Sarah Bishop (2 page)

"It can't be Old Lady Ryder," I said, joking, "because she's off on a trip to New York City."

Some of the people in the village of Mott's Corner still believed in witches. They thought that Mrs. Ryder, who lived by herself down by the pond with only a big black cat for company, was one of the leading witches.

"No, it's somebody who knows machinery," Mr. Purdy said. "I'll find out. I'm going to sit here tonight with a gun in my lap. At the first sign of a prowler, I'll blast away."

Mr. Purdy gave me a quick look that made me think that he believed my father was the prowler and that he wanted me to carry the warning home.

Under the seat was a jar of wild blackberry jam that I had planned to give Mr. Purdy as a present. But I didn't. I picked up the reins and drove away at a clip. As I slowed down for the stream, he yelled after me, "Don't forget to return the sack. It's muslin."

T
HE RAIN HAD
blown away by the time I got home and unloaded the half-full sack of meal that Purdy had groaned over so much. Father was at his bench in the barn, working on the grandfather clock that old Mrs. Ryder had brought in when she went across the river to New York City to visit her son.

In England, before we came to America, we had lived on a farm and raised a few sheep and planted potatoes one year and flax the next. Father was a hard worker and we always did well, until we had three bad years, one after the other. Then we fell behind in our rent and got dispossessed and had to move off the farm and into Midhurst village.

Father hired out as a handyman, fixing this and that, mending silverware and things like clocks. He liked this work, but my mother missed the farm. She complained most every night when we sat down to supper about how she hated village life.

One day she heard from our preacher, Mr. Brandon Carroll, who had gone to America and come back to do some recruiting, how land was inexpensive in a place called Long Island. And how you could grow anything
on the land and how there was always a good market for what you raised because the city of New York was nearby, just across the river.

It was the seventeenth of March when she heard this news from the preacher. By the end of the month we were on a ship that was sailing for America.

Now we were farming again, and Father was doing odd jobs to make ends meet, things like fixing Old Lady Ryder's clock, until the farm earned enough to pay back the money we had borrowed.

I went in the house and brought out a bowl of fish chowder, sweet pickles I had made early in the summer, and fresh bread I had baked that morning. I told Father how Mr. Purdy's mill had stopped running at midnight three nights in a row and started up again at daylight. How in a joke I had said that it was the Old Lady Ryder who had caused the trouble.

"Mr. Purdy said that he was going to wait tonight with a gun and blast anyone he saw moving around. He looked at me sharp when he said it, as if he wanted me to carry a warning."

Father laughed. "It isn't me and it isn't Mrs. Ryder. It may be Quarme. From what I've seen, he's off in the head. He likely stops the mill at midnight and starts it up again at dawn just to keep from working the long hours that Purdy asks of his millhands."

"Likely. Mr. Purdy also sent another warning." I told my father that he didn't want to let us have credit. But
more than that, he was grudging and gave us only half a sack. "He said that there were three of us now who had to eat, but later maybe there'd be less than three."

Father had a spoonful of chowder to his mouth. He put it back in the bowl and laid his spoon down. He walked over to the door and glanced toward the mill. Then he slammed the door and lit a lantern and hung it up to see by, now that he'd shut the sun out. He didn't say anything. Just stood there letting his chowder get cold and staring at the floor.

"Maybe Mr. Purdy didn't mean it," I said. "Maybe he only means to scare you into thinking about the King the way he does."

"He means to scare me all right. He's been at it for months now, ever since the first of summer. But he hasn't, Sarah. It's the crowd that hangs around him and listens to his rantings that scares me—Hubert Hines, the surveyor; Burton, the drayman; the post rider, John Seldon, who spreads gossip like the pox from here to Boston and back. And also Birdsall. He's the worst of them."

"Mr. Purdy wanted to know why we haven't enough money to pay for a bag of meal when you do tinkering for people and get paid for it. I wonder, too, sometimes. Why we are so poor in money that I have to ask for credit every week." I grew bolder. "Perhaps you bury it in the ground somewhere."

"Perhaps I do."

