Cape Cod (52 page)
From his perch, Sam saw the light green water of the Peaked Hill Bar just a hundred yards to starboard. He thought that Ourry might throw out his anchors to hold her off, but enough canvas was set that if the anchors held, the wind might blow the masts to pieces. And so the captain screamed at the officers, the officers at the mates, the mates at the sailors, the sailors at the marines, and the marines at one another.
And now, with the shoal water not twenty yards away, Ourry rushed down the deck and looked up at the mainmast.
“You up there! Restring the block! You must…
Hilyard!
”
And good English oak struck the American sandbar with a tremendous crash. The deck tilted to starboard. The sea pounded up and over the port side. George Ourry fell amidst a tumble of red coats and white wigs and was nearly crushed by a loose carronade that rolled across the deck and killed three marines. Dr. Thayer grabbed the rail and nearly went over the side. Men flew from the masts like ants flicked from a stick.
Sam, still clutching a line, swung out over the water and back toward the mast like a pendulum, and in the second before he made fast, he decided his chances were better in the freezing Atlantic than ever they would be with the furious brass-buttoned figure now picking himself up from the tumble of marines on the spar deck.
He pushed off with his foot, swung far out over the Peaked Hill Bar, and let go.
For a moment, he hung suspended in midair, looking back at the ship. She lay against the bar, the waves pounding over her, the Union Jack flapping impotently at her stern, and he decided that if this was his last vision, it would be enough. Then he struck the icy water and nearly passed out.
In the rolling surf, he managed to grab a broken spar, and clutching it with all the stubbornness he had gained in fifteen years on Cape Cod, all the cussedness he had inherited from his grandmother, all the will he had learned from his father, all the life he had drawn from his mother, he rode the rising tide to the beach.
For a few moments, he lay exhausted at the wrack line, and then, above the pounding surf, came the sound of… cheering. He looked toward the low bluffs and recognized this as Head of the Meadow. Provincetowners had gotten here quickly from High Pole Hill. The people of Truro had turned out as well. Eyes were always watching for ships to founder, and
Somerset
was the biggest thing ever to hit the back shore.
There were hundreds of them lining the bluff to watch the death of the ship that had so long invested their coast.
The cheering grew louder as the day wore on and Captain Ourry tried to work his way off the bar. He threw over food crates and casks, which were carried to the beach, where the scavengers fought over them. He threw over cannons to lighten his load. He put out a longboat with rowers, but the waves swamped them and drowned the men, and the people bellowed and screamed over the steady roar of the day.
Their hatred, thought Sam, was greater than his own, with so little reason. From them the British had stolen corn and cattle; from him they had taken a father. He wrapped himself in a blanket that a charitable soul had given him and sank to his knees. He could no longer watch the dying ship. This was war, but he was bitterly sorry for those he had killed, even for Tom Dodd.
Then the tide lifted the
Somerset
off the bar and pounded her, bow first, onto the beach, as though she had been sailed there.
The screaming of orders had ceased on her quarterdeck. The cheering had faded on the beach. Only the thunder of surf and wind remained, like a living presence between the rebels and the shipwrecked men. HMS
Somerset
carried two hundred marines and sixty-four cannon. But because of her list, the starboard cannon could be brought to bear on nothing more than the sand, and the port cannon simply pointed down the beach.
“ ’Tis time to strike, Captain,” said Dr. Thayer.
Ourry’s hand was frozen on the hilt of his sword. His eyes were fixed on the sand beneath his ship.
“Damage, Mr. Speel?” he asked the mate.
“Starboard stove in. Port side battered. God knows if the keel’s in one piece.”
Ourry raised his chin as if to allow some invisible noose to be passed over his head. “She cannot be refloated, then, and fighting their militia is pointless.”
“The better part of valor, sir,” said Thayer.
“Valor, honor, principles…” Ourry looked at Thayer. “That Hilyard boy was on the main yard.”
“He went over when we hit the bar. He was trying to fix the broken halyards.”
“Perhaps.” Ourry gazed up at the Union Jack, now blowing out straight and strangely proud in the wind. “Strike.”
The flag fluttered down. On the beach, a great cheer exploded.
