The Last Supper: And Other Stories (15 page)

“Working?”

“On and off, Sam. If the ships don't sail, you don't need rope, and that's the mighty hell of it.”

“Sure, Reuben.” It wasn't just that he seemed to feel for you, he did feel for you. “Who takes the ships from the port—they or us? But I tell you, there are other uses for a prime piece of cordage. A mill turns on rope, and you can pull a cannon with a rope harness—and, do you know, I have even heard it said that a man can hang on the end of a rope?” It came as a question, and questioningly the pale gray eyes regarded you, the big, square face gently curious, the big square nose inquiring rather than aggressive. Only the mouth was round and full and sensitive as well as sensuous, and knowing.…

Then in his mind's eye, Reuben Dover saw more, for he passed the day with Sam Adams and walked on to the Old Wharf, where the ships lay in every stage of construction, some with just ribs and keel, like herrings picked clean, some with flesh over the ribs, and some all decked and ready for the launching. One year merged with another, and as he dreamed, looking into the flames, he put the years together haphazardly, the good ones with the bad ones, taking from them what he wanted. So it was that when he came to the shipyards, they hummed with work, and men put down their hammers, saws and planes to wave to him and ask him how it went in the walks.

Rope to rig them, cloth to sail them, food to stock them and men to man them. Then they would dance over the waves like girls to their lovers and across the whole world the yellow folk and the brown folk and the black folk would see the colors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

He shook himself awake, wiping the, moisture from his eyes, and muttering, “He should a perished then, and what good was it for him to go on living, when I met up with one who had seen him in Boston, sitting by the window of his house, his spittle dripping and his hands so palsy they couldn't hold—and never a word of sense out of him, except when you called him a Jacobin, and then the old pride flowed back into him for a minute, God granting him that——”

“Who?” the glass blower asked.

“Why the old man, Sam, who else? He lived a proper life,” Reuben said. “He did what he had to do and what he intended to do. And when he had finished, he had finished, that's all.”

“And when was that?” came gently.

“To put your finger on it? As a moment? You know, I think I could do it—and I'll tell you of it, too, word by word. It was in 'seventy-five, and he was already by then fifty-three years old—or was it fifty-four? Well, I don't know and it don't matter, does it? There he was, anyway, riding his horse across the ploughed fields of Andy Simmons——”

“When was that, Reuben?” the glass blower inquired, for Reuben Dover was nodding over his rum as he spoke, tending to wander and live through the scene himself, without much thought for the others.

“I told you in 'seventy-five.”

“But when? On what side of the year?”

“I told you in April!” Reuben shouted, sitting bolt upright, but the Dutch farmer wagged an uncertain finger at him and said: “Now you did not—not at all.”

“And when would it be but in April?” He looked from face to face, and then he smiled, the wrinkles spreading all over his dry, leathery features. The landlady came up then, pulling a stool alongside his chair, and once again Reuben noticed what a fine figure of a woman she was, a ripe plum with clothes like the peel, for all of her years.

“Shouting,” she said. Her voice was deep and filled with honey, but maybe Reuben was drunk and a woman's voice would be like that the way he felt now.

“In April, I told them,” he said.

“Yes—and look at the time.” She pointed to the tall clock in the corner, and the hands were coming together for midnight. “Would you burn every stick of wood I have?” she wanted to know.

“And how would you have us keep out the chill, woman?” the glass blower wanted to know.

“There are other ways,” she answered, smiling at Reuben, who smiled back at her, just as graciously.

“Time enough,” he said. The clock began to strike, and he cocked his head, and then they all listened until the twelve chimes had sounded out. “I'll cut you wood in the morning. I'll cut you a cord and stack it up as high as your nose. Now have a drink with us and I'll tell you about that April.”

She poured rum from a pitcher, a tot for herself too, and sat on the stool, stroking a cat that cuddled in her lap. She hummed a little, the soft sound of a country dance, which Reuben didn't mind at all. It made a sound together with the roar of the blaze, and he wet his throat and told about that sweet April morning, with the sun coming up all red and clean in the east, and the crows flying and cawing, and the beads of dew all over the fields.

