April Morning (3 page)

“Goody Cooper,” he said to my mother, “I don't recollect a more delicious meat than your donkers. But neither do I recollect any home but yours where they're favored.”

“They're not proper English food,” said Mother. “They're Dutch food.”

“Now what do you know!”

“You see, my grandfather Isaac, he was in the coasting trade.”

“I've heard about your grandfather Isaac, indeed,” said Mr. Simmons. Unlike my father, he did not have to stop eating to talk; he did both at once. He said it respectfully, but nevertheless it gave my mother a twinge. She pretends not to know how many have heard and gossiped about her grandfather Isaac, who kept one wife and family in Boston and another wife and family in Philadelphia, but the knowledge was widespread. The fact that the Philadelphia wife was one half Shawnee Indian and had never been baptized—as the story went—gave the gossip an added fillip. While her grandfather Isaac was alive, she couldn't bear to speak of him or listen to him being spoken of; but when he died and left her two hundred sovereigns, Father said that his sinfulness took a back seat to his generosity and thoughtfulness. In addition, a sea captain was never judged by the same standards we used to measure a landsman.

“Of course.” Mother nodded. “Well, one day at sea, his cook died of the ague, and he put into New York harbor and engaged a Holland cook, and after that he never would sail with anything but a Holland cook, and he got a taste for Dutch cooking in his own home. It was the Holland cook taught Grandmother Zipporah things like donkers, and I got the recipes from her.”

“One more, Cousin Simmons,” Granny said. He was a second cousin on the Cooper side.

He said he didn't have the strength or the lasting power for another meat cake, but Mother knew as well as I did that he was saving himself for a piece of her pie. He explained that he had come by to walk with my father to the extraordinary Committee meeting they were holding tonight. Two weeks before this, the Committee had appointed him to write a statement on the rights of man, to which they would all put their names, and which would be posted in Boston. In my opinion, which nobody asked, Joseph Simmons was a poor choice. He was a nice enough man, but when it came to the fine points of disputation, he simply wasn't there. He had been working on the draft of his statement for two weeks, and most likely he'd work on it two weeks more. It would have been more natural for the Committee to select my father or Deacon Loring or Mr. Harrington for the task, but my father was a Company Captain and all sorts of positions and titles had been handed out to the others. That left Cousin Simmons for the statement.

He took his draft out of his pocket now, and told Father he had been waiting for an opportunity to have his considered opinion.

“Go ahead and read it, Joseph,” Father said.

Cousin Simmons cleared his throat and read, “We, the undersigned, holding to the positive and practical position that the rights of men are derived from Almighty God and sealed by His holy hand and will—”

He was watching Father's face, and his voice died away. “Well, Moses?” he said tentatively.

“Go ahead and read.”

Granny and Mother were dishing the pie and putting the plates on the table. Cousin Simmons couldn't resist tasting it.

“Go on and read, I said.”

“Well, what's the use of reading? Why don't you come out and say what's on your mind. I can't go on reading with your face all screwed up in disagreement.”

Granny said, “I can't see what's to disagree with when you've hardly begun.”

“I wasn't disagreeing,” Father said. “I was just thinking that when you leave church, theology won't hold water. I don't argue against a man's religion. And I don't want him to dispute me with his religion.”

“For heaven's sake,” Granny said, “Cousin Simmon's no more than read the preamble.”

“Just as important as any of the rest of it.”

“And how have I been disputing you with religion, Moses? I'd like you to make that plain.”

“Rights derived from God! That's no argument—that's a swamp. You'll get neck-deep in that. Fat George doesn't blow his nose without it's a God-given right, clear and simple. Why, I think the meanest, lowest thing about these wars they fight in Europe is the way both parties to the affair have God marching shoulder to shoulder with them.”

“Now if that isn't blasphemous, I don't know what is!” Granny snapped.

