know your father wants you, your father is very angry, he wants you by his side, come down, boy, come
here
—”

But the prescient child, clinging to the great trunk, stayed exactly where he was.

TWENTY-THREE

T
hus, the unspeakable evils of drink and dissipation; and an indelicacy of comportment so extreme as to render all moral judgment superfluous. It is no wonder that the young John Quincy Zinn became an avowed abstainer from drink, and an enthusiastic supporter of the Temperance Movement; and that, many years later—ah, it is a mercy to count how many!—he frequently joined his womenfolk in the parlor, around the piano (which Mrs. Zinn, Malvinia, and Octavia played in turn, being more gifted than Samantha and Constance Philippa), and sang with them, in a voice that never faltered, one or another of the great old Temperance songs. Tho' many were published in sheet music form, and even the least inspired offered wisdom, it is Henry Clay Work's superb “Come Home, Father,” that best expressed the spirit of the movement, and the pathos of the child victimized by parental neglect. This melancholy but beautifully melodic tale of a young girl sent to fetch her father from the tavern, that he might kiss his dying son goodnight, must have awakened unfortunate memories in Mr. Zinn's heart; yet of course he gave no indication, and the tear or two he might have surreptitiously wiped from his eyes, as the plaintive chorus echoes, again and again—

Hear the sweet voice of the child,

Which the nightwinds repeat as they roam!

Oh, who could resist this most pleading of prayers?

“Please, father, dear father, come home!”

—this tear, I venture, seemed no more than an o'erspilling of the sentiment of the moment, and could have awakened no undue curiosity in Mrs. Zinn or the sisters. For even the approximate nature of Mr. Zinn's childhood was unknown to them; and prudently so.

 

NINETEEN YEARS AFTER
the events of that horrific night, when pressed to deliver himself of the
particulars
of his background by the Honorable Godfrey F. Kidde­master, who had summoned him out to Kidde­master Hall in Bloodsmoor, for a private meeting, John Quincy Zinn looked his prospective father-in-law frankly in the eye, and spoke of domestic tragedy ensuing in part from family illnesses, and in part from impoverishment; he spoke briefly of having spent an intermittent period of time, as a boy, in the hire of farmers in the Blue Mountain region—German, Dutch, Quaker. They were good people, he averred, and treated him well: tho' naturally he was expected to work hard.

He had always been mechanical-minded, and gifted with his hands; but it was in '45 or '46, he told Judge Kidde­master, a faint blush stealing over his cheeks, at the confusion and, as it were, displeasure of speaking so lengthily about himself, that he deemed himself
born:
born into a sense not only of the miraculous interweaving of spirit that constitutes the Visible Universe, but to a sense of his own place within it, and, it may be said, his own Destiny.

This felicitous awakening was occasioned by his having come upon, in a bookseller's stall in Allentown, the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a name altogether new to him (for he was only seventeen or eighteen at the time, and, tho' decidedly bookish for a rural youth, and set apart from his contemporaries by a unique liveliness of intelligence, he
was
a farmboy without doubt); a name, and a voice, and a commandeering vision hardly to be resisted. He quickly scanned the great essay “Nature,” whilst standing at the bookstall, his trembling hands shaking the page, and thrilled to the wisdom therein, that the Supreme Being does not create nature about us, but puts it forth
through
us; that we are immortal, for we learn that
time
and
space
are relations of matter, and that, with a perception of truth or a virtuous will,
they have no affinity.

A man, John Quincy Zinn dared to lecture Judge Kidde­master (whom he suspected of wishing to interrupt—for Prudence's father had drawn breath, and was staring most intently at John Quincy), a man is after all fashioned by Nature, and indebted to the culture of the past only as its
Master;
and he must express himself in action in order to influence society, not hide away in his study, or in the woods, or in one or another comfortable retreat from responsibility. It was of course John Quincy Zinn's ambition—to which he hesitated to give the grand name
Destiny
—to influence his nation by the labor of his brain and hands, joining with that
American Destiny
as one individual among many, grateful for the opportunity even, if need be, to sacrifice himself.

