The Hearth and Eagle (2 page)

His wife pumped water into the sink and the pewter plates rattled against the spout. “He came to warn when our men’re in danger, same as he always did. You know naught about it. You’re a landsman.”

“I’m a Marbleheader the same as you. Eight generations of Honeywoods have lived in this house. Don’t forget that, Susan.”

The woman’s massive shoulders twitched. “I’m not like to—with you dinging at it day in, day out.”

The child stared anxiously from one to the other. Now Ma was getting angry again. Not on account of the Honeywoods exactly—Ma was a Dolliber and her family had been here as long as any—but it was because Pa—

Hesper went to her mother and tugged at her skirt. “I wish the boys
was
here at home, Ma—” she said, trying to fill the need and forestall the renewed attack.

Susan frowned. “Well, it wouldn’t be fitting if they was. Men must go far to work and fight—and the women must bear it.
Most
men,” she added looking at Roger.

The child’s hand dropped. Her impulse had done no good. Pa’s face had its cold, shut look. He walked back to his room, and the books and the pages and pages of writing that he never talked to people about. They heard the bolt slide in the door.

Susan trod around the kitchen, placing the pewter dishes behind their racks in the old built-in dresser, adding water to the beanpot in the brick oven, scattering the embers in the great fireplace.

“Go to bed,” she said to Hesper, who had long been expecting this command, and could measure by its tardiness the extent of her mother’s preoccupation. She obediently picked up the candle her mother had lighted. It flickered wildly in the drafts that blew down the chimney and from under the door.

“Here, give it me. You’ll burn the house down.” The big middle-aged woman and the small red-haired girl mounted the stairs. Susan waited until the child stood in her long cotton nightgown.

“Say your prayers.”

The child knelt by her cot. “Now I lay me down to sleep—” and atthe end she added timidly, “Please dear God, keep Tom and Willy safe.” And looked up to her mother for approval.

By the guttering light she saw the grim face above her soften, “Amen,” said the woman, and Hesper crept into bed comforted. Her mother bent over with a rare caress, and as she did so they heard a muffled thud below, and the house trembled a little.

“What is it—Ma!” cried the child struggling up again. Susan went to the window and pressed her face against the small panes.

“It’s the sea,” she said. “The water’s over the Front.” Hesper crowded to the window beside her mother; together they watched the heaving blackness outside. There was no lane, nor yard; the thin film of shiny blackness lapped up to the great chestnut tree before the house, showing here and there the jagged points of rocks pushed up from the Cove. “Ma, what’ll it do—” whispered Hesper. The woman lifted the child and put her into bed.

“The house’ll stand,” she said. “Go to sleep.” And Hesper knew instant security. Ma was always right. Ma was strong. Strong as the house that had been here so long. Gran was strong too—even when she cried and wanted to be rocked, you felt it wasn’t really her, it was as if she was making believe. And Pa—he wasn’t strong, but he had Ma and Gran and the house—and me too, she thought.

All night the storm blew, and sometimes waves swirled around the rock foundation of the house and poured into the cellar, but Hesper slept.

It was three weeks before they got the news and for Hesper the night of the storm was only a shadowy memory. Driftwood had been gathered, rocks rolled off the road, and seaweed thrown back to sea. The small craft which had been blown high on shore and on the causeway to the neck had been salvaged. At the Honeywood home no sign of the storm remained, except the scar on the big chestnut tree where the limb blew off.

The news came to the Honeywoods first. A boy flew into the taproom crying that a schooner had been sighted off Halfway Rock. Zeke Darling, the lighthouse keeper, had sent word it looked like John Chadwick’s
Hero.

Susan shut the taproom, threw a shawl over her shoulders and ran to the nearest high ground, on the ramparts of ruined Fort Sewall. She paid no attention to Hesper, who trotted after her, much interested. All over town people were hurrying to vantage points, up to the lookout on the Burial Hill, and crowding up the steeple on the Old North. Silently the women and children watched the schooner round the Point of the Neck and glide into the Great Harbor. Some of the children started to cheer, greeting this vanguard of the overdue fleet in the traditional manner. But there was no answering cheer from the men on board. The tiny figures on the deck seemed to move about in a listless and mechanical way.