In the cable tier, Barmy Burt was laughing and crying at the same time. He sat in a pool of urine and stared at the thin shafts of light now cutting through the cracks in the hull.
Dr. Thayer unlocked him and helped him stand. “We’re goin’ ashore.”
“Are we ’ome?”
“Not exactly.”
“Yes. We’re ’ome. We’re in dear old, merry old, jolly old England, where Britannia rules the waves. We been chained and been throttled and damn near been drowned, and the captain, ’e’s made us all slaves. But we’re proud, yes, we are, of the bravery we’ve showed, in subduin’ them nasty old Yanks, and now all we ask is a soft friendly bed and the captain can kiss both me shanks!”
As Militia Captain John Otis would write, there were “riotous doings at the wreck” that day. The men of Provincetown and Truro divided the spoils, Provincetown taking a third and Truro two-thirds of everything from marlinespikes to bread casks to the brass fittings from Ourry’s cabin. A Truro man even tried to take possession of a North Carolina Negro who had joined the
Somerset
crew.
Sam sat in the sand and listened to their negotiations, democracy in action, while Ourry marched down the beach behind his crew, last of four hundred eighty survivors to leave the
Somerset
under guard of the local militia. Sam had won, yet was he drained of joy as surely as he had been purged of hatred. In a way, he felt as stranded as the great hulk now swarming with scavengers.
But he would soon enough find his bearings. Word reached Truro village that he had escaped, and word came quickly back that his mother had moved there to be near her husband’s grave and her son’s anchorage. She was staying at the home of Samson Rich, and she was now in labor.
Thus did she become the patient of the Cape’s new doctor, William Thayer, and his assistant, Mr. B. Burt.
Before that day was out, Sam stood in the borning room of a house on the Little Pamet and met his brother, Edward William Hilyard. With one hand, his mother held the infant to her breast, and with the other, she reached out to Sam.
He jammed his hands into his pockets and tried to keep the boy in him from crying. “I’m sorry. ’Twas my fault that we never saw the ambush that night.”
She twined her fingers in his hair. “God has a purpose for everything, son.”
The familiar sound of her soft French accent filled him with joy and sorrow both. He knelt at her bedside and pressed his face to her cheek.
x.
“This war is far from over.” Dr. Thayer stood outside with Sam. The booming gale had finally passed, and a quiet November cold was settling on the land. In the Rich cottage, women were preparing a meal, and the sound of their chatter was tonic to men who had been so long aboard ship.
“I done my part,” said Sam.
“A fact I’d not make light with. Should His Majesty be victorious, you may pay for your sabotage.”
Sam looked sharply at the doctor.
“That would be Ourry’s word for it,” Thayer said, “though others would call it an act of war. I considered what you did a great release. I could not have stood the ship another week, or I’d have drunk myself to my grave.”
“But now you’re a deserter.”
Thayer pretended to ignore this. The sun’s last rays were reaching up the little valley. The bay was going gray in the fading light. “What are we looking at? I’d best know, that I may become native quickly.”
“The Little Pamet River. To the left is Tom’s Hill. To the right, that’s Cornhill.”
A flight of geese came in and settled in the river.
“Cornhill…” mused Thayer, “
Cornhill. That’s
where your name comes from.”
“Where?”
“A book I once read, about this place and the Separatist settlers. It mentions Cornhill and goes on at great length about a man named Jack… Jack
Hilyard
! Ever since I heard your name, I’ve racked my brain over that.” Thayer laughed, like a man who had found a lost penny.
“What is this book?”
“I believe it’s the log of the ship that brought the Separatists a hundred and fifty years ago. The
Mayflower
.”
Sam tried to calm himself. “Where did you read it?”
“Doctors with a taste for the grape often end up aboard His Majesty’s ships. And they often are found, before that, in waterfront taverns.”
Comeuppance… The word began to echo again in Sam Hilyard’s head. Comeuppance… revenge. He drove it away.
“I once tended a young man who’d been beaten in a tavern brawl, the wastrel son of a Hertfordshire squire, he was. As I hailed from the same town, he invited me to spend time at his father’s estate. The squire took great pride in his library, which contained an ancient Bible, a Shakespeare Folio, and the log of the ship
Mayflower
.”