“It could have been yesterday,” he said, and they nodded, all of them being old enough to know how time makes its way. “It could have been yesterday, and I had a place three miles from Lexington, south over east, where there used to be a stone mealy mill——” But they didn't know the land, being New York bred, and he said, “Well, there it was anyway, and I had a rotten few acres where you broke your plough on the rocks, so when I heard that shooting begin, like frozen twigs snapping, I say to myself, there it is, Reuben, and time enough too. Here's up and off and something doing, and I'll leave ploughing to them as wants it. That's what I said to myself, and I pulled on my britches. What are you up to? my wife says. What am I up to? My land, I'm up to making something and making it prime. Prime. So I took down my gun, a handsome musket of the French make, and I filled my pockets with ball and I took me a bottle of powder, and out I went—with her shouting after me that I hadn't heard the end of it yet——” He chuckled to himself over the memory. “Hadn't heard the end of it yet——”

“Where you at now, Reuben?” the glass blower demanded. “You started out with Samuel.”

“And I'll be at him. He comes along. He comes along with that son of a bitch, John Hancock, the two of them riding hell for leather until Samuel sees me.”

“What?”

“Why don't you keep your ears cocked? I told you before he came across the fresh ploughed field of Andy Simmons. Never was much of a rider, either, if the truth be told, just hanging onto the saddle and glad enough to pull up when he sees me. Come along, Hancock says to him, and Samuel answers, What do you mean, come along? This here's an old friend of mine, Reuben Dover. Then he says to me, a good day to you, Reuben; and I say, Good morning to you, Samuel, and what was all that commotion I heard?”

“Just like that?” the Dutch farmer grinned, slapping his knee.

“Just like that.”

The landlady smiled her warm smile and remarked, “I never known one yet connected with that war that wasn't the biggest liar in the nation.”

“All right now,” Reuben answered her patiently. “What is a lie and what ain't a lie? Twenty-eight years ago, that was, and the man who says he remembers this and that was said, literal, why he just talks big. Nobody remembers that way, and also it's proper a thing should ripen a little, the way a good wine does, and while it's a ripening, you want a little coloring, the way a painter does, and that's proper—wholly proper.”

“Wholly proper,” the glass blower agreed. “What I seen, with summer marches and winter camps, and suffering until you wouldn't know blood from tears, my children won't never see—and for their kids, by God, maybe they won't never hear of it even; for what are they saying already of old Samuel but that he was just a dirty and cantankerous old man? What we seen, it was just normal for then, but it ain't normal for now, and you got to dress it a little.”

“Just a little,” Reuben defended himself. “But I tell you I remember that morning just like yesterday, and when I ask what it is with all that snapping and crackling, the old man says, gunfire, lad, gunfire. It's gone and happened, he says, and the dead are stretched out on the green grass in the most unholy way, and there's going to be a terrible anger all over the land. That's what he says, him who brewed the anger himself for fifteen years—And I brewed a little of it too,” Reuben nodded.

“But he was going the other way,” the landlady reminded him.

“Sure, and I said to him, How is it, Samuel? Well, he said, I made it, and I'm off to tell the Congress a little about it. So I asked him, You going to miss the fighting? Miss it, he says, why there's going to be a bellyful for everyone, and I won't miss none of it! It ain't finishing, it's starting. So I waved him goodby, him and Hancock—who I never liked—and I ran North and found them at the bridge.…”

“Was you at the bridge?” the Dutch farmer asked.

“I was. I was that,” Reuben whispered. “In at the first, and in at the last.”

“Time for bed,” the landlady said.

“You seen him again?” the glass blower wanted to know.

“I never seen him again, may he rest in peace. That's why I say, he could have died then. A man should know the proper time for packing his things and going off.”

