Arundel (26 page)

If I spoke to her with disapproval about the wearing of breeches as being unmaidenly, which I sometimes did, she would say she had been meaning to get a brocaded dress with a bustle to wear down to Boston in the next sou’wester, which is no answer at all; or she would ask some pert question, such as how would I like to shorten sail in a westerly squall with a skirt tangled between my legs, which had nothing to do with the matter.

Or she would urge me to draw a picture of the sort of dress she should wear on the sloop in place of breeches, so she could have it made in Boston and call it her slooping gown, all as frivolous and meaningless as the mewing of a seagull.

Indeed, I was like to find myself infuriated whenever I held speech with her; but I was prepared for no such piece of outrageousness as she announced to me shortly after Arnold had gone off to the Sugar Islands.

I was hard at work calking our whaleboat when she came up and lolled importantly against it, one hand in a pocket of her bold and hateful breeches like a man, and the other playing with her string of cat’s eyes, so that I begged her to behave either like a man or a woman. At this she said soberly she was thinking of taking a husband, and knew no better way of behaving like a woman.

“Now why,” I asked, tempted to throw my calking knife at her, “do you want to go and do that! You’re living on a sloop as you want to live, more comfortably than you can live with any man in this town, and laying by enough money so in time you can own a sloop in your own name, or perhaps even a brig. Yet you must go and wreck this arrangement of ours, which is making money for all of us, when it was only for you that we let Thomas Scammen build the damned sloop. Where, for that matter, can we get another master for her? I believe before God there never was such a contrary, harassing hussy as you!”

“But you don’t know who I intend to marry.”

“No, nor care! Whoever he is, he’ll only put you to raising brats, a thousand of them, like all good husbands here! He’ll set you to hauling water out of the well and cooking and spinning; and you, being only half-sized and quarter-witted anyway, and thin as a crow to boot, will be an old woman, all wrinkled and gray and dirty, like the potato James Dunn carries in his pocket against rheumatism, before you’re a dozen years older! He’ll never let you go about in breeches and boots and a shirt open at the throat, as I do; so all in all I think you’ve been affected by the sun! What oaf is it you’re taking?”

“James Dunn,” Phoebe said, whirling the string of cat’s eyes around the forefinger of the hand that was not in her disgusting pocket.

“James Dunn!” I cried; and then, in stupefaction, I once more gasped, “James Dunn!”

“Yes, if you prefer to pronounce it so. James Dunn!” With that she imitated me, which to my mind is a loathsome trick for anyone to perform, and especially so with Phoebe; for there was never any mistaking her imitations.

“But you can’t marry James Dunn! He eats dandelion greens and ship’s bread!”

“That means less cooking,” she said calmly.

“He can’t count above five,” I protested; “not above four, I do believe! When he stood beside Thomas Scammen a few nights since, a tray in one hand and a pitcher in the other, and Scammen handed him a shilling, he couldn’t think how to take it without dropping either the pitcher or the tray! So he dropped the pitcher because it was in his right hand, and therefore easier to drop!”

“That’s easily remedied.”

“Indeed! And how would you go about it at Dunn’s age?”

“That’s simple,” Phoebe said, peering down her unbuttoned shirt and removing a fleck of dust from her chest with her little finger. “I’d never hand him a shilling.”

“Bah!” I said.

“What’s more, I’ll sail the sloop as in the past and if I have need of a seaman I’ll carry James along, thus saving wages. If I don’t need a seaman, he’ll remain here, doing as he’s doing now. I’ve spoken with James about these things, and he agrees with me it would be well if I continued to be master of the sloop, as well as”—she looked at me maliciously—“to wear breeches and boots; a garb in which he sees no harm.”

“He sees nothing in anything!”

“He seems to see something in me.”

“Pah!” I said. “What sort of marriage is that?”

“I’ve heard it named in Boston. There they call it a legal marriage.”

She went off, whistling, her hands in her pockets, the most hateful thing I could see in all Arundel.

These two, Phoebe and James, were a strange pair. Phoebe would be gone for three and four days, or even for a week, leaving James to blunder along as a helper at the inn. When she came home they would never moon together among the dunes, like other lovers; but she would come and sit in the gathering-room of the inn, giving James little problems to do for the improvement of his brain, she said, speaking of that which was not there. James, a needle-witted scientist in appearance, would brood over them and shake his head in perplexity, while Phoebe would try to make them clear to him. Or she would ignore James and come into the kitchen, where I would be working at my accounts, and spend hours telling my sisters how she had seen a woman in Newburyport or Salem or Boston wearing thus and so, after the manner of all women.

Why they were so slow in marrying I could not see. The times seemed to be growing more peaceable, and there was less talk of mobs in Boston and elsewhere. Also the wild men among the Sons of Liberty fell into greater disrepute than ever, and merchants, here and there, began to say a war with England would be ruinous. In view of all this I might have broken my promise to Arnold and gone off to Quebec; but whenever I spoke of it to Phoebe she said she was of a mind to be married in a few weeks, and would want to take James from his work in the inn, so they could go on a wedding trip. At that my mother would shake her head sadly, and I would have to sit furiously and bide my time.