The older man regarded him with pale, somewhat frosty eyes, and for a long imperious moment did not choose to reply. Behind and above him, to the left, were six handsome silver tankards (by Paul Revere, in fact—tho' young John Quincy did not know this at the time); to the right, in stately calf bindings, with gilt-stamped titles, the collected works of Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Lord Macaulay. No smile softened the Judge's stern expression (tho' his young opportuner had been smiling a great deal, and freely perspiring); it may even have been the case that his proud posture grew stiffer. And yet his words were gentle—and gently offered. He said, as John Quincy Zinn leaned eagerly forward, as if to hear a verdict handed down, alas, from the bench! “My dear boy, you are young: but you will not always be so.”

 

IT MAY BE
that the reader, despite repugnance for such details as I have felt constrained to record, in connection with the problematic matter of John Quincy Zinn's orphaning, harbors some small curiosity as to the aftermath of the child's escape, for I have left him, I recall of a sudden, at the very top of a many-branchèd oak; and no succor in view.

Strange it was, this aftermath; tho' no stranger, I must conclude, than much that has transpired, and will transpire, in my chronicle. For in the chill light of dawn young John Quincy awakened to the sound of a woman's voice far below, and tho' he gripped the tree trunk with an instinctive cunning, and did not for some time allow himself even to glance downward (as if fearing so subtle a movement might attract attention), he seemed to understand at once, that the full-throated warmth of this voice, however unfamiliar to him, promised a genuine aid. “Good morn, little boy, do you hear me, are you up there?—little boy?—yes?—will you come down?—and quickly, quickly!—for there is no time to spare.”—So the strange voice wafted up to him, and after no more than a minute's hesitation, during which time his red-rimmed eyes worked furiously in his head, the child's heart relaxed: and he made the decision, which quite altered the course of his remarkable life,
to trust the voice, and to climb down.

And so, indeed, he did. With that cautious and somewhat awkward precision of a cat, lowering itself from a height it has scaled with great alacrity.

In silence John Quincy Zinn returned to the ground, where stood a woman he had never before set eyes upon, yet seemed in a way to know: of no more than modest height, yet sturdy and full-bodied, with a strong jaw, and ruddy cheeks, and glistening eyes that belied the severe furrowing of her brow. She urged him to hurry; clucked at him impatiently; would have caught him in her strong arms and pulled him down, from a height of perhaps five feet, had he not jumped to the ground. She wore a plum-colored cape of coarse wool, with a hood that nearly covered her braided hair, and might have been in her mid-thirties, or younger; she was carrying a woollen blanket, which she immediately draped about John Quincy's shoulders.

“Now come with me, do not tarry: for we have a journey before us,” she said, taking him immediately by the hand, and pulling him along. He did not resist: had no thought of resisting: but obeyed her without a scruple. Indeed, it was a measure of the eight-year-old orphan's trust in this woman, as well as the desperation of his plight, that he had no thought to draw away from her, but had in fact to resist a sudden need to burrow into her embrace, and burst into wanton tears. “Come, come,” she murmured, taking no time to glance at him, but rubbing his raw, chafèd, cold-stiffened fingers with hers, “it is already dawn, and more than dawn; and we must set you on your way. God has His plans for you, my son—but we must make haste.”

She strode resolutely forward, and he followed, his panting breath turned to vapor. Haste!—they must make haste! After some strenuous minutes his knees buckled and he would have collapsed, had his able benefactress not caught him in her arms, and borne him aloft. She carried him out of the depths of the forest into an open place, a hilly meadow—and then down a steep incline—and finally to a lane, where a horse-drawn wagon awaited; and the driver, with a muttered exclamation, leapt down to offer aid. John Quincy was now but partly conscious: he had a confused impression of a rough-hewn but kindly face, and a pair of small, keen, dark eyes, as stronger arms bundled him up into the wagon, and hid him beneath the blanket and a layer of damp hay.

And then off—off they galloped, into the fresh chill mists of an autumn dawn in the mountains. The Devil himself might have been in pursuit, the driver so urged his horse forward, and the old wagon groaned and creaked.