“Do you remember the name?”
“Of course. Bellamy.”
Down by the marsh, Burt was picking cattails. For the first time since Sam had met him, he was neither laughing nor muttering to himself. He was singing, singing his poems in a most pleasing voice. He was free, but Sam felt the past chaining him into another cable tier.
“Did this book speak of a family named Bigelow?”
“It sounds familiar. Though I must admit I was well filled with Madeira most of the time.” Thayer fixed his eyes on the horizon. “Terrible vice, the grape. Destroys a man’s brain, then his gut. Perhaps here I can start anew, ’fore it destroys me.”
Comeuppance… Sam heard his grandmother’s word again, mingling with the call of the gulls. The book of history was in a town called Wheathampstead, Hertfordshire, in the hands of a family called Bellamy. What would his grandmother want him to do?
Then he heard the cry of his baby brother. He had had enough of comeuppance. He wanted to feel his mother’s love. And the love of a spirited Cape Cod girl, exiled now in Nova Scotia. How would comeuppance win her, when comeuppance would bring her family low?
July 14
“Get out of bed,” said the voice on the other end of the line.
“George?”
“The
Somerset
is out.”
“It’s six-thirty.”
“Bring Keith and Sarah over to Head of the Meadow. They’ll see something they’ll never forget.”
It had happened before, most recently in 1973. The sea got to raging, moved out a few truckloads of sand, and exposed the remnants of a mighty warship. Then the tide surged back to bury her again.
Must have been the thunderstorms that did it this time. All night the squalls gusted through. Geoff slept fitfully. Janice tossed beside him in the strobing light. But if either of them thought about a little middle-of-the night tumble to make them both sleep better, they didn’t do a thing about it.
Now the sun slanted through the trees, and the mist rose from the wet pavement, making the morning feel as though it came from out of the past, fresh and unsullied. And Geoff took his son adventuring. In Boston he had been one of those seven-to-seven fathers—gone before the kids were up and out past their bedtime. It was one of life’s lousy ironies that most people’s work demanded the biggest piece of their time just when their kids needed them most. On Cape Cod, Geoff thought he could give his kids what they needed and keep working, too. But lately he hadn’t given them a thing.
A promise of doughnuts did more to get Keith into the car than the chance to see the
Somerset
. Sarah chose to sleep in. “Can I buy two chocolates, just for myself?”
“Sarah likes chocolate, too.”
“Yeah, but she didn’t come.”
“She didn’t care about an old British warship. That’s guy stuff. But we’ll get her a chocolate. Just because we love her.”
Keith shrugged. He could be convinced. “So what kind of doughnut does Mom like?”
“Butter crunch.”
“Then we’ll get one of them, too. We love her, too.”
“Yeah.” But she was making it more difficult.
The road cut across the Little Pamet Marsh, rose out of the valley, and passed the ramshackle Rich house, an old Cape that always got Geoff to wondering what life had been like when the Truro population was a few hundred and ships like the
Somerset
marauded the coast.
At Head of the Meadow Beach a small crowd had gathered, mostly surf fishermen and beachcombers like George.
“Where’s the ship?” asked Keith. “You said it was as big as the
Constitution
.”
“It was, once.” Geoff laughed. “But it was stripped, then burned so people could get the metal out of it, like nails and spikes. Then the waves pounded on it.”
It was pretty disappointing, actually—a thirty-foot piece of keel, a few charred ribs sticking out of the sand, and the sparkling blue Atlantic ignoring it altogether.
George was sweeping around the ribs with his metal detector. When he saw them, he shouted, “ ‘The annals of this voracious beach! who could write them unless it were a shipwrecked sailor?’ ”
“You’ve been reading Thoreau again,” said Geoff.
The detector beeped. George told Keith to dig. The boy hesitated a moment, as though something in the sand might bite him, then he pulled out… a pop top.
“The British knew about boating safety,” said an old man photographing the remains. “No glass beer bottles on the boat.”
George laughed at that, and the old man introduced himself as Thomas Digges, professor emeritus of history, Dartmouth College. He was very tall, with very white hair and a sun-dried face. “I’m something of an expert on the
Somerset
.”