I wasn't surprised. I'd had suspicions for a long time that he was hiding money.

"Been burying it since early summer," Father admitted. "Since Purdy first threatened me, and Birdsall began to ride."

"Shouldn't I know where it is, just in case?"

"No, if you knew and they came looking for it, Birdsall and his gang, then you'd be bound to tell them."

"I never would."

"You don't know what you'd do. The other day, over at Hempstead, Birdsall broke in on Seth Parsons and his wife and asked them for silverware he knew the Parsonses owned. Parsons said they'd sold it. Birdsall's men clouted him over the head and knocked him unconscious. He died two days later. Mrs. Parsons they hung up by her thumbs until she told..."

"No matter what, I'd never tell."

"You'd be foolish. Valuables aren't worth your life. I'm not going to say where I hid them. Nobody knows but me. And it's not money. It's silverware."

"Silverware?"

"Yes."

Father began to eat his chowder and said no more. When he was through eating, he opened the door. He stood for a long time gazing toward Purdy's mill, at the fast-running stream and the wheel turning.

Father was dark-skinned and his hair was soot-black and long. He wore it in a club tied with a leather string.
He looked like an Indian. Many people took him for an Indian. Sometimes I felt that he wished he'd been born an Indian and lived in the wilderness and could travel about from place to place when the seasons changed.

He had the courage of an Indian, too; the courage to stand up to Purdy and Birdsall. He could have kept his thoughts to himself. He could have said that he hated King George. Or just kept quiet, like most of the people we knew.

F
ATHER ATE HIS
food and went back to work on Mrs. Ryder's grandfather clock, which had something wrong with its pendulum. He laid it out on his bench and did some soldering and put it back in the case and gave it a little nudge.

The pendulum had just begun to move when my brother, Chad, came into the barn. With him was a skinny young man who lived on a farm on the other side of Purdy's mill. They both had been drinking, from all that I could tell.

Father was strict about young men drinking, so I was surprised that Chad would walk right in and stand up
bold in front of him, even if he had the help of skinny David Whitlock, who was a student and very religious.

"Good morning, Mr. Bishop," David Whitlock said.

"Good morning, Father," Chad said.

They spoke this greeting at the same time and both bowed stiffly from the waist. Now I was certain that they'd been drinking.

"Chad, why aren't you at work?" my father asked sharply. "The day's only half over."

Chad and David glanced at each other and grinned, as if they were sharing a momentous secret. Then they clutched each other like long-lost friends.

I noticed that Chad had a pamphlet in his hand that had printing on its gray, dog-eared cover, something about
Common Sense
by someone called Thomas Paine.

Father noticed the pamphlet, too. "How did you come upon that pack of windy nonsense?" he demanded.

Chad and David were still grinning. They grew serious of a sudden.

David said, "Since you call the writing nonsense, I doubt, sir, that you have read it."

Father snorted. "I need not read it. I have heard it mouthed often enough. The colonies are English by birth. They enjoy English traditions and English law."

Young Whitlock took the pamphlet from Chad, fixed his thick, eight-sided spectacles upon his nose, and read: "We may as well assert that because a child has thrived upon milk, that it is never to have meat, or that the first
twenty years of our lives is to become a precedent for the next twenty."

"But England is our parent country," my father said.

David steadied himself on his skinny legs, turned a page, and continued: "Then the more shame upon her conduct. Even brutes do not devour their young nor savages make war upon their families."

He wet his thumb, steadied himself once again. "Europe, and not England," he said, quoting Mr. Paine, "is the parent country of America. This New World has been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe."

David gave the pamphlet back to Chad and said from memory, moving his arms and speaking like an orator, "Hither have they fled from every part of Europe ... And the same tyranny which drove the first immigrants from home, pursues their descendants still."

The boys stood together in the doorway, with the hot sun pouring down, David still posing like an orator, Chad clutching his dog-eared pamphlet. They breathed out strong odors of rum.

Father's expression had not changed through all of David Whitlock's recitations. I doubt that he had heard them. Without a word, he walked over and took the pamphlet from Chad as if he planned to read it. Instead, he tore it into pieces and threw the pieces on the floor.