“Nothing of the kind! I respect my Maker, I don't invoke Him. We wouldn't have the Committee, or need it either, if God just handed out His rights left and right. When God made man, He gave him a mind to consider with and two hands to set things right.”

“I was just putting it in a manner of speaking,” Simmons protested.

“We can't afford to put things in a manner of speaking, Joseph. We have got to set out our line clear and proper, and prove it all the way. Oh, yes, the pastor will hold that our rights derive from God. That's his business. He has to. But you and me, we know well enough that it was only because of a lot of stiff-necked people like ourselves that we have got a knowledge of rights. You consider my Uncle Cyrus in the rum trade. He says he'll die and see his ship and fortune sunk before he hands his trade over to the British. He has the right to trade with the islands because he backs up that right with his life. Same way, I hold this house of mine a castle inviolate—but that's pure boasting unless the Committee backs me up. Do you see?”

But Cousin Simmons was slow to see, and they went on discussing it over the pie and afterwards as they were preparing to leave the house. I stopped my father in the kitchen as they were leaving, and I said to him:

“I want to go with you to the meeting, Father.”

“Oh?”

“I know that the Committee made a rule about sixteen years before a man enters—”

“Are you a man now, Adam?”

“I'm tall and strong and only nine months away from my sixteenth birthday.”

“The proof of a man is the will to work and the ability to use his mind and his judgment. Can you offer that proof, Adam?”

I stared at him in silence.

“Talk to me when you can, Adam.”

Then they both left.

Granny said that there was more pure nonsense connected with a Committee meeting than a body could bear, and she didn't see why I would want to waste the evening hours there. My mother put her arm around my shoulders.

“Why does he hate me so?” I asked them.

“Hate you?” Mother said. “Adam, he loves you. You're his son.”

“Then I got love and hate mixed up.”

“What a way to talk!”

“How do you expect me to talk? Has he ever said a kind word to me? He chops at me like I was an old, dry pine for him to temper his ax on. Whatever I do, it's not right, and no matter how I do it, he finds fault.”

“That's just his way.”

“Is it? Well, it's not my way to like it.”

Granny said gently, “Oh, Adam, Adam, what a fuss to make over a cantankerous man who's enamored with the sound of his own voice! Moses Cooper is your father and I suppose he can't ever be anything else but that to you, but to old Goody Cooper here, he's just a son, just the same as you are, and he's never been any different but the way he is now, pigheaded and full of his own notions. Do you think poor Cousin Simmons could ever have written that statement to suit Moses Cooper? No, sir. Cousin Simmons might be the nicest and most delicate writer in all the county, but that wouldn't satisfy Moses Cooper. He'd find fault.”

“All I ever asked from him is one kind word. Just so he'd look at me once as if I wasn't dirt scraped out of the barnyard.”

“He just expects more than a soul can deliver,” Granny said.

I pulled away from Mother and started toward the door.

“Where are you going, Adam?”

“Out.”

“Adam, don't press it. Don't go over to the church. If your father sees you there after he ordered you not to come, he'll be very angry.”

“He's always angry. Anyway, I'm not going to bother their damned Committee—”

“Adam!”

I stalked out to the yard, and there was Levi crouching in the shadows. It was dark now.

“Adam?”

“Go to hell, you little rat,” I told him.

“You going to lick me, Adam?”

“Did I ever lick you?”

“No. But there's always a first time, Adam.”

“There will be if you don't stay out of my sight.”