Susan made a sound under her breath and began to walk down the path. Hesper looked up at her curiously but did not dare speak. They threaded their way around the fish flakes at Fort Beach, and up Front Street past home, and then Lovis Cove and Goodwin’s Head, and at each step others joined them, silent shawled women like Susan, excited children held in check by the tension of their elders. They reached Appleton’s wharf as the
Hero
made fast. No one spoke as Captain Chadwick walked solemnly down the plank, the plod of his heavy sea boots thumping like hammer strokes in the stillness.

“It’s bad,” he said, shaking his head and not looking at anyone. “Tor-rible bad.” Above his beard his face was gray-white as a cod’s belly.

The crowd stayed silent another minute, then Susan pressed forward into the empty space near the Captain.

“How many’re lost?” she asked quietly, as she had been quiet since the night of the storm.

The skipper pulled off his sou’wester. “Eleven vessels I know of, ma’am. All hands.”

“The
Liberty?”

He bowed his head. “I saw her go down not half a mile away. We could do nothing. Our own mains’l went like a tar-rn pocket han’kerchief.”

Susan stepped back, and others filled her place. The air grew harsh with despairing questions. The
Sabine,
the
Pacific,
the
Trio,
the
Warrior
—the agonizing list grew. Sixty-five men and boys had been lost. Scarce a home in Marblehead that had no kin amongst the drowned, and from the crowd behind, a woman’s voice raised in a long moaning wail.

Susan turned and pushed her way back through the people. Hesper followed close. She was awed and excited. Ma had been right. The great storm had got the fishing fleet, and Tom and Willy. She felt no special sorrow. Her brothers had been big men of sixteen and eighteen, away fishing half the year, and with no time for her when they were home. Cousin Tom Dolliber had been on the
Liberty
too. So he was gone with the others.

Hesper followed along behind her mother filled with a sense of importance and drama. By Lovis Cove they met her father hurrying towards them, his thin face anxious, his vague eyes peering into their faces.

“What is it, Susan? Why didn’t you tell me there was news?”

The child watched them nervously expecting her mother’s ready anger, because Pa had somehow failed again. But Susan was even quieter than she had been on the wharf. She laid her hand on her husband’s arm. “Come back home, dear.”

He gave her a startled, uncertain look, as surprised by this gentleness as Hesper was. They moved away from the child, and though Susan’s hand still rested on her husband’s arm it was as though he leaned on her, his long body drooping over the broad figure beside him.

Hesper trailed after them. She paused at Fort Beach a moment to watch a sea gull catch a fish, and felt a rough hand on her hair, and a painful tug.

“Don’t—” she cried, whirling around, tears smarting her eyes. Two boys had crept up behind her, Johnnie Peach and Nathan Cubby. It was the latter who had pulled her hair, and he now began to caper around her jeering—“Gnaw your bacon, gnaw your bacon—little Fire-top’s head is achin’.”

Nat was a skinny boy of eleven with watery yellow eyes and a sharp nose. Already Hesper was used to being teased about her flaming red hair, but she had not yet learned any defense. She shrank into herself and tried to keep the tears from rolling out of her eyes.

“Oh, let her be,” said Johnnie, carelessly. “She’s just a little kid.”

He was a year younger than Nat, a handsome boy with curly dark hair. He shied a stone at the water and watched it skip.

“What for you’re blubberin’—Fire-top?” taunted Nat coming closer. “Blubberin’ cause your head’s on fire?” He made another grab at her hair.

Hesper ducked. “I’m crying ’cause Tom and Willy’s gone down with the fleet—” she wailed.

Johnnie turned. He raised his arm and struck down Nat’s outstretched hand. “That’s so—” he said. “They was on the
Liberty.
My uncle’s lost too, on the
Clinton.
Reason enough to cry without you roilin’ her.”

“Oh, whip!” said Nat contemptuously, using an obscene Marblehead expletive. “I betcha my Pa’s lost too. Leastways he hasn’t come in from the spring fare yet. Ma, I think she’s give him up.”

Young as Hesper was, she was conscious of an obliquity in Nat, and that his speech about his father sprang from something stranger than bravado or the callousness of childhood. Though he was of normal height for his age he had a hunched and wizened look, and maliciousbrooding eyes. He reminded her of a picture of an evil dwarf in the Grimm’s
Fairy Tales
her father had given her.

“You shouldn’t talk like that—” said Johnnie severely, “and you shouldn’t say ‘whip’ front of a little lass. Run along home, Fire-top.”