“A fine way to talk!” the landlady snorted. “Such a lot of talk, and where does it get to? A fine thing. Now go home—go home now,” she said to the glass blower and the Dutch farmer. She bustled around them like a big hen and then she let them out of the door. Only Reuben Dover was left, he and the cat; the cat had curled up on a warm stone of the hearth, and Reuben Dover sat with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his palms, looking at the fire. Perhaps ten minutes went by while the landlady made things fast for the night, and during that time, Reuben examined the past in the flames with a growing sadness. It was true, he reflected, that life was a moment; it came and it went, and the great treasure of youth was gone from you even before you made a full acquaintance of it. Then you filled yourself full of rum to loosen the strings that tied up your memory, but you never talked what you thought, and the rare goodness and courage of those you had known defied you. You babbled and that was all.

By the time Reuben Dover reached Albany, he had already come to the realization that he would not continue on to Boston, that he would not stand over Samuel Adam's grave and pay his respects, that he would not ship out in a square rigger for all the youthful and wonderful places of the world—but that he would go back to his farm and accept the scolding of his wife and the pitying looks of his children, and that he would go to church and listen to the pastor's sermons on the Godless, and he himself would lock his own godlessness within him. He realized that youth is for the young and that youth is a land no one ever revisits. He realized that this journey upon which he had embarked so lightheartedly was a strange contradiction in itself, for more than a journey to do homage to anyone, it was a desperate and rather pathetic search for those things which had animated him so long ago; and he also realized that an old man could not solve the essence of a betrayal so enormous.

A number of things brought him to these realizations. Only the two men he had spent that first night talking to were interested in either him or Samuel Adams. In places where he stopped to eat or sleep thereafter, he was a bore, a tiresome old man. Twice he was roundly insulted, and at Cohoes, where he announced himself a Jacobin, a glass of beer was flung in his face, and when he fought back, a blow in the head laid him out flat. At Cohoes, too, the Merchant's Association had a Jacobin hanging in permanent effigy and now a card was put on his neck naming him Sam Adams; and after his beating, Reuben lacked the courage to tear it down and despised himself for that lack of courage. At Albany, a newspaper carried a story entitled: “An Intimate Exposure of the Frauds and Thieveries of the Late but Not Lamented Samuel Adams.” And these were just a sampling of many small but telling incidents. Yet even all of these together did not explain the bitter sadness of Reuben Dover, which he later entered in his journal in this fashion:

“I take this opportunity (he wrote) having taken no other, of paying my own tribute to my olden Comrade, Samuel Adams, may he rest in peace and without disturbance. For I have set out on a long journey to make some gesture to him, yet never completed that journey at all. My intent was to go to Boston, but no farther came I than Albany. Never finding along the way respect or consideration for the virtues I knew and labored for, I have no heart to continue more but will return now to my home.

“I must take note of the way this nation has changed, so that the Young are not brought up with honor for those who took the situation as it was and made from it a Revolution. Nor do citizens in the fullness of their life recall the splendid trials we endured. Rather do they embrace what was mean and narrow in the Yankee than the shining things that seem now so seldom. The honor of men who worked with their hands and their tools is now turned into dishonor, and to ask a wage for wife and child is to be called a Jacobin. To speak a good word for old Samuel Adams, that too is termed Jacobin, and it would seem that the brave People we knew are lost to us. I do not hold that way, for many of them must be in the towns and the countryside, and I think they will rally again as they did once. But who is to call them when those of us who remember are so old? I saw in Albany the new Smelting Mill, and the men who went in there to work took their children with them, holding them by the hand. No head, it seemed, was lifted with pride. The little children walked in shame and the grown ones too. And at a Goodsmill at Shineyside, I saw the same. I saw beggars in the streets and I was stopped by hale and hearty men who whimpered that they had no work.

“I can do honor, but what is the use if not to the living! I turned home because my part is finished and this land does not greet old men.”

The Child and the Ship

T
HE CHILD WAS THEN ELEVEN YEARS OLD, AND IF YOU
must have a time, it was the, year 1733, in the town of Boston in Massachusetts Bay Colony. The ship came from the West Indies, to where she came from the old country, a dirty old bark that still could make enough money for the owners, and she came sailing into the harbor like a monster from hell.