The Evening

I
HAVE TOLD
more or less what happened in the afternoon, through the mealtime—and I suppose it is for the most part what happened to me, or what I heard or what I saw. As far as the afternoon is concerned, I don't think that it makes too much difference, because allowing for our family's characteristics, everyone else in the village was eating their supper at about the same time. It is true that most of them were having chicken or salt pork, but we can accept the fact that in half of the homes, pie was taken for dessert, and you could safely say that three-quarters of them had boiled pudding. There was a sharp dividing line in our town between those women who cooked their boiled pudding in the old-fashioned English way, out of fine wheat flour and suet. The other half used ground yellow maize. We had stopped using flour after my father somehow connected English pudding with a conciliative point of view—something which Mother's sewing circle regarded as the highest achievement of logic during the past year; and you may believe that we saw some high moments of logic in our village. If it had been up to Granny, she never would have budged an inch, but Mother gave in, partly because deep down under everything, she admired Father's gift for argumentation. I once heard her state that she was quite proud of the fact that while Father could have argued any girl in New England into being his wife, he had chosen her to persuade. But there was also the fact that most of Mother's friends had already switched to maize. You would hardly believe this, but the maize-flour controversy reached such a pitch of philosophical excitement that there were a few days when half the women in the village just stopped talking to the other half. If the Reverend hadn't taken the situation in hand and preached one of his hottest sermons on the relationship of the fruits of the earth to plain, downright human foolishness, I don't know where it would have all ended.

But however the boiled pudding was made, it was eaten widely that night, as on most nights, and afterwards the men trooped over to the church for the Committee meeting. While I wasn't at the meeting, it seems to me that I ought to report something of what went on there. I was in bed when Father came home later that night, and heard him give Mother and Granny a full report, but to have things in proper sequence, I will deal with that now, before I tell what happened to me during the evening.

The meeting was called to order by Samuel Hodley, after which Jeremiah Phitts gave the financial report. That went its usual course, ending up with a balance of twelve shillings, sixpence. An assessment of threepence on all present was moved and voted. My father reported that a considerable number deferred payment.

Samuel Hodley took the floor again and gave the results of the weapons count for the village and surrounding area. It came to one hundred and sixteen assorted pieces. As near as my father could remember, it broke down somewhat in this fashion: there were seven close-bore guns with rifled barrels, a small number, but rifles are expensive instruments and the very devil to load. There were some sixty-odd smoothbore guns, of which about ten were old-fashioned firelocks. Among these sixty were fourteen British army guns, which had traveled to us—that is, they belonged to the Committee—a nice way of saying that they were stolen. There were five dragoon pistols, but these were the kind that a family bought to show off on the mantel in the sitting room, and it was questionable whether they would work. All the rest were fowling guns for pepper and salt shot.

Hodley wanted a central shot and power depot organized in the village, because he had read somewhere that any place under siege should have an ammunition depot; but since we were not under siege and most likely never would be, bis point was voted down.

Then Clarence Pinckney brought up his pet notion about drilling, but April was the wrong month to ask hard-working farmers to come out into the sunshine and drill, so the matter was put off for a fortnight. Cousin Simmons gave a progress report on the statement he had in preparation, and then the Reverend said a few words on tyranny, taxes, the moral condition of the High Church, the proper place of Oliver Cromwell in history as opposed to his current slanderers and detractors—and finished by paraphrasing the first two books of Maccabees.

Some of the more orthodox held that it was presumptuous of the Reverend to push Maccabees the way he did, since those books were more properly apocryphal than divine, but the Reverend would have none of such criticism. We were the brothers of Simon, he said, and if God put such a weapon as Maccabees I and II into his hand, he would strike with the weapon or shame the gift of the Almighty. I don't remember a case where the Reverend got the worst of that kind of an argument.

Next, they took up the discussion of a newspaper. No one really believed that a community as small as ours could actually support a newspaper, nor did anyone ever really sit down with it and try to figure out where the capital for beginning the venture would be found, the round sum of money needed for the printing press, the type faces, the ink and the newsprint. Instead, the discussion always turned into a hot debate between the pro-Samuel Adams radicals and the anti-Samuel Adams egalitarians, since it was Adams who again and again stated that a newspaper must be the connecting link between the Committees and the people. As far as our village was concerned, within a few hours after a Committee meeting was finished, every soul in the place knew every word that had been spoken—so I failed to see Mr. Adams' point.