Hesper caught her underlip with her teeth, though she didn’t mind the hated nickname from Johnnie. She looked at him adoringly, but the two boys had lost interest in her. They had sighted Peter Union’s dory pulling around the rocks to his landing, and they clambered down to the beach to see what luck the fisherman had had.

Hesper wiped her face on a corner of her white muslin pinafore, threw the trailing ends of her shawl over her shoulders in a gesture duplicating her mother’s, and continued homeward. The old house awaited her, and she thought as she often had when approaching it from the water side that it looked like a great friendly mama cat. It’s unpainted clapboards had weathered through two centuries to a tawny silver, and the huge chimneys, one on the old wing, one on the new, stuck up like ears. And the inn sign above the taproom door swung back and forth like the cat’s tongue. There had once been painted emblems on the sign, a pair of andirons and a flying bird above the letters “The Hearth and Eagle,” but they had all faded into a rusty red blur.

Hesper, moved by a feeling of special solemnity, went through the east door under the sign instead of around to the kitchen entrance as usual. The taproom door was closed, but she could hear her mother’s voice, slow and thick with long pauses. So Ma and Pa were shut in there. Hesper wandered into the kitchen. It was still warm with the sunlight from the windows over the sink, but there were clouds building, and the wind rising on the harbor.

Beside a small bright fire in the great hearth, Gran sat huddled in her Boston rocking chair. She was wrapped in fleecy gray shawls and she looked like a tiny old seagull. Her sharp black eyes were sea-gull eyes too. “What’s Roger doin’ in the taproom with Susan?” she asked querulously when she saw Hesper. “And why’d he run out before?” Her voice was high and thin, but on a good day like this it had a snap to it.

“There’s been a tor-rible thing happen to the fleet,” said Hesper importantly, imitating Cap’n Chadwick. “Tom and Willy aren’t never coming back. Ma’s telling Pa.”

The old woman’s wrinkled eyelids hooded her eyes. She stopped rocking. “They ain’t never cornin’ back?” she repeated, seeming to consider. Her eyes opened and stared unseeing at the child. Her mouthdrew itself into a pucker. “No more did Richard. He didn’t come back.” She shook her head. Her gaze slipped around the bright kitchen to rest on the hooked rug by the entry. “Right there I stood when I last saw Richard. I hooked that rug myself. ‘Ship and sunset’ we called it.”

Hesper stared at the rug on which she had walked a thousand times. “It’s real pretty,” she said, then drew in her breath. There was a queer noise from the taproom. A broken cluttered sound as if someone was crying, and mixed with it Ma’s voice, firm and comforting. Pa was crying? thought the child in amazement, when he hadn’t seemed worried at all about Tom and Willy before. The sounds frightened her, and she puzzled over them until she found the answer. It wasn’t that Pa didn’t feel, it was that he lived so far away he didn’t believe in real things, and when they happened he didn’t know what to do, except turn to Ma, and let her comfort him.

Old Sarah Honeywood did not hear the sounds from the taproom. She kept on staring at the rug, and the misty present dissolved into the vivid emotion of seventy years ago, emotion she had thought long outrun, and yet it was still strong enough to rush forward again and overpower the changed body and the dim mind.

She saw Richard as he had stood that July day, boyish and handsome in his regimentals. The “handsomest man in Essex County,” she had said that herself—that long-forgotten Sally Hathaway when Richard first came a-wooing to her father’s house in Cunny Lane. She had said it again on the rug, her arms around his neck, the tears running down her face on to her red linsey-woolsey. With the memory of the red linsey-woolsey the scene grew sharper and brighter. From outside she heard the shouts of the other men in Glover’s regiment. Orders had just come from General Washington, saying the Marbleheaders must proceed to New York. Already half of them had sailed over to Beverley. Richard must hurry, yet she clung to him begging and sobbing. He hadn’t wanted to leave her, an eight-months bride, and carrying his child. Yet he had been in high spirits.

“Us Marbleheaders’ll show the stinking redcoats how to fight, show the rest of them quiddling farmers too from back country. And so be it they’ve water down around New York, we’ll show ’em what a boat’s for too.” He had said that even while he kissed her again, and pulled her clinging hands down from his neck.

“Fare ye well, Sally lass—I’ll be back by snowfall.”