Chad said nothing. He glanced at David. There was a long silence. Then David Whitlock stepped forward
and gave a salute as if he were a soldier in the militia.

"Sir," he said to Father, who had gone back to his bench, "we have this day signed papers of enlistment."

"We leave tonight for Brooklyn Fort," Chad burst out.

Father put down the hammer he was getting ready to use and slowly turned around. "You what?"

"We have enlisted," Chad said. "We are soldiers in the militia, and we shall fight the King until he surrenders."

I don't think that Chad expected Father to clasp him to his bosom at this news, considering what Father had done to the pamphlet, but I am certain that he didn't expect what did happen.

"Fool that you are," Father said. He said it again and in three long strides crossed to the doorway and there fetched Chad a cuff on the ear.

My brother opened his mouth to say something but made only a small noise. David Whitlock backed away, acting as if he thought that his turn might come next.

"You'll get more than that," Father shouted. "The King's men won't bother to box your ears. They'll fill your skin full of hot lead."

David Whitlock spoke up bravely. "The King's men are on the run, sir. They have fled from Boston. It is said that they have scurried off to Nova Scotia."

"They will be back one of these days," Father said. "And you'll be the worse for it. King George has the finest troops in the world. And the finest ships. Hundreds of ships."

There was a short silence while David Whitlock was thinking up a reply. Chad mumbled a word or two that didn't make much sense. With his long hair tumbled in his eyes and his red face, he didn't look much like a soldier. I asked if there wasn't something I could fix him to eat.

"Something to carry along, Chad. Like bread and cheese and some milk?"

He shook his head. "The army will supply me."

"More likely you'll live off the country," Father said. "Stealing goats and chickens and fruit from law-abiding farmers. Burning their barns down if they refuse, as they've been doing up in Boston and other places."

"The sergeant told me that I'd be in the commissary," Chad said. "Since I've been working in the kitchen up at the Lion and Lamb. I'll ride in a wagon stuffed with food and I'll have plenty of it to eat."

"Chances are," Father said, "that you'll not ride so much as you'll walk. And be hungry more than you're not. And freeze your tail."

Chad peered at his friend David Whitlock for help.

"We signed up for only six months," David said.

"Long enough," Father replied, "to have your skulls split. By the Hessians, probably. YouVe heard of them. They're professional soldiers. Mercenaries, they're called. Come from Germany. The fiercest fighters in the world."

Old Lady Ryder's clock cleared its throat and struck the hour of one.

David Whitlock glanced at the clock through his thick glasses, which made his eyes look twice as big as they really were. He grasped my brother's arm and informed him that it was past time to be on their way.

Chad was eyeing the clumsy musket that Father hunted wild fowl with. He walked over and picked it up and made a sighting on an imaginary foe.

"I need a weapon," he said. "I'll return it when my enlistment's over. If you don't mind, sir."

"I do mind," Father replied. "It will kill no mother's son in this barbarous war. Put it down."

Chad did as he was told. There were tears in his eyes. I ran into the house to get him a loaf of bread to take along, but when I came back he was gone.

I watched the boys cross the cornfield, marching like soldiers. At the stream Chad stopped and waved. I waved back. Father shouted, "We'll pray for you, son."

And we did pray right there, kneeling on the stone floor while the boys came to the rise near Purdy's mill and disappeared among the trees.

That night I lay awake and thought about Chad. I wondered if he'd had anything to eat. I'd cooked his favorite dishes, succotash and Indian pudding, for supper, and he wasn't there to eat them. I wondered, too, where he would sleep. Most likely on the ground. He had a soft mattress on his bed in the attic. It was stuffed with duck feathers.

I thought about the pamphlet that Father had torn up
and thrown on the floor. I remembered some of the words David Whitlock had recited: "This New World has been the asylum for the persecuted..."

We had not fled from persecution, but we had been dispossessed of our farm and its belongings, our sheep, our plough, our scythe and butter churn. Still, it wasn't the King's fault that we lost everything. It was the law's fault.