Such thoughts were driven from my head in earnest when Phoebe, in the third year of her engagement, returned from Boston with the news that the East India Company, having a surfeit of tea in England, was to be allowed to bring tea direct from India to America in its own ships and sell it to our colonists. Thus, Phoebe said, the company would be able to sell tea cheaper than our merchants, who had to buy theirs in England: cheaper, even, than those who had been smuggling it from Holland.

This news, she said, had thrown all Boston into an uproar. The merchants, scenting ruin in having their trade taken from them, had forgotten their fear of a war with England and were bellowing as loudly as any of the Sons of Liberty.

Furthermore, she said, the Sons of Liberty, greatly encouraged, had taken on new life; and the mobs had started up again, tarring and feathering customs officers, and hurling buckets of filth through the windows of those whose sympathies lay with England.

Once more our gathering-room was full of bawlers and table-pounders of nights: bawlers who grew warlike at the news that a mob of Indians had seized the first of the East India tea ships and spilled tea to the value of ten thousand pounds into Boston Harbor.

I have heard folk say our war with England started over the tax on tea. I think these folk are addle-pated, for our merchants had been paying a tax on tea for two years before the cargo of the
Dartmouth
was tossed into Boston Harbor. I know for my part that the rumpus over tea excited me not at all. But it was another matter, a little later, when the English declared the port of Boston would be closed to all shipping until the citizens had repaid the East India Company for the ruined tea. Not only did they close the port, so that Phoebe was forced to land her Boston cargoes at Salem, but they further declared they would seize Sam Adams and take him to England for trial.

I could not think about these things without my shirt growing moist along my spine; and none of our Sons of Liberty whooped more loudly than I when word came to our committee of correspondence that a Continental Congress had been formed and that towns near Boston had sent it a message demanding that troops be raised to disarm the English parricide, meaning King George, for pursuing our guiltless countrymen with unrelenting severity and pointing the dagger at their bosoms.

There were rumors, most of them wild and false, of the coming of countless troop ships and how the English would transport us all to Canada or the Sugar Islands, or take our children as hostages; how no arms or ammunition would be sent to us ever again; how they planned to seize us and sell us for slaves; how all our towns would be put to the torch, and all the Indians of the West turned loose on us. A frenzy of rage and hatred filled us—not all of us, but those of us who had our anger fed each day by more news and more news, and by the growls of our neighbors sitting together over their glasses of rum.

Cursed with inactivity, we grew constantly more bloodthirsty, crying out for the infliction of terrible deaths on those against whom we raged. When we had word from
Portsmouth
on a clear December day, telling how Cap Huff had stormed and rampaged into the King’s fort with the Sons of Liberty and seized a hundred barrels of gunpowder, we were disgusted because he had let the garrison off with their lives, and not torn them limb from limb. Since then I have learned that those who cry loudest for blood are those who stay at home, making war with their mouths; but in those days we opined Cap had grown weak and womanly from being overlong out of gaol.

The ice still lay in the lee of the rocks that spring when we learned that English troops, marching out of Boston to prevent the powder in Lexington and Concord from going the same way as that in Portsmouth, had been met by our Minute Men in Concord and driven back into the city with scores of red-coats left dead and dying by the roadside. Those who drove them back, said the letter, had camped at the barricades at Boston Neck, so that the English could not come out again. This was another matter; and it was a silent crowd that night in the gathering-room. There was scant table-pounding, and no bawling at all; and some of the voices seemed querulous and at times given to unexpected cracking; while men laughed, when they did laugh, a little tremulously.

A few days later an express rider galloped up from the beach, flung me a handbill with a shout of “Nail this up!” and clattered on toward Falmouth.

I stood and stared at it; and one by one the folk in the house came out to see what it was—my mother and Phoebe and my sisters and Jethro Fish and James Dunn and Malary.

In Congress, at Watertown, April 30, 1775 [it read]

G
ENTLEMEN
:

The barbarous murders on our innocent Brethren Wednesday the 19th Instant has made it absolutely necessary that we immediately raise an Army to defend our Wives and our Children from the butchering Hands of an inhuman Soldiery, who, incensed at the Obstacles they met with in their bloody Progress, and enraged at being repulsed from the Field of Slaughter, will without the least doubt take the first Opportunity in their Power to ravage this devoted Country with Fire and Sword: We conjure you, therefore, by all that is dear, by all that is sacred, that you give all Assistance possible in forming an Army: Our all is at stake, Death and Devastation are the certain Consequences of Delay, every Moment is infinitely precious, an Hour lost may deluge your Country in Blood, and entail perpetual Slavery upon the few of your Posterity who may survive the Carnage. We beg and entreat, as you will answer it to your Country, to your own Consciences and above all as you will answer to God himself, that you will hasten and encourage by all possible Means the Enlistment of Men to form the Army, and send them forward to Head-Quarters, at Cambridge, with that Expedition which the vast Importance and instant Urgency of the Affair demands.